Reconfigure (19 page)

Roisin was not a great fan of intense exercise. Luckily her metabolism seemed to keep her in a relatively normal shape. She was by no means one of those stick insect models. As she raised from her slumber, dreams and images faded out of her mind. She thought about her infrequent attempts to run, or visit an outdoor gym in the park. This felt like the day after one of those mad moments. Every muscle in her body felt immobilised with a dull and annoying throb of pain. She remembered all those times she had not bothered faffing around with stretches, she just wanted to get on with the monotony of the exercise. Every time she would be reminded of the propensity of lactic acid to seemingly attack her body in defiance. This, well, it was like that.

She knew she was not going to be waking up anywhere nice. This cell fitted that idea completely. A set of LED spotlights beamed down casting very little shadow. There were no windows and just one door. A very traditional looking police cell door with a closed hatch. She had not been in one before, but TV and films provided enough terms of reference for her. The dreary cube she sat in had a less than comfortable bed on which she was now lying. Unlike most cells though, this one had, opposite the bed, a large wall of dull reflective glass.

She stood carefully, creaking like an old lady, holding her hand to her back and even uttering a little “ugh!” In the dull, almost onyx reflective wall she saw herself looking back. She was missing the combat fatigues and was now wearing a knee length blue cotton cover. She felt around the back of her new clothes and confirmed it was a hospital gown. Her hair was more ragged than usual. She felt exposed and scared. Her meandering thoughts chose to focus on the potential that she would be interrogated in some sort of hideous way, waterboarding? Injections? Hanging upside down from a meat hook. Not ideally helpful thoughts to cheer her up. It was the sensible part of her brain trying to find a path to understand why she was in this mess.

Another thread joined in and tied all the nasty thoughts into a nice package, with a bow. She said to herself “Don’t tell ‘em Pike!” The small amount of self entertainment, those re-runs of old comedy shows she used to watch with her folks, calmed her slightly. She knew she was still in deep trouble, but resignation to her fate set in. She sat back down on the edge of the bed. Still looking at her reflection. She figured there were people standing behind the one way glass, that’s usually how this went down in the movies too.

The dark onyx wall suddenly became very much brighter. She raised both eyebrows as she realised it was not good old fashioned single direction glass, it was a screen. On it she saw a very large head and shoulders of a face she recognised. The scale was intimidating. The eyes were the size of her fists. They punched their way towards her as the Commander spoke.

“Nice to see you again Miss Kincade.”

It was a pleasantry, but had an air of sarcasm about it.

“I am going to ask you some questions and you will answer them.”

It sounded a little like a question, though was delivered in a menacing tone to indicate it wasn’t optional.

“Are you Roisin Kincade?”

What sort of question was that?

“Yes?” She questioned back.

“Is this your house and office?”

A picture appeared replacing the head with a very high definition, almost like she was there, image showing her bullet ridden former workplace. The laptop sat on the desk with its single life saving hole visible.

“Yes and your drone did that!” Her emotions were running high now.

The Commander’s head returned larger than life again.

“Where is Doctor David Henry?”

On the screen a picture in picture kicked in with the image of David she had seen before at the briefing. That was actually a tough question to answer she thought to herself. Where was he? Being melded with a quantum computing device didn’t really put him anywhere? Her closest thought came out of her mouth.

“He is at one with the Force.”

The micro expression on the face on the large UltraHD screen stood out. Roisin knew she was being deliberately cheeky, daring him to act. She could see his annoyance, disdain and maybe a hint of admiration at the challenge. He remained locked in the same general facial state though.

“Is Doctor David Henry dead?” He asked, as a follow up.

“No.” Roisin replied, honestly. She may have said the same to a question asking if he was alive. Just another cat in another box.

“Are you able to take us to Doctor David Henry?” He asked her.

Again her brain whirred. She had no FMM, no way to Translate to the sealed in bunker, no doors. She thought of the farm, she knew where that was, roughly, but she answered

“Nope! Sorry. I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Which I don’t by the way!”

The head turned to look at someone else in the room with him. She heard a disembodied voice state.

“The stress analysers indicate she is telling the truth Sir.” Roisin noticed that the bright picture wall was not seamless. The sides and the bottom ran directly to the corners but there was a darker bar all the way across the top. In it were dull lights of various colours, that she could just make out.

She was once again stared at by her questioner.

“Do you have access to the anomaly inducing technology?” He asked.

“The anomaly inducing technology?” She replied.

