Idempotency (26 page)

Algorithms cranked on multiple threads, and the T-shirt android’s problems were reduced to their most atomic questions, farmed to individual processors: status, location, danger, risk, options, probable outcomes. Then a bit flipped. T-shirt android executed a new code path: The android decided to flee.

It paused and went limp for three seconds, then erupted; metallic muscles flexed inhumanly. It shifted all its sizable weight to one side and twisted violently out of Sindhu’s grip. Its right arm followed through and whipped against her left cheekbone, knocking her onto her back. Catlike, the metallic beast leaped up onto all fours, then kicked hard off its rear legs as if a gun had just gone off to signify the start of a race. It ran north, down the slum row that Sindhu had walked through.

The commotion had caused the nascent formation of an audience. The T-shirt android swatted half-a-dozen onlookers out of its way with ease as it darted away from the beach. Sindhu gritted her teeth, frustrated that she had left her guard down. She stood, took a deep breath, smiled to her audience, then took off running. As she started to run, a new message appeared in her heads-up ocular enhanced periphery. It read:

SYNCHRONOUS SKELETON REQUEST: OCULAR VISION ENHANCEMENT.

BEGIN 256 PETABYTE OpenPGP PUBLIC, PRIVATE, & AUTHORIZED ENCRYPTION . . .  AFFIRM THREE TIMES TO ACCEPT PUBLIC KEY AND SIGNED CHAT FROM:

SKELETON:SKL_e9992dd5f134. . .<256PB>. . .7fe23a

Sinhud waved her hand three times as she dodged an elderly vagrant who was wearing a blinking neon shirt. Glancing up, she saw a man floating about five meters in front of her; she correctly assumed it was Grepman. The image of him within the virt was now being virtually displayed within her ocular implants; he, himself, was in the real-time rendered virt of this slum as a virtGhost. Since he was virtually there, he could have floated, run inhumanly fast, or simply flown like a superhero. His appearance also could have been any form; however, he chose a rough representation of himself: simple smile, short brown hair. Handsome upon close inspection. And she recognized him.

She shouted over the raised commotion of the typically noisy slum: “I remember you from the dogVirt. Super-Grepman, I presume?”

“At your service, Sindhu. Take a left in ten meters, then an immediate right. We’re taking a shortcut,” Grepman told her, then smiled as his eyes strayed lower down her body. Sindhu was quick to notice his leering.

She hung a left and nearly flattened an old lady. The lady shouted vehemently back at her and Grepman winced. The fog seemed to be thickening as she went slightly uphill. She could see no more than fifteen meters in front of her now. The ground, a mixture of sandy dirt and trash, was slick with moisture. She began to pant, cursing herself for missing the gym a single time in the past year. A few strands of her hair had fallen out of her bun and were now feathering her face. It tickled.

“Okay, you’re close, you are going to take another right up here. He’s going to be about five meters in front of you after the turn.”

She took the immediate right, and the T-shirt android slammed into her. They rolled to the ground, and the android’s carbon-manufactured rib cage cracked against the front door of a stainless-steel shack.

Grepman yelled frantically, “His eyes! Gouge out his eyes!”

Sindhu took direction well and immediately raised her left hand and slammed her index and middle finger into the T-shirt android’s eyes. Bones in her hand popped like hard candy and she felt pain. She had expected a fungible material. The android swung its right palm upward and hit Sindhu below the chin; her mouth clamped shut and she bit her tongue. She let out a pain-riddled scream as she began to taste blood. The android took advantage of her stunned disposition and rolled violently, throwing her off him. Again it hopped onto all fours and sprinted forward. But this time, the combination of damaged eyes and dense fog caused the android to run smack into the side of a decrepit building across the walkway. It staggered, then erupted into a sprint, only to smack into the corner of another shack ten meters down the line. It began to do this repeatedly; as if it were stuck in a giant pinball machine.

Gathering herself, Sindhu spat blood onto the ground and sauntered toward the hobbled android. She grabbed it by the neck from behind and threw it to the ground. Jumping atop it once more, she deftly pulled out one of the bobby pins holding up her hair—which was now looking delicately unkempt. She gouged the pin into the android’s left eye. Within seconds she had dislodged the left ocular ball, and was now working on the right one.  As soon as it popped out, a few SOP nonvagrants ran toward Sindhu out of nowhere and secured the body. They attached a device to the android’s head, and an electrical current shocked the machine until the entire thing suddenly went limp.

