Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  “And these are just groups of concepts . . .”

  “Yes. Producing different neuronal firing patterns, but since they’ll be working together with the ones that are already there, fit’s the most important variable. And that’s even truer with the deepest level: ethics, philosophy, and core beliefs.”

  Pictures of different philosophers appeared around the room with some of their tenets under them.

  “You’ve got the ancients, like Aristotle and Plato and Confucius, who are excellent at explaining our social evolutionary characteristics, and then you’ve got thinkers like Descartes and Kant who are excellent in rationalizing them. And then you’ve got your Bentham and Mills and Rawls who attempt to transcend them, with everything from Spinoza to Kierkegaard in between.”

  “I don’t think we can afford anything like that now,” I said.

  “Or maybe you can’t afford not to: the right belief system is hardly a handicap. Something like a Nietzsche, Plato, Bentham module would actually be quite the opposite.”

  “You can mix and match?”

  He nodded. “It’s a lot of responsibility to have, but you’re the designer now. Both nature and nurture.”

  “Do you have Floriet?” I asked.

  “As chance would have it, they just finished adapting her last month. Very smart. Inspiring, but . . .”

  “But what?” asked Ethan.

  “I don’t know your specific situation, but from inference, it seems like you’re rather urgently pursuing a certain trajectory, while Floriet would be more conducive to someone already at equilibrium. Fortunately, most other people are in that same position, meaning low demand and only a 1k Benjie price tag.”

  “I’ll take her.”

  “Are you sure?” Ethan looked at me and I looked back.

  “Positive.”

  “It’s your decision, but if you do, I suggest balancing her out with a more hawkish strategic-thinking framework,” Dr. Griswald said. “Specifically, I think the Schliffen Manstein Module would be worth considering.”

  “Who were they?” asked Ethan.

  “Generals and combat theoreticians who favored using speed, local superiority, and mass envelopment to deliver a quick knockout blow to an enemy. You may recognize the approach under its more colloquial moniker: blitzkrieg.

  That sounded helpful, but the prices—now flashing beneath their icons—would drain almost all of the BFs we’d have left after the surgery. “I think we’re good,” I said.

  “You can download them anytime you want, if you change your mind. They might come in handy in a pinch.” He looked over his shoulder. “For now, Erica and Jeremy will show you to your rooms and we’ll get that new hardware installed.”

  A few minutes later, I found myself alone in a white room. Ethan had gone into surgery about half an hour earlier and I wondered how different he was going to be. I wondered how different I was going to be, too, having decided to go ahead with some of the competitive thinking, dexterity, and creativity modules, but holding off on the heavier, philosophical variety until I had a chance to read more about them. Ethan and I also needed to have a heart to heart since some of the modules like deception and charisma would affect our relationship. Sure, they’d help with the police if it came to that, but it was scary to think I might not be able to trust him the same way I could now. We’d probably just have to get commensurate observational and detection upgrades to maintain parity.

  I stared up at the blue and grey surgical arms dangling down from the robot, looking like they belonged in a factory, only thinner and with pincers and fine-pointed blades. They were menacing, in a way, but simultaneously comforting since it was hard to imagine something so sophisticated and seemingly well-engineered screwing up on me. Neurosurgery wasn’t like it used to be. Which was good, too, because I’d be doing this even if they were using rusty instruments in a dimly lit, paint-peeled basement.

  “It’s got a lot of arms, doesn’t it?” said Erica as she and the other nurse, Jeremy, walked in, rolling a mobile diagnostic unit alongside them. “But today we’re only using one, making a small incision into your femoral artery above the back of your knee. Including the stitches, the whole thing should only take about fifteen minutes.”

  “Because the nanobots build it in our brain, right?”

  “It’s already built, they’re just assembling it.” She followed my gaze to the items on the tray and said, “The substrates are preloaded into the tube in that arm right above you. You’d have to look through a microscope to see any of the actual components.”

  “And how long do I need stay afterward?”

  “Just overnight to make sure your immune system accepts the implant, but other than staying still for the next twenty-four hours during the nano-assembly, there’s really not much else to it.”

  “And since no one’s freaking out, I’m assuming Ethan’s surgery went all right?” I asked.

  “Without a hitch,” replied Jeremy, behind me. “And if you’re ready, I think we’re about ready to get started here, too.”

  “Because of how precise that assembly task is, we’re going to apply an acetylcholine inhibitor causing temporary paralysis,” said Erica. “It’s targeted so your lungs will still be functional, but after a few seconds you’re not going to be able to move your body. I’ll give you a few more doses, along with a soporific agent to take home with you, since I see you’re a pretty active sleeper.”

  “Is that safe?”

  “Ideally, we’d do it on site. But you mentioned that you couldn’t remain here over the weekend.”

  I shook my head. There was no way I could disappear for so long without alerting Jaden.

