Collective Mind (4 page)

It
was only lunchtime and Isaac was struggling to keep his eyes open. His body was
complaining after the strain of the previous day, the despair that had made him
decide to sell his creativity. The explosion, the hit to the head, the police
station, Vicky in a coma; his head was spinning after everything that had
happened yesterday.

He
plodded into the bathroom. Looking at himself in the mirror, he opened his eyes
wide and raised his eyebrows. Squeezing his eyes open and shut he thought he
looked more like a shabby hobo Gazing out at him from the mirror was a thin
young guy with dark hair and piercing grey-green eyes. The nose was a bit on
the large side, so were the ears, and the cheeks were slightly hollow. You
couldn’t really call him classically handsome, but the girls always saw
something in him and they probably knew better. Even the small scar on his chin
didn’t spoil his looks, instead it added a touch of the brutality that was
lacking. Isaac made a slipshod attempt to tidy up his hair, but it still stuck
out rebelliously. He glanced at the uneven covering of stubble on his face.
“Unshaved as always, and I’m not going to shave,” he thought.

“Women
like stubble for some reason,” was the first clear thought that came to him.
And at the same time they complain that it’s prickly.” He tried to imagine what
it was like when you stood at the mirror first thing in the morning and a girl
walked up to you and ran her hand over your unshaven cheek like in an
advertisement. But that was on television, that sort of thing didn’t happen in
real life. Hop into the bathroom, grab a quick wash and dash off to deal with
business at hand. The few girls Isaac had dated before had never done that.

To
get your cheek stroked, you needed someone you loved. A girl who loved you, not
just some casual hookup. There hadn’t been any genuine loving in Isaac’s life
since his sister had been ill and he didn’t wonder where it had gone.

No
one needs a boyfriend with problems, especially one who’s almost a beggar.
Everyone has enough headaches of their own; they can do without anyone else’s.
After discovering Vicky was ill, Isaac didn’t have the time or the money or –
more importantly, the desire to have a genuine affair.

He
had to make do with the girls – the drunk ones – who came his way at the
Stars’N’Bars. Hints were quite often made and he was given to understand or
even told straight out that he was cute, that he had handsome features, that he
was tall and well built. In fact he wasn’t all that tall, but that didn’t
bother Isaac, it wasn’t a problem in his life. No one needed to explain to
Isaac what the female tourists had in mind when they said that sort of thing to
the first young guy they met. Take everything given, as they say, though he was
always short of strength after a long shift.

Isaac
awoke from his thoughts beside his computer, with a cup of coffee in his hand.
“Oh, coffee! When did I manage to make that? Some things get done on autopilot,
as if you have your own barman sitting inside you,” Isaac chuckled to himself,
but he wasn’t feeling cheerful. “Stop. Why go straight to the computer? That’s
a habit.. I have to call the hospital and find out about Vicky.”

“Grace
Kelly Hospital, how can I help you?” the phone said in the familiar rapid
patter.

“My
name is Isaac Leroy…” Isaac cleared his throat, his voice was hoarse. “I’m calling
to find out about the condition of my sister, Victoria Frank, age twenty-two.”

“One
moment” He was put through to a different number, introduced himself again and
was reconnected again. Finally he heard the duty nurse in the right department
rummaging through her papers and the clatter of a keyboard and then a
considerate voice chirped in his ear.

“Monsieur
Leroy,” Isaac could never get used to that ceremonial form of address, and he
winced every time. “Monsieur Leroy, your sister has stabilized and the worst
has passed. At the moment she is listed as serious but in stable condition.”

“But
I was told she’s in a coma! I want to speak to her doctor.”

The
stupid, pathetic hope aroused by the medical term “stable condition” had been a
mistake. The doctor confirmed that Vicky was in a coma, but only yesterday her
condition had been much worse. She could have died. It was all over now, the
doctors were monitoring her progress and it would be clear when the surgery
could be performed.

“There’s
no need to hurry with the money, Monsieur Leroy, but nonetheless we have to be
ready to carry out the operation,” the doctor concluded, said goodbye and hung
up.

Isaac
was almost shaking.

“She
could have died, and I put off offloading my energy until the last moment.
Unforeseen circumstances – that moron of a terrorist could have cost Vicky her
life. I didn’t even keep a single day in reserve! What an idiot I was! More
stupid than any Veggie!

“I
hate COMA.” Isaac thought. “They have everything they need to cure people – the
technologies, the methodologies, the high-class specialists – and all of that
thanks to sucking creativity out of people like me.”

