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“Project?”
Chal racked her brain, trying to remember what exactly the project
had entailed. Something special about biological substrates, using
both neuronal implants and a digital neuronal core to guide
development. A hint of curiosity clawed its way into her thoughts.
Implant development was an essential part of the growing field of
digital intelligence, and she had never been able to crack it. She
shook her head, as much toward herself as toward Johnner.

“The project
you agreed to help with,” Lieutenant Johnner nodded. “You’ll
be the first to know the results of the trials we’re now
conducting. You will be the one guiding the trials.”

He no longer seemed
abashed at having abducted her, thrown her into a van, and driven her
God knows where. Phoenix, if she could believe him. Despite the
circumstances, she felt drawn into the mystery. What strides had they
made in the field? What trials were they running?

She shook her head,
trying to restore reality. “I–I can’t do it,”
she stammered. “I have a lecture in New York tomorrow evening–”

“That lecture
has been cancelled, as have all of your engagements for the next two
weeks.”

She gaped at him.
“What?
Cancelled
? You can’t just DO that–”

“I’m
afraid we can,” he said. “I’m not authorized to
explain to you the details until we reach Phoenix.”

“I signed on
as a volunteer,” she protested.

“You signed,”
he said. His voice was flatly insistent.

“And if I
refuse?” She crossed her arms, leaning back in her seat.

He coughed lightly,
embarrassed, and she noticed for the first time the streaks of white
hair at his temples. “If you refuse, I’m ordered to
escort you to Phoenix under compulsion.”

“By
compulsion. Which you’ve already done.” Her voice was
low, quivering on the edges with a mixture of curiosity and fright.

He straightened up
across from her. “I’m sorry, but yes. This matter
requires your urgent assistance.”

“And if I
refuse to help when we arrive?” she said.

“We have other
consultants on our list. The next is Dr. Corey Abboud, I believe,”
he said.

Dr. Abboud.
He was at Olin LabCorps, working on chimpanzees to develop new
digital intelligence chips that could be implanted without having to
rely on an external source of energy. His work was phenomenal.

So they were combing
through digital intelligence researchers. She immediately felt
herself reach toward the unknown, jealous of anyone who was able to
work on such groundbreaking research. Was it a bluff? She stared at
Lieutenant Johnner and he stared back dispassionately.

Despite her
misgivings, it seemed as though Lieutenant Johnner actually had a
project underway, and it sounded intriguing. If they were working on
the biological substrate problem, she wanted to know about it. She
wanted to be the first to know.

She thought about
the next two weeks. Her lecture and charity dinners in New York. The
Boston book signing. All cancelled. For what?

“Fuck.”
Chal leaned her head back on the seat. Her hand dropped away from the
seat belt buckle. “FUCK.”

Lieutenant Johnner
sat silently in front of her, waiting. Finally she shrugged in
reluctant assent. If there was no way out of this for the time being,
she was at least going to make the most of it. She sighed, turning
away from the military man to look out the van’s windshield.
The road in front was empty, the headlights shining onto an endless
highway. To Phoenix.

“This had
better be interesting.”

***

Interesting was Chal
Davidson’s primary criterion for anything. Men, food, work: if
it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t for her. This was not,
despite one ex-lover’s words to the contrary, how she explained
away her commitment issues. It was simply that she enjoyed being
around people that made her think. Most men didn’t do that, or
at least not for very long, and when she got bored she moved onto the
next one. Her relationships came and went like the seasons, and she
didn’t seem to care.

Some said that Chal
Davidson had become obsessed with discovering
interesting
things at the expense of friends, family, and just about everything
else. Others simply called her a genius.

Her background in
undergraduate school had been in theoretical physics, which she had
abandoned for a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins that never
reached fruition, her advisor having kicked her out once she made
clear her disagreement with him on the practical applications of
metaphysical philosophy. She ended up switching over to computer
science at the same school and wrapped up her thesis on digital
intelligence within a year, impressing everyone except those in the
philosophy department, who squarely turned their backs on her.

Her career in
academia was imbalanced, to say the least. Whereas most intelligence
scholars focused on theoretical models, Davidson only published
papers under pressure when she had to extend her grants, preferring
to focus on practical applications. She would seem to have been
tailor-made for corporate work, but she despised the suits and the
suckups. The one corporate job she worked at a large software company
lasted only a week before she yelled at the head boss during a
division meeting and was fired for insubordination.

Still, she had done
well for herself after a venture capital fund sniffed out her work on
biological substrates and granted her a cool three million dollars to
continue studying the applications. She hated biology and hired two
young brilliant students out of MIT to wrangle with the substrate
problems, turning her attention fully to the nascent field of digital
intelligence. Her work quickly took off and soon there was no lack of
capital to support her research.

Most digital
intelligence researchers focused on non-biological substrates,
developing software that could only be used in computers. In this,
they were continuing the artificial intelligence work that had begun
two centuries ago. Davidson thought that bio-substrates, though
annoying to deal with, had certain properties that lent themselves
well to high performance once the digital intelligence transferred
across platforms, so to speak. As everyone else moved toward silicon,
she shifted to organic media.

Eventually the
Fortune 500 companies grew interested in the long-term potential of
digital intelligence and it became trendy to have dig-int teams
installed in branches of both marketing and research departments.
Many universities had started offering digital intelligence programs
alongside the more traditional cognitive science degrees. The CEO who
had fired her seven years before invited her to dinner at a chic
French bistro and offered her a seven-figure signing bonus, but she
refused, in a manner she herself later described as “petulant
and short-sighted.”

At an interview for
one popular science magazine, she was asked to pose for a photo
shoot. The photographer came into the studio with a skin-tight red
dress. Chal initially balked, but the magazine interviewer talked her
into the dress. It turned out to be the right decision.

