The flowered pattern on the slipcover and the block-patterned quilt atop the made bed suggested a woman’s touch at some point in the history of the cabin, but one that was long past. The savory flavor of Kyle’s elk stew also suggested some domesticity, but, then, it was hard for Derek to judge. Too long he had eaten nothing but MREs and the bland fare at the mess at ConFoe’s regional headquarters.
Derek had started to try to explain the situation, but Kyle was banging pots and clearing space on the table for an extra person at first. Once food had been served, Derek’s mouth was too full of meat and broth and chunks of potato to permit clear communication.
Kyle stifled Derek’s futile efforts with a wave of his hand. “I’m not in a hurry, less’n you are,” he noted.
Derek was grateful for the opportunity to shut up and eat. Kyle ladled up seconds without being asked and leaned back in a second rocker, this one by the foot of the bed, while Derek finished his meal. As soon as he realized that there truly was no rush, Derek stopped shoveling the food in his face and took the time to enjoy it.
An hour or so after they came in, Derek was finally ready to talk. It was late, but both men were keyed up by the night’s activities. It was time for Derek to explain.
It was always hard to know exactly where to start a mal’s orientation, especially when the individual had been isolated from society for some time. Derek needed to fix on what Kyle knew—more importantly, what he thought he knew, since misinformation and fear and rumors were some of the ways that the mals attempted to hold sway outside of the urban regions. Inside the cities they just used brute force and intimidation, at least until the cities had been fully “pacified.” Now, of course, no one went there.
Derek decided to start with a few questions.
“What do you know about the Mandatory Conversion Act?”
“You mean that metric crap? Hell, boy, I’m too old to start measurin’ everythin’ in units different from the ones I learned. Government must not got much to do, if’n they be sendin’ fellows like you out to force people into that stuff and nonsense.”
“No, no, not metric conversion. Conversion of people.”
“You mean like the Spanish Inquisition?” The old man smiled broadly. “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” He looked wildly about the room with his eyes. “Where’s the comfy chair?” The old hermit guffawed until he coughed, then slapped his knee.
Derek didn’t get the joke or maybe too much time alone had sent the old coot completely over the edge. Best get down to basics.
“What about computers? Certainly you know about computers.”
“Sure, I know about computers. Don’t got much use for them, ‘ceptin’ they say my SolarFord has a chip or something controlling the automatic transmission. ‘Course, I ain’t used nothin’ but second gear for years now, so I don’t ‘spect it does anything.”
A shot of adrenaline coursed through Derek’s veins. “You have a truck?”
“Never mind about that. What about computers? All I know is that everybody spent a lot of time cooped up typin’ crap to each other on the internet, which as far as I could tell was full of nothin’ much but perverts, porn sites, and people trying to sell you insurance.”
“What about medical technology? Ever have a doctor give you an MRI or a CAT scan?”
Kyle Patterson bristled noticeably as soon as Derek mentioned the word “doctor.” “Damn quacks! Yeah, they gave Henrietta one of them CAT scans—she said it feeled like being in a coffin, real claustrophobic like. Then they’d said she gots the cancer and I’m just a dumb son-of-a-bitch, I don’t know any better, so I lets them cut her up to get it. Then they blast her with radiation ‘til her beautiful hair all falls out. They tell her she ain’t got hardly no time to live, so we decided to get away from all the people and the shovin’ and the salesmen and the doctors and come up here.”
Derek did not interrupt Kyle’s pain.
“But she did, you know, she lived twenty-odd more years. ‘Course, we couldn’t have no kids, ‘cause of what them doctors had done, but we had a right nice life in our cabin, just the two of us, without all that crap.”
Derek let the man settle a bit before continuing. “Do you know what an avatar is?”
Kyle screwed up his face for a moment, looking as if the government had seen fit to send Derek off to give the citizenry a basic skills test and that it was somehow important that he pass or at least try.
“Some Hindu crap of some kind, ain’t it?”
Derek smiled. The old crackpot had some education before he came to the wilderness. Of course, they were in the mountains southwest of Boulder, Colorado, where Hinduism had mixed and flourished for some time during the New Age days from which Kyle dated. “Actually, it originally was a Hindu word for the human vessel that a god took when visiting earth. But I’m talking about computer avatars.”
Kyle seemed disappointed that he had missed the question. “Guess I dunno, then.”
“What about Moore’s law?”
“Is that the Mandatory Conversion Act?” asked Kyle expectantly.
“No. I’ll explain in just a minute.”
Derek thought about his approach. The man understood about computers and medical scans, but that was about it. He would need to do a full-scale orientation.
* * * * *
Outside, Maria lay beneath the porch and listened.
* * * * *
A world away from the small cabin, two technicians settled in for the graveyard shift and began their own, more cosmic, observations. Their moves were relaxed and unhurried, their conversation a mix of efficient, technical jargon and casual small talk. They had done this before and they would do it again. They knew the drill and were comfortable with the routine. Finally, they finished the preliminaries and settled in to watch.
