Continuance (7 page)

Chaela cocked her head to the
side, openly smiling at him for the first time he could remember. “Jason,
somehow I doubt you’d suddenly start acting grumpy and white-haired if Stuart
weren’t around. I think that’s my department. But it’s a deal, anyway.”

He decided to risk a little fun. “Don’t
be so hard on yourself. It’s been at least five minutes since you did anything
grumpy at all.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I’m going
for a record. Anyway, I think our guinea pig’s ready to come out of sedation.”

Stuart’s breathing had quickened,
and Jason touched a few options on the table’s control surface to turn off the
sedation field. Slowly, Stuart’s vitals transitioned from the smooth,
intermittent lines of unconsciousness to the more rapid peaks and valleys
indicating a conscious state. Within a few moments, he inhaled deeply and his
eyes blinked open.

“Welcome back,” Jason said.

“Thanks.” Stuart sounded a little
sleepy as he sat up on the table. “I take it everything went okay with the
scan? Percentage of fried brain cells stayed within acceptable limits?”

Jason exchanged a look with
Chaela.

“What?” Stuart, asked.

“Just a little interference in
the system somewhere,” Jason said. “We got it fixed in time, though.”

Stuart glanced up at the ring of
emitters on the ceiling, all aimed where he sat perched on the table. “Nothing
to worry about. Right.”

“Dr. Fairchild told you, it’s
impossible for the imaging field to cause any neural damage.” Jason said. “That’s
the whole point of the thing.”

“I know, I know. It’s been tested
extensively on both primate and human subjects with no ill effects,” Stuart
droned. “I’m sure that’s what it says in the manual – which was, no doubt,
written by the prolific Dr. Fairchild – but how would I really know she wasn’t
just giving us the press release version?”

Chaela’s face darkened. “There’s
no cellular interaction,” she said as if explaining to a simpleton. “You’d have
to be scanned three or four thousand times for the damage to build up to
noticeable levels.”

“So there
is
damage.”
Stuart snapped a finger and pointed it toward Chaela.

“In your case, definitely.” Chaela
seemed to catch herself. She sighed, giving Jason a resigned look. “I’ll try
for six minutes tomorrow. Anyway, he’s awake, so I’ll see you guys in A/V.” She
strode toward the door, the tails of her white lab coat flaring behind her.

At first glance, the IPA room
wasn’t much more than a collection of workstations and consoles, with as many high-backed
swivel chairs and photoscreens arranged side-by-side along the walls. Animated
readouts and graphs hovered above a few, the digital pulse of Chariot’s
subsystems at idle. Jason flicked a finger at one display, rotating a status
diagram of the emitters running through their cool-down cycle.

“That was impressive work in the
IC today,” Dr. Fairchild said, her fingers fluttering at the controls of a nearby
station.

Jason tensed. “Not that
impressive,” he said, his tone noncommittal. “The scan failed.”

After Chariot had scanned Stuart,
they’d modeled the results in the A/V room, sifting through a sea of interconnected
neurons. At lower magnification, the model looked great, but as they zoomed
down to the synaptic level, the false color blues and greens gave way to
thousands of splotches in red – gaps in the neuromap.
Jason
did his best to mirror the disappointment on Chaela and Stuart’s faces, but
stared at the red spatter with relief. There’d be no quicker way for his plans
to fail than for Chariot to be a quick success.

“True. But Chariot completed the imaging
sequence, thanks to you.”

He shrugged. “The beam modulators
seemed like the best bet under the circumstances.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she
said, still not taking her eyes from the workstation. “Your decision to focus
on the modulators turned out to be correct, but that isn’t what impressed me.
It’s how quickly you
made
that decision. I’ve had exceptional students
under me before, Jason, but the calculations to account for all the variables
in that scenario would have taken up an entire wall. You did them in your head
in a few seconds. Either that or you made a reckless guess and got lucky.” She
finished at the workstation, turning her gaze on him.

