Soulminder

by Timothy Zahn

  “Adrian!” a familiar voice almost barked in his ear. “Take it easy, Adrian, it’s all right. You’re here. You’re safe.”

  His eyelids were heavy, but with a supreme effort of will he pried them open. Sands was leaning over him; behind her, an unfamiliar face frowned at something outside his field of view. “Heartbeat looks good,” the man said. “He’s breathing on his own.” He peered at Sommer as if at a laboratory specimen. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it.”

  Sands threw him an irritated glance before turning back to Sommer. “How do you feel?” she asked. “Can you talk?”

  Sommer worked saliva into his mouth. “How long?” he croaked.

  She understood. “That drunken idiot ran you down six days ago,” she told him, eyes flashing with anger. “One of Barnswell’s more brainless supporters, I gather, who didn’t much like you making a fool out of his idol on international television.”

  “How’s Danny?” The words came out easier this time.

  “Making a rapid recovery,” Sands said, and there was no mistaking the satisfaction in her voice. “Dr. Janecki says that aside from an occasional moody thoughtfulness, there don’t seem to be any aftereffects at all from his stay in Soulminder.”

  Sommer thought about his own experience, and about the Light. “Maybe he wishes he hadn’t been brought back,” he murmured.

  Sands’s forehead furrowed for a moment. “Yes, well, I’m sure that’ll pass,” she said. “Janecki also says that because of Soulminder they were able to get nearly the entire tumor out. She figures that a couple of months of chemical treatments ought to clean out any residue, and that’ll be the end of it.” Her lips twitched in a smile. “I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty good memorial for your son. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Sommer closed his eyes. A fog was rolling in over his consciousness … “Yes. It’s finished now.”

  He heard Sands’s hesitation, felt her hand squeeze his carefully. “You’d better get some rest,” her voice came distantly. “We’ve still got the lab’s trap running, so there’s no danger we’ll lose you. You’re pretty lucky it was still doing that complete file scan when you got run over.”

  “Lucky,” he echoed, his own voice sounding even more distant than hers. His last thought before he fell asleep was of the tunnel … and of the Light.

  It was another two weeks before they would let him return to work.

  To work … but not to his lab.

  “Well, what do you think?” Sands asked, gesturing proudly around her.

  Sommer stared at the huge room, and all the gleaming electronic equipment laid out on long and uncluttered lab tables. “It looks like a Hollywood movie set,” he growled, an uncomfortable feeling beginning to gnaw at the pit of his stomach. “May I ask just who is footing the bill for all this?”

  She waved her hand. “Oh, we’ve got backers coming out of our ears now. Everyone from basic electronics people like Hewlett-Packard—that stuff over there’s from them—all the way up to good old Uncle Sam himself.”

  Sommer grimaced. “Oh, great. The government. How to screw something up, in one easy lesson.”

  She gave him an odd look. “Maybe you haven’t got it yet, Adrian. No one’s moving in to take over—the only thing Washington’s concerned with at the moment is renting a set of Soulminder units to protect top government officials. We’re the ones in the driver’s seat. And that’s the way it’s damn well going to stay.”

  Sommer shook his head, the movement sparking a twinge from his neck. “It won’t last, you know,” he reminded her. “The minute you apply for a patent on the trap there’ll be a hundred copycats making their own versions.”

  “Which is why there won’t be any patents,” she told him. “We’ll put our money into keeping the Soulminder design and process a complete, black-hole secret. It shouldn’t be all that hard—thanks to you, we now know that Soulminder can handle a subject from at least ten miles away. We’ll be able to keep everything of value safely locked away in our own buildings, with our own security web around them.”

  Sommer nodded tiredly. “Well, I wish you luck with it. Just make sure—”

  “Whoa,” she frowned. “What’s this you stuff? We’re in this together, you know.”

  “No, I don’t think so, Jessica. I’ve done everything I set out to do. Soulminder exists, it works, and according to you, it has a good chance of surviving. It’s over now.”

