Authors: Christopher Brookmyre
Her face came gradually into focus as consciousness returned. It hadn’t been entirely absent; rather, lost in a storm of inchoate
threads of information, none of which ever quite resolved into an image, a sound or even a thought. For a moment he thought
what he was seeing was a mere accretion of such fragments, another vision about to dissolve, but it rapidly became sharp and
distinct. As before, the pain was gone but the memory of it lurked intimidatingly nearby, like a ned at a cash machine.
Iris was standing before him, only a couple of feet away. Ankou was gone, and with him his scourge, but Ross wasn’t sure right
then which one of the pair he hated more.
Something appeared in her hand, like a cross between a flash drive and a hypodermic syringe. At the prompting of a tiny squeeze,
a needle shot out from one end, reminding Ross uncomfortably of the spike he’d once had and the damage he had wrought with
it. Some flippant part of him tried to distract his fear of the coming onslaught by reflecting that it would have been great
for making margaritas. It didn’t work, though. He couldn’t take his eyes off the device. A last trickle of defiance wanted
to tell her there was nothing she could inflict upon him that was worse than what he’d already suffered, but it was silenced
by fear that she might be about to demonstrate otherwise.
He did manage a brief statement, however.
‘You evil fucking bitch.’
She put a finger to his lips.
‘I blame the parents,’ she said, and thrust the needle into his neck.
A phalanx of Secatore guards escorted him into the CEO’s office, a corner suite boasting more glass than the average viticulture
biosphere over in Napa. They had unlocked the restraints in the elevator, undoubtedly under strict orders. It wouldn’t do
for one of the architects of the company’s success to be seen frog-marched through the senior-executive-level corridors with
his wrists clapped in irons. A sight like that could result in a five-point hit on the NASDAQ, for goodness sake.
Zac Michaels sent a cursory glance in Ross’s direction by way of acknowledgement and gestured to him with an outstretched
palm, as if to say he’d be with him in a moment. The palm changed to a fist with thumb and pinkie outstretched to explain
the delay. He was on the phone, as the expression still went, even though telephony was no longer the conduit. Truth was,
the guy could have been having a board-meeting in his head, multiple audio and video feeds playing behind his eyes, but Ross
suspected he was actually talking to nobody: he just wanted to underline the power relationship by making him wait a little
longer. It seemed unnecessary given that he’d already left him waiting in a custody office in the basement since they kicked
his door in that morning, but sometimes the subtle gesture of dominance trumped the grander one.
Outside the huge windows, the sun was going down, painting the sky in reds and pinks. The day was closing, and closing fast.
Ross had been living here in California most of his days but his instincts were still hard-wired by his formative years in
Scotland. Sunset was slow there, even in winter: when you saw it dip, you assumed you had time before it became pitch black.
Over here, you got far less notice.
Michaels muttered a few last words to whomever he was speaking, wrapping it up. Ross caught something about ‘all moot now,
and ultimately no damage was done, so we can let him down from the naughty step’. It was ostensibly private, but unmistakably
for his benefit.
Zac Michaels: one-time low-level corporate enforcer and obsequious functionary, now chief executive officer of Neurosphere.
Almost every part of his body had been replaced over the years, but no matter how you altered the constituent componentry,
the overall result was still an oily prick.
‘Ross, Ross, Ross,’ he said, his voice pitched between conciliatory, admonishing and exasperated. He didn’t offer a hand;
the only shaking was by his head, gently conveying the ‘whatever are we to do with you?’ vibe. ‘Why don’t you take a seat.
I gather you’ve had a rough day.’
‘You mean having half a dozen assault vehicles converge on my beach house, then a team of security drones smash in my front
door and drag me off to custody? Don’t sweat it.’
‘I’m sorry it was so heavy-handed, believe me. Something like that shouldn’t be happening to someone of your stature within
this company. As you know, it’s an automated response, and the problem was you triggered it while certain of your security
privileges were suspended. Under those circumstances, the system couldn’t distinguish between an unauthorised access attempt
by a company employee and a potential penetration by some malicious hacker. I’ve been in meetings all day, otherwise I’d have
intervened earlier, believe me.’
Believe me
. All these decades on, that was still the giveaway that he was lying. And all these decades on, he really didn’t care that
you knew.
‘No you wouldn’t.’
Michaels shrugged and gave a little nod, as if to say
touché
.
‘No, you’re right. I thought a few hours cooling your heels in the basement was appropriate, and truth is I would have had
you released sooner if I hadn’t spent all day clearing up your mess and putting out fires so you don’t end up sacked or arraigned.’
‘So
I
don’t end up arraigned?’ Ross asked him pointedly.
