Idempotency (18 page)

“Mr. Dansby, thanks in advance for being our sixth in-house beta participant—and our first from the sales team—aside from your boss, of course. We are all thrilled to have you try out the product. I think you will find the deathTrip to be a transcendent and compelling experience.”

“So I keep hearing, Dr. Wirth. I’m eager to get started,” Dylan replied as he successfully withheld a wince from the doctor’s death-grip of a handshake.

“Well, Dylan, I’ll leave you be,” Frank said curtly, then added, “I’ve got to go teach our new interns how to write above a fifth-grade level. I’ll be here when you come back to realWorld.”

Dylan extended a hand, but Frank scoffed and said, “I don’t do handshakes—germs. I’m planning on living forever!” He spun and started to walk back toward the door, then turned at the hip and, while still walking backward, said, “Remember to
focus
when they’re knocking you out!” Frank then proceeded to gyrate his hips and pump his arms in the air while walking away.

Dylan shook his head and laughed, as he combed his hand through his thick hair.

“That man is an idiot,” Dr. Wirth said flatly. “Well, let’s get started. This way.”

The doctor led Dylan over to a row of five plush reclining chairs that sat against the far wall. They were spaced roughly five meters apart, with a host of equipment on both sides of each chair. Dylan sat in the middle chair. Within minutes the population of the room had tripled as dozens of people buzzed around him, hooking up monitors to nearly every portion of his body. Dylan recognized most of the employees, but aside from Kristina, he knew only a handful by name. Dr. Wirth was the lead neurologist on the project, and Dylan had interacted with him extensively during the design phase. The doctor had been employee number three hired at SolipstiCorp; Dylan had been number eleven.

Kristina Hollerith was sitting tall and straight in a chair next to Dylan’s recliner. They had been dating for six months, and their relationship was blossoming. Both of them had been through several meaningless relationships over the past few years, and both of them were looking for something more, something real.

Kristina winked mischievously at Dylan as she placed small monitors across his bare chest and torso. She then focused intently upon the primary media projection next to the bed, poring over waves of code and metrics. Aside from the doctor and Kristina, he knew no one else by name, though most of them knew him.

“Okay Dylan, are you ready?” Dr. Wirth assumed a staid position on a stool next to Dylan’s chair on the side opposite Kristina.

“Let’s do this!” Dylan replied loudly, his alacrity clearly forced by nerves.

“Okay—first things first. We’re going to give you a subtle relaxant, to ensure your pulse stays steady heading into the deathTrip. Hold out your arm, please.”

Dylan did as he was told. On a small metal table in front of the doctor sat several items, portending what was to come: a pneumatic injector (which Dr. Wirth was reaching for now), a small cup containing one pill, and a lump of wires.

Dylan heard a sharp
hiss as the pneumatic shot was administered into his arm. Within seconds, he felt his body loosen and his mind quiet down. He became several orders of magnitude more relaxed.

Dr. Wirth continued: “Good, very good. Now, next you will swallow the receiver pill. While not as marketable as the headpiece, which transmits the data, it could be argued that the millions of little guys in this pill—these nanoreceivers—are our most revelational technology breakthrough. To be clear, it’s not the reception capabilities that are the primary advancement—that tech has been available for decades. No, the impressive point here is that this nanocircuitry can find their way to specific portions of the brain, and then communicate directly with those areas. Our little salmon here”—he pointed to the pill—“swim upstream, using atomic circuitry to navigate your cerebral cortex, finally fusing with your electrical synapses to send messages to different portions of your brain.

“One note: A quirk you may notice upon returning is a lack of ability to recollect smells from your virtual life. This is one area we are still struggling with, as the olfactory cortex avoids routing messages through the thalamus, as all other senses do. We’re still working this kink out—but I think we can all agree that smell is the bastard gene of the senses, right?” The doctor smiled gently, as if he had made a sly joke, but Dylan was too drugged by now to provide any beneficent laughter. (Had he been fully conscious this would have worried him; Dylan had always particularly enjoyed smelling his food.)

Kristina walked past Dylan’s feet, and they locked eyes momentarily for one last time. She smiled, then reached down and gripped his foot. She squeezed it twice and nodded reassuringly. The small touch of humanity helped calm his nerves more than the drugs coursing through his veins.