His
thoughts suddenly took an aggressive turn: “But no one benefits from it all
because the treatment has to be paid for. Until we go to that freaking COMA to
sell our creativity, people, our nearest and dearest, just keep getting worse!”

Aggressiveness
is a form of helplessness, it surfaces when you can’t find the right words to
express your feelings.

What
was going on? The media were choked solid with praise for UNICOMA. The whole
world was rejoicing at the rosy forecasts of a happy future for mankind.
Problems were being solved, scientists had been given answers to their
questions, and solutions had been found for the technical puzzles. Even the
people who became total Veggies after offloading their creativity were happy
and looked content.

No
one paid any special attention any longer to terrorist attacks, like the one
Isaac had got involved with yesterday. They were regarded as no more than
disorderly conduct. Even the police ignored the feeble street protests.
Solitary messiahs, protest graffiti – there were always plenty of mental cases
and petty hooligans around. These troublemakers claimed we should be afraid of
the power held by UNICOMA. Some opposition scientists claimed that pooled
creativity was only useful to make progress, the kind of projects where some
prior work had already been done in the past. 1.         Not even a billion of
HIT, they said, could be helpful to start novel ventures of the future, such as
conquering deep space or curing future viruses. Thanks to Collective Mind,
people could accelerate research and bring it to a conclusion more quickly, but
without prior developments, pooled creativity was useless. Teleportation might
seem like science fiction, but in the middle of the last century, the
smartphone was pure science fiction too.

New
questions were being left unanswered and the society was growing more stupid.
At this rate of downloading there would soon be no one left to ask questions.
All of it was justified by populist claims that the diseases that had been
conquered saved people’s lives today, whereas critics and retrogrades could
always be found.

Orange
Energy sucked out of people would never be able to do what its original owners
could – it wasn’t capable of asking a new question, creating a dream, inventing
a new fantasy. Only human beings could do that. “Nonetheless,” objected the
experts from the UN, “there’s no guarantee that a man who holds on his creativity
would make rational use of it by himself. We still have to reap the full
benefits of the revolutionary leap forward that the world has made, readjust.
Let’s harvest the scores of new inventions that Collective Mind will produce,
and deal with the problems later. We’re studying them, but their number is
miniscule in comparison with the thousands of supremely important successful
new developments that we have.” The success of UNICOMA was well protected by
the armor plating of a host of useful technologies.

“Supremely
important,” Isaac spat out angrily. His hand reached out for a cigarette. “But
I don’t smoke!” In stressful moments, Isaac’s old reflex of fumbling on the
table with his hand for a pack of cigarettes sometimes came back.

He
tried to pull himself together. “Get on the computer Isaac, they told you
there’s still time. You can earn the money you need to pay for your sister’s
surgery from the V-Rain. Then there’ll be enough for a decent human life too.
Use the chance you’ve got! The doctors still don’t have a full picture! Just
get on with the work like a grown-up while there is still time! And don't
forget: long comas may bring a permanent damage”

His
rage and the pain inside his head made it hard to focus on his work, nauseated
and choked him, interfered with concentrating on the little device. He recalled
Pierre, the young guy he talked to at COMA. “Shit,” he thought, “I hope he’ll
be all right and won’t try to turn himself into a vegetable again in exchange
for worthless bits of paper. The two of us have been given a second chance.”

What
the heck was going on here? Isaac slammed his hand down on the mouse in
annoyance. The plastic cracked, but thank God the mouse still worked.

“One
thing the terrorist was right about is that the people who run COMA and sit on
all these inventions have too much power. It’s naïve to think there’ll
always be a decent man in charge, those who are cunning and unscrupulous fight
their way to the top easier. Someday soon, maybe tomorrow, a potential dictator
will take over; a tyrant, who will consolidate his power and flush all the
opposition down the tubes. They surely must have more serious weapons than the
ones they give their peacekeepers. They’ll hack the internet with their program
filters and tighten their control over the press that they’ve already got on a
leash. Their bank is already the most powerful and there will be a new empire
of Veggies. Well, certainly the more unquestioningly loyal Veggies there are,
the simpler it is to rule.