In what seemed to
her like the blink of an eye, she had amassed dozens of offers for
book deals, interviews, cover shoots, corporate advertising for any
digital product under the sun. She accepted them all, ignoring the
advice of her fellow researchers.

“People see
you as a sellout,” a senior colleague had said. Chal merely
shrugged.
Maybe I am.

In private, she took
all of the money from the promotional offers and gave it to charity.
She never told anybody that she felt guilty, or why. They wouldn’t
have understood. Only her tax accountant knew that Chal Davidson,
despite having the brains to match her beauty, was as penniless as a
grad student.

Her mom sent her
clippings from the local newspaper whenever it mentioned Chal’s
work. Paper clippings, still–Mrs. Davidson lived in Catalonia,
a non-digital post-Divide country. These Chal kept in her desk
drawer, even after the slips of paper turned yellow, thin, and
finally began to crumble, as all mortal things do.

***

Paper? That was what
she thought, before anything else, when the military man, Gray
Thomas, leaned forward in the van and handed her a binder full of the
stuff. “This is what we need you to review before Phoenix.”

“You needed to
print this all out?” Chal asked.

“It’s
for security’s sake,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “No
digital copies are allowed outside of the lab.”

Chal rolled her eyes
sleepily. The binder was three inches thick; she had already been
awake for twenty-seven hours, not counting the brief period of
sedation. And the sedative must have been an etorphine blend, the way
it knocked her out so quickly. She could already feel the
hydrochloride-induced headache coming over her as she turned to the
first page. There were so many pages.

And it was all
paper. Overly paranoid, that’s what the military was. As Chal
perused the binder, she felt as though she was back home, visiting
her mom who, despite Chal’s bribes, threats, and plain old
begging had refused to leave West Catalonia.

Turning quickly to
the second section, she was surprised to see copies of all of her
research on bio-substrate digital intelligence, including her thesis.
She skimmed over them now. Pieces of the text had been underlined,
and certain passages were copied over onto separate pages with dense
technical notes scribbled under them. Chal recognized the notes as
part of the lab processes that were required to apply digital
intelligence into a biological matrix, the results of which had never
been successful in Chal’s lab. At the bottom of one page
someone had signed his name to the scribbles.
Dr. Fielding
.
Chal would have to ask about him.

Continuing through,
she began to be acutely aware of the feel of the paper rasping under
her fingertips. In the middle of a paragraph on rat intelligence she
lost track of the words, her fingers underlining the sentence but not
understanding it. A noise grew in her ears, an insistent buzz, and
her mind wandered far, far away from the present.

Paper.

Paper dolls.

Paper dolls
blowing across the floor and under the bed –

“Dr.
Davidson?”

Chal was pulled back
into the present, where Lieutenant Johnner looked at her with
concern.

“Yes?”

“Thought we
had lost you for a moment there,” Johnner said. He smiled
impassively, and Chal gave him a terse nod.

“Just wool
gathering,” she said. He didn’t need to worry about her.
Nobody needed to worry about her. She turned back to the paper
binder.

Some of the material
was new, and she puzzled over the formulas for a while before
continuing her reading. Inserted in the middle was a copy of the
magazine article with her picture attached, the one with her in a red
skin-tight dress. She scowled and turned the page quickly.

There was also a
printout of her speech on the emotional ramifications of
bio-substrate dig-int. She had delivered it on a second’s
notice at a neurobiology convention a couple of years back.

She waved the paper
at Lieutenant Johnner. “Did they just put everything I’ve
ever said in here? Because this talk is about future emotional
possibilities for biological creations. Not machine-based digital.”

“That’s
right.”

Chal felt oddly
slighted by his tone. He hadn’t even answered her question.

“So, this is
just a transcript of everything I’ve ever said?”

“Everything in
that binder is relevant to the project at hand, Dr. Davidson,”
Lieutenant Johnner said.

“I’m
sorry, you’re saying
this
is relevant?” She
laughed, and stopped when she saw that he did not join her.

“You’re
saying you’ve done it?” Chal said. “Bio-substrate
intelligences? With
emotional
sentience
?
”

Lieutenant Johnner
shrugged lightly.

“Bull
shit
,”
Chal said. “You’re bluffing.”

“Bluffing?”

“Just like you
were bluffing with Dr. Abboud,” she continued, flipping through
the binder. “This tech is decades away.”

“The M.I.D.
has been working on this for decades, Dr. Davidson.” The
lieutenant’s blue eyes shone in the dim light of the road as
they turned off of the highway.

“What does
this–any of this–have to do with the military?” She
flipped ahead in the binder. Emotional induction studies, including
the recent Lidder paper. Child development research. One of her
articles on conscious feeling and qualia. “You can’t
weaponize
emotions.”

“You work in a
field with some very important implications, Dr. Davidson. You’ll
understand more once we reach Phoenix.”

He said something
else, but she was distracted by the sudden idea that something
interesting–very interesting–might be right around the
corner. Distracted enough that she didn’t hear the coolness
that had entered his voice. “Say again?” She flipped back
to the formulas. How had they gotten it to work?

“You talked
about chipping away at a problem,” Lieutenant Johnner said.

“Yes?”
Chal was eager, impatient. A million possibilities raced through her
head.

“Don’t
be too hasty to break through the ice,” Johnner said as they
pulled onto a deserted dirt road. “We’re standing on it.”

***

CHAPTER THREE

The progress of
digital intelligence in the world scientific community had been set
back by a number of factors since its inception. Apart from the
religious objections over the creation of intelligent life, society
believed that thinking machines were useful for only the most
technical of tasks. It was seen as silly to even try to work on the
more nebulous and impractical aspects of intelligent life such as
sentience and emotion. This attitude would prove to be dramatically
short-sighted.