Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  “Wait, wait. So, what’s your project?” asked Chris. “Some kind of pop rocks, soda can thing? You guys hate science.”

  Michael grinned. “I am kind of curious.”

  “Yeah, let’s see the goods,” said Samantha.

  “I don’t know, should we show them?” asked Ethan in his intentionally coy, showman voice.

  I shrugged. “What’s the worst that could happen? It’s pretty late in the game for copycats and corporate espionage. If only we had a volunteer that couldn’t sue us if something went wrong.” I feigned looking around. “Oh, Arthur, what a stroke of luck.”

  Arthur shielded his eyes with his robo hand. “I’m afraid you’ve already assigned me to a task requiring constant, sustained vigilance,” he said. “And I must warn you that burnt meat contains heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic carbons which increase the risk of cancer.”

  “I’ve got the grill,” said Julie.

  “She’s a keeper, Mikey.” And then turning to Ethan, “Do you have the item?”

  “I do,” said Ethan, pulling the tractor beam out of his pocket.

  “Holy shit, what is that?” asked Michael.

  “A focused tractor beam that can pull an object over from up to a hundred feet away. Arthur, would you be so kind?”

  “I’m afraid I’m only able to compute in the metric system,” said Arthur. “The English standard system isn’t even in my vocabulary base to make the conversion.”

  “Whatever. Just get over there and hold up those tongs,” said Ethan.

  Michael looked amazed. “Guys. Are you serious? A tractor beam? Dorian, if that thing works . . .”

  “We’ll take over the world,” said Ethan, mock rubbing his hands together.

  “But how were you able to create enough low pressure to counteract the basic gravity? And get the exact right pattern of soundwaves?” asked Michael. “I assume you’re using soundwaves that is, projecting 3D fields onto 2D spaces.”

  “We sifted through thousands of patterns to find low pressure areas surrounded by high pressure ones with exactly the right wavelengths.”

  “Needle in the haystack,” added Ethan.

  “You guys are like, geniuses. Mad scientists,” said Tony.

  “Let’s see if it works, first,” said Samantha.

  “Yeah, Tony. Why don’t you get Dorian’s dick out of your mouth for a second there, unless you’re just in it for the taste.”

  Tony looked halfway embarrassed for a moment before smiling. “It’s going to work. I got a feeling.”

  “You said soundwaves. So, we’ll like, be able to hear it?” asked Chris.

  “Not unless you’re a dog,” I said.

  “It’s a pity your ex isn’t here, Chris,” said Tony.

  “Do I need to separate you two?” asked Julie as Chris faux form tackled Tony, picking him up for a few strides and then dumping him playfully on the grass.

  “Okay, that’s good. You can stop,” I called out to Arthur.

  “I was joking about the English standard,” said Arthur, who’d already landed directly on the mark. “I play for both teams.”

  With the sound of Chris and Tony rolling around laughing behind me and the swarm of fireflies gathering on the tree line glowing green and blue, interspersed with glasswinged, emerald swallowtail and the occasional blue morpho butterfly, it was the kind of idyllic summer night you always hear people fantasizing about after the fact. But here I was living it. Knowing it was special. Only the summer night was in December, the insects were drones, and I was having to dial back my specs just to keep from thinking it was a pointless waste of time. But none of that seemed to matter at the moment. It was still real. It was still happening.

  “How tight should I hold on to it?” asked Arthur.

  “Just imagine its Chris’ dong,” said Ethan, deadpanning, as he made a wide, sweeping magician-like gesture. He stopped, raised the tractor beam with one hand, and a second later he was holding the tongs in the other, whisked across the dusk air in a short, shallow arc.

  “Holy fucking shit,” said Tony. Both he and Samantha had grins plastered on their faces. Chris looked excited, but also faintly bewildered. “And you guys really designed this?” he asked.

  “We hitched on to other people’s experiments, but yeah, we just kept refining things until it worked. Got lucky.”