“In
all the futuristic films, there always has to be an omnipotent corporation or
empire. Essentially that is the model of the future world. Of course, no one
ever thought the dragon would emerge from the UN. The more Veggies there are,
the more docile the world is. The total elimination of crime has weeded out a
whole mass of freedom-loving individuals who were beyond their control.
Tomorrow they’ll call anyone opposed to UNICOMA a criminal. And then there are
the people who don’t understand a thing, even though they’re not Veggies, take
that Pierre for instance,” – Isaac’s thoughts turned back once again to
yesterday’s miserable youngster.

Isaac
had no idea that Pierre was on the highest peak of elation because of the
attention lighted on him from the media. Alas that wouldn’t stay with Pierre
for long. Sooner or later the small windfall of fame that came his way thanks
to the real man of the hour, Mr. Elvis, would evaporate.

Something
else had come Isaac’s way – not fame, but a piece of the board from the central
computer. As he tried to focus his mind on his work, Isaac toyed with it,
intending to throw it out as he had promised himself to do. After his
reflections about UNICOMA, Isaac felt a certain respect for Elvis’s audacity.
He had to conserve his own energy and not waste his breath on idle talk and
promises, especially if it wasn’t all that difficult to make them into reality.
Isaac looked at the piece of board again – it had a couple of microchips and a
mini-memory card on it. A mini-card, but with a big memory, and it wasn’t a
fragment at all, it was complete and undamaged. Happy to do anything but work,
Isaac decided to take a look at what was on it.

He
plugged it into his own computer and saw a mass of folders with files and
tables. He opened the first one and froze, dumbfounded. His intuition or maybe
it was that special energy of his hadn’t let him down. He was looking at a
table of people who had been tested, but had not yet downloaded their
creativity. First names, surnames, IQs, creativity ratings and other data. Isaac
leaned closer to the monitor and quickly ran his eyes over the confidential
lines.

“Holy
shit! Didn’t that crazy hobo say: ‘Destroy this heart of the devil’? He wasn’t
all that far from the truth, that Elvis.”

The
memory card contained a whole heap of incomprehensible information, but the
most interesting things on it were the various ratings. This wasn’t the devil’s
heart, it was his database! Isaac’s fatigue instantly evaporated. His fingers
flew over the keyboard, he avidly devoured the content. “Lord, what do you want
me to do with his?” he thought to himself.

Isaac’s
hands hovered motionless above the keys. Destroying something was easy, if you
knew for sure what actually was to be destroyed. Isaac had come into possession
of a database, but what was the right way to deal with this knowledge from out
of the blue?

“What
if I search the table for names I know?” thought Isaac, in earnest excitement.

Isaac
opened the file named Human Imagination Tone. First, he decided to try his own
name, typed it in and launched the search. “I’m not in the top hundred, but I
made the top thousand, marked with five little yellow stars; 996 that is,” he
grinned to himself. His next search was for “Jeremy Link”. There was a lot of
empty chatter available on the internet about the professor, but there was no
serious open information.

 The
search engine found Jeremy Link. Wow! The name was in a separate table with the
striking title “Top 50 geniuses” The genius top list, no less! And these were
people who have not donated their energy!

Isaac
ran through the list eagerly. In the third place was a well-known Russian
mathematician, who worked at MIT. He cracked complicated theorems like nuts and
was famous for always refusing money prizes for his achievements. What had
jogged him into filling in a form to sell his creativity? Isaac found the
answer to that question in the “Remarks” section, where it said that the
mathematician needed to raise money for medical treatment for his child who had
a rare brain disease. Isaac gritted his teeth at this coincidence with his own
sister. Isaac’s fury with COMA overwhelmed him. It would never release him now.

Vicky
was Isaac’s stepsister, but she was the nearest and dearest person he had. No
matter how hard Isaac tried, he couldn’t clearly recall the moment when he
first met Vicky. What did his mother tell him, what did he say to her? He
remembered being introduced to a frightened little girl in a blue dress. And
that it was a good day, because he was given a radio-controlled car. And a bit
later Vicky’s dad – his mum’s friend, as he was introduced at the time – bought
Isaac a really great bike. Then he started coming round more and more often,
together with Vicky. Playing with someone, even with a girl, was better than
playing on your own. On the weekends Vicky’s dad drove them to the amusement
park and bought them big ice creams, and there was no reason to be afraid of
someone like him. Isaac quickly got used to him and was glad when he came,
always with a present, even if only a little one. Isaac was delighted when he
and his mum moved into his apartment, where Isaac and Vicky had their own room.

They
grew up like that together, went summer camps and the amusement parks together.
Then to school, to the parties at school, and then to the discotheques.

