Authors: Walter Greatshell
Mad Skills (33 page)
It was a very strange sensation. She could feel structures forming in her head, see and hear and touch them, clear as objects floating in space. Crystalline trees sprouted in the darkness, branching and growing into vast, intricate forests that merged in all directions to cover the void with fractal wilderness.
But the forest was off-limits—something was blocking the view, and when Maddy tried to move forward, she couldn’t. Of course: The spreading filaments had become a mesh, and the mesh had tightened to become a fence. NO TRESPASSING. It was a block cipher—a wall of numerical gibberish that had to be unscrambled with an entry PIN. A sphinx.
Fine, be that way,
she thought.
she thought.
The PIN number was based on a custom algorithm, designated E22—an encryption mechanism she had encountered before. To crack it, Maddy reentered the loading protocol, opening an emulated serial-port connection to establish a multiplexer control channel and a peer RFCOMM entity using L2CAP service primitives. To start the RFCOMM device, she sent an SABM command on DLC10 and awaited a UA response from the peer entity. When the response came, she was able to passively eavesdrop on the pairing process and spoof the code.
Nothing to it.
As the gate fell, Maddy fell with it—a distinct sensation of tripping forward, Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. Not just any rabbit hole—these were AutoCAD diagrams of the tunnel leading from Braintree to Harmony, and Maddy was not so much moving through it as it was feeding past her, a great volume of information assembling itself as fast as it could load the data … which (with her sluggish, improvised connection) was really not that fast.
But she was in the machine.
THIRTY-SIX
ASTROTURF
THE whole layout of the place was visible to her as a three-dimensional model, a CGI transcape comprised of live video feeds and digital renderings, incorporating every technical detail of its construction.
At the same time, there was a ghostly overlying design that seemed oddly to mirror the Braintree architecture, and it took Maddy a moment to grasp that she was not only traveling through the back corridors of the medical-industrial complex but through the inner reaches of her own neural implant. She was a fly inside her own head, zooming down the bundle of ultrafine wires that led from the 2.4835 GHz signal processor to the very core of her brain. The wires looked as massive as cables on a suspension bridge.
Down, down, as though descending into a mine shaft, Maddy penetrated her own cerebrum, diving through folds of white matter as thick as the mantle of the Earth, then entering the thinner corpus callosum, the choroid plexus, the thalamus. She emerged in the lateral ventricles as though entering a vast cave system—four caverns like subterranean finger lakes full of cerebrospinal fluid … in which she could see something that shouldn’t have been there.
What the hell …?
Rather than just stopping at the terminal ends of the electrodes, the wires forked to join a pair of large, podlike objects. They looked huge to her, ominous as docked zeppelins. Machines, but not made of metal.
Living
machines: fat, neuron-rich sausages webbed in pulsing blood vessels, bristling with nerve fibers. Twin lobes of the alien intelligence that had taken up residence in her skull. Permanent as ships in a bottle.
Living
machines: fat, neuron-rich sausages webbed in pulsing blood vessels, bristling with nerve fibers. Twin lobes of the alien intelligence that had taken up residence in her skull. Permanent as ships in a bottle.
Maddy could see the whole process: how these things had been
grown
here, cultured like a pair of giant, misshapen pearls, intelligent tumors that gave her the ice-cold reasoning power to do all the terrible things she had done in the name of survival. Even to do what she was doing at that moment.
grown
here, cultured like a pair of giant, misshapen pearls, intelligent tumors that gave her the ice-cold reasoning power to do all the terrible things she had done in the name of survival. Even to do what she was doing at that moment.
And Maddy could see the point of it all, the master plan behind it, which was not, after all, simply to enslave humanity but to save it. To enforce obedience, yes, but only so that the goals of an ideal society could be realized. People were idiots, that was the general theme, which scads of scientific research proved beyond a doubt. The data was all at her fingertips, going way back to Plato’s
Republic
: If granted complete freedom—true democracy—human beings would invariably screw it up.
Republic
: If granted complete freedom—true democracy—human beings would invariably screw it up.
So a few big brains dedicated themselves to a solution.
They quickly discovered that they weren’t the only ones: There was a whole network of scientists at work on the same problem, and a lot of research money for anyone with a promising hypothesis. A private research foundation was paying big bucks for insights into the perfection of mankind. Hence it was under the shady auspices of the Mogul Cooperative that Alan Plummer and Chandra Stevens founded their company: Braintree, Inc.