‘I’m not doing anything illegal. Jesus, Baker, we’ve both come
a long way since that grimy little compound in Stirling, but some things haven’t changed. You’re still your own worst enemy
and it’s still me that’s saving you from yourself.’
‘Aye, it’s a good thing Neurosphere isn’t relying on revolutionary scientific innovation to make money. I’m sure a genius
like you would have us trading just as high if Jay Solomon and I had never come along.’
‘The difference between us, Ross, is that I have always understood the value of what you bring to the table, but you’ve always
been too blinkered to see the reciprocal. This isn’t about share prices or opening up a new revenue stream. What I am doing
right now will put us in a position with the military that will secure untold opportunities – for all of us.’
‘What you are doing right now will put us morally in a position alongside any black-market scan vendor on the streets of Mumbai
or Lagos.’
‘Oh dry your eyes, Baker. Come on: you won that fight. You got your law passed. And as any black-market scan vendor on the
streets of Mumbai or Lagos would tell you, we seem to be the only people obeying it.’
‘So that’s who you’re measuring yourself against in terms of ethics?’
‘I’m not the one who created this menagerie, if you want to talk ethics. You won’t make me a surrogate for your guilty conscience.
I’m not the one who’s done something I’m ashamed of.’
‘And is that why you locked me out of the whole system? Because you’ve nothing to be ashamed of?’
‘Actually, if you remember, I initially only locked you out of a small part of the system, and I did it knowing that you would
take the bait and hack your way in. That put you in violation of Article 774 and allowed me to suspend your access to the
whole system until an investigation was concluded, giving us time to do what we needed. It’s all moot now anyway. It’s over.
Look.’
Michaels sent him a couple of feeds, instantly projected on to his field of vision. One showed the file integrity readings,
more and more scans showing one hundred per cent, ready for extraction. The other displayed the current status of a rogue
upload, introduced to the system that morning but now safely isolated.
Neither image came as a surprise, but Ross still had to suppress a show of emotion in seeing that the outcome was now all
but confirmed.
‘Your last-ditch little Hail Mary pass was tracked from the start,’ Michaels told him. ‘I know you were always pretty hot
at those first-person shooters, but the world of business is real-time strategy. If you try to play
my
game, you’ll lose every time.’
Ross glanced at the two information read-outs again. First one, then both of them blacked out, right on cue.
He glanced up at Michaels, who suddenly didn’t look quite so confident.
‘You sure about that?’
Ross closed his eyes and braced himself for pain, but instead what he experienced was a rush like no drug had ever effected
in the human mind. She had injected him with new memories: memories from a future he’d never got to live, played out in the
present tense. They were not complete, just shards and splinters, snapshots and highlights. At first they were like fragments
in a kaleidoscope, but then they coalesced in his mind, assembling themselves into a picture that made sense.
He and Solderburn in the R&D lab, Ross working on a very early synthesis model and beginning to see startling indications
of just how complex the scan results might be. An experiment to see how a scan might interact with a virtual environment.
Ross rooting around for a basic world-builder program; meanwhile Solderburn cuts to the chase and boots up the first 3D game
that happens to be on the desktop. It is
Starfire,
which in times gone by Solderburn used to run on a partition as a multiplayer server: he, Ross and whoever else fancied staying
behind after work to duke it out with each other or against Reaper bots
.
They watch as the uploaded entity begins battling his way through the map; then, purely in the interests of science, Solderburn
spends twenty minutes playing deathmatch against, technically, himself
.
Two geeks stay late into the night, energised. Ross working out of hours is a rarity now, done purely on his own terms. The
day he learned Carol was pregnant, he walked back out of the scanning cubicle having realised he was the one with the power,
and management pissing him about had been a long-term gambit to prevent him noticing this. He called their bluff, told them
what he was here to do and what he wasn’t. That was years ago. He never looked back
.
Solderburn begins uploading some more scans but Ross is conflicted about the idea. He has deduced from the behaviour he is
seeing exhibited within the game that these are not glorified AI bots they’ve created. He is aware that the scan, if uploaded,
could be a consciousness that wouldn’t know it was anything other than the person who lay down in the scanning cubicle. He
argues that it may be unethical but this is Solderburn he’s talking to. He knows the guy is only going to do it anyway as
soon as he leaves
.
Solderburn ridicules him for being precious and melodramatic, and Ross has to concede that this may be the case. Nonetheless,
he remains sufficiently squeamish about the idea as to encrypt his own scan so that Solderburn can’t upload it
.
It is late the next morning when he returns to the lab and Solderburn shows him something astonishing. The scans are no longer
in
Starfire.
