Soulminder (3 page)

For a moment he hesitated as natural caution reasserted itself. They hadn’t hooked a living person to the Mullner since the very first calibration readings, and Sands had boosted both the power and read-density a hundredfold since then. Besides that, basic safety rules said never to try something new alone.

But it could easily take a day or more to find the proper correlation between his soul-trace and that of the old man. And if Sands came back from LA empty-handed, she might not be willing to wait that long.

The thought of Barnswell’s bigots with their hands on David’s memorial made up his mind for him. Pushing his chair back against the Mullner computer feed, he got to work.

The first time he’d gone under the Mullner, Sommer had been struck by the dreamlike qualities the device seemed to induce. Now, after Sands’s improvements, the effect was even stronger. Sitting alone in the lab, the walls of which seemed to fluctuate between too close and too far, he listened to the hum in his ears and brain.

And dreamed of David.

David’s birth, and the sixteen-hour labor that Sally had had to go through to bring him into the world. David’s first step, ten months later, which had careened him headfirst into the corner of the coffee table. David at his daycare center when he turned two, at first impossibly shy and then turning completely around to become the world’s shortest tyrant.

David on the night of his death.

Sommer had relived that night a hundred thousand times in the past eleven years, and though the emotion surrounding it had subsided from an exquisitely sharp pain to a dull background ache, the wound had never entirely healed. Would never heal.

The accident, and David’s death. The funeral, and his frustrated sublimating into the burning need to find a way to keep such unnecessary deaths from ever happening again. His growing obsession with the Soulminder project—yes, he could admit now that it had been an obsession. Sally’s inability to understand his drive and reliving of the past. Ultimately, her inability to put up with it and him any longer.

David would have been sixteen this year. Sommer tried to envision him as a teenager, but he couldn’t. The small, five-year-old face kept intruding, and eventually he gave up the effort. The face faded, and he drifted off into other, less painful dreams …

It seemed to take him a long time to find his way back to consciousness, and when he finally became aware he discovered that that, at least, hadn’t been an illusion. His desk clock read six-twenty: two hours and four minutes exactly since he’d activated the Mullner. Blinking aching eyes, he worked himself out of his chair and limped over to the computer. Even with the relatively low read-level he’d set the Mullner on it shouldn’t have taken nearly that long.

Sure enough, the time indicator showed the Mullner had finished its trace two hours and two minutes earlier and had been waiting patiently ever since then for new instructions.

Frowning, Sommer keyed for storage and duplication of the trace and then took a moment to stretch stiff muscles. Knocking him out for two hours was a new trick, something the original Mullner model hadn’t been capable of, and for a minute he wondered uneasily if he was in for a long night of equally unexpected side effects. But aside from fatigue and a few muscle twinges he felt all right, and dismissed the worries as being overly paranoid.

Besides, he’d been pretty exhausted lately. Maybe all that had happened was that his body had seen the opportunity for a quick nap and taken it.

His stomach growled, reminding him it was dinnertime. Taking a deep breath, rib cage creaking with the effort, he sat down at the terminal and began to set up the comparison program. There would be plenty of time to run over to the deli down the street after the computer was chugging away.

As he worked he thought about the dreams. And wondered whether the Mullner apparatus induced similar ones in the dying.

“It’s amazing the tricks one’s mind plays when one starts getting old,” Sands said conversationally, her fingers dancing nimbly over the relevant sections of the two Mullner traces, Sommer’s and the old man’s. “Take me, for instance. Thirty-six is hardly approaching senility, and yet, I would have
sworn
I could take off cross-country for a day without worrying that my partner would do something damn-fool stupid.”

“Guilty as charged,” Sommer said, mentally urging Sands on. “Except that anything that works isn’t stupid, is it?”

“You’re thinking of treason,” she corrected him absently. “‘For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.’ Stupid risks are always stupid risks.” She hissed between her teeth, a sound that was as much thoughtful as it was deprecating.

Sommer could stand it no longer. “Well? What do you think?”