The screen filled again with grainy security image footage. It showed an alley way and some large bins. It was like an isometric 3D view in a game, angled down and across. She could not see the person’s face but a figure was brandishing a knife and stepping forward. As the video ran she saw herself pick up the knife blade and wave the would-be attacker around in the air. It looked so fake. She could have easily been sat in her office moving 3D models and attachments around seeing the same gravity and physics defying image.

She remembered the fear of that moment. It joined and re-surfaced her fear now, stronger and much more intense than before. In that alley she had the ability to reconfigure the World. She had Full Metal Marmite, she fought back. Now she had nothing to fight with. She was unable to just Translate away, unable to shuffle things to places elsewhere or make a new drone sculpture out of a 10p piece. Roisin felt an utter crash in her spirits. The bravado, the façade, she had just started to use to give this giant talking head some lip, crumbled. She turned her head to the floor, her shoulders sunk, she shook her head and answered quietly.

“No, I don’t.”

The head turned to the direction of the previous voice and nodded. The screen went dark.

She tried to process what had just happened. No fists, no blades, no buckets of water? She had been asked some questions, and she had answered truthfully to the letter of the question, if not the spirit. She remembered the disembodied voice. Stress analysers, truth? She was in front of a big lie detector! Her attention to detail, her pedantic answering had pretty much saved her. They knew she didn’t know how to get to David, and they knew she couldn’t do anything to them or escape. Sensible voice kicked in, pessimistic, but nonetheless accurate. Her heart rate increased, her eyes widened. She felt the stiffness of her lactic acid filled muscles loosen. They thought she didn’t know anything and couldn’t do anything. That didn’t exactly make her the most useful human on the planet. This lot had killed an old couple in a car to make a deal happen, they had shot at Roisin more than once too. She was some sort of a lead, but maybe more of a liability now? Despite her heightened state she was finding it hard to focus and concentrate. She felt so very tired again. Sudden jet lag? Her pessimistic brain offered one last nugget of information as she lay down on the prison bed.

“Gas, poison gas?”

Roisin felt a pressure on her chest, then warmth on her face and in her throat. Her nose felt different, like it was pinched. She opened her eyes, almost unable to focus in close enough to see the side of a head and an ear. The ear moved away and up. She took a huge and surprising gasp of air, breathing in and out, full and fast as if she had just learned the new skill. Her eyes focused and she saw Doctor Henry.

“Just lie still, you are going to be all right.” He said to her.

He may be no medical doctor but she did like his bedside manner right at the moment.

“It seems your Lifejacket just saved you.” David said to her as she started to gather herself and sit up. “Do you know what happened?” He added looking at her medical gown for any blood stains.

She was still enjoying the whole breathing thing at the moment but was able to gasp. “Camera… Alex…”

As she arched her back and slid the phone that she had landed on out from under her. She had arrived at the same place she had first Translated into, though this time horizontal. The same place she had sent the Phone to before being captured.

He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder as he reached for the phone. He swiped through the pictures she had taken a few hours ago. He swiped back and forth through each. “Alex? What have they done to you?” He muttered.

He looked at her, checking her pupils like a proper doctor.

“I think we got you just in time.” David said. She looked at him,

“I was in a cell, they asked me questions, then I felt really tired.”

He looked at her directly.

“Did you tell them anything?” He asked with severity.

She smiled at him, now regaining some of her sass.

“I answered everything truthfully.” She retorted.

She saw the panic cross his face. That was not the ideal way to treat someone who had just breathed life back into you. She quickly followed with an explanation.

“They had some sort of truth machine on me, but I heard one of them say I was telling the truth. They definitely asked me questions they knew the answer to, my name, my house. Then they asked where you were. I was just being a bit pedantic and messing around, cheeky even, when I said I didn’t know. I mean, I don’t know where you are when you Meld.”

His face mellowed. He was still a little red from the shock but nodded gently to appreciate the pedantry.

“I think they may have just used carbon monoxide on you given your state, nothing fancy, no fuss, nothing needed to decontaminate the room. You just sleep and drown.” He postulated.

Great! All that fancy stuff and they killed her with a dodgy gas boiler.

She then explained how she had found Alex, but that she was not showing up as Human on FMM.

“It is like something is missing from her. It means the search can’t see her as her.” She finished.

“What about the spare phones you had?” Asked Doctor Henry.

“I shot all three of them. I couldn’t have them get hold of them. They put a mobile signal damper around like some posh restaurant. I was cut off so, bang, bang, bang.” She answered.

“From these surveillance shots it looks as if Alex was about to be caught. She had a phone too, it’s not in her hand in the images of her capture. She drops like a stone. I cannot see any gunfire or anything making contact. I can only assume she did to her what you did to the phones to avoid any questions and to not let it get into their hands. She was protecting me.”

