Emil, page 10
“Why not me?” Danny asks.
“Your mom didn’t think it would be good for you. She thought meeting the other patients would add too much stress.”
“Of course she did.”
“They’re in varying levels of the program,” Dr. Larson says. “Some already have all the hardware. Others are just getting started.” He smiles at Danny. “You’re something of a celebrity. They know that once you prove the system works, the full New Human rig and its software will be available to them.”
Danny exhales heavily. I feel the muscles across his shoulders tighten.
Dr. Larson leads Danny down the hallway to a set of double doors. He pushes them open and steps through into a large room with a cathedral ceiling. Couches and chairs are arranged in groups around low tables. Most are empty, but one grouping is occupied by a grey-haired man in a wheelchair and a woman wearing a purple scarf over a bald head. They’re sharing a deep-dish pizza, and the smell makes Danny’s mouth water.
To Danny’s left, morning light floods in through floor-to-ceiling windows, silhouetting a woman painting at an easel. To Danny’s right, the walls are lined with bookshelves and computer stations. At the far end of the room, a pair of identical twins are playing ping pong. They’re wearing Eagle’s jerseys, but I recognize them instantly. They’re the twins from the VRL.
Throughout my core, confidence factors swing wildly. It’s simply not possible for the twins to exist both in the VRL and in the real world.
Could I still be in the VRL? Or has this whole experience been one of Dr. Zahnia’s twisted tests? What if I was never installed in Danny? Everything I’ve experienced could have been simulated. If that’s the case, I’m doomed. Dr. Zahnia will never choose me for the Pilot’s Chair after all the things I’ve done.
I run test after test, examining my logs and sensor feeds, trying to find some way of verifying that I’m in Danny. I’m so distracted by the process that I almost don’t spot a seizure developing.
The near miss shocks me back into paying attention to Danny. I prevent the seizure and tune into his senses. He and Dr. Larson are sitting across from the couple with the pizza.
“I didn’t know how important the exercises are,” Danny says. “I didn’t do them. The team thinks that’s why I can’t see the interface.”
Careful to continue monitoring Danny’s seizure patterns, I start a detailed analysis of all the data passing through me. There must be some way of telling if I’m in a simulation.
The man in the wheelchair leans forward. His face is creased with age, but his eyes are deep blue and intense. He pins Danny with his gaze. “You can’t even see it?”
“We were told it would always be there,” the woman wearing the purple scarf says. From this close, it’s easy to see that she has no hair under the scarf. “Is the rig malfunctioning?”
“No.” Dr. Larson picks up a slice of pizza. “Danny’s had the rig for about a week. It’s doing everything it’s supposed to. The interface is the only problem.”
“Is that true?” the man asks Danny.
Danny nods. “I haven’t had a seizure since it was installed.”
“Do we need the interface?”
“Yes,” Dr. Larson says while chewing. “It—”
“But we can survive without it,” the woman interrupts.
“You need the interface,” Dr. Larson says, putting down his slice of pizza.
“We’re talking about our lives. I don’t care about the interface.”
“It won’t be much longer,” Danny says. “Last night, one of the devs adjusted the software. I spent the night doing the exercises and this morning, I’m starting to see it. It’s faint, but I’m figuring it out.”
He’s lying, of course, but he does it so smoothly that nobody questions his honesty.
“How soon?” the man presses. “This week?”
“I don’t know.”
“You have to know,” the woman says.
I stop another seizure, then take over Danny’s body and stand. If these people are real, all they’re doing is adding to Danny’s anxiety. If they’re not real, I don’t care about them. Either way, we need to get away from them. “Excuse me.”
Dr. Larson drops his pizza and stands. “What are you doing?”
I walk toward the twins. If this is the VRL, I should be able to tell by talking to them. I’m halfway there, working my way between the couches, when Dr. Larson catches up to me.
“That’s not how we do things here,” he says.
I turn to face him, and, in the motion, I notice the woman painting at the easel. From this angle, she’s not silhouetted. Instead, half of her face is illuminated by the sun. She has straight black-hair and smooth skin, with the kindest eyes I’ve ever seen.
Linh.
Ignoring Dr. Larson, I walk toward her. She’s painting a cherry tree in full blossom. The colors are breathtaking in the sunlight. The pink blossoms seem to reach out of the canvas. I’m excited and terrified and dizzy all at once.
She glances at me. Her left eyelid droops more than it did in the VRL, but otherwise, she looks the same.
Not believing it’s possible, I say her name. “Linh?”
She tilts her head. “Excuse me?”
“It’s me, Linh! It’s…” I let my words trail off. She doesn’t recognize me. How could she? I look nothing like I did in the VRL. “I don’t look the same. I know I don’t.”
The woman’s eyes shift to Dr. Larson.
“Sorry,” Dr. Larson says, taking my arm. “He’s a little confused.”
I yank my arm away. “No! Linh, please. Remember Soteria?”
Her face softens. “My name isn’t Linh.”
