Idempotency (4 page)

Dylan took a deep breath, then shrugged. “Look—I could blab on and on about our new tech for an hour, but it won’t be as effective as just showing you. Let’s get to the demo. I have a small video to show. No fancy production, just the nuts and bolts of what we offer. Janet, mind hitting the lights so we can get this show on the road?”

Janet asked the room to dim the lights, and the room did as instructed. Dylan waved a hand, and the SolipstiCorp logo materialized in three perfect dimensions before morphing into two translucent images rotating above the table. A small image of a hospital bed holding a recumbent brown-haired, sinewy, older woman appeared below a larger image that presently displayed only a dark splotchy area. Activity abounded in the smaller image as doctors, engineers, and nurses swirled in fast, time-lapsed speed around the patient, who appeared awake but staid. Suddenly, the commotion in the lower image subsided as the woman seemed to be placed into a trancelike state with some type of headgear atop her brown hair. Simultaneously, the larger image began to change. The dark, splotchy vid began to transform into a fuzzy picture of some kind. After a few seconds a woman could be seen, out of focus, staring into the “camera.” It did not take the crowd long to see the woman’s arms were enveloping the camera. Several people around the table gasped as they realized what they were viewing: the virtual experience of a newborn as it saw its mother for the first time.

For his part, Dylan tried to avoid looking at the holoVid. Watching the demo only brought back emotional memories of his own personal experience using SolipstiCorp’s new tech. All salesmen had experienced their own deathTrips prior to selling the product, and Dylan’s experience had been an unmitigated disaster. SolipstiCorp scientists and engineers—his girlfriend among them—were still hard at work hashing through zettabytes of data, trying to squash the bug in the system. So far they had been unsuccessful. Instead of being reminded of his own traumatic experience, Dylan checked in on an urgent message he had received moments before on his BUI. His boss, Frank Cunningham, instructed Dylan to call back the moment he left EGC corpSoil. Dylan rolled his eyes at the latest histrionics of his friend and boss, and he began scanning the fascinated faces of the EGC employees.

The upper image sped up. Mouths in the room began to drop as the point-of-view vid stared upward from a crib as the “child” played with a simple toy. Next, it sat in a baby chair at a table spitting up food; now it was crawling; now it walked; it fell, and the image became blurry as its tears filled the holoVid. It looked in a mirror and a two-year-old boy stared back. Now he was staring at schoolteachers, students, more teachers. Playing sports. A broken arm. A cast. College. Time slowed to a crawl as a bubbly teenage girl leaned in to kiss the boy; his eyes closed and the image went dark. Light then flowed in as the images zoomed back into accelerated time. He was riding a bicycle; now he caught his almost twenty-year-old reflection in the mirror of his new 1960s-era Ford Mustang. More school. A plane flight, war, Vietnam. Explosions. Home. Funerals. That same bubbly girl, in a wedding dress. Children followed. Now he was attending work in an office building in San Francisco: work, sleep, work, sleep, work, sleep. Over and over. Weekends with his two children sped by and they grew like flowers in spring. The passing of time relaxed once more, and the man and his wife were walking down the street. They stopped to gaze into the window of a restaurant to read the menu. He was middle-aged now. Another wedding. And another. Grandchildren. A new house south of the city.

In the smaller image, the elderly lady tossed gently in her bed. Only a few people—the primary doctor, a nurse, and a technician—walked in and out of the image on occasion.

In the image above, the man was now shaving in a mirror, decidedly older. Decidedly old. A retirement party followed, with grandchildren running ubiquitously throughout a thoroughly lived-in house. Time slowed again and the man grabbed his left arm. He collapsed as the camera swung upward, showing the ceiling of their house. The upper image blinked out, came to life briefly to see the woman standing in a hospital room. Above the recumbent camera, staring at the camera, she cried wildly, reaching out to touch the face of the camera one final time. The upper camera faded back to its initial black splotchy state, and the lower image jumped to life once more. Doctors and nurses swirled around the blonde lady, and she sat up for the first time. Once again time slowed, and the bottom image rotated and focused in on the patient’s face. She was crying, but these were clearly tears of joy. She wore a smile born of wonderment and love. There was no misinterpreting her current emotional state: It was painted on her face as plain as a child’s on Christmas Day. The holograph faded out.