  She snorted. “Hardly. There’s a tremendous amount of work yet to be done. Research on better neuropreservatives, regrowth of damaged tissue, bioengineered organs and limbs—maybe even entire replacement bodies—”

  “Wait a minute,” he interrupted her. “What on earth are you going on about?”

  She took a deep breath, eyes blazing into his with a dark fire he’d never seen there before. Or perhaps only never noticed. “You see Soulminder as a holding tank for critical patients,” she said quietly. “I see it as mankind’s ticket to immortality. My ticket to immortality.”

  For a moment he stared at her. To have worked with her for three years, without ever recognizing what it was that was driving her … “That’s not realistic, Jessica,” he said gently. “Death is a part of life—”

  “So was smallpox, once,” she said tartly. “I’ve heard all those arguments, Adrian. Every one of them is either nonsense or rationalization.”

  “Death is a part of life,” he repeated, louder this time. “It’s as much a passage to what lies beyond as your birth was a passage into this world.”

  She snorted, a sound that was at the same time contemptuous and oddly nervous. “What lies beyond. You mean all that stuff about tunnels, do you, and bright lights and passages and friendly voices?”

  “Why not?” he demanded, even as her tone made him wince. “Don’t forget that I was there. I saw it.”

  “Saw what?” she retorted. “Something real, or something totally imaginary? Can you prove it wasn’t a psychovisual reaction or a forced memory of birth or even a side effect of Soulminder itself? Come on—you know that a mind in that state can’t be trusted.”

  He swallowed, gazing into her eyes. Hostile eyes: eyes that showed she had already made up her mind. “It’s your life, Jessica,” he sighed at last. “If you want to spend it chasing a rainbow, that’s your business. But count me out.”

  Something in her face changed. “I’m sorry, Adrian. But I can’t.”

  “Jessica, I don’t want to be immortal.”

  “I know.” She pursed her lips, and a flicker of pain crossed her face. “But for the moment … I can’t let you have that choice.”

  He stared at her, something cold running straight through him. “I don’t understand,” he said carefully. “Are you trying to say that my Mullner pattern can’t be erased from Soulminder’s files?”

  “I’m saying,” she said, “that your pattern won’t be erased from the files.”

  “Then I’ll go in and do it myself.”

  “No,” she said quietly. “You won’t.”

  He just looked at her silently, and after a moment she sighed. “I can’t let you die, Adrian,” she said, the words coming out with difficulty. “All this medical research is going to cost money—lots of money. I need Soulminder to be as big and as powerful and as rich as it can possibly be … and you’re the key to that. You—Dr. Adrian Sommer—are the symbol of Soulminder. The man they couldn’t kill; the man whose resurrection machine has fired imaginations all over the world.” She took a deep breath. “The only man who can keep those imaginations fired.”

  “That’s crazy,” he breathed.

  “Yes, it is,” she admitted, an odd weariness in her voice. “But it’s happened. And until Soulminder is firmly on its feet, I have no choice but to take advantage of it.”

  “And if I refuse to be Soulminder’s mascot?”


  Her eyes were almost pleading. Almost, but not quite. “Soulminder is your child, Adrian, as much as David ever was. You can’t turn your back on it—who knows what kind of monster it might become without you?”

  He looked her square in the eyes. Jessica Sands, once his co-worker … now with literally the power of life and death over him.

  The power of life without death. “I think,” he said quietly, “that it’s already becoming that monster.”

  She winced, but remained silent, and after a moment he turned away. A hundred small lights flickered at him as he did so, reflected from the gleaming new instruments surrounding him. What is a man profited, he quoted tiredly to himself, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

  He had no answer to that. But one way or another, it looked as if he was going to find out.

