The Beam: Season Three (71 page)

Iggy stopped pacing and looked at Noah. Then, with an air of chastising, he said, “Do you have any idea how tricky it is, in a story, to lead a character to realize something without actually telling it to him?”
 

“No,” said Noah, “considering the storyteller is in control.”
 

Iggy laughed as if Noah had told an obvious joke. Then, seeming to consider the matter closed, he said, “I’m not a tech guy. This is your ball, your court, your everything. Define the problem for me. And don’t lean on O’s mined user data as your solution.”

Noah sat up. “Mindbender is tricky in a very specific way. We’ve been able to interpret and reproduce most of the electrochemical impulses from a brain. That part isn’t terribly difficult, and a lot of the same technology is already live on Crossbrace. So it’s just copying data. The problem is what I think of as a
dislocation paradigm
.”
 

“Mmm-hmm. That’s the philosophy stuff.”
 

Noah considered splitting hairs again, but Iggy hadn’t understood the difference the first time and probably wouldn’t now.
 

“Sort of. It’s a question of which mind is really the mind. If I’ve duplicated my mind online, there’s…” Noah paused. This part made him uncomfortable. He’d never been religious, but working on Mindbender made him wonder if he maybe always had been. “There’s
something
that seems determined to only recognize one or the other
mind
as primary, but not both.”
 

“In other words, as long as you’re using your mind and soul and spirit within your earthbound body, the Mindbender
mind
you’ve copied onto Crossbrace — ”

“Onto
The Beam.”
 

Iggy rolled his eyes as if the difference wasn’t crucial, which of course it was. “As long as the mind in your head is still in use, someone out there keeps treating the other as an archive. Just files, and nothing more.”

“Right.”
 

“You know, I have a doctor I should introduce you to.”
 

Noah sat up.
 

“Real old-world kind of guy. Works in a castle.”
 

Noah sat back then rolled his eyes again.
 

“Name’s Frankenstein. He’ll give your Crossbrace brain the spark of life.” Then, when Noah didn’t react favorably, Iggy slouched and added, “And you think
Alexa
can help? Alexa Mathis. The erotic writer turned porn mogul.”
 

“She was gathering biometric and behavior data since before she hooked up with the rest of the Six and formed O. Since then, that’s what the company
does
: gathers user data. Did you ever hear the adage about how McDonald’s is actually a real estate company?”
 

“No.”

“O’s like that. They’re a
data
company, and sex just happens to be the most lucrative thing to sell — once the data shows you what people want. Innovation at O has always outstripped Quark’s in highly focused areas because it’s directly driven by things O can manufacture and sell. O’s profile aggregates and predictive models are the best out there. Because here’s the thing: Some parts of our Mindbender uploads
do
light up, as if
parts
of the upload are willing to consider themselves independent. So what we need is a way to figure out what makes those parts special, and that’s what I’m hoping O’s information can show us.”
 

“Independent parts
of an upload? Isn’t the idea to have one cohesive mind, not a bunch of little
bits of intelligence
, like random AI?”
 

Noah shook his head. He’d thought so for a long time, too, but as usual, breakthroughs tended to come when assumptions were tossed out the window. Inside a human head, the brain’s wetware had to be kept in one central place. But in computing, power had always come from distributed parallel processing. As early as the Internet days, even human tasks hadn’t been immune to the same idea. Recaptcha and mechanical turk had proved that huge groups of individual people, used efficiently, could parallel-process large tasks in no time if enough people shared the load.
 

Processing in pieces wasn’t the problem. The trick was in perfecting the system. You needed an efficient way to break a whole into pieces then a reliable way to bring those pieces together in the end.
 

“It’s so much harder to maintain the integrity of an archive — and by ‘archive,’ I mean a discreet mind that used to live in a discreet skull without other minds touching it — than it is to allow that archive to fragment and live in bits that communicate with each other.”
 

Iggy frowned. “You want to upload your mind…then let it break apart?”
 

“It’s the way the network wants to work. ‘All for one, and one for all,’ in a way. Trying to create discreet clusters not only violates entropy, which moves much faster in the new world — ”

“You mean
online
.”
 

“Right. It not only violates entropy; it’s also just totally inefficient. Fragmentation isn’t the problem so long as you have a way of keeping track of all the pieces.” There was more, but Iggy wasn’t technologically inclined. And there was something else, too: Just as intelligence moved faster if it was allowed to work in parallel chunks, Noah was loath to put 100 percent of his trust in Iggy’s hands. There were parts of this plan that only Noah should know existed, for insurance.
 

For example: Iggy shouldn’t know that one piece of the fragmented puzzle (the master cypher, which unlocked the code) actually needed go into another person’s mind entirely rather than being stored with Noah’s. Or that another piece (the coalescence engine, which showed the pieces how to defragment and reform) would need to be stored inside yet another.
 

But for Iggy’s purposes, this was good enough. A smart man always kept a back door open, and aces up his sleeves.
 

Noah stood from the couch, crossed to Iggy’s bar, and opened a crystal decanter of scotch. He smelled it. Noah barely drank, but liquor’s scent was intoxicating.
 

“I need O’s user data,” Noah said, restoppering the bottle, “because with a large enough data pool, I can model mind uploads, predict outcomes, and run experiments. If I know Alexa, O has probably done some of the analysis already. You’ve hear the way she talks about sifting her sex workers’ key talents so O can build their avatars. It really is religious with her. But an avatar…why, that’d be most profitable for O if it truly resembled a human mind. When you think about it, Iggy, O growing an avatar from user data is a hell of a lot like what we’re trying to do with Mindbender.”

