In the Courts of the Sun (28 page)

Like the Kerr space system, the Consciousness Transfer Protocol hadn’t originally been developed for time projection. And it had also started from humble roots and grown slowly, over decades. In the 1980s it was still just planaria swimming through simple mazes at the University of Illinois in Champaign. One flatworm would learn the routine, and they’d record pulses from its little neural node and fire a repeating pattern of x-rays based on the recording into a second one, and the second would learn how to navigate the thing a little more quickly. The goal was to develop a surgical technique that could rewire parts of donor brains to make them easier to transplant. But by the early nineties the university was doing it with macaques, and in 2002 the Warren Research Group did their first human trials on terminally ill volunteers in India and Brazil. Two years ago they’d done what they said was their last real-time human trial—the first “wet test” that Marena had mentioned back at the Stake—and downloaded Tony Sic’s SOS into the head of a sixty-one-year-old Honduran man who was dying of stomach cancer. There was no measurable loss of Sic’s essential memories, cognitive ability, or personality. Or so they said.
I got the feeling, though, that they’d also done some other tests they weren’t telling me about. Probably they’d done at least one test like this one and sent Sic’s data into the mind of someone in the past. But I couldn’t find out anything about it. “Some things are just so illegal nobody wants to know about them,” Marena said, as though all the other shenanigans I’d found out about lately were just traffic violations.
And really, what we were doing wasn’t nice. Before they started with my SOS, the Swiss team had sent a salvo of photons in a pattern designed to irreversibly confuse Soledad’s mind, or, as A
₂
put it, to “wipe down the target’s gray matter.” Obviously, her brain’s so-called lower functions, like sensory and motor skills, had to be left intact. So what they called the “wash wave” wouldn’t disturb what they call noetic memories, that is, semantic and spatial knowledge, things like how to speak the language or walk down stairs. But her episodic memories—that is, more contingent multiple copies. You could say that what we were doing was more along the lines of a photographic print, or rather a hologram. A holographic negative contains a 2-D record of the rates that light waves bounce off an object, and when you pass light back through the negative, it sculpts the waves back into position, as though the object were still there. And every bit of the hologram has a complete picture. That is, if you cut the negative in half and put light through it, you still see the whole image, still in 3-D, although with some loss of detail.
But you do need a human eye to read it. Like a hologram, the record of my consciousness was just a template. It was only useful as a way of rewriting another system, and like I think I said already, at this stage of technology the only system large and complex enough to work was another human brain.
The upside of this was that none of the content—that is, my SOS—had to be interpreted. Beyond making sure it was as complete as possible, none of the people or programs working on the transfer had to know anything about what pattern encoded which memory, or caused what thought or action, any more than a camera would have to know whether the face it was taking a picture of was smiling. As long as the intervals between each wave crest were precisely timed to mimic hippocampal output—most long-term memories go through the hippocampus—the cortices would think they were getting information in-house.
Of course, gamma photons have a lot of charge, and they can do a lot of damage. That’s why the Gamma Knife is the hot tool in microsurgery. In this case, the host—as they liked to call her, as though she were inviting us in—would be exposed to nearly two sieverts of radiation, not an immediately terminal dose, but enough to get some tumors or personal things, like, say, what her father had looked like or what she’d worn to her first communion—dearticulated, and she would become an anterograde amnesiac.
So what we were doing wasn’t much different from murder. No, let’s be honest. It was murder.
According to Taro, who wasn’t a neurobiologist but who in his polymathic way knew a lot about the research, the first tests had come out “spotty.” Subjects picked up some, but not enough, or the induced memories got misinterpreted, or they got confused with unerased innate ones. Maybe the poor Honduran guy had wondered whether he was himself, or Tony Sic, or just crazy. In the last year, though, they’d found a solution to this: massive redundancy. Brains don’t store a single memory or skill set or whatever in a single spot. It’s distributed through different neural networks and sometimes even across different cortices. So we could send each gamma packet many, many times. If one of my memories didn’t take hold in a given part of Soledad’s brain, it still had a good shot at getting picked up by some other area on the next go-round. This strategy also took advantage of the fact that memory has a tendency not to overwrite. That is, when the neurons were in their confused, amnesiac state, right after the wash wave, they were especially eager to form new connections. But once a microregion of the brain had encoded a bit of memory, it was more or less set there, and the next induced memory would have to settle somewhere else.
Presumably, if the target brain was still healthy, everything that I needed to be me would be represented somewhere. Even though the old saw about how you use only 10 percent of your brain isn’t at all true, there’s still enough room in there for a lot of storage. Not that that would matter this time. Anyway, since the waves were spread out over hours, her brain wouldn’t fry. Instead, it would experience something like a series of simple focal seizures—which are too localized to interrupt consciousness—and then would immediately begin to repair itself. It would form new attachments and run new routines. It would stabilize its EEG. And as it went on living—especially in the first few hours, but also for days afterward—it would start discarding duplicated memories in order to make room for new ones. It would react and learn and function normally. The same way your sleeping brain makes sense of random firings from sensory and motor nerves by converting the noise into a more or less coherent dream, the abadesa’s brain would heal by building new memories that would correlate with mine, and would even construct a way of understanding the world that would be very much like mine, so much so that it would think of itself as me. But her rewired brain would never replicate mine exactly. It would be more as though she were watching a tremendously detailed movie of my life, and then, as she left the theater, she would find that she didn’t remember her own life and would begin to think that instead, she’d lived mine.