Look,
Alan had said in a taped lecture dated November 13, 2002,
all you have to do is look at all of history to know the human race will never overcome its basically selfish, brutal tendencies. Every organization, every religion, every civilization from the beginning of time to the present has been built on the notion of getting people to live together in harmony … and every one, no matter how oppressively or progressively it imposed its laws, has failed. Failed miserably. Education is no good—even lessons learned through painful experience are unlearned by the next generation. Look at Vietnam and Iraq. There’s a willfulness to the forgetting, a fundamental inclination to repeat past mistakes, to ignore established facts, to deny cause and effect. Clearly, something new has to be done to break the cycle once and for all, to move the species forward. Because unless something is done soon, our civilization will fall. It’s statistically inevitable. And even if
Homo sapiens
don’t go completely extinct, all our higher virtues—the hard-won advances in medicine and technology, in knowledge of the universe, in music and literature and art—will be swept away. Vanish as though they never existed.
Alan had said in a taped lecture dated November 13, 2002,
all you have to do is look at all of history to know the human race will never overcome its basically selfish, brutal tendencies. Every organization, every religion, every civilization from the beginning of time to the present has been built on the notion of getting people to live together in harmony … and every one, no matter how oppressively or progressively it imposed its laws, has failed. Failed miserably. Education is no good—even lessons learned through painful experience are unlearned by the next generation. Look at Vietnam and Iraq. There’s a willfulness to the forgetting, a fundamental inclination to repeat past mistakes, to ignore established facts, to deny cause and effect. Clearly, something new has to be done to break the cycle once and for all, to move the species forward. Because unless something is done soon, our civilization will fall. It’s statistically inevitable. And even if
Homo sapiens
don’t go completely extinct, all our higher virtues—the hard-won advances in medicine and technology, in knowledge of the universe, in music and literature and art—will be swept away. Vanish as though they never existed.
Avoiding this future required a new way of thinking. Tricky choices were coming, dangerous waters that would require clear judgment to navigate, bold decisions unclouded by religious hysteria or unreasonable opposition. The Singularity was coming.
Godhood was coming.
Not to everyone—that was neither feasible nor desirable—but to an educated elite, a privileged few. The Moguls.
Maddy saw this word, this acronym, MOGUL, cropping up again and again, and finally traced it to its source: Miska Orthotics and Gerontology Underwriters Laboratories. That was the source of it all, the silent partner of dozens of private research foundations around the world, a vast blanket entity of which Braintree, Inc., was only one thread.
So that was it. Technological breakthroughs had been made that enabled people to replace almost any body part with an excellent prosthetic substitute: legs that could walk, hands that could touch, eyes that could see, ears that could hear, flesh and organs with not only the suppleness and sensitivity of living tissue, but which could perform their functions every bit as well as the originals, if not better, and which could be replaced as needed. Throw-away hearts, disposable bodies … all for a price.
And the ultimate replacement: the s
elf
.
elf
.
From what Maddy could determine, scanning volumes of classified material, the process was modular—an incremental replacement of knowledge, swapping blocks of damaged, decaying, or dead organic neurons with artificial ones. In that way, acres of messy old synaptic pathways could be plowed under to make way for a neat, orderly crop of sweet American corn.
With proper conditioning, the brain adapted to the changes, planting over the rough spots, cleaning up corrupted data, until eventually the person’s whole mind was converted to the new medium—a more durable and easily replaceable medium than the soft tissue of the human brain. Astroturf. One-Use-Only was now Multiple-Use … or even Infinite-Use. Maddy could hardly believe it, but the scientific data didn’t lie.
If the human mind could be transplanted, that meant a person could theoretically live
forever
.
forever
.
There had been no gas leak in the fun house. What had happened to Maddy and Ben was grand theft. They had been deliberately set up, stripped down, their minds stolen and rebuilt as part of some crazy immortality experiment.
The problem was, not everyone was meant to live forever. Immortality was to be a perk of membership in a very select club. The rest of humanity would get the consolation prize: a coach-class ticket to Lemmington. That was the no-frills operation, the basic cable, which was already cranking out dozens of happy customers a day.