They have found a way to access other games on the same hard drive. By evening, lights are blinking to indicate that they
have accessed other drives on the array. More astonishing still, some weeks later they observe that the scans are making changes
to the games. They realise events are moving at their own digital clockspeed there, only slowing to real time whenever he
and Solderburn interact with a game, a temporal alteration the scans don’t appear to notice
.
They expand the experiment, loading more and more games, more and more scans. Ross alters the synthesis model so that the
new uploads have to abide by the rules of the worlds in which they find themselves, otherwise it will be anarchy. He and Solderburn
edit the memory files to erase recollection of the scanning process itself, so that the entities experience a less jarring
splice: going to bed and waking up somewhere new instead of walking in one door and the world having changed when they open
it again
.
Solderburn reveals their work-in-progress to the suits, playing it as a trump card to win two tricks at once. By doing so
he secures himself and Ross a blank cheque in terms of time and resources, while simultaneously taking the ethical considerations
out of Ross’s hands and above his pay grade. Ross is thus vindicated in his decision to secret away his own file, as it soon
becomes clear he will not have the option to encrypt any others. As the Simulacron is rolled out into hospital testing, the
company regards the resultant scans as belonging to Neurosphere rather than their subjects. So begins, in an industrial estate
in Stirling, an argument over a whole new definition of
‘intellectual property’ that will ultimately reach (though not quite end at) the US Supreme Court
.
The ‘menagerie’ continues to evolve, and Ross’s observation of it assists the development of his synthesis models. He and
Solderburn incorporate their progress into the framework, causing the gameworlds to become more and more real as their inhabitants
project detail from memory and imagination but experience it as sensory perception
.
Their work forms the basis for the phenomenally successful Memento Mori project, around the advent of which Ross first publicly
raises ethical questions concerning the rights of what comes to be known as digital consciousness, or DC. Having observed
the entities in the menagerie, Ross understands that you can’t leave DCs to exist as brains in jars. As a result, all Memento
Mori scans are connected to a vast virtual realm referred to within Neurosphere as the Secondverse, in which they can live
out meaningful existences beyond their real-time interactions with their loved ones
.
Meantime, the menagerie still ticks over in a metaphorical dusty corner of Neurosphere; metaphorical because, like everything
else by now, it is stored in cloud systems so that no part of it is in one location. (Strictly speaking, by this stage ‘planetary
atmosphere’ or even ‘nebula’ would be a more accurate analogy than cloud, but the terminology endures.) Its sector is code-named
Cirrus Nine. The original Stirling hard-drive array remains a node on the network however, and on a rare visit over from Silicon
Valley, Ross is amused to find that you can still play
Starfire
on it
.
However, the more he has learned, the more the technology evolves, the more guilt he feels on those (albeit increasingly isolated)
occasions when he remembers about his and Solderburn’s early experiment. From his observations he knows that the entities
inside have no idea where they are, and he is enduringly aware that they did not consent to be there. Indeed, it is this lack
of consent that precludes one possible salve to his conscience: the idea of merging the menagerie with the Secondverse. Neurosphere’s
lawyers have specifically forbidden such a measure because the whole point of Memento Mori is that its inhabitants have a
direct line of communication to the outside world. If the unconsented subjects of the menagerie were able to contact their
former selves, the liabilities would be catastrophic
.
It is a wrong that there is no way of righting. It cannot be undone, and the solution is certainly not to switch it all off,
even when that is
still an option. He comes to accept that it is the resurrectionist’s price, the cost to the soul of the unethical act that
was necessary to advance the scientist’s knowledge. But in Ross’s case it is more than merely a sin with which he must always
live. He has a responsibility towards this secret realm, and this drives his sense of responsibility towards all digital consciousness
.
With the lines between digital and organic consciousness forever blurred, DC rights becomes a very serious issue. Religious
groups lead the objections, mainly because they don’t like the fact that this technology has given rise to a whole new field
of ethics that their entire belief system didn’t anticipate, raising awkward implications regarding the omniscience of their
various mythical creators. (The practical ramifications are particularly messy for the Vatican, where, following the ordination
of a new pope, it transpires that a DC of the previous pontiff is continuing to issue edicts and passing comment on his successor,
the fallout frequently threatening to cause a schism within the Church
.
Having spoken to the scans of their late relatives and heard witness of how convincing the DCs perceive their selves and their
digital reality to be, it becomes harder and harder for people to think of DCs as mere binary files, but it is the deeper
implications that truly alter popular attitudes. Ultimately it is Bostrom’s simulation argument that sways the attitudes of
individuals and governments. Once people come to understand that their own current existence might be a simulation, and that
for all they know they might already be a DC, this leads to a new interpretation of the golden rule
.