“Finally, we come to the prototype for the headgear—the transmitter.” Dr. Wirth motioned to the lump of wires. “No doubt, you business folks will spruce this up with some catchy art and branding of some sort, maybe some aniPaint. At its core, the headgear is merely a simple spiderweb of wires to be worn gently upon one’s head. Once in position, it will send noninvasive commands to the nanoreceptors from the reception pill. But by then, you will be completely—”

Asleep. Dylan drifted off, about to become a new man . . .

When Dylan closed his eye to begin his deathTrip, he inhabited the life of a new and disparate soul. In Dylan’s deathTrip, this man’s name was Dalton. Dalton’s story was ostensibly fabricated fiction—however, four hundred kilometers away, Reverend Coglin sat in his ornate office watching the vidFeed of Dalton’s life. A life that looked suspiciously similar to Coglin’s own life.

Reverend Coglin was dying, and he needed a new body to transfer his soul into. He was a messenger from God, and his message had yet to be delivered. His efforts to utilize Randy Dansby, though initially promising, had ultimately failed. His engineers and doctors—Dr. Kya Okafor’s predecessor, in particular—had ultimately failed him. When rumor began circulating on the darkNets about SolipstiCorp’s new deathTrip tech, Coglin’s interest was piqued. When Kane had informed Coglin that Randy Dansby’s great-nephew, who shared Randy’s unique genetic marking, happened to work at SolipstiCorp, Coglin knew that this was a sign from above: divine kismet.

Coglin and Kane had pieced together this information just one week before Dylan was scheduled to undergo his deathTrip. They surreptitiously bought off the actors (they used androids to ensure secrecy) and screenwriters to pen Coglin’s own life story for Dylan’s deathTrip. Doing so in one week’s time had been challenging, but corpDollars have a way of making miracles happen. The names of the people and places were ultimately changed to hide Coglin’s identity, but the situations were certainly his own.

There was just one small problem. Dylan—or Dalton, rather—would still have the ability to choose his own path. There was no guarantee he would make the same choices that Coglin had. This problem proved challenging. For this, Coglin had to buy off a young engineer within SolipstiCorp to obfuscate a predetermined code path within Dylan’s deathTrip. Dalton would be forced to choose the same path that Coglin had chosen.

Never one to revel in the past, Coglin wasn’t prepared to watch every second of his life during the three-day deathTrip, but there were portions he didn’t want to miss, especially Sabrina’s death. He wanted to ensure Dalton felt the same rage that still burned inside Coglin to this day.

Dalton was born in a small farming town in northwestern Washington State (very close to Coglin’s own town). The first image of Dalton’s life was from a hospital. Images of a lonely childhood whirred by quickly that morning, and Coglin barely paid attention, going about his normal workday. However, his eyes began to drift to the holoVid when a vision of Sabrina appeared.

The deathTrip was about eight hours into Dalton’s life when Coglin decided to pour himself a stiff Armagnac to take in the viewing of Sabrina’s death. He sat down on an oversized, pleated leather love seat and stared at the woman he had once loved. The android playing Sabrina had been meticulously detailed—hair the color of wheat and eyes the color of the ocean—and she looked just like Coglin remembered her.

Coglin watched as Dalton and Sabrina fell in love. The couple held hands one moment and made love the next. Small arguments quickly turned into playful flirting. Soon came their glorious wedding, more grand than any of his colleagues. Next, a honeymoon. A routine then began to set in, as Dalton worked all day and would come home to find his good wife having made dinner, or not. The couple’s frequent playful chiding began to turn into legitimate grievances. They stopped going on dates, excepting when Dalton needed his trophy wife on display for social events. He berated her for not supplying him with children. She screamed at him for being selfish, no longer caring for her needs. Long arguments left little time for sex, though Dalton still forced himself onto her nightly; it was his godly right, after all.

Coglin sat forward in his leather sofa as he noted Sabrina beginning to look sick. Her face had become gaunt, like the leather he sat upon. He wondered if she had been starving herself, of if she was already sick at this point. Another year passed, this one less dynamic. Sabrina had been broken; she no longer fought back. Her passionless eyes looked into the screen at the viewer of the deathTrip’s holoVid, as her husband fucked her like the lifeless doll she was.