Vicky
was probably the most important thing in his life. She was always really
considerate and cool. He could always talk about everything with Vicky. The
years went by and Isaac shared with her the stories of his love affairs, and
she complained about her boyfriends. He told her about his inventions and the
problems he had making progress with them, and she listened closely and
encouraged her brother, and wouldn’t let him give up. And Vicky used to laugh
and say that he was her very best girlfriend, who wouldn’t even look at the
same boy as she.

Isaac
felt a need to think about something different, because sooner or later his
thoughts about Vicky would come to the time when she fell ill. He drove away
his memories and went back to the data base.

Isaac
focused on another famous name, the inventor of the unique search engine
“Piquet”. Johnson Pike lived in Beverly Hills and was a very rich man. He got
rich after launching his search engine, with a totally new approach to the
analysis of results.

The
usual search engines were focused on the amount of site traffic, and a lot of
traffic automatically made a site important and ranked it high in the ratings.
In the first lines of the located data, users saw the most popular sites, not
the reference that they needed. The information they were looking for was
either hidden away somewhere in the last pages, or was never even located at
all.

Piquet
was better and faster at finding results for given search parameters. The
algorithm for the results of analysis was complicated and, of course, wasn’t
made public. Specialists assumed that the search engine analyzed all the words
on each site found. If there were too many words, that meant it wasn’t a
professional site, but some kind of encyclopedia, news portal or resource page.
Piquet assigned credibility to sites on the basis of the frequency of the
search words relative to the total number and the presence of specific,
strictly professional terms and phrases. At least, that was what the manual
claimed. Paranoiacs claimed that the search engine also analyzed the files on
the computer of the user who launched a search, in order to figure out what he
did and rank the results more accurately.

Apart
from everything else, Pike was a superb PR man. In his numerous interviews
about the search engine and his company, the inventor frequently toyed with the
journalists, only talking about what he wanted and cracking jokes, including
dirty ones. At one press conference he put eight penguins in the front row, and
he arrived to another wearing an astronaut’s suit. In the first case he
announced that he wanted to see a decently dressed audience at the conference,
and in the second case that he had been searching for an answer to a very
difficult question out in space – and found it. The journalists loved and hated
him at the same time. On the one hand, he was rude, but Pike only attacked
people in response to an attack, never overstepping a thin boundary line, plus
he threw fantastic parties, at which he was always very hospitable and
generous. In any case, he was a newsmaker, and no one quarreled with him
openly. After all, tomorrow he might block your name in his search engine, and
you would instantly be consigned to journalistic oblivion.

Late
last year the extravagant Pike had put on yet another show, in which he jumped
off the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles—into the sunset—on a yellow
hang-glider with “Search in Piquet” written on it. And five big stars. The
journalists outdid each other in inventing catchy headlines. A superb banquet
was laid out for them on the roof. The next day the wings of the bright-yellow
hang-glider appeared on the front pages of all the major newspapers and news
sites.

Everybody
was really surprised when Pike announced he had decided to download his
creativity. At the test session, to which he invited the press, he said that
his creativity level was off the scale and declared emotionally that from now
on his imagination would serve the good of society.

However,
before offloading his energy, he was required to hand over the Piquet algorithm
to the company’s board of directors and wind up all activities that required
intellectual energy. In the table it said that the downloading of Pike’s
creativity had been postponed once again. Probably it had just been another of
his PR moves, so he could announce to the press how high his level was.

Isaac
clicked the mouse on other tables in the data base. He went into the top 100 of
those who had already downloaded their creativity. Among them he recognized the
name of a celebrated artist, Andrei Sharov. He was a Veggie now, he didn’t make
art any more, but the pictures he had created became world-famous.

Isaac
recalled the story that had been all over the media. The artist, solitary and
unsociable, never left his studio, scraping by on occasional sales of his
pictures, which were not especially popular. Not a single serious art gallery
wanted to take him on. After all, you see, he hadn’t invented anything
conceptually new, had he? He burned down the garage containing his unsold works
and was one of the first to download. His creativity index turned out to be
astronomical. Of course, they wrote about it in all the newspapers. The
artist’s works were suddenly noticed, and the rush started. His few remaining
works were declared masterpieces, and not a single critic dared to say anything
derisive about them anymore. The owner of a tiny local restaurant, who took
pity on the artist and used to feed him in return for his pictures, received a
lot of money for them. The six works hanging in the dark little restaurant
ended up moving to the National Gallery and they even brought the artist to the
opening. Only he didn’t care any longer about the fame that had suddenly
descended on him.