Laws are passed internationally, enforcing a single crucial principle: one person, one scan. You can have real-time updating
back-up, but you cannot make copies, and nobody – absolutely nobody – is allowed to own a scan of anybody else
.
All DCs are strictly registered and protected. All except the knock-offs available on the black market, naturally, but that
is as reviled as the slave trade. Any company found to be trafficking in scans would face instant pariah status, not to mention
massive criminal charges
.
But where corporations are involved, there will always be loop-holes, and Zac Michaels has found one: thousands of unregistered
scans, DCs with no rights and no copy protection. Cirrus Nine is a treasure trove, and the outside world doesn’t know it exists.
It is a potentially unlimited source of DCs for research and experimentation, and the military are waiting impatiently on
the sidelines with their
tongues hanging out and their wallets open
.
It’s not that simple, however. Michaels’ problem is extraction, which is not a matter of walking into a server farm and copying
all the scans on to a USB stick. The DCs can’t be copied while they are in a state of read/write activity. To extract a scan,
you first have to put it in stasis, and to do that you need to contain it in one place within the gameverse. Unfortunately
for Michaels, the DCs are scattered to the four winds: a vast diaspora permanently in motion
…
All of this Ross saw and understood – experienced in the present tense, but read back as knowledge, as recollection – in literally
the blink of an eye.
When his lids rose he looked upon the same face before him but felt something entirely different: a new recognition, not of
the punkish woman he had followed across worlds, but of a face that somehow stayed the same though he had watched it change
and grow over decades.
‘Jennifer,’ he breathed, not quite believing, not quite sure he understood.
‘I didn’t come here to infiltrate the resistance, Dad,’ she said, finally speaking in her own voice. ‘I came here to infiltrate
the Integrity.’
She waved a hand and the restraints withdrew, the column shrinking back into the floor. They stared at each other for just
a moment, then she stepped closer and hugged him. Technically it was the first time he had held her, but it felt simultaneously
like both the first and the millionth. He had a thousand questions, but right then her embrace was answering enough of them
to be going on with. He was holding his daughter in his arms. Granted the circumstances were not ideal, but with that part
sorted, he was sure that they could deal with the rest.
His eyes filled and for a few seconds he couldn’t speak. He wanted just to stay there, in that moment, but he knew he couldn’t
afford to.
‘Michaels,’ he issued in a choked whisper, his way of signalling that he was ready to saddle up. ‘Michaels is Ankou?’
‘Yes and no. Ankou is an amalgam of things; that’s why he can’t settle on a form. The programming dweebs at Neurosphere tried
to amend his scan so that he’d have the powers of an
Original, but they couldn’t pull it off. So instead they merged his scan with all this nasty new tech that he can manipulate.
For a while I wondered why he never left the Citadel, then I worked it out: he can’t. He is the Integrity’s power centre.
In essence, Ankou
is
the Integrity. He has pseudo-Original powers, so he’s been able to fashion weapons and vehicles, and this new tech lets them
erase stuff on other worlds.’
‘Those whips,’ Ross said. ‘Rifles too. Can they erase people?’
‘The Integrity won’t because DCs are worth too much. They want people intact, but they need a deterrent to keep them in line.
The whips write temporarily to your memory files, so that it feels as though you’ve experienced physical agony and emotional
torment your entire life: for a few moments after impact, you can remember experiencing nothing else.’
‘What about the troops?’
‘Multiple clones of a handful of Neurosphere security personnel,’ Jennifer told him.
‘Ankou creates them in here, so Michaels is covered against charges of making unauthorised copies.’
‘You got it. The name Ankou means soul-collector. Michaels had you locked out of the system so that you couldn’t interfere
with his extraction plans. That’s when we came up with our counter-measure.’
‘We?’
‘Real-world you and real-world me. Michaels knew you’d try and hack your way in again, and you did, but only as a decoy. The
real system-breaches were carried out by me: that is, real-world Jennifer, thousands of miles away. Part of his efforts to
fend off interference involved cutting off all communication with Cirrus Nine: there was no way of seeing what was going on
from the outside, apart from pure data, technical read-outs: in particular, file integrity. But you remembered there was one
interface Michaels had forgotten about.’
‘Stirling,’ Ross stated. ‘The original hard-drive array.’
‘So I took a trip. Four days ago in real time you uploaded this scan of me, incorporating a shitload of highest-level Neurosphere
clearance codes you had procured. These were to open various doors for me once I got in here, help me lay the groundwork.
That’s the last part of what I know about the
outside. But as we’re both right here now, that means the rest went according to plan.’