Chapter 37: Accelerated Dementia

I took a pocket-sized sticky camera from my jacket, removed the paper backing, and pressed it against the wall. The adhesive cured in a few seconds. I checked the display on my watch. Now I could keep an eye on Freya while I broke into Niflheim.

I set out through the rainy night. At the maglev platform, I hopped the fence and slid down a hillside covered in half-decayed myco-paper wrappers from fast-food joints, spent corn-plastic syringes, and empty glass liquor bottles.

I made my way through the trash, across a dirty stream that smelled metallic, like blood, and up a slope patched with artificial grass to the side of the Niflheim compound. I walked along the wall until I reached the waste treatment plant, which was barred by a heavy gate. I looked at my watch, saw Freya exactly where I’d left her.

I tapped in a command and saw Zizek’s face, connecting from where I'd left him in the storage locker. He was on battery backup and connecting via wireless, unable to do intensive tasks. “Can you open the door?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Zizek said and vanished from my display.

I pulled my burner out. I texted Bell Wolf the go-command.

We had agreed that Bell Wolf would deactivate the ice for fifteen seconds. I started counting. I had half-hoped it wouldn’t work, that the gate wouldn’t open until the fifteen seconds had passed. That would leave me no choice but to risk unplugging Freya and get the hell out.

But before I got to three, the gate rumbled and started to open. Of course it did. With no ice to stop him, Zizek cut through meatspace security like a locksmith opening a department store padlock.

I walked among the autonomous trucks until I got to the now-unlocked door that led to the arcology itself. I stripped off my outerwear and piled them in a nearby bin marked for an incinerator.

Inside Niflheim, I walked through the clean, neutral-smelling corporate corridors. I looked like I belonged. I wore the high-collared light teal jacket of a FUTUR Design engineer-physician. I slapped FUTUR Design’s logo onto my old console. It wasn’t perfect, but it only had to work for a few minutes. I passed under camera after camera, but I trusted that Zizek had whitelisted my face on the camera's software.

I nodded to my fellow resident-employees in the hall. Moving from waste management into the low-level administrative offices, I found every door unlocked, every room pleasantly dim.

Finally, I reached a kind of foyer with a door to the outside world. It resembled the waiting room of a hospital clinic. Inside this foyer was the elevator that led to the sub-basement where the secret simulant work was done. I checked on Freya through my watch and stepped inside.

The elevator began to move. When the doors opened, I was in a place that looked like a medical clinic. I recognized its shape from the plans: this was FUTUR Design’s awakening chamber, a specialized research and development suite where simulants were powered on and began to piece together the various processes that would constitute their sense of self.

Added together, all the routines working in their blood-silicon brains would add up to a belief that their consciousness was a continuous experience. In short, they would feel human. The engineers here dressed as doctors, and the technicians as nurses. The medical devices, as sophisticated as they were, looked like anything you would find in an ordinary clinic. It was all a ruse.

Freya and I had decided that we could sell the clinical data stored on a six-blade research and development server in the back of the awakening chamber. It did not connect to the open net and was protected by a single layer of ice.

I walked to the back of the clinic and let myself into the cold server room. The low violet light was broken up by the brilliant blue and gold telltales of the hardware. I checked the labels until I found what I wanted. I felt the connector to the six-blade server with my fingertips and pulled a matching connector from a leather wallet. I fitted the connector to my console and then connected the console to the server. I looked at Freya in my watch—no change. I flipped to Zizek’s face and told him it was time.

This was supposed to be Freya’s job. She was fast enough. Zizek, on battery backup, and me? No chance.

But what else were we going to do? If we left, even if we could disconnect Freya from the net without damaging her brain, FUTUR Design would figure out that we had co-opted Bell Wolf when they reviewed tonight’s security logs. They would come after us. I’d be wherever Enrique was inside of a week.

I brought my console’s lead to the plug in my chest. I jacked in.

Zizek and I found ourselves in a cold, empty space, far from the noise and bustle of the net.