Chapter 9
“Did you ever watch the Weather Channel, Kyle?”
Kyle looked perplexed by the change of subject. “Yeah, sure, back when we was just regular folk.”
“Do you remember when they would give the computer forecast for the next five days?”
Kyle nodded uncertainly.
“Computers are good at that kind of stuff. Basically, they can do two things. They can store a lot of information in a very small amount of physical space. Second, they can process that information—run calculations on the information, compare it to other information, change variables, and compare the variations to one another.”
“Yeah, they’re big ol’ calculators. Less’n that’s what folks used to say.”
“More than that, they can translate the numbers and the formulas and the variations into pictures and sounds—that’s how you can see things on the computer screen.”
“Like them darn video games kids was always wastin’ their time on.”
Derek thought back on his history. “Yeah, but that was a long time ago. Things have gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. See, back in the late twentieth century, a guy named Moore noticed that the processing speed of computers was doubling about every eighteen months. That’s Moore’s Law. Another guy noticed, similarly, that practical computer storage capacity was doubling about every two years.”
“So, you got big, fast computers, is that what you’re saying?” The grandfatherly man gave Derek the kind of indulgent smile usually reserved for people who spend too much time talking about their job or their kids.
“Actually, you have very small, but powerful and fast, computers.”
Now Kyle began to look noticeably perturbed. His eyes sparked and his bearded chin jutted out defiantly. “Look, mister, whatever you’re sellin’, I ain’t interested, hear? I gots no use for no teeny-tiny computer predictin’ the weather or somesuch. I look out the window and I can tell whether it’s snowin’ or gonna snow soon. That’s ‘bout all I need to know. Besides, I ain’t got no money or credit or whatever the tarnation people use these days.”
“Calm down, Mr. Patterson. I’m not here to sell you a computer
, at least not in the way you think. I’m just trying to build off of examples that you know.”
Derek decided he had better move to the meat of it, before he irritated or confused his subject further.
“Now take those CAT scans we talked about a few minutes ago. They’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated, too. If you take that technology, along with the old-fashioned stuff like x-rays and newer stuff like MRIs, basically magnetic scanning, and the ability to read your genetic structure at a cellular level and apply something like Moore’s law to it, you end up with pretty powerful technology.”
“So, now you gots teeny computers that take really good pictures of the insides of stuff.” The old codger rolled his eyes. “I tell you what, you go call Polaroid and I’ll call Kodak. Hoody-hoo!” For somebody who had spent the last six or so years all alone, the guy hadn’t lost his ability to wax sarcastic.
It was time for a new tack.
“Did you ever hear the story of the invention of chess?” That shut the coot up, but only for a second.
“You gonna tell me how the computers can play chess now? Everybody knows that.”
“No, the story of how chess was invented for some prince or other muckety-muck in India or some place like that.”
Kyle tilted his head down and squinted up at the babbling government representative. “Yessirree, sounds like you got the details down on that story.”
Derek brusquely ignored the insult. “The important part is that the prince decided to reward the inventor by giving him one grain of rice for the first square of the eight-by-eight checkerboard, two for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, sixteen for the fifth, and so on, doubling for each one.”
“So the inventor got a bag full of rice? What’s that got to do with anythin’?”
“More than a bag full—if you double something sixty-three times it becomes an enormous number, more grains of rice than existed in India to give the inventor. When the prince realized he could not give what he promised, he killed the inventor to avoid any embarrassment.”
“That’s government alright.”
“Maybe, but the point is that just such doubling has been occurring in both computing and scanning technology for decades now. For all practical purposes, mankind now possesses infinite computing power and storage with minimal space or power requirements—it’s all molecular based these days with self-replicating nano-machines.”
“Nano? You mean like the crazy space guy on TV from Ork?”
Derek wished he had paid more attention in training to historical pop culture references. He could do nothing but wave off the question. “Uh, no, I don’t think so. Machines that grow more of their own kind, like algae.” Kyle’s silence clearly indicated to Derek that he had once again confused his subject. Maybe the late night was getting to one or both of them. He again circled back to something he knew the old man understood.
“Let’s talk about video games. The computer showed you a game world and you could do things in that world, like race cars or shoot alien invaders or whatever. And the representation of the person playing the game in the game world was known as an avatar—a computer manifestation of a real person in the virtual world of the game.”
The lights came back on in the old man’s mind. He nodded energetically. “Yeah, I played once with one of the neighbor kids, way back when Henrietta had to take his mom into see some lawyer about her son-of-a-bitch drunk, wife-beatin’ husband.”
Derek steered Kyle back on track. “Well, people would use avatars on the computer for more than games. They would use them in chat rooms, where they could communicate with other people who were on the internet.”
“Them places where all the perverts used to hang out and talk dirty.”
Derek hesitated briefly. The official histories always glossed over the considerable impact that the porn industry had in developing virtual worlds, avatars, and bio-sensing and feedback devices during the early stages of developing full conversion technology.
