The Beam: Season Three (83 page)

“No, that’s it,” Leah said. “I told you how once I was deeply immersed, and it felt like parts of me were shedding off. You’d had the same sense, as SerenityBlue, from the other end — of something dissolving away then coming together as you. But now that I know who you are, none of it really makes sense to me.”
 

“You already knew who I was.”
 

“I mean, you’re a person. You’re Violet James. You’re the most famous Respero case in history. The way I figure, Respero was always a cover. The news has already buried it all, and you can bet Respero will continue, but now that I know what to look for, I get a good feel for it. Of the millions of people sent to mercy killings over the years, it looks like they kept throwing them all at The Beam. Only a few stuck, like you. The rest fell apart while you lived on. But that’s what I don’t understand. If you’re Violet, how were you SerenityBlue? And if you were Violet all along, why does it feel like…” She sighed. “Well, like I
made
you?”
 

Violet shrugged. “Maybe you just helped me come together. Maybe you were there when I was lost, and you helped me become something else.”
 

“You mean, maybe I helped you coalesce somehow? I encountered you floating around after Respero, and let you get your bearings?”
 

She seemed to think again. “No. I think it’s as I said. You helped me become
something else.”
 

“But you’re SerenityBlue. And SerenityBlue is you.”
 

“Only a little,” she said.
 

Leah wanted to ask further, but this felt like talking to Crumb during those first days, in the limbo between Crumb and York. He’d known he knew something, but not what it was. The schism had sounded painful to reconcile. So Leah let it go.

Still, something itched beneath her skin.

Because as well as Leah remembered helping SerenityBlue coalesce, she remembered a second coalescence, too. Something that in many ways felt like Serenity’s inverse. The black to her white. The up to her down. A coalescence that, until recently, she’d barely remembered, as if it was trying to hide and had erased itself from Leah’s mind in one way so it could appear fresh in another.
 

Sam’s handheld blipped.

“Who is that?” Leah snapped, suddenly sure that someone had read her mind, and that the malicious presence — which they’d shared even as n33t and Shadow — was checking back in on its chaos. The id to someone else’s ego, just as Serenity was id (or something kinder) to Violet James.
 

But Sam was already pocketing the handheld with a smile.
 

“It was my mother,” he said.
 

Chapter Twenty-One

Killian picked his patient’s hand up, squeezed it, then began to massage the web of flesh spanning thumb to forefinger. The hand was cold, but the vitals were all green.

He turned the hand over then used a small, dull pin to tap the index finger at the pad.
 

“Do you feel that?” Killian asked.
 

“Yes.”
 

He tapped the middle finger, same place.
 

“And this?”
 

“Yes.”
 

“Good, good.”
 

He circled the cradle and then, with a feeling of ripping off a bandage, began to disconnect peripherals. He knew for sure that everything was solid across the board, and that there were a copious number of redundant copies regardless. But unplugging cords felt like yanking life support, and he had a superstitious certainty that he wasn’t supposed to pull a single one.

“Do you want to try standing?”
 

The patient sighed. “Not yet.”
 

“Would you like to see your readout?”
 

“Why?”
 

“Oh, I don’t know. It just seems like something that might be done at a time like this. Kind of like showing a new mother the nanograph image of her fetus.” Killian’s smile felt forced. He was chattering for the sake of noise. He had no reason to fear this man, but he’d had plenty of reason to feel nervous around the avatar. Killian wasn’t a Null hacker, but in the right circles, Integer7’s reputation seemed to have spread like a virus. Even then, Integer7 seemed more mischievous than malevolent, but still it gave him nerves. And there was no playbook for something that had never been done.
 

“No. Thank you.”
 

“File integrity is complete in all of the redundant buffers,” Killian said, running through the stats despite the man’s clear disinterest. “And of course in the body. It’s all wetware, so it’s not apples to apples, and you can expect some disorientation as you adjust. Your brain — your
mind
, sorry; you didn’t have a brain before — isn’t used to containment, but the simulations predict it will adjust.”

“‘Predict.’” The word was flat and almost seemed to carry a sense of menace.
 

“Well, you’re patient zero. Sorry, patient
alpha
; saying ‘zero’ makes it sound like a disease.” Killian forced a smile that probably came out looking like a grimace. “We don’t have actual results. I’m sorry, I thought Sally made that clear. Did she not make it clear? I’m so sorry. I was under the impression you specifically requested to be moved
now
, without waiting for testers to inhabit the other fabricated bodies. If I’d known there was any scintilla of doubt, I’d have — ”

“It’s fine.” He raised the hand Killian had recently been squeezing to life and flexed it in front of his eyes. It looked exactly like a natural hand, like everything about the body. But creating organic parts had never been the problem. “It was important that I be first.”
 

“Oh,” Killian said. “Well then. Good. We aim to please. And I’m not seeing much evidence of dislocation?” It came out as a question, which he hadn’t intended. He was supposed to project certainty. Yes, the download seemed to have gone just fine, but almost all of Xenia’s experience — and
literally
all of Killian’s — was in uploading minds, not downloading them. Mindbender’s purpose was supposed to be escape from the mortal plane, the promise of immortality, all that. The wider applications that involved a move in the other direction (flesh vacations for digital beings, light speed travel, bulk transit for the Mars terraforming project) were supposed to be decades or, likely, centuries down the pike.
 