Sands hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t know, Adrian. I really don’t know.”

“Why not?” he demanded. He jabbed a finger at the spots where her fingers rested. “The exact same curl on both Mullner traces? What else could it be?”

“You’re assuming—again—that it’s the topography of the embellishment tendrils that’s significant,” she reminded him tartly. “We don’t
know
that that’s true. Besides which, you’ll note that the two curls aren’t in anywhere near the same area. How do you explain
that
?”

Sommer sighed, feeling the excitement of the discovery beginning to fade and slip from his grasp. “I don’t explain it,” he told her tiredly. “I presume it’s related to the differing circumstances of our sons’ deaths—timing, emotional impact, life afterwards; that sort of thing.
Yes
, there’s a lot more work that’ll need to be done on it. But it
is
a start. Isn’t it?”

“Of course it’s a start,” she soothed him. “And anything that helps us understand the lifeforce certainly qualifies as progress.” She waved a hand helplessly. “But whether it’s enough to shake more money out of our underwriters is something else entirely.”

Sommer clenched his hands into fists. “Did the people in LA give you any kind of timeframe for their response?”

“If you mean can we get this written up and sent to them before they make a decision, yes. Whether it’ll affect that decision, I don’t know.” She hesitated. “And at any rate, we need to be thinking about long-term funding, not these last-minute, stop-gap things. I don’t know about you, but I don’t focus well when I’m wondering where my next circuit board is coming from.”

“Barnswell is not getting his hands on Soulminder,” Sommer said flatly.

Her lip twisted, just a bit, before she could smooth it out. But it was there long enough for Sommer to read the impatience. “Look, Adrian, I know how you feel—”

“No, you don’t,” he cut her off brusquely. “We both know what Barnswell would do with the data. He’d tear it apart until he found something he could use as evidence for his petty little prejudices. And in the process he’d destroy Soulminder.”

“Oh, come
on
,” Sands snorted. “Aren’t you getting just a little melodramatic here?”

“Am I?” Sommer countered. “You really think potential underwriters will want their names and corporations associated with us after that?”

For a moment Sands was silent. “Maybe we can get some guarantees from him up front,” she said at last. “A written promise not to release any of the data without our permission. Westmont more or less offered that, you know.”

“Westmont also all but said that contracts were made to be broken,” Sommer countered. “What do we do if he reneges? Sue him for breach? It would be a useless gesture—the damage to Soulminder would already have been done.”

Sands looked him straight in the eye. “Five million dollars is a lot of money, Adrian,” she said softly. “A hell of a lot of money.”

“No.”

For a long moment they just stared at each other. Then, reluctantly, Sands broke the contact. “All right,” she said. “I guess I understand. Well … ” Getting to her feet, she headed for the door. “I guess I’ll go back to the hospital and pick up the trap.”

“I thought Dr. Samuels had another volunteer patient lined up for the room.”

“He does, but the prognosis gives her another two to four weeks to live, and I thought I’d see what else I could do with the trap. Maybe boost the range or focus—it’s got to be one of those that we’re missing out on. See you later.”

She left, and Sommer turned his attention back to the two Mullner traces spread out on the desk. Somewhere here was the evidence they needed to bring fresh money into Soulminder.

Five million dollars.

Tears blurred his eyes, and he sank down wearily into his well-worn chair. Five million dollars. Five million filthy dollars. From a filthy little man with a filthy little mind.

And Sands was probably on her way right now to get it for them.

“Damn!” he swore viciously, uselessly, to the empty room. Sands didn’t care a burned-out diode for his vision of Soulminder. Only for Soulminder itself. Coldly determined to make Soulminder work, willing to sell her own mother to see it work.

An iron-ringed, single-minded goal … without which, Sommer knew full well, she would long ago have left him to carry the burden alone.

He sighed, hearing defeat in the sound of rushing air. Sands would sell their data to Barnswell—if not today, then tomorrow or the next day. And there was nothing he could do to stop her. Even if he’d had the strength of will left to fight her; even if she didn’t really have as much right of ownership to the data as he did. She would sell out, and Barnswell would give her his assurances … and as soon as her back was turned he would do what he damn well pleased anyway.