  CHAPTER 2

  Judgment Call

  The circuit tracer beeped notification that it had completed its task, and for a moment the computer paused, mulling over the numbers. Raising his coffee mug for a cautious sip, Adrian Sommer rubbed one eye as he kept the other on the monitor. Please let it have worked, he pleaded silently with the computer. If this latest design bottomed out like the last two, his partner was likely to either throw an angry fit or else drop into a dark-brown depression, and Sommer was far too tired to deal with either. Please …

  Abruptly, the software finished its ruminations and sent the cursor skittering across the screen, scattering amber letters and figures in its wake. “Well?” Jessica Sands asked from over the paperwork pile on her desk, dark anticipation in her voice.

  “Hang on,” Sommer told her, keeping his mental fingers crossed as he waited for the screen to scroll to the end. “Bottom line is … um. Well, bingo, I guess. Nearly a four percent reduction in baseline power requirements. We’re definitely on the right track.”

  She grunted. “Maybe,” she said, without noticeable enthusiasm. “Remember that it also requires twenty percent more circuitry and at least that much more space than the original trap.”

  “But theoretically more than doubles our assumed three-thousand-mile range,” Sommer pointed out, annoyance beginning to percolate in his stomach. Sands had been tinkering with the basic Soulminder trap design for months now, but even though she was making somewhat jerky progress on streamlining the device, each improvement seemed to make less and less of an impression on her. A phlegmatic attitude which, unfortunately, didn’t also extend to her failures. “At the moment, I’d think boosting our national coverage to something that’s effectively continental should be more important than any gains in overall efficiency.”

  “Certainly if you’re talking such niggling gains as four percent,” Sands agreed sourly. Looking at her watch, she tossed her pen onto the desk and then tiredly cracked her shoulders backwards. “I suppose we ought to throw everything back into the safe. Your junior watchdog could be here any time now.”

  For a moment Sommer just looked at her, his eyes tracing the new lines and shadows in her face and the hardness around her mouth. Soulminder had burst into existence barely eight months ago—had been handling commercial operations for only half that time—and already the strain was visibly aging her.

  Was aging both of them. “Look, Jessica, I understand how you feel,” he said quietly. “But you know as well as I do that it has to be done. There’s just no way on the face of this Earth that we can keep handling all the core Soulminder work ourselves. Somewhere along the line, sooner or later, we’re simply going to have to let other people in.”

  The lines tightened a bit further. “Yes, well, someone like Frank Everly wouldn’t exactly be at the top of my invitation list. If you want me to be undiplomatic about it.”

  “When have you ever been otherwise?” Sommer countered dryly, and was rewarded by a slight and almost unwilling smile. “I understand your reservations, but now is exactly the right time to hire a professional security consultant. And Everly comes highly recommended, by people I’ve always been able to trust.”

  Sands sighed. “I’m sure he’s capable of being part of the solution,” she conceded. “I’m equally sure he could be a major part of the problem.”

  “We have to trust someone, Jessica. We can’t continue to do all this alone.”

  “Why not?” she demanded. But there was little fire in her voice. The argument was pure reflex, a bare shadow of the knockdown fights they’d had on the subject throughout the last month. “All right, so Soulminder takes off slower than everyone wants it to. Would that be so bad? We’re still the only game in town, and if people have to wait a little while for us to increase our capacity, then tough.”

  “You don’t mean that, and you know it,” Sommer told her. The counter-argument, too, was little more than automatic reflex. Both of them were deathly tired. “You push our current pedestal of popular support too far and it’ll get knocked right out from under us.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance,” she muttered.

  “It’s not a chance you can take,” he told her bluntly. “Period. You want Soulminder to be the money machine that’ll maybe give you a shot at immortality someday. If you keep trying to do everything yourself it won’t matter how rich Soulminder ultimately becomes, because you’ll be dead from the stress inside of five years.”

  Her reply, whatever it would have been, was interrupted by a ping from the intercom. “Dr. Sommer, Mr. Everly is here,” the receptionist in the outer office reported briskly.

