The transaction goes as smoothly as I could have hoped for. The two guys keep the minivan, but after I hand them the thick envelope with the cash they help us load all the gear into the back of our pickup. I make sure they don’t open the lidded plastic tub containing the last earthly remains of Theo Johannes. We’ll need to do a comprehensive inventory, but most everything that Jeff wouldn’t have used up looks like it’s here. I don’t think they’re holding anything out on us.
In retrospect, it was probably lucky that we didn’t lock it and grab the keys. It would have been towed away by the time we were done clearing the swarm and making sure that not a single bot of it remained. Then we would have had to deal with reclaiming a van that wasn’t ours in the first place from an impound lot and maybe having to explain to the local cops why computers marked as our family’s property were in there with some dismembered body parts. That probably would have been harder than getting it back from a couple of opportunistic car thieves.
In any case, we have all the gear that was in the van back now with us in our motel room. Evan is taking a look at the head and spine now, seeing if he can figure out whether Jeff actually got the implant installer working. The mineral rich parts of the rest of the guy’s body are already in a billion pieces split up among as many bots. Whatever other bits the swarm couldn’t make use of are now an unrecognizable paste at the bottom of the filled in hole in the ground underneath where we rebuilt the storage locker.
I’m glad no one was around to witness two Butler children saving the world from another Butler child yesterday, but there’s no way that this won’t get out somehow. At the very least there’s got to be video going around of us on the bridge. It won’t take long for someone to recognize Evan or me and start putting things together. We’ll have to call the Feds. There’s no way around it now. We’ll need to report the Butler Treaty violation to the Critical Technology Task Force. At that point, I guess we might as well report Jeff’s murders too.
I sigh.
More interviews. More red tape. More people getting in the way of us tracking down our brother.
I’ll kick that can to later. After we’re home again at least.
I glance over at my brother, seated on the floor with the lidded tub containing Theo’s remains resting in front of him. His eyes are closed and his face has a look of intense concentration. My overlay shows me that his medbots are hard at work, swarming through the layers of plastic packaging to the brain inside. I’m still not sure why Jeff took the spine too, but honestly, I don’t think I really want to know.
While he’s working on that, I start in on the inventory of our gear. All the medical bots are missing, along with some of the surgical paraphernalia and a few of the cables. A couple of the tablets are also gone, but all the servers are here. A couple of the diagnostic wireless access points we use for debugging are missing too, but the other three are still here, including the one that Jeff converted into the jammer he used this morning. I think everything else that was stolen is accounted for.
I look at Jeff’s hacked-together jammer again. If I understand the hardware I’m looking at right, he amped up the transmitter and then just had it blast out white noise on every frequency that it knows. Simple and effective. Clever bastard.
I haul some gear to the desk and fire up one of the primary servers. The fans on the back of the chassis blast with a loud hum as I connect up the monitor, mouse, and keyboard. This one has the implant auto-installer code. I compare it to the version in my index that Louise showed me, the starting point that Jeff would have had to work with.
It has changed a lot since Louise last touched it.
Jeff was always one of the best coders out of all the siblings. Looking at the most recent change logs, I think he solved most of the problems with Smith’s installation. Mostly the code is improved, but some of the changes are just weird. Not just that they’re wrong, it’s more than that. They don’t make any sense. Code that seems to do nothing, variable names that are gibberish, and some data structures that just dangle pointers off into unclaimed memory. Most of it should run fine, but some of it might cause some weird behavior.
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I feel Evan stand up and stretch his arms and legs.
“How’s it looking?” I ask him.
“Still figuring it out,” he says, “but it doesn’t look like what happened with the others. Or with Smith. I’m going through capillary by capillary, looking for the same damage we saw in the others. So far I haven’t seen any of it. It’s hard to tell without having seen it when this poor guy was still alive, but I think Jeff might at least have something here that wouldn’t kill him. The optic nerve interface is all sorts of wonky, but otherwise things look close to right.”
“That tracks with what I’m seeing,” I reply. “He’s got the installer code branched into four versions. Three are marked as failures, the last one has ‘SUCCESS!!’ in all caps in the notes.”
Evan grunts in acknowledgement. He’s still as tired from yesterday as I am. I nod and start examining the code in the success branch carefully as Evan sits back down to delve into the guy’s brain again. The code looks better than the other three branches, fewer of the weird functions and what looks like better adaptability for working generically on any brain. The other big difference is that all the safety protocols that Louise had put into the original installer code are gone from this version. Nothing that checked on the health of the patient was part of this installer.
“Check this out,” I tell my brother. He gets up and comes to look over my shoulder. “There’s this weird Jeffism in the code that installs the optical interface bypass. I think that’s what you were seeing. Here, where it’s supposed to try to find the nerve clusters and feed the extra signals into them to let the implantees see the console overlay and what our eyes see at the same time? This part of the code in that function is all wrong. It’s a complete override. The signals from the biological eye just get thrown away.”
“Hmm,” Evan says, getting up again. “I guess that would work if you don’t care about seeing with your human eyes anymore. I mean, if you’re OK with just using bot vision this could work.”
“Then I think he might be able to install it on himself,” I say, eyes still glued to the screen in front of me. “The rest of this code all looks solid.”
“You’re joking right?” Evan asks. “There’s no way he could have worked out all the issues that fast. He hasn’t even had two weeks since Smith, and he’s spent a lot of that on the run. ”
“For real,” I reply. “Whatever else you say about Jeff, when it comes to code that kid’s a mad genius.”
“Well, that’s not great,” my brother’s rumbling voice understates.
“Yeah, not great. On the upside, without all the gear, he’s only got one shot at it. There’s still a chance he’ll accidentally kill himself.”
“He didn’t take the autodoser with him though,” Evan says. “Or any of the drugs. There’s no way he could install it.”
“Well,” I say, “you know the part of the software that Louise put in to make sure the subject is anesthetized and immobile?”
“No,” Evan says, “but that sounds like something she’d put in.”
“Yeah, she did, but then he took it out. It’s gone in this version. There’s nothing stopping him from doing it on himself while he’s conscious.”
“Are you kidding?” Evan asks. “That’s insane.”
“Literally,” I agree, “but so is Jeff.”
He pauses.
“Fair point.”
“So, he may or may not have a working implant by now, and he may or may not be anywhere near St. Louis anymore.”
“Yeah.” Evan nods glumly.
I turn to the computer and start the shutdown process. There’s nothing else I need from it before we go home. “Are you getting the feeling like we’re back where we started?”
“Yeah, feels that way. But look on the bright side: we have our gear back, he only has one shot at the install, and if he takes it he could kill himself, or blind himself, or something else terrible that would land him in a hospital. We’d find him for sure then.”
“That’s the bright side? Hoping for dumb luck?”
“Plus he never got calibrated for the full version of the implant. Even with Father guiding that process it took most of us a long time to get up to full speed. So if he does manage to get a working implant, he won’t be able to do much of anything with it until he figures all of that out. He’ll need specialized hardware and medical supplies and a whole lot of other things that we can use to track him down.”
“I guess that’s true.”
My phone rings. It’s a text from Lin.
Still nothing on the search of the river, and the private investigators say they have checked everywhere. If he came to shore, it wasn’t anywhere near St. Louis.
I show it to Evan. “Let’s get out of here. I want to go home.”