T-shirt android had been rendered incapacitated. Interview nailed.

Sindhu wasn’t the only SOP recruit with an interview on this day. Dylan’s interview, however, was far less violent—but no less odd . .  .

“Mr. Dansby! It’s so good to finally meet you in person!” spoke the mellifluous voice of Mike McCormack, gregarious recruiter extraordinaire, whom Dylan had been playing phone tag with for the past week. It had taken only a few hours after his experience in the SOP multiVirts to receive the call from Mike about the NRS job opportunity.

“Absolutely—been looking forward to it!” Dylan volleyed, enjoying the social inanities that were common with both business development and human resources.

“So, how do you like the headquarters? Pretty impressive, right?” Mike asked amiably.

Dylan had taken an NRS-chartered graviCopter the previous night into the Seattle area. The weather, of course, had been drizzling incessantly since he’d arrived, and he hadn’t had much time to take in his surroundings. That said, it was impossible to miss the NRS headquarters. The building stuck out like a sore thumb in downtown Bellevue, with its opulent gold-crested trimmings and its optically deceptive inverted triangular structure. The building looked like an upside-down pyramid balancing carefully on its point. In actuality, it was more of an octagon and was being held aloft at its corners with a unique suspension system. Even so, the building looked magnificent.

“It’s impressive, that’s for sure,” answered Dylan. “The architecture is astounding. I can’t get over the balancing act. I just hope everyone doesn’t decide to run to the same side of the building at the same time! How exactly is this thing standing?”

“Yes, I find it’s best not to think too hard about that,” Mike McCormack responded melodically. He had a sweet-sounding voice that belied his wide body. His rotund midsection was covered elegantly with an obviously expensive pinstriped, three-piece suit. He wore his brown hair short, meticulously trimmed and styled.

“So, does your employer know you’re interviewing with us?” Mike asked, changing gears.

“Yeah, I went ahead and told them. I felt it was prudent, given the unique relationship between our two companies.”

“Good; I would agree with that. Between you and me, I think there’s a good chance SolipstiCorp becomes part of the NRS family at some point,” Mike said, winking, “but you didn’t hear that from me.” He chuckled devilishly.

Dylan grinned in response. “I have no comment.”

“Well, let me start by telling you a little about the day ahead, and then I’ll give you the spiel about the NRS family. I’ll leave some time for initial questions you might have, but keep in mind that I’ll be seeing you again at the end of the day, so you can ask me as much as you want at that point, too. Sound good?”

“Sounds great.”

“Excellent. Well, you’ll be speaking with five different folks today, and you’ll be having lunch with two more. We don’t like to grill people at lunch—pun intended—so that will be more of an informal question-and-answer session with some of your would-be peers. So feel free to ask lots of questions during that time. So far, so good?”

“Swimmingly good!” Dylan replied, mustering all the positivity he could as he hunkered down for the long day ahead.

“Let’s say, for grins, that I had secretly cloned an exact copy of you. And let’s assume your clone walked through the door directly behind you, right now. And, let’s say I told you to fight your clone.” Korak paused to study the candidate’s reaction, then asked: “Who would win?” His face showed no emotion as he asked the question; his voice didn’t quiver beyond a semi-tone.

Dylan recoiled. “That’s an absurd question.”

“Why?” Korak responded evenly.

“Well, for one, it just is.” Dylan grinned, then continued when Korak showed no reaction. “And two, I’m a generally peaceful person. Neither myself nor my clone would agree to fight. End of fight; no winner.”

“What if I told you that you had to fight to get the job?”

“Wouldn’t do it,” Dylan replied.

“Why not?”

“I just wouldn’t. The job’s interesting, but it’s not worth me sacrificing such a strong moral belief over, especially one so . . . violent.”

“So you hold moral beliefs—less strong, less violent—that you would be willing to sacrifice in order to get this job?”

“Well, I—” Dylan started—he’d walked right into Korak’s logic trap. Collecting himself quickly, he chose to reply unapologetically, “Well, yes, I suppose there are moral . . . edge cases—for lack of a better phrase—that I would consider crossing in order to get this job.”