  “That should be fine—just be sure you won’t need to move for at least ten hours following each injection. I change a pretty mean bedpan, but that’s why we requested you not eat before coming in.” She paused and looked down at me. “Now, I’m going to need you to lie back, take deep breaths, and speak up if something doesn’t feel right. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Chapter 37

  I stared up at the constellations on my ceiling. Michael had told me how many hundreds of light years away each one of the stars was: Alpha Centauri was just a jump, hop and a skip away at four, Gacrux—at the top of the Southern Cross—was farther at eighty-eight, and Rigel was farther still at seven hundred seventy-seven. But even that didn’t seem unreachable anymore. The more Revision I got, the more I believed that we were going to get there. I might even get there.

  I had needed to stay in bed all day as the acetylcholine inhibitors wore off, but my mind had still been racing. From about 12 p.m. I could think about multiple things at once. And from around 1 p.m. it seemed like I could see every angle of those things, every permutation, every contingency, devouring scattered details and melding them together—nothing passing too quickly. If anything, it felt like things were slowing down and I had all the time I needed to figure things out.

  I could fly through large sections of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Plato’s The Republic and Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Each had its compelling parts, but I knew pretty quickly that I didn’t want to swallow all of it. Especially Nietzsche. The slave morality stuff was thought provoking, and the supermen parts were alluring in a way, but it was all vaguely unsettling and out of touch given that it wasn’t the greatest people getting Revised, it was the people who just happened to be already loaded.

  After I got through a few more books, I leaned back and looked out the window. With their 50x resolution zoom, my bionic eyes could see an aphid on a leaf all the way across the yard and the intricate patterns on the tree bark. And the microfibers of coloring on the constellation stickers when I looked up at the ceiling. Next to one of them was a bug or some kind of mite that couldn’t have been bigger than a millimeter. Something I would’ve never seen otherwise. And then there were two, three. All around the room on the walls.

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sp; I knew instantly they were drones. Very small drones. And Jaden had put them there, just like he’d done with the spiders and the ants. That’s how he always knew what we were going to do, and that’s why he wasn’t worried about me now.

  My first instinct was to leap up and smash them, but it was gone almost as quickly as it came. The less Jaden thought I knew, the better, and it even became an advantage for me since people always acted with more assurance if they thought they knew something other people didn’t. But then again there was a bug on my arm—one on my shirt, too—that had probably followed me to S24. So he knew what Revisions I’d gotten. He knew I could probably see them now.

  The panic multiplied at the thought, but I fought through it, trying to focus, trying to pull the thread of logic all the way through. It meant I still had to act like I saw the bugs, but also act like I knew that he knew, and that he probably already had something smaller in place or was inside my film directly, which wasn’t so far-fetched considering all the security he’d hacked to break into the houses. He probably expected me to act like I thought I was being surveilled from now on, though, which meant what I actually should do was smash the bugs, sterilize myself to kill anything smaller, and then sub in a film feed from last week when I was pretending to be sick—before making one last big run for it.

  No, he’d see that coming, too. And he’d be even farther ahead by then.

  Paralyzed, I mind-clicked through to software modules. Floriet seemed to be working fine so far—I was thinking of all kinds of ways I could Revise myself without having to rob any more houses—which was great. I didn’t want to fucking rob any more houses. Or lie to my parents. Or fight with my brother. But maybe that was the problem. Maybe it was like Dr. Griswald had said, and it was the kind of thing that made more sense once things settled down. Because I did need to lie to my parents. I did need to fight with my brother. And if I didn’t, nothing would ever settle down again.

  I took a deep breath and let my mind linger over the download button on the Nietzsche Plato Bentham Module, the one Griswald had recommended, saying that it would “shake things up.” Fucking hell. These were well-known, well-respected, classic philosophers—it wasn’t like they were random psychopaths—but still, I wish I had had more time to read them.

  I clicked the download button and watched as a status bar emerged, showing one percent. Two percent. Three percent. Next, I opened the strategic planning tab and clicked the Schliffen Manstein Module, adding it to the queue. Then I waited, lying back down, my heart pounding. What was I doing? I didn’t know, just that I had to be doing something. I couldn’t sit and wait for Jaden to corner me.

  The minutes ticked by. It took about forty to download Nietzsche Plato Bentham and since I was worried that Jaden would notice the broadband slowing down, I thought about saving Schliffen Manstein for later, but that went quick, hitting five percent almost as soon as it started. When it was done, the only thing I could think about was the necessity of flipping the board. Quickly. The most dramatic thing I could imagine.

  When it came to me, the largest tide of cortisol I’d ever felt surged into my blood. I thought about turning it off—I went through my interface and my thoughts hovered over the “reduce” button—but I only dialed it back thirty percent. I didn’t want to lose any urgency. If anything, I hadn’t been urgent enough. He was making drones an order of magnitude smaller than mine.

