Mappa Mundi (42 page)

The second, until the development of Micromedica's NervePath™ system, has been purely theoretical. It was a mental construct, an idea, of how an experience of Self could be analysed.

In order to get a map of the mind, in order to have a chance of fitting it onto the physical map of the brain, the concept of the
meme
was adopted as a primary tool.

The meme is the basic unit of ideas, like the gene is the basic unit of a DNA strand. All ideas are memes, or are made up of combinations of memes, in which case they are called a
memeplex.
Each meme activates specific neural patterns in the brain. This relationship is consistent. You can relate a meme directly to a physical pattern of neuron activity. Therefore we can use memetic theory to model the mind and brain.

In the ordinary world a map is a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality. In a mind map there are many more than three dimensions to account for.

The human mind organizes its ideas around a cluster of scaled axes in a theoretical n-dimensional space called the
Memecube.
All the axes are bipolar, such as the scale of Size, which has two opposite extremes: Little and Big. Other Primaries are Good/Bad, Hard/Soft, Warm/Cold, Alive/ Inanimate.

The axes themselves are not memes, but fundamental concepts, drawn from sensory information about the real world; they are cross-cultural. Each meme occupies a single, unique location within the mind's structure and its position can be mapped by referring to its coordinates on these axes.

Other definitions you will come across:

Information Hypercube:
the theoretical space containing all the information in the universe.

Global Common Cube:
the theoretical space containing all memes that are shared by human beings alive today.

Every individual has a unique Memecube; the total of their knowledge accumulated through experience. This includes, as a large subset of that knowledge, the Selfplex. An individual's Selfplex contains all of their beliefs about themselves and the world. The Selfplex is the identity of the individual and the master map by which they navigate their lives.

When the project, Mappa Mundi, is completed, it will be possible to use Micromedica technology to map individual Selfplexes. Micromedica NervePath™ has provided the technical ability to detect meme-patterns,
composites of information, and emotional assignment. NervePath also has the capability to alter memetic patterning. It can “install” new knowledge by predicting the meme-pattern and setting it in place. It can alter attitudes, by tweaking the emotional triggers within preexisting memes.

Mappa Mundi will thus be a tremendous power enabling instant “learning,” the controlled modelling of a personality by careful grooming of its components, the eradication of certain memeplexes from the Global Common Cube (example, racism, a conditioned social reaction, but not something such as hate, which is an emotional response), the manipulation of individuals to prefer particular products or political ideals, and so on,
ad infinitum.

You can see the potential is vast, for good and for worse.

Jude read further into the links on the file, slowly capturing the extent of Natalie's knowledge of Mappa Mundi, the way the systems worked and what had happened to her Selfware programme when it had been sabotaged and illegally tested.

Jude's body temperature cooled and he became stiff and tense as he read it. Infinite organization and adaptation taking over every cell? But she looked so—normal. How could it be? When he got to the part that said Patient X was still alive and “out there” he felt his whole body waver with a pulse of deep physical and intellectual unease. He was tired and his mind was at the edge of comprehension. Despite this, its appetite for facts and figures didn't abate, but he became more strung out, doped on the information. As he read, his instincts started to tell him he should get the hell out of Washington, DC, find a new identity in another state, preferably another country, and reinvent himself in a profession more suited to living.

The file also told him that Ivanov/Guskov, his Russian, had been playing the whole of the Western military for fools, using their money and their anxieties to put himself in a position of power, running “black” projects whose yield was going to be entirely in his own service.

Jude couldn't believe her theory here: could a person have that much barefaced gall? But there it was. Guskov had foreseen the development
of something like Mappa Mundi from a long way off and had realized its dangers. In return, he was determined that the technology was going to be used for freedom and not repression. But Jude didn't see that forcing it on the world was anything but oppression.

Natalie pointed out in her text that there was no future in arguing this one, because the stuff was all but built, and he supposed that was true—so who was to blame? Did the arms race reach all the way back to the first wheel?