Jason’s stomach sank, sweat slicking
his palms.
She practically designed the damned thing. Of course she noticed
something!
He racked his brain for something to say, anything to encourage
her reckless guess theory. But before he could reply, a chirp sounded on her
console.

“Yes, Lieutenant Vance?” she
said, her amiable tone at odds with those penetrating eyes, still steady on
Jason.

“Someone’s asking for you, Dr.
Fairchild,” a man’s voice called over the channel. “A Mr. Grieves?”

She did turn then, brightening as
she fixed her gaze on the console again.
“Thank
you. Please send him down. I’ll meet him in my office.”

Dr. Fairchild’s fingers flicked
over the photoscreen, bringing up a projection of alpha-numeric strings
arranged in rows like a spreadsheet – hundreds of them. “I’m afraid I need to
go. Would you mind feeding the next Arkive data block into Chariot? The more
real neuromaps the AI can analyze, the quicker it can learn and adapt.”

“Happy to help.” Jason suppressed
a surge of excitement. He couldn’t imagine what would make the professor so
eager to meet with a DIA spider. She seemed to tolerate Agent Grieves at best.
But Jason wasn’t about to complain. This was the chance he’d been waiting for.

Over the last few years Chariot
had mapped hundreds of subjects, but even though Dr. Fairchild had managed to
get sub-cellular structure during calibration runs, every time the target was a
live subject, the resolution deteriorated. Noise in the data made the scans
unusable. So the professor had come up with a workaround – an AI system
designed to learn and recognize anomalies during the scan. But the it needed a
benchmark to learn from – examples of real neuromaps. The kind that could only
be found in Arkive.

She touched another cluster of keys,
then looked up at Jason. “Okay. I’ve issued you a passkey to access the next Arkive
block. You can use one of the stations here to start feeding the neuromaps into
the AI.” She rose and gave him a polite smile before disappearing into the
hallway.

With a glance over his shoulder,
he took a seat at a station in the corner of the room. He chose it because it
was some distance from the door, but still offered a good view should anyone
come in. It took him a moment to bring up the Chariot project files and find
the Arkive block Dr. Fairchild had unlocked. Then he felt inside his pack for a
small, hidden pocket with his op-drive, a transparent rectangle about an inch
long. The drive contained only two things – a single human genome and a script
designed to find a match for it. The script was Jason’s own design, but the
genome had been a gift from Alex, hacked from a set of fifty-year-old medical
records from a patient who’d been in a car accident. Her name was Michelle
Baxter.

With a click, Jason snapped the
op-drive into a reader slot next to the station’s controls, and a photoscreen
materialized in the air in front of him. The lab operated as a closed network,
so loading or removing data was strictly prohibited. Access to removable
devices like his op-drive was supposed to be disabled, but with a little work,
Jason reconfigured the reader to mimic an authorized network drive.
Perfect.

 With a couple of touches, he
launched the matching script, watching as it systematically churned through the
data for a biorecord matching Michelle’s genome. Jason’s pulse picked up a notch,
partly for fear of being discovered, but only a small part. Until this moment,
his chances of finding Michelle had been limited to the SLIDe records he bought
from Alex. Getting a result that way wouldn’t be far off from winning the
lottery – a chance match from a sea of chance data on the even slimmer chance
she was even out there to be found at all. But this? This was a sure thing. He
knew she was in the Arkive data somewhere. Finding her was only a matter of
time, now.

“Working on a
secret project?”

If Jason’s heart
had beat fast before, at the sound of Stuart’s voice, it raced like a cornered rabbit.
He jerked his head around to see his roommate crossing the room toward him.
Without looking at his photoscreen, Jason tapped a control to kill the script’s
status window.