Killian forced himself to breathe. It had all gone perfectly. Things were fine. It didn’t matter how nervous he’d been or how many nightmares he’d had about downloading poorly and then being haunted by the angry ghost of The Beam’s most infamous man for the rest of his days. It had worked out okay in the end. The patient could feel his hands and feet. He sounded coherent.
 

“Why would there be dislocation?” Integer7 asked.
 

“Oh. Well. I was just checking.”
 

“But why would there be?”
 

“Well, we had an issue with the dislocation paradigm for uploads, as I’m sure you know. Of
course
you know! But really, that issue more or less went away once the key sequence to the integration software was inserted. Once the sequence was extracted from Captain Long, your archive became fully holographic, as would any other uploaded minds in the system.”
 

“Which means Mindbender is now open for anyone who knows how to upload.”
 

“Yes, sir. But as you requested, we’ve kept the matching upload technology confined to your indicated group. You understand it’s a two-piece puzzle? The insertion of the key, from Long, was like a master decrypt cypher that unlocked the decoding, hologram-making end of the process. But any mind that’s not uploaded using the correct encoding will still fragment, with rare exceptions as we’ve seen with batch testing, in the range of zero point zero — ”

“I know all of this,” Integer7 said.
 

“Oh. Yes. I’m sorry.”
 

“So what about dislocation?”
 

“Oh. Well, maintaining the integrity of the uploaded file was always comparatively simple.
Comparatively
. We knew there was a cypher out there. But the notes said the original cypher vanished with Mr. Hawes, so we’ve been attempting to recreate it?” Another sentence coming out as a question. Killian wanted to slap himself. He must sound so weak.
 

“Hawes gave it to Dominic Long.”
 

“Long knew Colin Hawes?”
 

“In a manner of speaking.”
 

“Oh. Then how were you able to maintain integrity before the cypher was inserted?”
 

“I’m different,” Integer7 said.
 

“Sure. Of course.” Killian paused. Then he said, “But how — ”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Killian,” the patient said, “but are you planning to answer my fucking question at some point?”

Killian felt his heart leap up to the top of his throat, grab his epiglottis, and hang on tight.
 

“Sir! Of course. I’m so sorry. I tend to prattle on when excited. The problem with the dislocation paradigm was that whenever there was an archive in two places, meaning two copies of a mind — say, on The Beam
and
in one of these artificial bodies — there was always confusion from…from
somewhere
…about which to make
real
and
alive
, as it were. Like Frankenstein’s monster.” Killian mimed pulling a giant knife switch and giving a mad scientist’s grin, but his effort seemed to fall flat.
 

“But I solved that.”
 

“The insertion of the second sequence caused it. Yes, sir.”
 

“I
solved it,” Integer7 clarified.
 

“Yes. The AI was able to extract your sequence from Mr. York while he was with the girl.”
 

“Does York realize what happened?”
 

“I don’t think so, sir. We’re watching him, of course. But for all intents and purposes, he seems to believe that he simply traveled from one virtual place to another. He does not seem to realize they were in a hole.”
 

“And the girl?”
 

“She vanished, sir. We’re not sure.”
 

Killian thought his patient might take umbrage, but said nothing.
 

“I’m not sure how it worked, sir, but it did. It’s like there was a piece of…well, of
you
…inside Mr. York? When we made the transfer, it lit right up as if the two pieces recognized each other. I daresay it wouldn’t have worked without that other piece.”
 

“It wouldn’t have.”
 

“How does it work, sir? We’ve been trying to crack dislocation here at Xenia for
decades
. May I ask how you managed?”

The patient sat up in the cradle, loose download wires sliding from his shoulders to pool in the thing’s bottom. His head turned to face Killian.
 

“No. You may not.”
 

Killian blinked. “Oh. Yes. Of course, sir.”
 

Integer7’s hands went to his new head, which was specified to be like his old head. To his new hair, like his old hair. Across his arms and chest. Then they reached out for the small, round glasses on the table by the cradle. The ones his estate had given Killian such a hard time about procuring.
 

“I’d like a mirror.”
 

Killian practically clapped. “Oh! Of course. Yes. This is the exciting part, isn’t it? Like unwrapping a present. All that hard work. All that time! I can’t even imagine. And this is a triumph for me, too, seeing as — ”

Integer7 was staring into Killian’s eyes.
 

“Yes,” Killian said, his manner dampening. “Well then, of course. It’s right here, sir.”
 

Killian stood by the foot of the cradle, pushed the wheeled thing around in a half circle, then stood beside the patient. Together, they looked at the new body and the new mind inhabiting it from behind its curious little round glasses.
 

The patient watched his reflection. He tipped his chin down then up. He rubbed his cheek. He ran a hand through his short brown hair.
 

“Welcome home, Mr. West,” Killian said.

Shit From Brains

Hey all, and welcome to “Shit From Brains,” which is what we call our author’s notes these days. We used to call them “Author’s Notes” and I (Johnny) never wanted to write them because the whole concept seemed boring. Like I’d need to wear a beret and pontificate about the general difficulty of life and writing, or otherwise find something super meaningful to say. Who wants to do that? Nobody, that’s who. So we decided that if we made them crude- and irreverent-sounding, I’d write more of them because that’s more fun and I’d know I could be casual. And if you don’t like the title … well, you just read
The Beam
and there’s a few swear words in there. So fuck it. We’ll keep it cleaner in our kids’ stuff. Maybe like “Brain Stuff,” though then it’ll seem like an anatomy lesson.