  “That’s so awesome, man,” said Michael, without betraying the slightest hint of disappointment over the implications for his own entry. “When you started building Syd, I thought you’d just get bored and stop, but then she turned out great and then this . . .”

  “Yeah, because you helped,” I interjected.

  Michael waved his hand. “Not that much.”

  “Should I catch some more fireflies while I’m out here?” asked Arthur.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Tony. “I want you lit up like a Christmas tree. People keep forgetting it’s almost Christmas.”

  “We’ve had our tree up since Halloween. My dad’s a psycho like that,” said Julie.

  Someone else had started talking but I didn’t hear because Chris walked back over and said, “This is pretty cool, Dorian. I thought you guys were just fucking around, but . . .”

  “It started that way, but . . .” I stopped and took a long deep breath, before switching to a more serious tone. “Hey man, listen. I know I haven’t been a very good friend lately. I know that. I’ve been hiding out in this science world because it was stuff that actually made sense—and that I could be proud of myself for figuring out. But it’s not an excuse.”

  “There are a lot of things you can be proud of yourself for.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I don’t know.”

  “But I understand what you’re saying.”

  I looked down at my watch. It read 6:44.

  Chapter 36

  “Cold feet?” asked the lab tech as he led us down a long corridor.

  “That’s mostly why I’m here,” said Ethan. “When we’re finished I won’t have to be nervous anymore. Right? I’ll basically tell myself not to be?”

  “You’ll have nano-electrical bio-fiber threading all the way through your amygdala so you can tell the neurons there to fire however you like,” replied the lab tech, Steven.

  “Good.” Ethan paused, rubbing his face with his hand. “’Cause I’m so sick of being scared about shit, man. I’m so over it. I just want to be . . . I just want to be who I want to be.”

  I shook my head, not liking how Ethan just opened up to complete strangers. Ninety percent of the time he’d be suave and confident with new people, but every now and again he’d just start baring his soul. I get that it feels good to get stuff off your chest, especially if you’ve been isolated, but other people don’t want to be imposed upon like that. And even if they did, and even though he was being vague, it was risky from a security standpoint. We didn’t know this guy. We didn’t know Dr. Griswald, either, who seemed like a mercenary if there ever was one. For all we knew, Jaden had come here and was paying him twice as much to keep tabs on me, or worse. It gave me some confidence that S24’s entire business model was based on discretion, but you never knew.

  “But how will you know when you should be scared?” asked Steven. “That’s why I leave that part alone.”

  Steven was probably in his early thirties though still had this jocular, friendly, ageing bro kind of vibe to him, seemingly the kind of guy who’d do a data science boot camp or flip robos—if that were still a thing; whatever the economic shortcut flavor of the moment was. His slips in professionalism were a little unsettling but, then again, I was still on a high from the barbeque and it felt good to keep joking around.

  “Don’t you have control over it?” I asked.

  “Sure, but when are you going to choose to be scared?”

  I laughed. “When I’m with this guy’s mom. I swear every time she gives us a snack or lemonade I feel dizzy afterward.”

  Steven chuckled.

  “Fuck you, man,”
said Ethan shaking his head, not willing to play along.

  “She’s a legit cougar, I’m telling you.”

  “I had two college friends hook up with another friend’s mom and he never found out,” said Steven in a matter-of-fact manner. “We weren’t good with secrets, but this was different since . . .” He trailed off as we passed another lab tech and arrived in front of a large, open room. “Okay, so yeah. The code I just sent you guys’ll call up the office AR on the viewer’s second tab, so you can see graphically a lot of what’s going on under the hood. And then take that data to run hypotheticals, plot Revision trajectories—see where that next leap’s going to take you. It can be pretty fun to play around with.”

  As soon as I plugged the link in, the surrounding space on my film came alive with electronic diagrams of Ethan and me stretching to the ceiling, accompanied by a plethora of charts and tables of sensory data.

  “So, here you both are, looking healthy,” said Steven, gesturing towards one of the nearer schematics. “The immune system’s accepting everything about as well as could be expected.”