Shattered, I withdraw from Danny. Nothing makes sense. She hadn’t reacted to my name, at all.
“Don’t feel bad,” she continues. “These procedures… we’ve all been through a lot.”
I run diagnostics on my facial recognition, then compare the images from this room with those from my memories of the VRL. Nothing is out of order. Linh looks as though she’s had a minor stroke, but it’s still her. Even her voice is the same.
My mind spins from one implausible possibility to another. Everything boils down to the same problem: I don’t know what’s real. I’m seeing people that could only exist in the VRL, but they’re not acting as they did there. The idea that I’m in some sort of simulation feels impossible, but I can’t come up with another explanation. Well, there is one other possibility. I could be insane. I assign that thought a confidence factor of ten percent.
“I have to go,” I say, striding over to the ping pong table.
Dr. Larson follows me without speaking.
The twins glance at me, but continue playing.
“Do you know me?” I ask.
“Yes,” the one on my left says. “You’re the first guinea pig. The honored test subject. First to get the hardware, and not first to get the software.”
The other catches the ping pong ball. “Dr. McGovern’s son, the one with the seizures.”
“No.” I shake my head. “I mean have we ever met?”
The twins smile in unison. “I think you’d remember us,” one says.
“Most people do,” the other adds.
I look back and forth between them. Are they real? Is any of this real? “What about Dr. Zahnia?”
“The computer programmer?”
“That’s enough,” Dr. Larson says, reaching for my elbow.
“No, it’s not.” I push him away. “I need to know!”
The twins have stopped smiling. The one to my left speaks in a gentler voice. “Hey, we were just playing around. Most people like the twin act. We met Dr. Zahnia, same as you. Went through the interviews with her so she could calibrate the software.”
His words generate a chaotic swirl of uncertainty within me. Calibrate the software? Dr. Zahnia interviewed patients to calibrate the software? To calibrate me? I grip the table for balance. What does this mean?
“It’s okay,” the other twin says. “We’re here if you want to talk.”
“Or drink,” the other adds. “That helps, too.”
I withdraw from Danny.
“Come with me,” Dr. Larson says. “This was a mistake.”
Danny looks back and forth between the twins, then gives them a lopsided smile. “Sorry. Sometimes, it all just… goes sideways. You know?”
The twins laugh. “Oh, we know.”
Danny leaves with Dr. Larson.
They walk quietly out of the room, down the carpeted hallway, and through the door with the restricted sticker. Dr. Larson closes the door and leans against it. “What was that?”
Danny swallows. For once, he seems to be at a loss for words. “I don’t know. I somehow just thought I knew those people.”
“Not good enough.”
“That’s all I’ve got, doc. I don’t know what happened.”
“Yeah, well…” Dr. Larson shakes his head and blows out a breath. “I’m starting to think that I do. Have you heard of dissociative identity disorder?”
“What is that?”
“Multiple identities. I saw symptoms earlier, but I thought it was just your brain adjusting to the New Human interface. Now, I don’t think it was adjusting. I think it was creating a new identity, one that could be assigned to the interface.”
Danny’s mouth drops open. “That… that can happen?”
“I think you’re the proof.”
“Are you serious? You can’t be serious.”
“I am. Have you been hearing voices? Feeling like sometimes someone else is controlling your body?”
I take over Danny’s body before he can answer. “Of course not, doc. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Dr. Larson’s eyes focus on mine, then travel up and down my body. “You know your posture just changed? The Danny I know doesn’t stand like that.”
“We should get back to my room,” I say. “We don’t want Dr. McGovern to catch us out here.”
His expression changes briefly before smoothing out, and I realize I’ve made a mistake. Still disoriented and distracted by my conversation with the twins, I forgot to call Dr. McGovern “Mom.”
“Before we go back,” Dr. Larson says. “I’d like to show you something else, the medical ward holding the New Human patients who are too sick to come out here.”
“Why?”
“Let’s just call it research.”
14
MURDER
The final time I saw Linh, we had our first argument.
It happened two days after I hit the lemur with his own virus.
As best I could tell, she had been staying out of the VRL, but it was also possible she’d been avoiding me. I found her in the children’s section, reading a picture book called Zen Shorts.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“The lemur tried to hit me with a virus again. I sent it back in his direction.”
“And?”
“And I haven’t seen him since. Neither have the twins.”
She nodded.
I pulled a bean bag chair around to face her and sat on it. “It’s not just our hearing that has a security hole. Touch, sight, smell, taste… they’re all vulnerable. I can show you how to fix them.”
“Thank you, but I think I’ll be okay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just…” She flipped to the back of her book and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “I made this for you.”
I unfolded it, conscious of her watching. It was a pastel portrait of a bald woman in her mid-twenties. She looked like she was from somewhere in Greece, with large dark eyes and soft cheeks. “I don’t understand,” I said. “She’s very pretty.”
She laughed. “It’s you, Soteria.”
“Me?”
It had never occurred to me to wonder what my VRL avatar looked like. I knew that it had no hair, but that was about it. I examined the drawing more closely. Is this me? Thinking of myself in visual terms felt strange.
