Idempotency (19 page)

As he fell, so too did Dr. Wirth’s optimism. He quickly came to the tacit conclusion that SolipstiCorp’s efforts had just been pushed back by months, if not years.

It took Dylan a full week before he capitulated to the reality that he was, in fact, Dylan and not Dalton. Even then, his real memories took much longer to come back to him, and they were always intertwined with those of Dalton’s life. His jumbled memories were slowly sorted out like a pile of dirty laundry: delicate Dylans to the right, dark Daltons to the left.

The psychiatrists he worked with had required him to make copious amounts of highly detailed notes, all clearly separating details between the two disparate lives. Most of the simpler memories were sorted out through repetitive, cognitive exercises: where he was born, details of his friends and family, birthdays and holidays, and so on. Where Dylan struggled intensely was during the sorting of memories containing common threads: notably, shared locations, celebrations, or world events. Both Dylan and Dalton had traveled to Europe after college. Sorting through those memories had taken Dylan weeks. Weddings, funerals, a friend’s bar mitzvah—all were challengingly similar.

One month after his deathTrip, Dylan was starting to properly discern details between his two lives. After two months passed, he was able to converse effectively with his close friends and the few family members he still had. Three months passed, and he was able to begin living unsupervised once more, including casual socializing. After four months, the emotional wounds had begun to scar and Dylan’s depression over the death of a virtual woman whom he’d hated—Sabrina—in addition to the death of an entire fabricated world, had started to become manageable.

Dylan also began working again. He’d considered quitting, but his noncompete contract would have made finding another job nearly impossible. So he rationalized his work as trying to ensure a negative experience would never again happen to anyone else (certainly not a customer). Eventually, Dylan’s naturally optimistic nature kicked in and he became himself again. Idempotency had been restored, barely.

The hardest part, however, had been dealing with Kristina. To her, he was the same man. But to Dylan, he had just lived a life married to another woman, one whom he’d felt an unhealthy amount of enmity toward. To her credit, Kristina had been more supportive than Dylan could have possibly imagined. She waited on him hand and foot, taking a leave of absence from work, and yet she still stayed up all hours of the night pouring over his case, the code, the log files, anything she could get her hands on. Eventually, Dylan was able to recall and feel their friendship again, but feeling love had been much harder to come by.

Meanwhile, Dr. Wirth and his sizable team, Dr. Graham and his team of psychiatrists, and the entire engineering department had all become engrossed with the Dylan/Dalton conundrum. They had not been able to pinpoint any measurable root cause as to why or where the experience had spun out of control. There were plenty of educated guesses, but educated or not, they were just guesses. Human trials were put on hold while mass amounts of data were being collated and combed. Through it all, the company kept on pitching the sale, assuming the bug would be found and squashed eventually.

After nearly half a year had passed since his deathTrip, Dylan was healthy enough to go back to his role as a business-development specialist. His first job had been the EGC sales pitch.

Dylan was suddenly the most important man in the company, and the higher-ups knew it. He was given a bonus and a raise and in return asked (though, in truth, it was a requirement) to sign a new and more restrictive noncompete, which he did.

The only issue Dylan couldn’t get past was Sabrina. He thought about her incessantly. He couldn’t grasp the fact that she had never existed. He didn’t—
wouldn’t
—believe it. He knew logically that she was merely a figment in the ether; a collection of 1s and 0s that formed a structure based off of feedback from Dylan’s subconscious; and yet he
believed
deep within his heart that somewhere, in a
real
place, in a
real
form, Sabrina must still exist.

He didn’t admit this to the psychiatrists, of course. He knew doing so would guarantee several more months of intensive therapy. Instead, he shrugged off the topic. After all, he had loathed Sabrina in the end. It was easy for him to convince the doctors that she hadn’t been that important to Dalton in the grand scheme of his life.

Late one evening, months after Dylan’s ordeal, as the hallway lights in Dr. Wirth’s white office had all died down to a subtle simmer, the doctor received an odd email from SolipstiCorp’s CEO, Jack Carpenter:

From: Jack Carpenter

To: Dr. J. R. Wirth

Subject: client info

Dr. J I hope this finds you well,

Soon after you ack reading of this email, you’ll receive a vidchat from our most prominent and pertinent client. He needs answers, and you’ll provide them.

I realize your instincts in this matter will drive you to be reticent toward answering fully, however, do otherwise. Our client needs to know everything. He’s under full NDA of course. Don’t hold back, doc.

— JC

Dr. Wirth squinted in confusion and nearly jumped when a vidChat notification popped into his BUI’s periphery. The doctor’s old wooden chair creaked harshly as he leaned back. He scratched his chin, furrowed his brow, and finally waved his hand to answer the vidChat.

In front of him, the image of a man’s back came into view. The man stood facing a sprawling view of some city that Dr. Wirth could not place. Low clouds shrouded the tallest buildings in the distance. A subtle mist hung just below the clouds, as if gravity had tired of pushing the rain downward. The man himself appeared tall but hunched over; he clasped his hands behind his back. The vid image was dark, but the doctor was surprised to notice graying hair upon the man’s hanging head.

“Dr. Wirth, thank you for seeing me at this late hour.” Coglin spoke with a gravelly voice.

“Of course, Mr . . . .” Dr. Wirth’s voice hung in the air like the mist the old man stared out upon.

“I understand there’s been trouble with a recent trial subject—a Mr. Dylan Dansby. Correct?”

“Yes.” Dr. Wirth paused. If he wasn’t going to get any information, he would at least make his mystery client work for information.

“Tell me, Doctor, was idempotency . . . restored in this case?”