  Sommer glanced at all the equipment strewn about the lab tables, some of it utterly top secret, as he leaned over the speaker on his desk. “Show him into the office, Rita,” he instructed the receptionist. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The heavily reinforced door that led between the lab and their office was at the far end of the room, beside a control board and a pair of flat screens. Sommer was halfway there when, on the leftmost screen, the office door opened and Rita ushered Everly into the room. The door closed behind him; with a casual glance around, he chose a chair in the conversation area between the two desks and sat down.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” Sands commented from over Sommer’s shoulder.

  “We’re not hiring him for his looks.” Reaching over, Sommer keyed the right-hand screen for a scanning of the detectors that had studied Everly on his way down the hallway leading to Rita’s desk. X-ray, infrared, metal detector, explosives sniffer … “Looks clean enough,” he told Sands. “Shall we go in?”

  Even without looking, he could sense that Sands was bracing herself. “Might as well,” she growled.

  He nodded and began unlatching the deadlocks that sealed the lab from the inside. By the time he had the door open, Everly was on his feet again. “Mr. Everly,” Sommer greeted him, crossing the room to offer his hand. “I’m Adrian Sommer.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Dr. Sommer,” Everly nodded. His grip was the kind Sommer liked in a handshake: firm and clean, with a strength behind it that the owner felt no need to demonstrate. “You too, Dr. Sands,” he added, releasing Sommer’s hand and taking Sands’s.

  “Likewise,” she said with noticeable coolness. “Please, sit down.”

  “Thank you.” Everly resumed his seat.

  “You’ve compiled quite an impressive resume for someone who’s barely reached his forties,” Sommer commented as he and Sands took seats opposite. “CIA, FBI, security adviser to the Secret Service, head of security for Apple’s Brainchild Project. And that’s just the high points.”

  Everly shrugged slightly. “I’m good at what I do.”

  Beside Sommer, Sands stirred. “You have a high opinion of yourself, Mr. Everly.”

  Everly cocked an eyebrow. “Would you prefer false modesty, Dr. Sands?” he asked calmly, with no trace of irritation or defensiveness that Sommer could detect.

  Her lip twisted, just a bit. �
��No, I suppose not,” she admitted.

  Everly turned his attention back to Sommer. “You’ve seen my resume, and probably sifted through whatever dossiers on me you could get hold of, so I expect my credentials really aren’t in doubt here.”

  So Everly was the direct type. Sommer liked that, too. “True enough. I suppose the only real questions are why you’d want to work for Soulminder, and what you think you can do for us.”

  “Second one’s easy enough.” Everly waved a hand back toward the reception area. “For starters, I’d toss out that stop-gap hallway detection gear you’ve put together and install a real system. I could name you at least five weapons, right off the top of my head, that your net wouldn’t catch.”

  “I thought our little gauntlet was reasonably unobvious,” Sands said, a touch of challenge in her tone.

  Everly shrugged. “It is. Reasonably. I just happen to know what to look for. Second, I’d run a fine-tooth over the rest of the building—with emphasis on your main lab back there—and see what else has to be done to make this place secure. Third, I’d take a look at the plans of your new building and correct any problems now, before it actually starts going up and you wind up having to knock out walls to fix things. Fourth, I’d get some people in here to start a complete—and I mean complete—screening of all current and prospective employees. Especially those who’ll be working with the main Soulminder equipment itself.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work,” Sands said. “Especially when you’d be doing it all for considerably less than Apple’s already paying you.”

  He looked at her. “True,” he agreed. “Which leads us back to Dr. Sommer’s first question. The answer’s simple: I want to work here because I think what you’re doing is a hell of a lot more important than anything else going on in the world today. I can see the possibilities you’ve got here—some of them, anyway—and some of the ways all the good parts could be killed outright or perverted or bureaucracied to death.” Something behind his eyes seemed to harden. “I’ve seen all of those happen, and to projects that weren’t anywhere near as ambitious as yours. I don’t want to see Soulminder go down that road.”