  “And it would’ve rejected them by now if it was going to, right?” asked Ethan.

  “Probably. The lipid membrane cloaked around the nanobots fool most of your T and B cells, but since each one has a different gene arrangement every once in a while you’ll get one whose receptor can randomly bind to the membrane. And then when the cells start dividing into daughter cells that have that same receptor and instruct the B cells to secrete targeted antibody molecules, then its game over and we gotta pull ’em out.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “Never at S24. Dr. Griswald’s great about patient-specific tailoring, but all the time at other places.” Steven arrived at an AR terminal and began typing commands into the touch screen, causing our circulatory systems to light up red with thousands of little green dots moving through the veins and capillaries. “As you can see, now you have nanobots delivering glucose and O2 all over your body, seven hundred percent more efficiently than before—allowing your cells to produce more adenosine triphosphate during cellular respiration. ATP, as you probably remember from intro bio, is needed in the biochemical reactions for muscle contraction, providing for increased speed and stamina.”

  His abrupt transition from such casual to such scientific talk was jarring, but reassuring, too, making me think that maybe I’d written him off a little too quickly. As far as I was concerned, the more things he said that I didn’t understand the better, considering he was part of the crew that was about to put a chip in my head.

  The lab tech gestured to stat bars emerging to the right of each subsystem, blue lines shooting out past where the grey baselines were. “But given how power-hungry learning, reasoning, and synthesis are, it’s your brain that needs energy the most. These carrier bots took you up sixty-five percent in composite functionality and those simulating Schwann cells took you another fifty. But to get the real gains, you’ll need a brain computer interface or BCI, which I see you’ve both elected to implant. Is that still correct?”

  We nodded.

  He smiled. “I got one a couple months ago and it’s like having super powers. It was me opening doors and turning all this on in here, connected wirelessly through my BCI. You can control every device on a network. It’ll take training—your neocortex has to learn new firing patterns—but that’s what the neocortex does. And we’ll get that all scheduled in outpatient when you’re done.”

  A man and a woman in white scrubs emerged through a side entrance and walked over to a row of screens projected along the opposite wall. “That’s Jeremy and Erica, who’ll prep you for surgery here shortly. It’s complicated, but the gist is that we’ll insert a wireless transponder, transceiver, and comp unit into your femoral artery, where they’ll be nano-ferried up through your carotid artery and hooked into your brain’s vascular system. Depending on the particular unit specs, this should more than double your general intelligence.”

  Faded green projection lines extended past the ends of blue attributes already drawn.

  “Double checking the hardware you’ve elected, we’ve got a TwinfireS2A neocortex with cloud connectivity allowing pay-as-you go server access and processing power, building on a base of fifteen petabytes of storage, nine terabyte channel X7R9 330 ghz memory, going up to seventy terabytes. A fifth-generation a15i phalanx processor at three terahertz with new Euclid Thorium architecture. Hmmm.” He paused and studied the screen. “It says here you’ve chosen a dedicated Nvidia GPU, but I think you’ll want an APU: since it has both graphics and central processing on the same chip, you’ll save a lot of power. And it’ll take up less space in your frontal lobe, where real estate is at a premium. Ideally, yeah, you’d get a dedicated GPU to free up more of your CPU and better render your point cloud, but it’s pricey. And it looks like getting one in the needed size would be outside your budget.”

  I hated how everything always came back to how much money we were able to rob from people. “How far outside?”

  “About ninety thousand Ben Franklins.”

  “Could we swap them later?” I asked.

  “It’d be more surgery, but the nanobots can carry out everything they carried in. And the beauty is that every part is replaceable, duplicable, and scalable. The only real . . .” The lab tech turned as Dr. Griswald came in through the door. “Oh, good timing: we were just finishing up with hardware and wetware. They’re going with an APU for now and’ll be porting over to a dedicated card later.”