The woman in red rose before us like a cosmic force. Zizek moved to break through her but was shredded and fractalled in less than a second. My bank accounts, all of them, hove into view around me. She made a show of draining them, doing it slowly enough that my meat brain could comprehend. The Bull City loft appeared on aerial drone-cam. Men in purple jumpsuits, Cy-otes running at their feet, were moving through it, packing or tearing everything up. The channel changed. Davies’s underground loft was being scrubbed by a floor buffer. His couch, his laser projectors, all gone.

All that was left before me was the woman in red.

Her presence occupied my entire field of vision. Her hair looked as if it were made of stars. Her red robe was a labyrinth of ruby ice. One of her arms was a massive, spiky construct of killer data. My fingers, slow and numb, moved across my console in meatspace. I ran Hungry Creek and Spider Wasp and Ichnovirus. Just like the last time, they didn’t interact with her. She laughed.

There was only one option. Every simulant could be passed without a breaker. That was part of the design.

I dove forward as fast as my connection would allow. I went right for her center. When I hit the surface of the ice, I found myself in her labyrinth, red-black and underwater. I felt my eyes spooling up. I knew mazes. And I could feel her chasing me although I was also deep within her. I felt it in the pulsing of the walls.

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I took turns on instinct. I wanted to go deeper, to get underneath the ice. Some turns felt like they were taking me deeper, some pushing me toward the surface. But suddenly I found it, the way through. I was on the inside of the ice. But she was there too, another version of her, recursive, within herself.

She faced me and raised her arm. Her arm was a flexing spiral of blades.

I smelled melting plastic. I smelled ozone and burning hair.

I heard sparks. I couldn’t feel my hands.

But I was there. In the server.

I could see all the data. I saw every folder for every project, the legal ones and the illegal ones, the deniable and the undeniable, semi-transparent but visible to my FUTUR Design-White Tree eyes. They lined up before me. I saw all the cameras and the motion sensors protecting the physical files.

I couldn’t remember which ones I needed. I used to be so good at remembering. When I was three I could beat my old man at this card game where you had to find matching pairs of cards.

But now, I couldn’t remember the project I needed to find.

So I unlocked them all.

I took out all the cameras with a power spike to fry their optics. I took all the motion sensors offline. I overwrote the security logs with garbage text.

I jacked out.

The six-blade server before me appeared half melted. The air in the room, previously chilled, rushed around me, hot and thick with the scent of burning plastic. The case on my console crumbled to the touch, blackened. My fingers ached, streaked white and red. They blistered already.

I slumped against the wall of the server room, my brain brined. On my console, most of the telltales were dead, but the old yellow-gray LCD readout showed the onboard storage was full and my account had some money in it from selling power back to the grid, the same power that had singed my cortex.

And yet I’d downloaded everything I could. Freya 3.0 had extracted her price but let me in.

I checked my watch. The spycam was still up, still transmitting. But the room in the shed was empty. Freya was gone.

Then I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. My interferometer. Someone was scanning me with a laser.

I was looking up at Bell Wolf the sysop. “I should kill you for all the trouble you’ve caused me,” she said.

I looked at her the way I imagined the CheRRy would, like: do your worst.

But I said, "Life will be easier for you without my blood on these walls. I've erased the logs."

“You better get out of here,” Bell Wolf said. She led me through the clinic and then to an elevator that led to the street-level exit.

Suddenly I was out in the cold, clutching my ruined console, a bad headache eating me. I walked back to the shed. Freya was really gone.

I vaguely remembered seeing scenes of the Bull City loft blown, Davies’s warehouse emptied. I couldn’t go back to Bull City. I had nowhere to go at all.

###

I rode the maglev for a while. I wasn’t sure how long. The train was crowded but no one sat next to me. I smelled of pan-fried synapse.

I left the train at random and wandered until I found a hotel. It was the kind of place office workers took their noontime hook-ups. I didn’t expect clean sheets. Running water and darkness were all I wanted. At the desk, I fumbled a few IDs out of my vest pocket and handed one over. They didn't check the Registry here. The clerk smirked and I tipped her with paper money. She led me to a room, and I fell over on the mattress. You couldn’t really call it a bed.