So that’s what they’ve done to us,
Maddy thought.
Maddy thought.
Even with her new brainpower, she had never understood how they were able to recover her memories. All the auxiliary computing power in the world couldn’t magically rewrite the complex web of synapses that had been destroyed in the accident. At best she should have been a blank slate, starting over from the beginning. Instead, she was a fully formed person, as if somehow they had been keeping her soul on ice and just had to thaw it out. System Restore. Which was exactly what they must have done.
But how?
Maddy went looking. She could see the whole layout of the mine: how they had automated it like a regular assembly line, with robots and revolving operating tables like spokes in a wheel, each turn a stage in the implant procedure, until at the end patients were whisked away to Recovery/Post-Op, where their brand spanking new brains were saturated day and night with canned experiences, captured memories enhanced with pharmaceutical neurotransmitters and positive reinforcement. Then off to Harmony for a little street conditioning … before being released into the real world.
Oh yes, there were many thousands of them already out there. American society had been thoroughly infiltrated, right up to the White House. Not the president himself—not yet. That was perhaps for the next election, or the one after that. But they were among his advisers. And it wasn’t just the goons from Braintree, but all the corporate offshoots and international subsidiaries and government affiliates—all the grim, bloated piglets suckling off the monstrous brood sow known as the Mogul Cooperative. Its bastards were everywhere, up to the highest levels of government.
Looking at Braintree’s list of political connections, Maddy gasped to see a familiar face: Vellon. The man she’d dreamed of killing in the limo. She had done her best to forget that night, burying it in a dark corner of her mind, never quite sure if it had really happened. But there he was, his pointed head on a flock of obituaries. Only his name was not really Vellon.
It was Joseph Lawlor—
Congressman
Lawlor.
Congressman
Lawlor.
Maddy suddenly realized that she remembered Lawlor from one of her earliest dreams, postop, when she was still a basket case touring Braintree in the company of her folks. There was a big shot congressman from Washington there, and Dr. Plummer had been giving them all a tour. No wonder Vellon looked familiar.
From deleted e-mails, Maddy learned that Lawlor was invited to Braintree in the hope that he would petition Congress to approve an increase in Braintree’s funding. But the congressman had his own ideas. He was a disturbed man who saw possibilities in Harmony far beyond anything the doctors ever intended, and he demanded they put him in charge of the project … or he would open an investigation to expose it. Lawlor wanted Harmony to be his own personal toy box. Dr. Plummer refused, but Dr. Stevens recommended they play along; she was a fan of hardball. So Lawlor became Dean Vellon, and a fake election was held between two fictitious candidates: Vellon and Strode.
Lawlor was confident of victory. That was the beauty of Harmony: Nothing was left to chance. But he made the mistake of celebrating prematurely. He requested a companion for the evening.
So they sent Maddy.
Like a windup toy, like a perfect little robot, she fulfilled her function. But the pressure of killing must have been too much, causing her psyche to crack like an egg. It sheared apart, hatching a furry little avatar of destruction—her own remorseless id in the form of a raccoon named Moses.
But no more,
she thought.
You jerks haven’t got me yet. I’m still human—human enough to jack you up.
she thought.
You jerks haven’t got me yet. I’m still human—human enough to jack you up.
Entering a file called Madzog 227, Maddy found herself at the center of a thousand-faceted jewel—a vast crystal ball comprised of smaller crystals—whose every mirrored face was a door that opened on command, expanding to reveal a playlet from her own childhood, some familiar scene or sensory impression.
Extremely
familiar.
Extremely
familiar.
What the frick?
she thought, scanning furiously.
she thought, scanning furiously.
Every scene was a flashback—these were bottled memories of every significant or not-so-significant moment in her life, digital collages assembled from snippets of 3-D high-def video, reconstructions and reenactments and lifelike CGI. These were
her memories
, a pirated Greatest Hits collection of her entire past. It was as if a thief had been in her mind, illegally downloading the stuff that made her her.
her memories
, a pirated Greatest Hits collection of her entire past. It was as if a thief had been in her mind, illegally downloading the stuff that made her her.
So this was the source from which Maddy flowed, the headwaters of her mind, comprising everything she had ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, or felt, from age three to age fifteen. All converted to code and readily download-able into any neuroconductive holographic quantum matrix. Such as her implant.
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