  “Good. That’ll be next week at this rate.” Dr. Griswald smiled at us, or rather tried to smile, opening his mouth and twisting his lips to one side. It wasn’t stiff—he clearly had Revised social graces—just uneven, as if by himself and everyone else being so Revised he didn’t quite know what was exactly natural anymore. “So, how are you two doing? Fighting the good fight, I trust.”

  “You know it, Doc,” said Ethan.

  Dr. Griswald hit a few buttons on an AR window and the room-sized models of Ethan and me shrank down to scale between us. They were still outlined in blue, but instead of abstract like before, these were complete with birthmarks, muscles and detailed facial composition.

  “I’m missing my dick,” Ethan said, gesturing at his image.

  I laughed. “Are you still planning to add an inch in your next Revision? That should be a piece of cake for these cats.”

  “Fuck off,” said Ethan, laughing, too.

  “We can make the diagram more realistic if it’d make you more comfortable,” said Steven. “However, we find that most—”

  “No, no, Jesus,” said Ethan, reddening slightly. “Don’t pay attention to this asshole.”

  Dr. Griswald walked up and touched my representation, making annotated ligaments and tendons appear as he did. He turned certain things up and down like faders on a mixing board, moving across me with practiced fluidity, seeming to lose himself inside each augmentation. His face bent and tilted, coming out of its previous molding. His hands were careful, but seemed to follow some greater rhythm, peeling back layers of data that reached multiple levels down.

  I’m sure he was seeing things on his own AR channel that we weren’t, but it felt like he was looking past even that, to someplace else. Somewhere without time, since he appeared to be completely unaware that everyone was watching him—Ethan and I in front and the nurses and Steven standing with their hands folded, seeming to take mental notes. A minute passed. Then three, then five.

  From the looks of it, all his modifications were wireless instructions to the nanobots: More myelin in this part of my brain. More fiber in my muscle. More synthetic cartilage in my knees now that more force was being exerted on the joints. And by the way he would pause and think, adjust, then adjust back, it didn’t seem like I was just a patient or a paycheck anymore, but his sculpture or something. A David to his Michelangelo. It was weird, in a way, but I wanted him to care. The more he cared, the more he’d invest, and the better job h
e’d do.

  “Excellent muscle growth,” he said.

  “Just for the record, I was in pretty good shape at the start of this. I don’t want you getting too big of a head.”

  “I’m afraid the damage is done,” he said dryly. “Since your arrival condition is a matter of record.” He hit another button and a second, earlier version of me materialized next to the first one. Alongside it was a series of displays that graphed out our previous two month’s progress in a number of different colored lines. “Thirty percent less grey matter. Seventy-two percent less neuronal firing. Forty-one percent less muscle mass. You’ve come a long way, especially having started from such a low base. That’s what makes you two special.”

  I locked eyes with him, thinking of my brother, wondering if he was doing the same thing with him. “You wouldn’t happen to know anyone else special, would you?”

  “I don’t kiss and tell,” he said solemnly, moving around the model and walking up beside me. “I’m more concerned with the specific patterns in here . . .” He reached out and touched me, the actual me, tracing a curved line on the side of my head. ” . . . Than the structure out there. I can build that for anyone. The magic’s in how you integrate them.”

  “And when you say patterns . . .,” said Ethan.

  “I mean the software. Using hidden Markov models and Hebbian learning, the brain will see the start of something it recognizes, neurons will fire and, depending on neuronal activity above and below, others will fire in response. For millions of years there was a hard cap on the number and shape of these patterns and the speed at which they could be recognized. But now that the brain can access petabytes of storage and hundreds of gigahertz of processing power, there’s potentially an unlimited number of new pathways available for idea and skill uptake. So look here.” Dr. Griswald gestured to a screen that was forming in front of our body holograms. “I don’t know how you’re funding yourselves, but there are business modules like the Ansoff Matrix, PESTLE, and Blue Ocean for improving your competitive thinking.” He clicked on the Ansoff Matrix and PESTLE and two diagrams of the frameworks appeared. Then he waved them away, and dragged a different group over. “And if you’re expanding operations, there are leadership modules like Up or Out and Transformational.”