The Lightcap (6 page)

Adam pondered the ever increasing pace and meaning of change when a soft tone emitted in his left ear.  The search on Lightcap had completed.  He turned to Hana and said, “I’ve got to run.  I appreciate you being here to listen, even if I’m not able to talk much.  We should get a drink some time.”

“I’d like that,” she replied with a shy smile.

It seemed to Adam as if he teleported back to his apartment.  He couldn’t even remember the elevator ride down.  He grabbed his notetab and brought up the results: one thousand hits on the public mesh about Lightcap.  Adam thought a command to have the results sorted and watched as they snapped into categories.  More than half of the results were classified as conspiracy theory sites, hosted on nodes that forbade security software, unregulated outposts that remained set against the mostly corporate mesh that had sprung up with regulation and software created by people like Adam, Dej, and others at companies like Adaptech.  Adam had no doubt he was mentioned on some of these sites. 
They probably don’t have very nice things to say about me
, Adam mused.  He’d helped relegate them to the corners of the virtual world, barring them from the chaotic heyday they’d enjoyed.  He’d ruined their party, and he knew it.

Roughly three hundred of the sites were news outlets with articles covered various aspects of why the Lightcap wasn’t real or anything to be afraid of.  These were mostly nodes in geographic areas marked for having a higher tendency to gossip or engage in conspiracy theories: high income, low responsibility areas.  A few were low-income neighborhoods near affluent areas, apparently close enough to reap some of the benefits of prosperity.  Adam pulled these up and found mostly fluff pieces with interviews of people who looked as if they were the crazies who created the conspiracy theory posts about the Lightcap.  Panicked eyes, wild hair, mad scientists without authority or credentials. 

Standard countermeasures,
Adam thought. 
Get out in front of the story, paint your opponent as a mad, raving loon, deny everything for as long as possible.  Eventually people will find out, but until then you aren’t going to give them any help.  They’ll get distracted anyway, people being as forgetful as they are fickle
.  The fact the media covered it meant money flowed from someone, somewhere.  Nothing aired on the news that didn’t have a benefactor; no fact or fabrication was reported without prior transaction.  Why would they worry about what was true when they could be making money?  So went the reasoning of the media conglomerates.  They had been sued several decades before by a group of concerned citizens in an attempt to force what little remained of the Fourth Estate to hold to some level of integrity.  The media kings lost the first time, but on appeal the citizen group ran out of money.  A series of delays kept the case in limbo until the collapse and subsequent purchase of the States by Metra Corp. 

Forty years before, several State economies went under, bankrupted and gridlocked to the point of political irrelevancy.  The States had been incrementally privatized over time, such that when a group of the five largest corporations pooled resources under the name Metra Corp to buy a six State region, very little changed.  Regulations weren’t enforced quite as often, and several of the private police forces merged to form the larger Central Provisional Authority, which provided security services for the entire Metra Region.  Overall, daily life for the average citizen remained the same: poked, prodded, bought, sold, and ultimately disregarded as an individual.

After the Metra Corp takeover, the media companies being sued owned the court system set to decide the case. ”There will be no conflict of interest,” these companies said in a statement.  “The autonomy of the courts will not be infringed.  Justice, not loyalty, should be the focus of the judiciary.”  Talking heads with handsome jawlines and cheekbones spoke with soothing words in high definition.  Who could doubt such pretty faces, such pretty voices, such pretty pictures, on the channels owned by the companies being tried?

Some people knew what was really happening, but speaking out might cost them their livelihoods.  Employee protections were at an all-time low.  People could be fired for wearing shoes that offended the delicate fashion sensibilities of their boss, after likely signing a contract to that effect.  Say the wrong thing to the wrong person, or have a position high enough in a company to warrant a mesh auto-query, and it might attract some unwanted attention.  Losing a job was the best way to end up living on the streets.  Most didn’t last on the streets.  Adam had highly marketable skills, but others weren’t so fortunate.

All of this had weighed on Adam’s mind since the beginning of the day.  His face was lit by the dim glow of his notetab as he thumbed through post after post on the conspiracy sites about the Lightcap.  Some were outlandish, claiming with bold capital letters that Lightcap granted strong telekinetic powers, the ability to transmute lead to gold, the energy to rip a skeleton from flesh, a way to talk with the dead, direct communication with alien civilizations, or the energy to sustain a fusion reaction through thought alone.  All over the map. 
The human imagination will always be a dozen steps ahead of reality,
Adam thought. 

Many of the conspiracy sites seemed to be doing their best not to be taken seriously, with flashing banners proclaiming alien conspiracies, or shadowy, Zionist cabals intent on enslaving the world population; long, ranting paragraphs blaming everyone from liberals to conservatives to lizardmen to poltergeists to businessmen to poor people for every problem imaginable from the abandonment of the gold standard to bunions.  A few stories stood out to Adam, feasible but reminiscent of an urban legend with a cousin’s friend or brother’s coworker as the source.  Truth twice removed.  Reports of soldiers returning home, shell-shocked and crying out in the night, yelling about Lightcap and murders and plots.  All unsubstantiated, none with any follow-up.  Dead ends.

Adam was caught between thoughts of memories being zapped into nothingness and plots by evil businessmen to turn the world into revenue-producing slaves when he drifted off to sleep.