Dr. Wirth chose his words carefully, until settling on: “Idempotency is a
philosophical
theory. I deal with science. We’ve separated Dylan’s memories and his sense of self appears to be . . . relatively . . . back to where it should be.”

The old man cleared his throat, which seemed to lead to a subtle cough. “And, if he lived the same life again, in another deathTrip? The life of Dalton, a second time over—would idempotency be more or less likely to be sustained?”

“Less. Certainly.” The doctor hesitated, then recalled his CEO’s words to not hold back. “I fear for Dylan’s general psyche should he go under another deathTrip in a
different
life. If, however, he were to deathTrip once more as
Dalton
. . . I believe the
Dylan
we know would cease to exist. His mind would become malleable—no, more than that—liquefied. His sense of self would become a blank canvas.” He took a deep breath, adding, “Unless, of course, we can figure out what went wrong in the first place.”

“Of course,” the old man replied quickly. He turned his head slightly toward the camera, then added, “And you have no leads in that area, as yet?”

“No.” Dr. Wirth looked down at his desk, away from the old man’s surreptitious gaze. Then, with confidence, he said, “We’ve taken
great
care to ensure idempotency is sustained in our deathTrip process. We write memories only to extremely specific and safe portions of the brain that we know to be nearly unused. We naturally tested Dylan’s mental physiology beforehand and there were no signs of anything out of the ord—”

The old man began to laugh. “You don’t have to convince me, Doctor. I’m certain you all have the most benevolent of intentions.” He was still chuckling when he began to cough. He unclasped his hands and leaned on something off screen to steady himself. The fit passed, and he breathed inward, a raspy breath. At last he said, “Thank you, Doctor. You’re doing fine work. Keep it up.”

The vidChat winked out, and Dr. Wirth was left staring at his desk, wondering what exactly that had all been about.

—ancient Tamil/Indian proverb

Sindhu was determined and persistent, a solid combination. It hadn’t taken her more than a few days to compile a list of hundreds of darkVirt locations. She received the first from another anonymous realWorld encounter at the decibelityFactory. After that, finding more locations became a cinch. She had already gained a reputation as a respected contributor to several popular open-source software projects, and now that her alias was floating among the darkVirts, she found that several important people were now seeking
her
out, rather than the other way around. She was now routinely virtTripping every night after her day job; virtually hobnobbing with the technically elite in the dark underbelly of the darkVirts. She hadn’t, however, let on about her intentions of finding SOP just yet, nor had she aired her extreme progressive views on the striated classes. She didn’t want to lose any friends, nor make any enemies, just yet.

Most meetings Sindhu took part in focused on the open-source software that powered the multiVirts: the Buoyant project. To keep up appearances, Sindhu had checked in hundreds of thousands of lines of code. It had been a trivial effort, yet her contribution rate exceeded that of the next most active participant by 20 percent. Initially, her fellow darkVirt anonymous coders had claimed that Sindhu was merely contributing superfluous code for the sake of getting credit. As the leads of the project soon discovered, however, this was hardly the case. Sindhu wrote efficient code. Her stock skyrocketed, and everyone wanted SinTh3t!c working on their project.

On her first virtTrip, she had taken part in an anonymous developer conference held on the surface of the sun. A platform levitated around an ocean of photospheric activity. Lava bursts towered unconscionably high around the hundreds of virtual guests at the conference. Most at the event took this in stride, having traveled to this darkVirt previously. Sindhu had trouble containing her awe. Though simply virtTripping from the comfort of her own bed, the view she had taken in was virtually composed from actual cameras that circled the surface of the sun; the brightness had been tuned down, of course. The experience was transcendent.

A few of the more observant in the crowd at the event had noticed Sindhu’s childlike awe and chided her as a virtNoob. Sindhu did not take kindly to this moniker, and soon began bottling up her amazement. This had been difficult the next few nights as she experienced virtTrips ranging from the surface of Mars, a single blade of microscopic grass, the back of a comet, and—Sindhu’s vote for most original—within a two-dimensional black-and-white world.

After a few weeks of dizzying darkVirt experiences and tiresome virtual social gatherings, Sindhu had developed a trusted confidant. An older man (or so his virt representation appeared) who was rumored to have been an early coordinator of darkMultiVirts and frequent OSS contributor. He agreed to meet her in a darkVirt at the Vatican one lazy Sunday afternoon. They met, appropriately, in a confessional booth.

“Sindhu, you don’t find SOP. They find you. And if you’re looking for them, you can be sure they already know it. Other people might know it, too. I’d try to keep quiet about it for a while,” spoke the old man through a small window in the darkened booth. It smelled of musk, but this was only the darkVirt tricking their senses.

“So SOP does exist!” Sindhu remarked.

“Of course, Sin. Where there’s smoke . . .”

“There’s Simeon.”

After she peppered her elder confidant for what seemed an eternity, he finally gave in, vaguely agreeing to put some feelers out for her. Whatever that meant.

Several weeks passed and Sindhu was becoming disenchanted. She had followed up with her new friend daily, but each time he gave her only a virtual shrug in return, saying he had done as much as anyone could possibly do and she needed to be patient.

Patience was not one of Sindhu’s virtues.

Selling products had never before been a problem for Dylan Dansby. In the past, he could have been asked to sell the most innocuous, unsubstantial item ever invented and Dylan would have taken the task on as a challenge, a game to coercing his customers into wanting something so badly that they had to have it right away. He instilled lust into his prey, a carnal desire to gain advantage (be it power, prestige, or personal enjoyment) by obtaining an item that outshined competitors because of its superior quality, uniqueness, or unrivaled value. After Dylan was through with them, his customers would have no choice; they would covet the product and stop at nothing to obtain it. And Dylan would revel in every minute of it.