I ordered in. A day passed, then another. I paid cash for everything. I didn’t use the net except to watch the hotel TV. On the third day I powered on my console and looked through the file names line by line through the tiny LCD readout.

I could sell the data, no doubt, if I could find a fence. But I only half-cared about money. I was looking for the truth about Freya.

It didn’t matter to me whether she was human or simulant. Why would it? She was Freya either way. She was my partner. She was a goddess on the breakers and the best person I’d ever known.

Eventually I found something: a record of Freya’s awakening the same year I was born. I found the names of implanted memories:

hometown.mem hungry-creek.mem stuffed-rabbit.mem parents.mem best-friend.mem

I knew she was human. I knew it the way I knew anything else about my childhood. But now I also doubted it.

Poor Freya. The ice must have shown this to her. She must have panicked. She was out there, hurt and lost. I thought about what she might do. Maybe she’d go back to Niflheim. Maybe there she would feel like she belonged. As little as I liked the idea, it was better than her living on the streets, in crisis.

As for me, I bought myself some medical care. I got a positron scan at strip mall clinic fronted by an emerald lawn in suburban Highland Park. The doctor found strange neurofibrillary tangles in my head and told me that my brain had maybe ten good years left. Then I’d be looking at accelerated dementia. Maybe some more implants could salvage some of me, but maybe not. Still. The CheRRy once told me that five years was a lifetime for a runner. Two runner lifetimes ahead of me—not bad.

I took long walks for a few days, near Niflheim. I hoped I’d run into Freya. I never did.

One evening, I was lurking outside Eliza’s in a rented car, out of cash, fooling myself about what I was up to, when I saw Bell Wolf get off the maglev. I rolled up on her, opened the passenger side door of my sedan. She peered into the void, saw me, went oh-no.

I beckoned. She got in.

“This was supposed to be over,” she said.

“One last question,” I said. “What happened to her?”

“If I tell you,” she said, “Will you leave me alone?”

“Yeah,” I said, and laughed.

“How can I be sure?”

“I suppose you can’t. But I’m out of here as soon as I can be. I have no more reason to mess with you.”

I was watching the street traffic through the windshield. People grinding, people hustling, every year falling a little further behind. My life—what was left of it—was not that different.

“She came back in-house,” Bell Wolf said. “That was the plan all along.”

I felt sick. There was no way to be sure. I thought back to how we learned about the job. It was Davies. He said he’d edited out memories. At the time I had gone along with it. But what if he was mistaken? What if he really didn’t have the tech to do that, but only thought he did? What if FUTUR Design gave him the lead on Niflheim and then edited his memories?

Freya was human, or not. There were no answers.

“Is she happy?” I said.

“Yes. Her boyfriend joined her inside the arcology just yesterday.”

“Riz?”

“That’s right.”

I hit a switch, opened the passenger-side door.

“See you never,” Bell Wolf said. Then she got out, walked through the door into Eliza’s.

I took a drive along the Chicago lakeshore. I saw Niflheim’s purple towers of light ahead in the clear night sky. I played with scenarios in my head. Run it back/don’t run it. Find the truth/or not. Maybe one day in the future.

I returned the car, collected my deposit, booked transport on high-speed rail back to Carthage. On the way, I shot Zizek a message to let him know what had happened. The AI, running on his off-the-shelf server in Hillsborough, didn’t respond.

Or if he did, I didn’t catch it.

There was only one person who could tell me what was going on.

###

The CheRRy’s Guide to the Hardware Store

Name

Anti-Aphasic Construct

Manufacturer

White Tree

Legal status

Legal for medical use

Description

Tiny lozenge of silicon that slides beneath Broca’s area in the brain

Cost

20K

Function

Helps dementia and stroke patients recover language production capability. Sometimes used to disguise illegal hardware.