He found himself on the subway, same seat where he’d been that morning.  Struck with a sense of déjà vu, he looked around, wondering why the car was empty.  There were always passengers.  His perspective shifted out of his body, and time sped up as he saw himself from outside, watching as he rocked back and forth along with the train then fell asleep, just as he had that morning.  Time slowed back down, and Adam watched as the same disheveled man appeared, shuffled toward him, and fell across his lap.  This time, the incident slowed almost to single frames, as if he had put a video in slow motion.  His disembodied consciousness watched as the disheveled man slipped a note into the pocket of his sleeping form.  As the man apologized and shoved off, Adam felt his consciousness being drawn back into his body.

There was a brief snap as Adam’s point of view locked back behind his eyes, where it should be and where it belonged.  Disoriented, he looked around but saw no trace of the man, not even when he jumped to his feet and ran to the door, hoping to get a better view of the adjacent car.  Completely empty.  He tried the handle.  Locked.  He could hear his racing heart thump in his ears as he sprinted to the other end of his own car.  Another locked door with no one beyond.  Adam remembered the note, secretly placed in his pocket as he slept.  He shoved his hand into the split separating the fabric.  He shook as he withdrew a tear of crumpled white paper clutched between forefinger and thumb.

There was one word, written in the bold strokes of a hurried hand.  

His gaze was drawn toward the front of the subway car as it emerged from the dark underground into an impossibly bright burst of light.  Then, darkness.

Adam gasped awake.  He wasn’t quite sure what had just happened, but it felt more real than any dream he could ever remember.  He vaguely recalled being on the subway, and the man . . . the man.  The note! He bolted out of bed, bare feet striking cold wood floor.  The shock didn’t even register in his excitement.  He grabbed the jacket he’d worn that morning, matte black and secured close by strips of magnets that ran from the collar to the mid-thigh.  One of the things he loved about it was that it had pockets large enough for his notetab to fit comfortably.  He dug through each of the pockets, even the hidden one along the inside seam, but there was no note to be found.

After his feet finally protested too much against the unforgiving floor, he lay back down, shivering involuntarily as he got under the covers still slightly damp with the sweat of his nightmare. 
Mnemosyne,
he thought. 
Why do I know that word? 
He turned, grabbed his notetab, and thought of the word again, this time directed at his dome.  The oldest mention he could find on the mesh was from Greek mythology, Mnemosyne being one of the race of immortal deities known as the Titans.  Mnemosyne was, according to the mesh, born of Heaven and Earth, the personification of memory.  The most recent mention was from a software project, a venture between several corporate entities and academia aimed at mapping neurons to bits, with the intent of creating an upload of the human brain.  He could not find anything linking Mnemosyne to the Lightcap, but he started a deep-scrape search just to make sure.

Most information on the mesh was easily accessible, if it was public.  A deep-scrape search ran against encrypted data that was publicly available, trying to guess the passkey with a brute-force attack that included contextual clues based on anything known about the owner of the file.  Many people used simple passkeys, such as the names of their pets and their birthdates, sometimes even the word “passkey” followed by “123”.  No matter how much technology progressed, any system was only as secure as its most careless user.  People put a great deal of material on the mesh that they shouldn’t, whether out of hubris, ignorance, or apathy.  Since Adam knew such a search would take hours or even days to obtain any usable results, he put the notetab on the nightstand next to his bed, then fell back into a troubled sleep.

The blaring alarm kicked Adam back into the waking world.  It seemed his head touched his pillow mere seconds before.  He was exhausted.  He blinked and was at the office, the entire morning gone like a skipped scene in a video.  He remembered it if he focused, but from the detached view of an observer rather than active participant. 

He once again found himself in conference room 4C, as ordered at the end of the previous day.  He was seated at the head of the table, opposite Doctor Velim, surrounded by his eighteen-person team.  She was speaking.  “The boxes in front of you contain your Lightcaps.  Transfer whatever information you need from your personal Mind Drives, but please be aware anything you load onto the Lightcap becomes property of Adaptech.  Once you have finished, please put your Lightcaps in place.  They will automatically turn on and initialize.”

Boxes were opened with sounds of broken seals and crinkled plastic, the bags containing the Lightcaps discarded like wrapping paper at a child’s birthday party.  Even if there were reservations, most of these people were geeks, always excited to try out new electronic gadgets.  Dej gave voice to the gasps and muttering around the table by saying, “The Lightcap looks the same as the Mind Drive, except there’s a fourth bubble where the arms meet in the back.”  He turned the device over in his hand.  “Oh, and a big etching that says ‘PROTOTYPE’. That too.”

“Yes,” Doctor Velim responded.  “That’s by design.  The technology is derivative, and we were able to optimize the device so that its form factor is almost identical to the v5 Mind Drive.  The Lightcap provides the same control of electronics as the Mind Drive, along with extra features.  Think of the Lightcap as a Mind Drive Plus.”

Satisfied with her answer, a silence settled over his team as they loaded their personalized profiles from their domes to their new Lightcaps.  Adam did this as well, seeing no reason to set everything up from scratch.  If his employers decided to monitor his information, they’d find standard dome customizations related to thought patterns, words to avoid recognizing, and audio notifications.  Nothing outlandish or illicit.

After much tinkering and several last-minute questions everyone finished setting up their Lightcaps.  Adam wanted to exude confidence while hiding the pit he felt in his stomach, so he flashed a smile, said, “Alright, here we go,” and slipped on his Lightcap.  For a moment, nothing happened.  Then, with a click, Adam was rushed down a dark tunnel and plummeted toward a bright, warm light.  He exited the tunnel with great speed and basked in the comforting blanket of heated air surrounding him, his momentum slowing to a stop.  He hung in place, suspended, the world completely devoid of definition, everything washed out and bathed in a soothing, opaque white glow.

Then the light was replaced by darkness.