“We can get her back here now we know where she is.” Roisin pointed out.

“No, they have her in a stable condition. She still exists. I don’t know what sort of life support they have her on, medication too. If we bring her back here we might destabilise her and make her worse.” He explained.

“Look this might be a crazy idea…” Roisin started. “When I ran an Attach on the mugger, to his knife, he stopped being anything, other than a part of the knife. It was like your Meld, but different. You know your brain is there, but your body is static. Nothing is happening. When I detached him he got up and ran away.”

“Stasis! Of course!” David was now on her wavelength. “We can keep Alex safe, it will pause every atom in her body, there are no physical functions to deteriorate.”

Roisin clambered to her feet. She moved in a way that did not show any of her to Doctor Henry, that he shouldn’t really be seeing, due to the flimsy hospital gown. Clothes could wait. She sat at her Mac VM and used the development version of FMM to Zone in on the remote OrganicShell. She saw considerably more Human cubes around Alex. The obviousness of the empty research lab being a trap for her stood up and saluted.

“We need something to Attach her too.” She said out loud. Roisin decided it would be nice to not do anything too weird to Alex for Dr Henry’s sake. He was Melded and so she was talking to herself again. She initiated an Attach to the bed Alex was already on. Roisin imagined the various medical devices and sensors experiencing confusion and alarms screaming. She could see some of the surrounding human blocks moving frantically back and forth trying to diagnose the fault. She Translated the bed to the lab. It fitted in the gap around Ray K., there was a little room each side of the bed to manoeuvre.

“Alex!” Shouted David Henry as he rounded the central table to the new arrival. Roisin had pulled him back to the World. Alex and the bed were his to look at first. He stared at Alex, static on the bed, no breath, no movement from her. She was like a wax dummy. He touched the side of her face, the hair rigid and feeling the same nondescript texture as the rest of her skin. He knew she was not dead, but he yearned to have all of her back, not just this shell. It was a raised painted texture attached to a bed.

Roisin felt she needed to check the Bed and Alex for any type of tracers. She had been trapped once by not thinking the obvious. The cage they were in would stop any rogue signals, but it was worth a look. She checked the hierarchy of the OrganicShell in more detail. Sure enough, there was a small device of some kind linked in the structure that had some electronics in it. Rather, it had had some electronics in it! Everything there now made up the Bed composite object. Static, inert and held in place but some quantum probabilities.

“If we can find out what Alex did to herself, we might be able to reverse the process?” He said and looked at the static Alex “And get you back to where you belong."

Roisin was still working looking at the cubes that made up the bed and Alex, spinning them around the screen trying to look at it from every angle. She was seeing the same sets of blocks she had seen on every use of FMM. She looked at her own sphere on the screen and noticed the lack of related objects. Just a Gown cube intersecting the sphere.

“Doc I need to go shopping!” She said as she looked down at the light blue all-in-one cotton cover. She got up and walked to where her previous nights bed was. She had moved her trousers, her hoody and her Converse shoes there. Roisin carefully stepped into the trousers. Pulling them up under the robe. She was not, as she had heard it called, a fan of going commando, but needs must. The Converse shoes felt very different without her usual pair of socks too. The warmth and cosiness to her feet was very welcome. She hung the hoody over her shoulders. She felt half dressed, she was half dressed.

“There are some clothes upstairs.” Said David. By upstairs Roisin knew he meant in the farmhouse. It was such a casual comment to make, but they were in a hermetically sealed subterranean bunker! He suggested she hurry back as he Melded. Roisin grabbed another phone from the burner collection, synched FMM to it and ‘popped upstairs’.

The farmhouse felt comfortable and homely after the lab and the cell she had recently experienced. It made her feel homesick. She had liked her little house, her office, her routine, her Marmite. Being in a space, walking through doorways, opening wardrobes and looking in chests of drawers, felt so ordinary. Finding another t-shirt was simple. She found socks too, a decent length set, white. Roisin lost a little of the comfort factor thinking about wearing someone else’s underwear. Even washed and pressed it seemed a little creepy. She was pleased to find some bags, freshly delivered unopened Next parcels, near the chest of drawers. She pulled open the bags and found some clean underwear, the bra was not a perfect fit, but it was close enough. It was still weird, but she felt less bad putting on box fresh underwear.