Coglin watched as Dalton rushed into their bedroom to find his wife lying in a pool of her own vomit. He rolled her over and she looked like skeletal death. Moments later they were off to the hospital. The next few minutes of the holoVid were spent in various hospital rooms. And then the results: terminal cancer, which had spread—everywhere. He was certain she had known long before but intentionally kept it secret, not wanting it to be healed.

Coglin slowed the vidFeed. This was the moment before she died. He turned up the volume.

“Why did you do this to me?” Dalton asked as Coglin mouthed the words he once spoke.

“You did this to yourself. Even now, at the time of my death, you are only thinking of yourself. You are a narcissistic, selfish, sinful, evil man.”

“You fucking cunt. You fucking whore.” Dalton held her hands, but this was not a loving embrace. He squeezed her hands until her bones began to pop.

She only smiled and replied, “I aborted three of your children.”

Dalton began to panic. He panted. He looked around the room, frantic, then looked back at Sabrina, but she was no longer breathing.

“No! No! You can’t die, you fucking bitch!” Dalton and Coglin both shouted simultaneously.

A beeping sound became a solid tone as nurses and doctors rushed in around him. And then, the deathTrip stopped. The holoVid went dark.

Coglin jumped up, panting just as Dalton had been moments before.

“What the hell—Kane! Contact Kane, now!
Where’s the vidFeed?
Why is it off?” he screamed, his voice already hoarse from his first syllable.

Kane replied, “It’s off at the source, Reverend. The doctor’s pulled Dylan out of the deathTrip. His vitals were off the charts. That’s all I know. I’m trying to contact our sources within SolipstiCorp now.”

“Fuck!” Coglin roared as he threw his glass across the room and watched it shatter into a million tiny pieces, just as his soul had shattered that night so long ago.

After Sabrina had told Dalton of his aborted children, the virtual Dylan had been awakened suddenly from his deathTrip to find that he was actually Dylan Dansby and that none of what he had just experienced had been real.

After Sabrina had told Coglin of his aborted children, he’d drank himself silly, fell on the stairs of a church, and suffered the vision of an angel who offered him a gift in the form of a necklace with a pendant of the Baby Jesus on a cross.

Neither party would ever be the same.

Just before the deathTrip ended, back at SolipstiCorp’s headquarters, Kristina and Dr. Wirth poured over logs from Dylan’s ongoing deathTrip. Something was going horribly wrong, and they couldn’t figure out where the problem was.

“I do not understand this at all. This is really unprecedented.” Dr. Wirth rubbed his goatee thoughtfully. Kristina had never seen the confident doctor so perplexed.

Everything had gone to plan for the first four hours. At that point anomalies had begun to occur, until finally the doctor had been forced to admit that something was seriously awry. Dylan’s heart rate had steadily climbed between hours four and eight, and it was now shimmering between 170 and 180 beats per minute. His mesoscopic neural oscillations were giving off inscrutable readings. Dylan was also sweating profusely. None of the previous trial participants had exhibited any reactions similar to Dylan’s experience. Dr. Wirth was stumped.

“We’re going to need to bring him out of stasis—” As the doctor uttered these words to himself, Dylan’s eyes began to flutter open wildly. Suddenly, as if startled by a trumpet in his inner ear, Dylan yelled at nothing in particular. The words were inaudible, but they clearly intimated pain. Tears gushed down his cheeks as his facial expressions started to show a glint of cognizance. His screaming stopped abruptly and his eyes began darting between Kristina and Dr. Wirth. His hands gripped the reclining sofa he was laying on with a force that would have held the seat against the floor if the room had been turned upside down.

“Where the
fuck
am I?” Dylan asked with a surprising amount of composure.

Dr. Wirth gave Kristina a sideways glance and she shrugged in fear. He then took a deep breath and answered, “Dylan, you’re back in the lab at the SolipstiCorp headquarters. I’m Dr. Wirth, and Kristina Hollerith is right here, too. You have been undergoing a test of a new piece of technology that we are developing, and it would appear something went wrong. What is the last thing you remember, Dylan?”

“I don’t know who the fuck you think I am, but I am
not
Dylan. Where the hell is Sabrina? Where . . .” His voice trailed off ruefully, and he wobbled from side to side before crashing down against the side of his bed.