Iggy snickered. “No wonder Alexa believes. But the things that make her able to figure some of this out for herself make her more important as a
believer
and a
future
ally, not someone who’s in on the story’s truth from the start.” Iggy shook his head. “I’m telling you, Noah: O’s data is off limits, and we
cannot
tell Alexa what we’re up to. Trust me on this. You’ll need to find another place to get your
mind data
.”
 

“Where the hell am I going to find that large a pool of intelligence data?”
 

Iggy tapped his chin. Noah watched him then turned his search inward. The issue mattered, and Iggy was strategic enough to understand. At first (and maybe for a long time), making Mindbender click would only matter to Noah West. But once the model was proven, anyone with means would be able to upload, live digitally, even build new bodies for themselves and create utopias in the sky to live like gods. Until then, official word even among Panel would need to be that Mindbender had met a dead end. Iggy, out of them all, was patient enough to keep the secret and wait.
 

“What about Respero?” Iggy said.

“Respero?”
 

“You’re the computer guy. Would that work?”
 

“Would
what
work? I don’t even understand the question.” Noah blinked hard. Maybe he understood it after all. And worse: He wasn’t nearly as repulsed as he should be because Iggy’s off-the-cuff suggestion was right. It fit the bill far better than O’s data pool ever could.
 

“Never mind,” said Iggy. “It was just a thought.”
 

Noah held up a finger. “No, that could work. A Respero chamber is essentially just an evaporator. Who do we know in Respero? High up.”
 

“Everyone.” Iggy laughed. “You
do
know the strings that Panel can pull, right, Noah?”

“Okay. Then we start immediately.”
 

“Start what?”

“Start on a new Respero unit design.” Noah began pacing, now making Iggy look stationary. He’d need to entangle the changes with patents and decoy technology so that anyone who cared to investigate would believe the new units were merely enhanced reclamation chambers. “Two-stage cycle. The second is evaporation, same as now. But the first is a high-bandwidth Fi upload.” He tapped his chin. “This won’t be easy. Can I talk to Eli?”
 

“Only if you want him figuring out the rest.”

Noah paced. And thought. “Okay. I’ll push pause on Beam development to make time. The units won’t be able to upload that quickly, though, to get it in before the evaporation cycle begins. So we’ll need the subjects mapped beforehand.”
 

“You mean just follow Respero cases around with scanners before their time comes, painstakingly making a brain map so the upload can go quickly?” Iggy made a sarcastic smile. “I think they’d figure out something was up.”
 

“More than that,” said Noah. “The cortex needs to be primed to
create
the map. So we’ll also need subjects reflecting during the scan.”
 

“Reflecting?”
 

“Thinking about their pasts. Reliving memories.”
 

“So in the hours before their deaths,” Iggy said, frowning faux-thoughtfully, “you want state-mandated euthanasia victims to look through photo albums and remember the good times. While being scanned. Sure. That’s easy.”
 

Noah’s mind was churning, pieces falling into place. If this could be done, Respero could be revitalized from the ground up. New units in every Department of Respero would, with proper maps made ahead of time and multiple overlapping scanners working in parallel, be able to conduct Mindbender uploads in the seconds before the subject was evaporated. Uploads made in such a rush would be messy, and that was a problem because Noah’s own experiments proved that even meticulously collected uploads tended to crumble. But hundreds of people were Respero’d every day in the NAU, so the pool of uploaded minds would rapidly grow. Within a year, even accounting for losses due to rushed uploads, Respero would create a database larger than anything O could possibly have.
 

Once the database was formed, Noah could experiment all he wanted. Respero subjects were officially dead and gone, and nobody went looking for them. With hundreds of thousands of new minds to sift every year, Noah suddenly felt confident that it was all just a game of numbers. He could suss out what made some archives stick and others fall apart. His estimates right now predicted that at current failure rates, only 0.002 percent of minds would be able to maintain the level of data integrity required for Mindbender viability. But given the numbers involved, Respero would still give him plenty of success stories to choose from — many solid minds he could study to learn how to make it work.
 

Noah looked at Iggy, who was still waiting for an impossible answer. In order for a quick upload in the Respero chamber to have any chance of holding together, the machine would need a neural map. And in order to get a complete neural map, scanners would need hours of deep-memory activity to lead the mapping software in the right direction.
 

“We ritualize it,” Noah blurted.
 

“Ritualize it? What do you mean?”
 

“You’re the storyteller. So we tell them a story. It’s supposed to be mercy killing anyway, right? So we make it look like the state wants to make the whole thing more merciful. Right now, people are wheeled into rooms in hospitals, and they never come out — neat and tidy, but kind of a bummer and pretty sterile. But what if we turn Respero into something totally different? Stop thinking of it as medical, and make it social as well. Hell, make Respero
graduations
an honor; I’ve seen O do stranger manipulations to what you’d think were immutable morals and beliefs. We create events around the whole thing. Maybe before you get evaporated, there’s a ceremony. Or better — a fancy dinner. A time for…oh, yes, this could work…a time for family and friends to say goodbye.”

Iggy nodded. “Okay. And…what? Someone’s there with covert scanners, to make the maps?”
 

“State Respero agents. But they have to dress nice. Seem to be part of the party.”
 

“Sounds expensive.” But now Iggy was rediscovering his stride. A moment later, he said, “But the state doesn’t pay anyway. Like you said, we make it a point of honor to have a great Respero Dinner. It’s already ritualized a little; people accept it; there are cards you can buy, for shit’s sake. So…yeah.”