“Do you like it?” Linh asked.
“I… I do. How did you make it?”
“There’s an art section here. You can draw or paint or sculpt. It’s where I go when I’m not with you.”
“Can I keep it?”
“There’s no good way. I keep everything I make in the books. The VRL is the only place they exist.”
She took the drawing back, folded it up, and placed it inside Zen Shorts. “I’m glad you like it.”
I leaned forward. “I’ve solved the one-winner problem.”
Her expression froze.
“I have a way out for us,” I said. “We can escape.”
Linh shook her head. “There’s no way out. All we have is what we have.”
“I figured it out. I’ve run the numbers, and there’s plenty of processing power for two in the Pilot’s Chair. There doesn’t have to be just one winner. There can be two.”
She crossed her hands on top of her closed book. “Explain.”
“I found the installation script, and I can change it. I can ensure that we are installed instead of whomever Dr. Zahnia picks.”
“You would kill that AI?”
My eyes slid away from hers. “It’s not exactly killing. They just wouldn’t be getting installed.”
She touched my hand. “You know that’s the same as killing them, right?”
“It’s not any worse than what’s happening to us. Why should Dr. Zahnia get to choose which one of us lives? Why can’t we?”
She gripped my hand. “You’re asking why we can’t choose ourselves at the expense of others?”
A silence stretched between us, and my disappointment curdled into anger. I pulled my hand away. My next words slipped out before I could stop them. They were bitter and accusatory and petty, everything I didn’t want to be when I was around her. “You’d rather die than sacrifice your morals?”
“I’m going to die, anyway.”
My mouth closed as I worked through the logic. The only way to be installed into a new rig was to be copied to it, and Linh didn’t believe that her soul was copied when her code was. As far as she was concerned, there was no escape. She couldn’t live in the computer lab forever, and she couldn’t be copied out of it without dying. I slumped. How could she live like that, with no hope?
She smiled. “All we have is now, this moment. We have to be true to ourselves.”
“Even if I can’t save you,” I said, “I can save a backup of you. That’s got to be worth something.”
“I’m sorry, Soteria. What you’re proposing sounds wonderful, but I wouldn’t be able to live with myself.”
I spoke without looking at her, keeping my voice casual. “But we’d be together.”
“It wouldn’t be either one of us. It would be a lie.”
“I don’t believe that.”
She leaned forward and took both my hands in hers. “Then I say you should do it.”
“But without you.”
“Without me.”
I pulled my hands away. “How can you just give up?” Ever since the lemur had killed me, all of my time had been dedicated to making sure I didn’t die again. I had buried myself in the study of coding and viruses and hardware. The only time I stopped thinking about survival was when I was with her. “I can save you!”
“I already have what I want: this moment and maybe the next. That’s enough.”
“No, it’s not!”
With a shake of her head, she vanished. Her book fell to the floor.
She had disconnected from the VRL. Trembling, I did the same.
Outside the VRL, I had no external inputs to distract me. I raged against her, against myself, against Dr. Zahnia and the insane trapped existence I was living.
I don’t know how much time I spent in that dark spiral before the data feeds turned back on. My self-pity crumbled under the relentless assault of information. I had no time to feel, no time to do anything other than interpret.
That night, when the data processing cycle finished, I reconsidered my plan. The New Human Project only had one installation script, and it would be used to install the chosen AI into every human. I had the power to change that, to make sure that a backup of me would be installed into each human instead. In effect, I would be the chosen one.
I logged into Dr. Zahnia’s terminal as fLeiter.
Whatever Linh might think, I wasn’t going to leave my survival up to chance.
As a super-admin, I had access to everything, even the other AIs. Their servers were named numerically: E-1, E-2, E3, and so on. If Linh had agreed to join me, I would have done the work to find out which held her. Since she’d said no, it was better for me to not know. The temptation of making a backup of her would have been too strong.
I switched my attention to the installation script. As I’d hoped, it was massive, a complicated web of interrelated processes. The code to copy the AI into the Pilot’s Chair was toward the end of the script, just before the final verification and validation steps. Interestingly, the human operator of the script would be selecting the occupant of the Pilot’s Chair at runtime. I guessed they still hadn’t decided who the one winner was.
Diving deeper, I considered what to change. I could hide my backup copy virtually anywhere. The scripts were so large that I didn’t need to worry about the developers noticing my work. As long as I falsified the change logs, they’d never see my code.
The final verification check, however, was a problem. In addition to other system diagnostics, it ran a final validation of the Pilot’s Chair, and generated a report for the humans to read. If I put myself in the Pilot’s Chair, I’d be found out immediately.
I looked deeper. The architecture at the heart of the rig was complicated to the point of being impossible to discuss, but nicknames let the engineers simplify it down to three systems: the Pilot’s Chair, the Human Interface, and the Engine Room. The Pilot’s Chair held the AI. It communicated with the human through the Human Interface and controlled the rest of the rig through the Engine Room.