As the file came to an end with cold predictions about Bobby X's impending fate Jude began just keying up files at random, to look at anything less distressing. He came across some hastily jotted notes and doodles. One of the pictures was particularly odd, a scatter of curlicues and flowers and twisting vines interspersed with fractal-like arrays of lines. There was only one word. It sat in the middle of a briar patch where small animals lay dead on the long thorns of the vine. It said:
Distribution???

Jude put the pad down and closed his eyes. Distribution was the problem with it, no question. NervePath was highly regulated and production was very limited. A global assault couldn't take place unless that changed. Not even the US would have the stockpile to do it.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the blank and featureless ceiling. A slow, nasty, insidious thought, like the tail of a big blue-point cat, was sliding through his mind.

Natalie scrubbed hard in the shower. She had changed and it wasn't all due to the Selfware. Now, when it was quiet, she heard in the running water the sound of a distant storm coming, a thousand blades of water being honed in the wind. Despite the heat of the jets on her skin, she shivered convulsively. When Jude had spoken about Mary, that was when it had begun. She'd been trying to find out why, but out of respect had made herself stop trying to see what he saw. Now she wished she hadn't been so polite.

As she dried herself later she glanced at her face in the mirror, wondering if she looked as on-the-edge as she felt. Her hair was flat.

Jude was lying where she'd left him. “I did my thinking,” he said. “You're right. We have to trust each other.” He flicked a finger towards her Pad where it lay on the carpet. “Disturbing reading. Guskov sounds like he's more than halfway to crazy already. Kinda makes sense, though, all those different bits of research I could never fit together and his protection coming from both the mafia and the government. He must be the most protected man on the planet.”

“Only because he has so many people partially informed who think they're better off helping him than not,” she said. But Jude was right. Guskov was untouchable.

Jude didn't move. “That stuff you know, about the distribution still being out of whack with the rest of it—Guskov not having NervePath production capacity and no means of getting a global strike …?”

“Mmmn.” She was looking at her shirt and underwear with some dismay.

“Does he have any Micromedica capacity anywhere you know of?”

“No,” Natalie replied, staying wrapped in her towels. “It's all under government licences and at particular sites. Unless there's already a black market set up, and you've got any evidence of machinery going out of the country under false papers?”

“But I bet there's a lot of genetic capacity out there.” He was almost talking to himself. “In this country alone there's at least four or five labs running who're doing unlicensed and black-market work—mostly run under hard protection from organized crime rackets. In other parts of the world, less famously regulated, that must be much easier.”

“Genetic?” She glanced at him and sat down, wearily, on the edge of the bed, scrunching the nasty carpet between her toes. “Yes. There must be quite a lot. That's why there's so much fuss about tailored diseases …”

“Tailored viruses and bacteria,” he said. “Caused the government here to start a counterterrorist programme, very late in the day, based at
the CDC, using Mikhail Guskov on advisory because he had excellent contacts with leading Russian scientists and Chinese labs doing the best work—they're just about to test it at Dugway in a couple days' time.”

“But that's a biological-based operation,” she said, seeing by his expression that it was more than that and dreading the revelation.

“Yeah,” he said. “Designed to disperse counteragents over huge areas of population as fast as possible, working from relatively small release quantities that are set loose in densely populated centres. A disease that is maximally infectious and carries antigens—or any other payload—using its own virulence to replicate both itself and its cargo.”

It took a moment for Natalie to realize what he was saying. “It can carry Micromedica as cargo? Replicate it?”

“Well,” Jude said, pushing himself upright and taking a long, slow breath. “The version I got out of a dead man's hands can. But something tells me that this isn't what I'm going to see at Dugway.”

