by Jeff Edwards
I nodded.
The kid looked back toward the performance artist’s Turing Scion. “Asshole over there has kept his Scion plugged in for over a year. Try to imagine that. Four hundred years trapped inside a machine.”
“It’s not like it’s a real person,” Jackal said.
“It thinks it’s a real person,” the kid said.
I looked across the bar at the anguished face of the Scion, and suddenly I couldn’t bear the thought of being in the same room with it. I cleared my throat. “This is all very interesting,” I said, “but I have business to attend to.” I looked at Jackal.
“Sorry,” she said. “I got a little sidetracked.” She pulled a data chip out of her pocket and slid it across the transparent table top.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out an envelope. “Cash,” I said. “As agreed.”
We traded.
I wouldn’t be able to verify the contents of the chip until I got home. Jackal knew this; out of courtesy, she didn’t open the envelope until I was gone.
Outside the bar, I waited for a cab on Santa Monica Boulevard, and tried not to think about Turing Scions. I’d seen one years before, and I hadn’t liked it anymore than I’d liked the one inside Nexus Dreams.
John had talked Maggie into letting him make the recording. She’d been excited by the idea: her mind, her personality stored in a digital module. All you had to do was plug the Scion into a computer and presto, Maggie in a can. Sort of the electronic version of immortality.
She was in there, all right, or at least an incredibly accurate computer approximation of her personality was. Her memories were in there too, current up to the instant when John had slipped the sensor network over her head.
Maggie had tried to talk me into making one. She and John both had. I’d refused, a decision I had never regretted for a second. Man is not meant to be factored into logic algorithms.
The Scion had just been a novelty to John and Maggie, an interesting trinket. Every once in a while, they would drag the module out and plug it into John’s computer. They’d talk to it for hours, giggling over it, like children playing with an amusing gadget. Then they’d unplug it, and it would go back on the shelf.
It might still be there somewhere, gathering dust at the back of one of John’s closets. I made a mental note to ask him about it. If the damned thing was still around, I wanted it erased.
The past was dead, and nothing that was recorded on a stack of memory chips could change that.
DOME CITY BLUES is available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook formats.