Dylan glanced around the room. Several people sat with their mouths open. Others rubbed their chins pensively.

Janet raised the lights in the room and then broke the silence, asking in a deliberate tone, “What did we just see?”

Dylan replied, “The blonde-haired woman in the bed lived an entire virtual life—eighty-one years of life, to be precise—over the span of three days. While she was in her other life—her deathTrip—she was oblivious to her real life. The boy who grew into a man was the fictitious life she lived within her three real days. When the man died in his virtual life, he had no idea he would awake as the woman on that bed. Her deathTrip was entirely fictitious—programmatically generated.”

Dylan paused to let the weight of the holoVids and his words echo in the room, then continued. “There are three keys to our technology. One: our tech is noninvasive. You don’t need any implanted devices—no ocImps required. Take a pill, put on our patented headgear, and you’re off. Two: our tech provides what we call an elastic time experience. This is a fancy way of saying we can speed your brain up. Using our deathTrip tech, you can live about four hundred virtual days per one realWorld hour. And lastly, three: Your experience is idempotent. This means that you return from your deathTrip unchanged in your original life. You have the memories from your experience, but they don’t change your personality. Your sense of self—your soul, if you believe in such a thing—is entirely saved. As if you had just watched a very long and intense movie.”

Janet spoke up first, slowly. “Assuming this is all . . . true, and real, and everything works . . . why do you see us, a space-based cruise liner and a Vegas gaming conglomerate, as a customer for this . . . deathTrip tech?”

Dylan grinned. “Where better to have a virtual experience than when you are stuck in space for several days with nothing better to do? All of our deathTrips are entirely fabricated. Your choices are your own and your fate is undecided, but we can set up your character with all manner of situations. Want to be a prince? Or maybe the king? We can make that happen. Want to be musically gifted? Done. Want to live the life of the opposite sex? No problem. Want to be a spy? We can push your character in that direction. We have a handful of basic demonstration deathTrips ready to roll; all of the characters who interact with you in our deathTrips are generated from Hollywood actors, and we also employ several award-winning writers to pen the general situations we can set your character up with. But like I said, the choices you make are your character’s own; the virtual experience will mold itself to your choices.”

“So . . .” Janet looked confused. She leaned forward, crossing her hands on the table. “I see the entertainment possibilities, but why not use the tech to try and solve real problems, like the next-gen stemgineering issues? Enabling memory backup and restore—seems like you could do that with this tech.”

“Well, look, it’s a good question, Janet.” Dylan subtly folded his own hands to match Janet’s posture—a trick he did so often it had become a subconscious act. “There are dozens of corporations spending trillions of dollars trying to solve the problem of memory backups. We’re looking at solving it, too. Frankly, we think we’re way ahead of our competitors. But we’re investigating all avenues of business opportunity. Consider the educational opportunities: A man can become an expert piano player in one life, easily surpassing the ten-thousand-hour requirement to master an instrument, and then wake up a few days later to his real life, now an expert. People are still restricted by their innate physical capabilities, of course, but their mental capacity is enhanced. If you were born with two left feet, we can teach you the dance moves but we can’t stop you from stepping on your partner’s toes.” A few people around the table chuckled.

Dylan leaned forward. “But we believe yours may actually present the largest opportunity. Have you read about this new extended-life depression issue?”

Janet shook her head.

“Many leading psychologists—and we employ several of them—believe that as we begin to age indefinitely, the single most important medical issue facing society will be the depression that comes with never experiencing death. We don’t see deathTrips as entertainment—we see them as medical treatment to combat extended-life depression, or ELD. And this will only become larger once the memory backup-and-restore issue is solved. We’re plotting a blue-ocean strategy here: compete in a market that doesn’t yet exist.”