He looked up at her and his eyebrows were raised quizzically, too, as though he was surprised at his own capacity for conclusions. “Mary and I are to witness the trials, make sure we know all about it so that we can stop any thieves stealing the ideas. She didn't mention anything but antigen dispersal, though. And the thing I've got does a lot more than that. Looks like our man's got around his troubles that way. If he has labs across the world producing even tiny amounts of this Deliverance thing, then he only needs a sample of NervePath as big as a pinhead, plus his programs, and he's free and ready to rock.”

Natalie shuddered—it seemed like her whole body wanted to spasm. She dragged back the orange and brown coverlet and got into the cleaner sheets, hoping to stay warm.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, drawing the blanket up to her chin. “Your turn.”

As Jude went into the bathroom and closed the door she lay back on the pillows and tried to ignore the fizzing sensation in her nerve ends, like every nerve was a wire and every wire was in a magnetic field
and jumping like a flea. She assumed it was some effect of Selfware. Everything had happened so fast, there'd been no time to assimilate it. She hadn't believed Mappa Mundi could be so advanced, nor that all the assumptions it made about people, their brains and minds, could be right. Did the government really imagine it could broadcast ideas like TV programmes and have everyone fall neatly into a big, organized group? Control of that kind wasn't possible and it wouldn't last. When the reset ideas started to break up or caused other parts of people's meaning structures to dissolve, what would the results be?

In Dan it had caused confusion and loss of motivation. In others—there must be others, of course. People who didn't know what was wrong with them, like the Deer Ridge population, some becoming depressed, some losing a little memory, some becoming psychologically so disturbed that they were entirely unpredictable and dangerous. Get a large population as destabilized as that and a few dissenters or even organized opposition would be the last of your worries.

She wondered what her father would say. So much potential, he'd probably tell her, for saving and fixing these poor bastards on the mental wards … all used up by idiots in making everyone else an idiot, too. And yet, he was in on it from the start.

Natalie looked at the briefcase. Inside it were the pieces of White Horse's scanner system.

She got up and brought it back to the bed with her. As she heard the people next door getting up and talking about breakfast through the paper-thin walls, Natalie extracted the components and the toolkit and began to rebuild it.

When Jude came out of the bathroom she pointed it at herself and depressed the Send key. The LCD screen readout—a long grey strip that sat loosely out of place on top of the massed circuitry—flickered and fussed, but the readout of the saturation levels was accurate. She then searched for Any Other Systems, besides the NervePath type she'd already known about. The readout confirmed her suspicion.

“Look at this,” she said. “My latest version NP has just cleaned out the last of a bunch of older-style material, introduced yesterday and trying to follow its instructions to colonize my nervous system.”

Jude stared at her. “What?”

“When you go home,” she said, “you should bag that peanut butter and try to get some from the same batch that went out to the reservation. I'll bet you folding money it's all contaminated.”

“What?” he said again.

“Did you eat any?”

“No, I hate the stuff.”

“And yesterday, did you handle any?”

“Handle?”

“When you pulled out the bag you had your hand in the can,” she said. “Did you wash it?

“I wiped it on the—shit, what're you doing?”

Natalie looked down at the readouts taken from him.

“Eight percent,” she said as despair and fury washed through her. “Oh shit, shit, shit!” She flung the fragile machine down on the mattress. “Can
any
of this get any fucking worse?”

Jude sat opposite her in the roadside diner and listened to her talk comfortingly about what he could expect. He was numb with the new shock.

“You won't feel anything,” she said, examining the salt shaker and looking anxiously out of the windows, one and then the other. “As long as nobody zaps you with some half-baked software, you won't notice any difference and there won't
be
any difference.”

“Couldn't you write something to stop it?”

She shook her head. “Its replication and occupation controls are preset in its hardware. I've got no access to that. Even if I did, I don't write in nanolanguages—they're supercompressed, no more than fundamental switching systems expressed as single electron jumps …
maybe if I read up really fast …” She glanced up at him with deep sympathy and sorrow. “Maybe I could. But there's no time. We've got to go along with what we decided, and even then …”