  The nurse had said to wait eighteen hours and it had only been seventeen, but the dizziness had been gone for a while now, and I needed to get up. Last night my mind had been all over the place, lucid one second, confused the next, followed by dreams that were as terrifying as they were euphoric. And when I awoke, the moments felt like bubbles, expanding based on how much time I needed to think of something and then popping when I was done. But now it all seemed like it had stabilized, just at a higher watermark.

  I rose, nonchalantly pocketed the muscle relaxant syringes from S24, and walked down the hallway.

  “Hey, Mom,” I said as soon as I got into the kitchen.

  “You look like you’re feeling better.”

  To give myself an excuse for sleeping so long, I’d turned white on my way in this morning by having the nanobots move blood away from the surface capillaries and sweat by stimulating my eccrine glands. They’d said it would take time for the CPU to start picking up on my neural firing patterns, letting me just think about something I wanted to happen, but even now I could manually make menu selections from the graphical interface.

  “I think I just needed some rest.”

  “So, you’re telling me that you and Ethan didn’t get any last night?” said Mom, raising her eyebrows.

  Ethan and I had both given the classic excuse of sleeping over at each other’s houses when we spent the night at S24. Ethan’s parents were eccentric, disagreeable people, and his mom wasn’t even in town, so it wasn’t like they were going to compare notes with my parents. “Too busy with gossiping and pillow fights,” I said.

  “I think it’s cute you guys are back to doing sleepovers. You used to do that all the time with Michael and Christopher before you all started getting girlfriends.” She paused. “Do you have your eye on anyone at the moment?”

  “Too busy bringing home those big grades you were all up in my grill about.”

  “I wasn’t up in your grill,” said Mom. “But what about that Samantha? How’s she doing, anyway?”

  I took a few steps farther in and saw Mr. Bosworth lying in a parallelogram of sun where the kitchen merged with the dining room. “Probably a lot better now that she’s not dating me.”

  “Why would you say that?” Mom asked, sounding offended as she placed whatever she’d been holding on the counter and turned to look at me. It was as if she herself wasn’t complaining about how moody I was just yesterday, and how worried I made her by never telling her when I was coming home, and how I always forgot Mother’s and Father’s Days. “Any girl would be so lucky to have you.”

  “Right, Mom,” I said, almost amused. I’d spoken just long enough for it to be natural in case Jaden was watching and now I could open the sliding door that looked out on our backyard. “But anyway, I’m meeting some people at the library. We’ve got a group project in geology and still’ve got a ways to go on it.”

  Normally it would’ve been a flimsy excuse, but my grades had been so strong lately that it only followed that they required effort to maintain.

  “I’m proud of how you’re finishing out your senior year. Kids think they can take it off, but colleges still look at those transcripts, you know? I think it’s going to be worth the sacrifice.”

  “I know, Mom. And I’ve been applying for internships and picking piano back up, too. I’ll play you something later.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. I wasn’t just bullshitting you about that.” I laughed a little as I opened the sliding door the rest of the way and took a step outside. “Jeez, it’s hot out. Wasn’t it supposed to start cooling off again today?”

  “Not until tonight, they’re saying.”

  Mom always loved to use the term “they’re saying,” even if she just heard it from a single source.

  “Winter’s a no-show.”

  “Well, it always felt like summer down here, coming from Edmonton. Though Dad says there’re days in December now where they don’t even need coats.”

  Mr. Bosworth brushed by me and scampered onto the patio. “Dorian! The cat, grab it, quick!” cried Mom, but he was already past me. I took a few steps after him, lunging, but that only made Mr. Bosworth bolt out into the garden.

  Mom scooted around the counter and dashed by me. She had two cats get eaten when she was a kid and was preternaturally determined to never let this one outside. There weren’t wolves here like there were in Canada, but there were coyotes. “Don’t just stand there, help me!”

  “Okay, you flush him out through the garden and I’ll come around the side of the house,” I said, switching off my fil
m and neural interface. Before she could answer, I was walking back through the kitchen, accelerating to a jog in the hall and by the time I got to Jaden’s door I was nearly sprinting, kicking it down in one fluid motion. Jaden shot up in his chair and spun around just in time to block my fist and send his own crashing into my eye socket. He twisted my arm taut and snapped it like a twig when I came at him again, but in doing so he brought me in close enough to slam the syringe with the acetylcholine inhibitor into his chest.

  “What the fuck,” cried Jaden as he whirled, stumbling back into his seat. I fell back the other way, my arm exploding with the hottest, most violent sensation I’d ever felt. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t breathe. My vision was clouding, but out of the corner of my eye I saw Jaden trying to use the arms of the chair as leverage to pull himself up, and I willed myself to crawl over and jam the second syringe with the sleeping medication a few inches away from the first one.

  “You fucker,” he gasped, grabbing my good arm still holding the syringe and trying to break it against his elbow like he did with the other one. But the inhibitor was already relaxing his muscles and we both toppled backwards into the chair, me rolling off and him pawing at his desk in an attempt to prop himself up again.