“So what are you up to?” Stuart
sank into a nearby chair. With a push, he glided across the floor, coming to a
stop next to Jason. “Not much, I see.” He looked a little disappointed as he
eyed the display. It showed only the biorecord listing Dr. Fairchild had
unlocked for him, rows of numbers and letters in glowing green. The search script
was still running invisibly in the background.

“I was about to start feeding some
neuromaps into Chariot,” Jason said. From the corner of his eye, Jason could
see his op-disk sticking out of the station’s reader. Had Stuart noticed it? Casually,
he slipped his lab coat off and laid it over the slot.

But Stuart’s eyes were on the
photoscreen, a spark of interest showing. “So that’s them? The biorecords from Arkive?”
He pointed to the sequences of numbers and letters.

Jason nodded. “She had to unlock
this set for me before I could process them. I guess they’re keeping pretty
tight controls on all this stuff.”

Stuart snorted. “No kidding. I
asked if Ivory could get a guess pass. She’s been practically begging to come
down lately. ‘I’ll consider’ it,” the prof says.” Stuart punched Jason in the
shoulder. “But
you
got access, so it can’t be
that
tight, right?”

Jason put on a smirk. “Good
point.” But Stuart was more right than he knew. Jason had passed the background
check with flying colors, all based on fabricated data, planted with care in
all the right places. Sometimes it didn’t hurt that Chrysalis used skilled
hackers like Alex.

Stuart looked at the photoscreen,
staring at the data floating there. “Can you believe each one of those is a
person? I mean a
real
person?” Each line showed only the biorecord’s ID
number, nothing more than a long alpha-numeric string of characters, but as he
looked at them, he understood and shared the awe Stuart seemed to feel.

“I know. It’s a little surreal to
think about,” he said. “Thousands of them. And they add more to the database
every day. The ones who opt for stasis, anyway.”

“It’s hard to believe there are
people living out there right now who used to be nothing more than one of these
files.” Stuart looked at the data as if he could see their faces among the
sequences of numbers and letters filling the photoscreen.

Jason knew he should avoid this line
of conversation, but the comment surprised him. “You’re talking about those
retreads, right? Someone cloned using their genome and imprinted with their own
neuromap?”

“Have you ever met one?” Stuart
asked.

“How would I know? They don’t
look any different from anyone else, do they? Why? Have you?”

“Like you said, how would I know,
right? Not likely, though. I think only a handful were continued before the Moratorium
ban.”

Three-hundred-twenty-one
to be exact.
A small number, given the tens of thousands in digital stasis inside Arkive.

“But I guess there are illegals
out there too,” Stuart said. “Continued
after
the Moratorium. Who knows
how many? They say it’s like they picked up their lives right where they left
off before they died.”

Jason kept himself from snorting.
Sure.
Leaving friends and family behind, dealing with culture shock –
future shock – while living in constant fear of discovery.
Just
like
picking up where you left off. It was more like illegally emigrating from a
third world country.

“I didn’t realize you were so
fascinated by retreads,” Jason said. “Might be good to keep that under wraps
around here.”

Stuart held up his hands. “Hey,
I’m not saying I’m a rubber lover or anything, but wouldn’t it be interesting
to meet one? I mean, can you imagine remembering what it was like to drive in a
crowded city before autonav? To have seen the footprints on Mars the day we
first landed there? Hell – to know what it’s like to
die
?”

Jason’s stomach clenched. The
memory of a needle in his arm, watching as the fatal drug cocktail inched its
way along the tube toward his veins. He tasted the faint tang of metal on his
tongue, just as he had then. It had been a terrifying choice, but it had been
his. In some ways, he’d have preferred the cancer he’d beaten to the disease
that replaced it. At forty-five, the Alzheimer’s was early onset, no cure.
Faced with the specter of allowing it to slowly steal away his mind – his very
self – he’d chosen stasis.

Stuart was watching him, and
Jason realized he’d been silent too long.

“Hey, well I guess you’re busy,”
Stuart said. “I gotta get to my next class anyway. See you later?”