“Among other things,” he temporized. “The advances in computing power and storage and scanning also affected the games and virtual worlds until it got to a point where the technology was so advanced that you could scan a person, a real person, in minute detail—down to their individual molecules and the neural pathways of their brain—and you could store that massive amount of information in a computer, and the computer could process it so fast that the person could actually consciously exist in a virtual world in a computer. When you really sit down and think about how technology advances, you realize that it was inevitable that people would eventually be able to live inside a computer.”
Kyle Patterson was clearly appalled. His mouth dropped open and his eyes screwed up in disbelief. “Live inside a computer?!? With a bunch of perverts?!? Who the hell would want to do that?”
“Well, at first,” admitted Derek, “no one much did, especially since the scanning process at that level of detail is . . . destructive to the subject being scanned.”
Kyle furrowed his brow only briefly. “You mean, it kills them.”
This was always the tricky part. “Let’s just say that a person’s consciousness can’t exist in this world and a virtual world at the same time.”
“‘Cause they’re dead in the real world . . .”
“Well, in a manner of speaking. That’s why, except for a few techno-geeks, the first to choose conversion to a virtual world were the terminally ill and those in great pain. They would leave this world and exist in the virtual world. Since the physical body of the scanned subject is no longer capable of functioning, once you go virtual, you stay there. It actually avoids all sorts of messy complications, like people moving back and forth between virtual worlds and the real world or the same consciousness existing in two places at the same time.”
“Like a Xerox machine spittin’ copies out all over the place.”
“Yes, in a way. Replication could lead the power-hungry to dominate the virtual worlds and would stifle diversity and, most importantly, fundamentally alter the nature of those worlds in a way that would make them alien to life on the real world.”
“But if the virtual world is just like the real world, what’s the point? Won’t those people be in pain and die there, just like they would here?”
“Sure, except for the fact that digital individuals are able to be processed so as to eliminate pain and repair physical damage in ways which we can’t in the real world. It’s tedious and was, at first, an incredibly expensive process, but, like most technological developments, it became somewhat affordable to the masses over the years.”
Derek swallowed hard in an attempt to clear the lump in his throat and stared fixedly at a corner of the cabin in an effort to keep his eyes from misting. He hoped Kyle would think he was just giving the fellow a chance to digest what he’d been told. In reality, Derek could not help but think of Katy. His service had paid for her modification and now, on Alpha Two, Katy was walking and running and had been doing so for close to five years. She would be almost grown up now, but he did not doubt for a moment that he would recognize her when he converted in and that she would come running up to hug her big brother in that better world when all of this was over.
The old man interrupted Derek’s reverie. “That’s a right interestin’ story, boy, but I ain’t in no pain, other than missin’ my missus, and I ain’t dyin’, leastwise no faster’n everybody’s dyin’ at any given time. So I thank you kindly for the somewhat bizarre offer, but I’ll give it a pass.” Kyle got up from his rocking chair. “You can stay the night and be about your business in the mornin’.”
Suddenly, Derek was too weary to continue. It had to be past three in the morning and the adrenaline and duty that had kept him going for the last several days had long since subsided. The cozy cabin, his full belly, and the lack of any perceived danger were lulling him into a warm comfort that did not exist anywhere in his Conversion Forces experience. There was no reason to rush the old man—Derek coul
dn’t even convert him if he wanted to until he retrieved the equipment from up the pass.
“I agree it’s time to rest and I appreciate the hospitality—you don’t really see that much in my line of work. You sleep on what I told you. There’s a bit more to come before you decline the offer I have yet to make.”
The old man muttered something about salesmen never taking no for an answer as he gestured Derek toward the couch and toddled off to the outhouse, taking both guns with him. He returned a few minutes later weaponless and headed straight to his bed. Derek took a moment to remove the slipcover from the ancient couch and fold the worn and faded cloth neatly, before hitting the john himself, then sacking out. He didn’t see where the old man had stashed both their guns and he didn’t bother to look.
No doubt his host could slit his throat as he slept, but then he had been at risk of death since he met the fellow. Though he had not intended it in such a way at the time, he also knew that telling Kyle that he had more to say in the morning was practically a guaranty of safety. It wasn’t just that the guy probably craved company after all these years, it was inherent in humans to be curious.
Derek’s information was assuredly a puzzle to the hermit. A puzzle that came with a potential payoff. Even if he might not want the payoff, Kyle could no more smother Derek in his sleep than someone could attend a reading of a will and not ask, “How much?”
* * * * *
None of what Derek had said was news to Maria. She had not been entirely isolated from the real world while these developments had occurred. Some of them even predated her. Of course, he had skimmed over the rise of the virtual pleasure palaces of the porn purveyors that were precursors of the development of true virtual worlds and full-bore conversion technology. More importantly, he had said nothing about the theological implications of conversion. And, of course, he hadn’t really gotten to the punch-line yet, that the old man was about to face a terrible, unforgivable choice.
Forced Conversion Page 8