She had promised to hurry back, but she found the kitchen. There was a toaster, no bread in sight. The fridge offered nothing, a few long living jars of condiments sat there and a tub of Margarine. Otherwise it was cleared as if the owner was on holiday. The freezer had several loaves of bread in it. She pulled the nearest ice cold loaf out. She bashed the loaf on the worktop edge to separate some slices. As she caused the slices to part her brain ran a scenario where she just Translated the ice crystals out of the bread using FMM. Her counter thread then added all the things wrong with that. The bread would lose all its moisture, it would be like a cardboard cracker bread. The old school way had worked. She put the toaster on auto-defrost and let it do the work, “Au natural.” She said to herself. The toast popped, she checked a few cupboards for Marmite, but only found peanut butter. That would have to do. She spread it thickly and crunched her way through an early morning breakfast. She took two more slices from the frozen stack and repeated the action. She boiled the kettle, found two mugs, some instant coffee and a fresh carton of long life milk. She Translated the resulting coffee and toast back to the lab along with herself and typed Doctor Henry back to life.

Whilst David sipped his steaming coffee, she cupped her hands around hers and talked through the steam.

“I look at the World through your API, I can see things as they are and then make some things as they weren’t. It is always the same. The 10p drone and the coin and cap joined in a different way, but chemically. Lower down the chain.”

“You are suggesting.” He spluttered through toasted crumbs, “That we are looking at this the way we always do it?” His statement was a deliberate and well known provocative one to innovative thinkers. She was an innovative thinker.

“The way we have always done it! We need to mix it up, take a view we have not taken before!"

She turned to the code and put in a new set of plus and minus buttons and a default button on the main view. She wired those buttons, to an increment, decrement and a reset to <2709>. She ran the code and despite not having a connection checked the number rose and fell as she clicked. David was looking over her shoulder by now. He nodded in agreement.

“Fractal Iteration Level.” He said quietly to her.

She was now in the lab, with two static human frames. To run this test he had to be elsewhere, dialled in and ready to figure this metadata out. She needed to be sure the directory structure worked as she expected to map the buttons onto a new layer to look at. All she had done before was see the World as the default listing command had shown it. She entered.

“ls -l”

The result was as before.

>total 2

drwxr-xr-x+ 5 root wheel 170 1 Sep 2015 World

drwxrwxr-x+ 14 root wheel 476 1 Sep 2015 usr

This time she tried.

“ls -a”

The screen filled with text blasting past, hidden directories now showing. The numbers rattled in quick sequence up and past 2709 and on. She stopped them with a Control-C. Fractal iterations would be infinite, that is usually their thing, she thought. She typed to change to one of the symbolic directories.

“cd 2710”

The symbolic link was accepted. She checked the contents and saw another World and usr listing as before. She modified the FMM viewing code to make sure it was requesting from the correct iteration directory set by the buttons not just the default one. Roisin compiled the code and hit save.

She had her usual version of the World, her sphere and some other cubes on the screen. She hit plus and it became <2710>, a new level of iteration. Her screen filled with millions of cubes, the VM had a hard time as it rapidly reached a memory addressability limit, it rebooted itself. Before the crash Roisin had seen what looked like atomic elements labelled. A view of the World with the detail a high end electron microscope might have? It was no wonder the machine crashed. How many objects would that be in a 1 m cube around her? She had just zoomed in on the atomic landscape. She started again. This time she hit the minus button. The screen was a lot less busy. It just showed level <2708>. A single block appeared, about where her sphere had been. It was labelled HumanConcept. She expanded the range to a few more meters. Relative to her she saw a QuantumConcept cube. David looked like he was a QuantumConcept and she was just a plain and simple HumanConcept. There were no other Concept cubes in the room. Poor Alex, was not registering, she had lost her HumanConcept.

“That’s it! She has lost her mojo, baby.” She said out loud to detract from the tension she was now feeling.

Doctor Henry, returned to motion, pondered the small amount of evidence Roisin was able to impart, albeit she did it with great enthusiasm.

”Fascinating. An architectural overview of the World with human consciousness as a concept. You are right, Alex has lost what makes her, the concept that defines her as a person not just an organic shell. You need to go again and run a deeper Examine. What relates the concept to the physical world in the 2709 iteration? There will be some linkages, there has to be. Alex’s body may not have a link to her HumanConcept, but if she took a risk and moved her concept elsewhere, it may be something we can find.”

“Like a missing symbolic link needing to be reattached in a file system?” She answered knowing the analogy held.

“Yes, we need to relink Alex to herself, she is going to be out there.” He said.

They took their positions, and started again. Roisin looked at FMM, changed to the <2708> concept level and clicked on herself to do an Examine. The text box read.

Designation - HumanConcept