His eyes drifted to the file cabinet where the hard copies of their precious Mullner traces were stored. Little more than complex curlicues of ink on paper, as people themselves were little more than a collection of exotic chemicals. Each trace—somehow—the record of an entire life. The life of someone who’d allowed him to share in the very private moment of death … and had trusted him to respect that privacy.

Sommer clenched his hands into fists and took a deep breath. “All right,” he said aloud, getting to his feet. It would probably make Sands furious when she found out—and was almost certainly unethical to boot—but right now his tacit promise to the souls he’d traced mattered a lot more than either consideration.

The project took nearly an hour to complete. Repeating the operation on the duplicate computer files was considerably easier, taking less than a quarter of that time, and when he was done he sat back in his chair in vaguely guilty satisfaction. Barnswell could now have the data, and if he misused it he, and not Soulminder, would be the one to suffer most.

Or so Sommer hoped. At the very least, the individuals who’d let him take their soul-traces would be unaffected—

He paused in mid-thought as something suddenly occurred to him. Something so obvious that he couldn’t believe he hadn’t thought of it before.

For a long moment he just sat there, gazing off into space, feeling an old fire he thought he’d lost forever begin to burn again within him. Leaning forward, he attacked the computer keyboard.

A minute was all it took to hit the first wall. Muttering under his breath, he scooped up the phone and punched for Sands’s cell.

She answered on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Listen, do you remember where the data on the Mullner trace recognition pattern is stored?” Sommer asked.

“Uh … try a file called FITTER.CV,” she suggested. “Or something like that—I’m sure FITTER is part of it. What do you want it for?”

“I think it’s time we took another shot at that approach,” he told her, struggling to keep his voice calm.

“What, you mean tailoring the trap to the individual soul? I thought we proved way back when that even a supercomputer wouldn’t be fast enough to record the Mullner trace and configure the trap fields in the time available.”

“Right,” Sommer agreed, “
if
we wait until the moment of death to take the reading. What if we instead take the initial trace beforehand, like I did last night.”

There was a long silence on the other end of the line. “I don’t know,” Sands said at last, slowly. “It’s not exactly the way we wanted Soulminder to work—you plug your average accident victim into the Mullner and you’re likely to kill him right there and then. You saw what it did to you.”

“So find a way to modify the Mullner,” Sommer ground out, beginning to be annoyed at Sands’s attitude. “Make it gentler but still able to take the entire trace. At least it’s something to try.”

“I agree,” Sands said. “I’ll see what I can do when I get back. Meanwhile, you might call Dr. Samuels and see if he can scare us up a guinea pig. Best bet is probably someone who’s reasonably healthy right now but needs some risky surgery.”

“Uh … right,” Sommer managed, thrown off-balance a bit by her abrupt switch to his side of the argument. “I’ll do that. See you later.”

“’Bye.”

They worked late into the night, Sommer on the computer software and Sands on the trap itself, until a throbbing headache forced Sommer to call it quits. Sands remained behind, and when he arrived the next morning there was a note from her telling him that, as of five-thirty a.m., the hardware modifications to the trap were complete. The note wished him luck with the software, and suggested he not expect her in too early.

Sommer got to work, but before he did so he took a moment to check the flag he’d planted in the Mullner-trace computer files.

The files had indeed been copied, just after he’d left the evening before.

Not unexpected, though it still hurt that Sands would go behind his back and against his wishes like that. But, oddly enough, even such duplicity was unable to dampen the growing enthusiasm within him, the gut-level sense that this time they were indeed on the right track. With any luck, Barnswell’s money would take them far enough along that track that they would never again have to deal with him or his kind.

It took four more days to finish the software modifications, and another two after that to complete their limited repertoire of simulation tests. At that point, there was nothing to do but wait for Dr. Samuels to locate a likely patient.