“Of course you would.” Korak’s response was matter-of-fact, and he began to raise his hands as he said it in order to take notes, swishing and swooshing several items within his ocImp’s interface. Finally, he leaned back in his chair, looked directly at Dylan and said, “Our world is interpreted in a binary fashion, Mr. Dansby; yea and nay votes in Congress make laws, up or down votes by shareholders determine employees’ fates. Ties have been eliminated from all major sports, silver medals may as well be last-place finishes these days. Stoplights are the only tertiary thing left in the world, and even those are anachronistic now, thanks to the autoTrans.” He paused and glanced out his floor-to-ceiling window that looked out upon dreary Lake Washington. “But this propensity to simplify via polarity masks the true, grayish nature of humanity.

“Take the issue of dermatrophy, a hot topic in the darkNets these days. I, of course, believe it’s reprehensible—a scourge on society. In my humble opinion, people should be allowed to extend their lives only if they have the financial means to do so in a socially accepted manner. So when does extended aging for the poor become morally wrong? Is it wrong for the poor to get a vaccine to extend their life? No, I don’t believe so. How about a single organ transplant at a naturally young age, say fifty? Perhaps—many of my colleagues believe so. But eighty? How about multiple-organ transplants past the century mark? Organ transplants when the patient can’t afford treatment for skin-cell regeneration? Of course, this is morally wrong. So while the debate is cast simplistically as to whether you are for or against the argument of extended life for the poor, this masks the true debate of where you draw the line.”

Korak paused and stared at Dylan’s concentrated eyes.

“My point is, Dylan, while our world may be binary, the rules governing what defines a zero versus what defines a one—those rules—are quite subjective and often arbitrary. In this job at NRS you will be asked to do things under the guise of absolution. But what is absolution for one, might be morally wrong to you; following through on those directives might require you to blur or move entirely your defined lines in order to do what’s right for the corporation—to do what’s right for NRS. Does this make sense, Dylan?”

It most certainly did not make sense to Dylan, but he replied diplomatically, “Mr. Searle, I must admit to not understanding the entirety of your point, but I believe you’re stating that the world is, naturally, not black-and-white, and that I will be asked to do things that I might personally disagree with for the sake of the corporation. If that’s the case, I think you will find that in my role at SolipstiCorp, I most certainly acted in this manner. Specifically, in the area of selling our deathTrip product, which I clearly had a—let’s say, questionable, at best—experience with. So yes, I will place the corporation ahead of myself.”

“Of course you will,” Searle replied quickly, nodding. He took two uncomfortably silent minutes to jot down some notes in his BOI. As he did so, he seemed to speak to himself in his own language. Dylan struggled to translate, but it sounded like gibberish.

Finally, Korak looked back at Dylan and stated flatly, “Good. Now that we have that little talk out of the way, let’s get to some tough questions.”

The holoDoor faded open, emitting a serene sound as it did so. Korak was about to enter, but he caught sight of a distracted Reverend Coglin standing next to a seamless, singular, ten-meter-high-by-thirty-meter-wide window looking out onto the modern metropolis of Bellevue below, the infested waters of Lake Washington, the dilapidated sprawl of Seattle, and the breathtaking, snow-capped Olympic Mountains beyond that; all of which was surrounded by puddles of water called the Puget Sound. Reverend Coglin was waving his arms emphatically and speaking to someone within his personal BUI display. He wore a simple blue button-down shirt tucked into a pair of khakis; both pieces of clothing were meticulously pressed. His skin was tanned and worn like leather.

Korak cleared his throat.

Coglin shouted bitingly, “Yes! Get in here, Korak. You can hear this, too, that’s why I opened the door.”

Korak walked into the spacious office and headed toward the expansive desk that sat in front of the window where Coglin stood. He unbuttoned a single button on his antique, charcoal three-piece suit, and then sat delicately into an illegally obtained authentic leather chair and began listening to Coglin.

Coglin waved a hand, and the middle third of the commodious window was replaced by one man’s large head. The man had several chins, and even his forehead looked to be carrying extra weight. He was sweating slightly and drinking a tropical fruit drink. Behind the man, a white beach and an opulent resort could be seen and possibly envied.