In fact, if everything went well, she wouldn’t even be aware of a difference. She’d be lying on her pallet staring at her crucifix, and she’d start to forget things. Her face would begin to feel hot from the increased blood flow through her vertebral and carotid arteries as millions of neurons fired over and over to the point of exhaustion. Technically, there’d be a short period of neural bursts and then a longer refractory period of suppression. Her breathing and digestion and everything would, presumably, cruise on as normal, but she’d slowly forget who she was, and where she was, and then even how to speak. But then, like muscles rebuilding themselves after heavy lifting, her neurons would put the new connections together, and in a very little while she’d have constructed a sense of identity that, if I were able to meet her, I would recognize as my own.
But of course I wouldn’t meet her. Back in 1686, the abadesa would live two more days, do a few things—secret things that weren’t yet represented in our historical record—and then she would die on schedule. She’d be laid out in the habit she died in, without being embalmed or even washed—in those days, the brides of Christ trusted that their sempiternal purity would keep them from putrefying—and cured for one year in a well-ventilated room in the
almacén
. Then she would have been moved to where she was now, and if she’d still been able to see with her deflated and shriveled eyes, the window in the casket would have let her see silhouettes in the chapel archway, her aging sisters hobbling in, praying, and rustling out, and then new sisters and priests, and then strangers, and then strangers in odd and immodest clothing, peering at her through boxes and not praying at all. One evening an oddly colored flood of unvarying light would spill in from the nave, and it would come back every evening after that. The offering candles that had lit her through most nights would dwindle but never quite stop. And then, on one of the nearly identical and almost innumerable afternoons, she would have seen Marena, Dr. Lisuarte, Grgur, Hitch, and me as we walked in, a little hesitantly, to desecrate her corpse.
“Can you go wake up that queen?” Marena asked Grgur, who was trailing behind with Hitch. “Thanks.” She meant the priest.
They set up a halogen work light and turned it on the
retablo
and it squelched any touch of Gothic mood the scene otherwise would have had. Padre Panuda came in with a little sort of camp stool and sat in front of the casket. He got out his keys—there were about a hundred of them, on a loop of green twenty-pound fishing line—found the right one, teased open the old Yale padlock, and tried to pull up the dark oak lid. It stuck. He stood up and tugged. The coffin lifted up but the lid stayed on. Hitch found a kind of miniature pry bar in his kit and we tried that, but it was no good. Finally Grgur found a couple of old squarehead nails on the head and foot ends of the frame and yanked them out with a multitool. Padre Menudo jiggled the thing and pulled at the thing again and it croaked open. There was a cloud of vegetal smells, like basil and old roses. He peered in through the cloud and moved aside a couple of big corsages or nosegays or whatever. The petals shattered and the shards fluttered around.
“Mejor hacemos nosotros esta cosa,”
Marena said in surprisingly decent Spanish. “We’d better do this part ourselves.” The priest said okay, blessed the place again, and left. The three of us stood there for a minute, looking at the corpse.
“Me da rabia,”
Hitch said. That is to say, “This is giving me rabies.” Meaning, “It’s bumming me out.” I could hear his arm move like he was crossing himself.
“We were all going to hell anyway,” I said.
“Hey, let’s get Jed,” Marena said, imitating the old Life cereal commercial. “He’ll touch anything.”
“It’s okay, I trust you,” I said.
“No, really, go ahead.”
“I’m sure you don’t have anything up your sleeve.”
“I know, just—for crying out loud, just go for it. Really. I’m serious.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. I squatted down. Lisuarte had thought I was still a little speedy, so she’d given me a hypospray of noraephron, and now I was wobbling a little. I reached into the casket and started to peel back the layers of homespun wool and then muslinish cotton skirts from around the body’s crotch level, but they were all sort of oily and crumbly and just broke where I folded them back. She was an air mummy, so underneath the fabric her skin was in pretty good condition, almost a dark green, dripping over this little delicate abstract Henry Moorish pelvis. I felt for the anterior iliac spine and then down at a forty-five-degree angle, pressed to find the pubic symphysis, and hooked two fingers up under it. There was all this hard, sharp skin in there and under it there was this sort of stringy greasy stuff. Grave wax. I found what felt like the right two flaps of skin, like dried jade-plant leaves, and moved my fingers up into the vagina, through clogs of crumbly adipocere. Poor lady. Of course, I’d done this with one or two shall-we-say mature women in my day, but this was a new record. Just relax, babe. My finger hit what I thought at first was the coccyx, but then I realized it was what I was looking for and got two fingertips around it. A flood of mixed relief and anxiety sort of inflated my blood vessels, to what felt like Michelin Man proportions. I pulled my hand out and rolled the thing around on my palm. It was a little hexagonal box, about the size of a large calcium-magnesium tablet, black now but I supposed made of copper. It was crusted with crumbs of grave wax and I scuffed them off with my thumbnail. It wasn’t a locket. I guess it must have been a needle case or something. Lisuarte had laid out a little lightbox and magnifier on a towel on the floor, and I set the thing down and looked at it. Some of the goo on one end looked like it might be red sealing wax. After a minute of messing around with tweezers and a dental scraper I got the little lid off. There was a black roll inside. I tweezed it out and when I put it down on the plastic it seemed to be made of metal. I started unrolling it carefully, but then it turned out it was really a thin, triangular sheet of hammered silver foil, about the size and shape of a Cape of Good Hope stamp. Maybe she’d torn it off a pyx or something. Maybe I had, rather. At first it looked blank, but when I breathed on it you could see lines scratched on with a needle, in a twitchy mix of uncial script and my own five-thumbed south-paw handwriting: