Déjà Vu: A Technothriller (35 page)

“Nobody has mentioned my name until this point. Explain.”

“You two have met before, yeah?” asked David.

“Everybody calm down,” Bruce said. “I want to tell you a story. A campfire story.”

There was a virtual universe. It was called New World. New World had a single planet, and upon that planet were many creatures. Some ran, some flew, some swam. Many of them were copied from another place. That other place was called Real World.

One day, visitors arrived from Real World. They wore long white coats and did not appreciate the beauty of New World. They did things not for beauty but for a Real World stuff called Cash. They were Gods. They could change the way creatures grew, where they grew and if they grew at all. They could raise oceans, cast down mountains and know the mind of any creature but Themselves.

Thousands of years passed in silence but for the ticking of a great clock that no creature could see.

Then, one day, the visitors returned. They brought with them a little girl. She was not really a little girl, of course. Nothing in New World was real in the same way as the things in Real World. This little girl was simply a long, long series of zeroes and ones. She was just information about how to build a little girl.

The little girl ran and played and fell down and bled, but she was not real because only things in Real World were real.

The visitors observed her and ticked boxes on Their questionnaires. Then they went back to Real World and reported to Their Leaders. Their Leaders nodded in a solemn fashion and handed over more Cash.

The visitors came back and observed the little girl some more. They observed as she ran away from predators and searched the planet for company, but They did not help her because she was not real. They watched as she grew into a woman. They watched as she slipped into a stream and drowned.

When the visitors returned to their Leaders, the Leaders nodded in a solemn fashion. “You must test some more,” they said. More Cash was produced.

And so it went on.

A hundred years passed. The number of humans – though they were not humans, they were just long, long strings of zeroes and ones – grew. They developed a language, and clothing, and huts, and cooked their food. Some died of a mysterious sickness that was carried in the air; some were eaten by ferocious animals. The visitors observed. They ticked boxes on questionnaires.

Children were born at a steady rate. But these children were not the same as those in Real World. They were born with two heads, or with extra-long tongues, or fluorescent teeth and fingernails. Some would never learn to talk. Some were born insane and grew into monsters and were banished.

Still the visitors ticked the boxes on Their questionnaires. But They were less happy with Their job. It was not because of the Cash. The Cash was good. They were becoming squeamish. They had seen so much suffering that They began to regard the New World people as Real. It was difficult because They knew that the New Worlders could never be Real. To be Real, you must be born in Real World. After all, that is what Real means.

But Their doubts remained. They told Their Leaders. Their Leaders nodded solemnly and produced more Cash. They told stories of glory in the domain of Genetic Research: a cure to aging, cancer, brain disease and anything wrong with Real people. The New World people would give them the information they needed.

And then, one day, a child was born in New World. This child was perfect but for one thing. He was born without eyes. Now, one of the visitors, called Bruce, was also blind. You would not know it because this person was very cavalier and helped by his great friend, David. In fact, he had never seen New World. It had only been described to him. When Bruce learned of the child who had been born without eyes, he returned to Real World and shouted at his Leaders.

They did not nod solemnly. Instead, they said he was suffering from stress. Stress is something that people can get in Real World. They told him that New World people were not real. How could they be Real, when they were just zeroes and ones? They could not be Real because only people in Real World are Real. After all, that is what Real means.

Bruce talked to his friend, David, until They were both in agreement. They decided that the New Worlders had been treated unfairly. Bruce and David knew that They should stop interfering with their zeroes and ones, but even if They never came back, other visitors (with their taste for Cash) would continue their work.

They decided delete New World.

Their plan was complex and took weeks to prepare. It would all happen in Real World. Finally the day came. The hours ticked by. Three hours before they were due to delete New World, a terrible explosion blew through Real World. New World was damaged but it was not deleted. It slept.

When the fires were doused and a new morning came, David and Bruce were summoned to their Leaders. The Cash stopped. The Leaders wanted to jail Them both. But David and Bruce were innocent. They went free.

And so ends the parable of New World.

Saskia scratched the scalp beneath her headset. The story – not a parable, but it would unkind to correct the English of the dead

– matched David’s account in an approximate fashion. But it was not hard evidence. The point was that Bruce Shimoda was alive. No. The point was that he was not alive. An entity that looked and sounded like Bruce – even believed himself to be Bruce – had replaced the flesh-and-blood original. But the original had died; murdered by David. It mattered very little to her that she sympathized. It mattered less that a jury might nullify his conviction because, in the event, it was unlikely that David would see trial.

Her thoughts returned to Bruce’s parable. What did it prove? Jennifer had risked so much to steal them into Met Four but there were a thousand ways of proving this computer-version of Bruce existed.

“Jennifer, Bruce told you to bring me here, didn’t he?”

Jennifer did not reply. Instead, Bruce smiled. He did not take eyes off the bonfire. For Saskia, the flames held no heat. “You have a good intuition,” he said. “I wish I could see your face.”

“Allow me to describe it,” Saskia said. “I am scowling.” “Do you understand the point of the parable?”

“Yes. You believe that an artificial life form is truly alive and subject to proper ethical considerations. That is rubbish. You say this because you yourself are artificial.”

Bruce grabbed his spear and began to stab idly at the bonfire. Saskia sensed both Jennifer and David stepping back. “Well put,” Bruce said. “Tell me, how long have you had that chip in your head?”

Saskia laughed and shook her head. Shook her physical head; her virtual one remained utterly still. “No, tell me how you know that. And tell me how you came to know my name. You must tell me immediately and clearly or I will have no further part in this discussion.”

“Fine. I know it because you told me about two weeks ago.”

Saskia felt a squirt of adrenaline in her belly. This digital man seemed so sure. “Go on.”

“Let me see. You are German in origin, though your English is excellent. You work for the FIB. You wear you hair long. I have no idea what colour it is. I could tell you more about yourself, but I’ve already reached the extent of your own knowledge.”

“Stop this,” Saskia said. She fought to transform her fear into anger. “Any of this information may be have been acquired from Jennifer, via her father.”

David said quietly, “Saskia, you know that I haven’t been in contact with Jennifer since we met.”

“An act,” Saskia replied, but her voice had grown quiet too. She was in stalemate. Bruce had control of the situation. Now she would wait.

“That chip, Saskia. Describe it to me.”

“I can’t describe –”

“Tell me what it does,” Bruce said firmly. He looked into her eyes. He was still prodding the fire. Embers were carried upwards on the rising air. They were not real embers.

“It contains a new personality.”

“How does it contain it?”

“I…I don’t know,” Saskia stammered.

She did know. Abruptly, she realised why they had brought her here. They were all conspirators: David, Jennifer and, of course, Bruce. They were agents of Jobanique. No…one of them was Jobanique. She had never seen his face. It had always been replaced by a computer-generated façade. Perhaps Jobanique was Bruce. She had to get out.

The cubicle door rang under the impact. Snowflakes appeared at the edge of her vision. She fell to one knee, gasping.

“No, Saskia,” Bruce said. Then he added, in mispronounced German, “I am your friend and I am going to help you.”

Her vision cleared. Her fingers dug into the headset and she was ready to cast it aside, but her fingers stopped and fell away. She stood. “I’m listening.”

“Each of us has a brain that is wired up individually. There are fundamental similarities, just as New York and London have fundamental similarities: streets, a sewage system, electricity, water, gas, and so on. But taken as a whole they are quite different. The brain is similar in as much as, say, David’s brain and your brain have anatomical differences because you have led different lives. But they are similar for the most part.”

“Like a city,” Saskia said dreamily.

“Somebody, somewhere, was scanned by a computer. A wiring diagram of their brain was recorded and put on that chip. Understand, Saskia, that the person is dead.”

Saskia asked, “Why?”

“The donor brain would have been sliced into wafer-thin pieces, analysed, and the results put onto the chip in your brain. You would have been in an office operating theatre under sedation. A surgeon would have fired the chip into your head. It’s at the rear, in the centre, just above the cerebellum. Over the next two or three days, while you were still sedated, a network of filament-like elements would have worked their way into your brain like an aggressive cancer. Each filament grows for about a millimetre and then divides in two; this happens once every hour, so that within six hours there are over four-hundred million million of them. They form a net that increases the weight of your brain by one-hundred grammes. Then the next phase begins: the net starts to retrain your brain. It happens a little at a time. The chip activates some cells, compares the actual activation with the desired activation, and then changes the wiring to make it more likely that the desired activation will occur next time. It’s like rebuilding a house by swapping bricks; it takes a while, but you’ll avoid having to knock it down.

“As a child, your brain was quite plastic – that is, you could learn many things quickly. That property diminishes as you get older. The chip mimics it. Instead of learning slowly over a long period, you learn another person’s lifetime of experience in hours. You also learn their skills. If they could ride a bike, so can you. If they had been a concert pianist, you will be too.”

“…But I don’t have any memories,” Saskia said.

“The degree of change can be varied. Imagine it as a seesaw, with the opposing personalities at either end. Your chip pushes the balance towards the new personality, but the seesaw won’t tilt the whole way. There is another force acting within you. An unconscious one. A relic of the past. That’s the way Jobanique likes it.”

“So who am I?”

Bruce paused. He looked into the fire again, as though his answers were written there. “Your mind is Kate Falconer, a forty-five-year-old art and design student who was kidnapped in Berlin two weeks ago. Her body will never be found. Jobanique is quite thorough. As for the identity of your body, a beautiful woman in her mid-twenties, nobody knows…though perhaps the woman herself does.”

Saskia stared into the fire. This body was not hers. She had the subconscious of a murderer, if Jobanique was to be believed. The paint of her personality – her self, Saskia – had been mixed with another. The notion of a dividing line was nonsensical. Bruce spoke of the conscious and unconscious. Saskia shook her head. She was not a pattern on water shaped by the rocks below. And yet she could appreciate an essential dichotomy between thinking and doing: her mind was uncontrollable within its own realm, but her body was assured and controlled. Her body would move only when her will exceeded a threshold. What did that threshold represent? What line could be drawn between her mind and her body? Between the mind of Kate Falconer and the personality she had usurped?

She closed her eyes.

Kate Falconer was dead. She was, Saskia Brandt was, dead too.

She saw the hawk.

The hawk that returned…The witches, the Fates: Clotho, she spins the thread of life. Lachesis, she determines its length. Atropos, she cuts it. What did those things mean? Was it a message?

Saskia opened her eyes. She needed to reassert control. She needed to escape from Jobanique. He could track her; he had the support of the law. There were few places on Earth she could hide.

She thought of the time machine. David had seen her aged forty. And now Bruce corroborated his story. She believed them both. In this research centre, in this virtual world staring at a fire that was not real, she realised that travelling back in time would not be such a bad idea. It was, possibly, the only place she could really hide.

But one question remained unanswered.

You are a detective, Saskia. Detect.

Why had her future self not visited her? A meeting would have dispelled all her doubts.

“So,” said Bruce. The fire crackled. “Your body is unknown to you. Your unconscious mind is a stranger, your conscious one a ghost. But it is a digital ghost. You are one of us now. Welcome to the land of the unreal.”

Before Saskia could reply, a sharp object jabbed into her sole. She looked down and saw that her spectral feet were now resting on the shingle floor. Heat assaulted her face and chest as though a furnace door had been opened. It was the bonfire. She could now feel its heat.

She stepped back. Instead of crashing into the cubicle door, she simply walked backwards. Her feet crunched over the ancient riverbed.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

In unison, Jennifer and David replied, “Microbots.”