Isaac
went back to the table that included Link. Where was he now, this professor?
Isaac wanted to meet Link face to face and tell him what he thought about him.
All about UNICOMA, and the Veggies, and people like Isaac, who were stuck on
the sidelines of life. Link probably read the avalanche of ecstatic articles
about him, so let him hear a different opinion for a change. Isaac wondered why
he had disappeared and why he was hiding. He ought to be held accountable for
what he had done, and for what was happening now, and for what it would all
lead to in the future. What did he think now that his invention had been at
work for seven years?

The
ideal thing would be to make him destroy the system for integrating creativity.
If he knew how then he would need to convince him, pressure him or ultimately
threaten him. The world was turning into a new goddamned Matrix, only not in
the movies, but for real. Isaac recalled the old film with Keanu Reeves. People
seemed to be alive, but they were asleep, they lived in cocoons, in illusions,
believing that their world was real. What real point was there in being born,
living a quiet life, always toeing the line, and dying? In erasing your
individuality?

If
Link had managed to build his invention, he would surely be able to destroy it.
Destroying is easier than building if one knows what to destroy. The technology
was classified and hard to get at, but Link ought to know how to do it.

Isaac
went back to the previous file that mentioned his name and scrolled up and
down, then up again. The names of creativity-carriers who, like him, had their
levels measured, but haven’t yet been downloaded. And as it happened, there
were quite a lot of them.

Isaac
winced at the title ‘Creativity Carriers’, “What kind of crap was that name?
They’re just normal people who have not sacrificed their singularity. They had
to realize what Isaac had discovered about Coma. Maybe they have already
realized that? Maybe they have known it a long time ago, and Isaac was the only
one who had taken so long to see the light? Today they download creativity,
tomorrow people’s sense of humor, memory, emotions? The dismemberment of a
person’s individuality.

“Let’s
take a look,” Isaac said to himself, using the mouse to select a random name
from the local list. He stopped at the name Eric Delangle. Just as he thought,
there was a page in a social network and a blog account registered to that
name.

Delangle
was a biologist who used to head a project for studying melanoma. After the
project was no longer required and melanoma had been eliminated by Collective
Mind, Eric moved to Morocco, where he opened a little business offering
mail-service genome decoding to all comers. Anyone who paid a few bucks into
his account and sent him a little test-tube with their saliva in it could find
out what percentage of their genes matched the genes of Neanderthals and
various famous historical figures. Through preserved DNA he could, also
discover where their ancestors dwelled, find out part of their genealogical
tree and other irrelevant twaddle that was really only of any interest to the
owner of the spittle. In the very first lines of his resume in the business
social network, Eric had written in large letters: “I’m not selling my
identity, and I advise you not to”.

“It’s
a shame that Morocco’s quite a long way from here,” Isaac thought. “This guy
would have been good enough.” Catching himself thinking that, Isaac realized
why he was looking at the list. He was searching for fellow thinkers and needed
people like himself who were dissatisfied with the present state of affairs.
Isaac wasn’t a born leader, he didn’t have the right qualities. But he had no
choice; he could only start with himself.

If
there were other groups of discontents somewhere Isaac hadn’t heard about them,
but he did have quite a lot of experience in solving complex problems, and he
knew where to begin. In principle he had to approach this like any complex
problem. Logically.

Isaac
sorted the list by education and age. It would be easier with people the same
age as him. He plucked out of the list a young guy with a technical education,
a local programmer working as a barman. He wasn’t the only one with talent who
had been dumped overboard, or behind a bar counter. Coincidentally Isaac had a
technical education too. Maybe the search engine would tell him what the techie
barman had on his mind.

The
candidate called himself Bikie and was crazy about motorbikes. Isaac found his
blog, in which Bikie was scathingly abusive about UNICOMA, the UN in general,
as well as Link, and mocked everyone who offloaded their creativity. He had
posted various photographs including his own and of his Harley’s. Looking out
at Isaac was an awkward, longhaired clodhopper with big round eyes. Plumpish
and ungainly, Bikie’s build was frighteningly heavy-caliber who also possessed
thoroughly good-natured air, which could not be said of his posts. “I hope he
really is good-natured,” Isaac chuckled. The last entry was fairly old and very
short: “No one reads me here, that’s COMA for you!”