Around the table heads stopped shaking and starting nodding. A lengthy round of questioning followed, but Dylan was unable to provide too many answers because he couldn’t disclose proprietary SolipstiCorp information. All parties had signed bioNDAs, but even genetically signed promises required a modicum of trust—cross your heart and hope not to be sued. After venting some frustration, Janet had become exasperated at the secrecy and called a prompt end to the meeting. She noted the multiple action items and follow-ups that would take place between the two corps over the coming months. All parties stood, and handshakes preceded the typical perfunctory platitudes, bringing the meeting to a cordial close.

Throughout the meeting Dylan had been receiving priority notifications from Frank through his BUI. Frank’s rhetoric was on the rise, to the point where his last message to Dylan had included the words
life
,
death
, and
fired
, all sprinkled amongst various versions of the word
ass
. Dylan shook his head and decided he better stop pushing his luck and get back to his boss.

Buried somewhere deep within the inner workings of his heart, Rev. Edward Lee Coglin had planted a fecund seed, the fledgling sprouts of which were tinged with a subconscious hunch that his carefully derived plans might be, upon Judgment Day, frowned upon (ever so slightly) by God himself. But was he not God’s own child? God’s own creation, made in God’s own image? And anyway, he would be vindicated, ultimately, as the bringer of salvation—so that had to count for something. Still, late at night, after his arduous prayer recitals and past his nightly study of scripture, once he had laid his skull’s thin mask onto his feather-stuffed pillow and began to wander through the dark recesses of his mind’s echo-inducing imagination, there and then would the nagging make its presence known: a tinge of doubt.

He combed through his bushy gray hair with frail skeletal fingers, his skin so taut that it stretched over bone to the point where he could see the actual whites of the knuckles poking through. His old age was the source for much hallway rumor throughout NanoRegenSoft. Why would the patriarch of skin regeneration technology refuse to use it on it himself? Shouldn’t he not only be the owner, but also a client?

Cursing himself, he rose from bed, unable to sleep and not desiring to focus on a seed of doubt that he’d prefer to dump acid on. He grabbed his robe and slipped it on lazily. The robe draped over his fragile body as if it were made of lead instead of silk. With a grunt and a slight limp, he walked across the room in order to sit in his favorite rocking chair, which faced a large wall. The chair creaked an objection as he sat.

“Wall. Opacity 30 percent.” His voice crackled with a combination of sleep, age, and disease.

The wall faded away, showing high-rises around him (none as high as the one he stood in), as if Mother Nature had stuck her face up from within the Earth into a toy filled with pins. Beyond the high rises lay several bodies of water; beyond that, far in the distance, he could see the Seattle skyline. The sky was filled with automated drones, the ground with automated transports.

The six signs of the end times given by Jesus had long since come to pass. The exact nature of the eleven biblical prophecies were debatable, but their status was certain: The prophecies had been met. And now, as Rev. Edward Lee Coglin looked out upon his herd, a feeling of nausea rose from within his bowels, for the final two signs given by the Apostle Paul had recently been attained on a global scale as well: Godlessness and Apostasy.

Just a glance through the trending news stories on the corpNets would echo Paul’s fears—sexTrips, drugTrips, virtTrips, genderTrips. It made him ill. His herd was no longer deserving of his attention. No—he needed to filter the good sheep from the bad, and give the rest a gentle push to complete their destiny. And he would surely provide it in due time. The apocalypse was coming, and he would make it as painless as possible.

“Street View—First and Denny." His voice crackled like a dying fire, and the view on the wall was wiped clear to be replaced by a three-dimensional live stream of the intersection of First Avenue and Denny Way in downtown Seattle, across the lake. A nondescript twenty-story low-rent building stood in front of him. Small windows dotted the walls, one for each sleeping compartment.

“Drift up, overlay unauthorized darkNet and darkVirt—” his voice lowered in disgust “—
erotic
activity.” He spoke as if his throat was made of tinfoil.

His vantage point of the building began to rise, and as it did it became overlaid with throbbing dots of various colors, each one depicting differing acts of network-assisted depravity.

He continued, “Terminate network traffic, execute injection ten-thirty-one-six.”