Con Code Read online

  Miller may be a doctor, but I question his intelligence when he announces, “We’re safer up here on the seventh floor.” Safer. Despite how we left the fifth floor a raging inferno. Right.

  Every television on the seventh floor shows the same thing. Firehose spraying into the crowd outside, until the front lines of attack are pushed back behind the line of yellow caution tape once again.

  Sputtering crackling noises proceed sprinklers kicking on throughout the building. Gordon has time to stow his device inside his jacket before the deluge. Televisions broadcast firemen turning their hoses to the building until the fire popping from the fourth and fifth-floor windows is nothing more than a smoking hole in a wall. The indoor rain douses my concern about being trapped in a human toaster oven. I need to get my hands on those video files. Once the water sputters to an end, I turn up my mouth in what I hope is a convincing smile. “Gordon, may I take a look at the footage you mentioned?”

  Gordon makes eye contact with Miller before reaching inside his jacket to retrieve the device. I want to look at Miller too, to see what look these two idiot humans just exchanged, but I also don’t want to take my eyes off Gordon. Stupid human heads only have visual receptors in the front plane of their face. How is that efficient? It’s not. Gordon holds the tablet firm, even after letting me tug it toward myself. I have to stop and stare and him, waiting to see what game of wills we’re playing, holding my face in the smile I practice constantly.

  Gordon releases his grip. The tablet rushes my face, but I regain control. I don’t want Abby or Gordon watching my reactions, but no one looks away while I push play. I have no idea what is expected of me here. Am I to sit comfortably? There is no way to sit comfortably for a metal shell being.

  I risk a look toward Miller, hoping he’ll understand I need privacy without my having to say anything. I mean, surely looking at Miller will benefit me here. Human thoughts are not computer thoughts. Thanks to Wi-Fi, I can connect with other electronic devices, whose passwords I can hack. Human beings are not so simple. I suspect it’s still possible to hack a human brain across airwaves. I have yet to figure out how.

  Miller’s face isn’t without reaction. I simply have no idea how to interpret what he’s doing with his head. His eyebrows move in a barely perceptible lift, and his mouth parts less than a centimeter. I wouldn’t even say it’s enough to be considering talking, or even enough to inhale properly.

  “May I have some privacy?” I ask.

  Abby’s ponytail swings like a pendulum at her back as she stands in reaction to my request then catches herself in a weird half-up, half-down position. “How are we to know if something jogs her memory if we’re not here?”

  Below the surface of my skin—way down deep on the inside, where the program runs—I smile because ponytail is exactly right. It’s a tight smile reserved for emergency gloating, not currently beneficial for show. With an artificial steady expression, I look to Miller to await his verdict to my request. Abby slowly returns to a sitting position. My internal gloating grows to the brink of my ability to hold it in.

  He blinks more times than his average. I know this. I know all their averages if I want to. It doesn’t take long to get an average of someone. Humans are all so full of average it’s overwhelming.

  He blinks again. “You’ll let us know. Won’t you, Jennie?” Miller is one of the only people who call me by my name.

  “Yes, Doctor,” I say.

  He claps his hands in front of his gut. “Well, then. I think we’ve all earned a break today.” He takes the remote for the wall screen and silences the interior replay of what’s taking place outside. I say replay because the screen is point zero seven seconds delayed from the action happening outside.

  I try to ignore the voices and vehicles outside the window and wait for the room to clear. Gordon trudges out of the room first. I want to like him, but also want him to fix his cuff button. I can’t decide if that’s mutually exclusive.

  Abby waits where she sits. My arms stay tight across the screen, even though it’s black, I don’t want to share it with her.

  “Let’s go, Abby.” Miller waits for her to exit in front of him, then turns to provide me an expression I haven’t deciphered yet. It could be ‘don’t let me down’ or ‘that Abby, what a pill huh?’ or ‘don’t worry, I’ll take care of this one, you get some rest.’ Then again, humans don’t murder and rampage one another—tallying take outs and kills like trophies in this version of their existence. Perhaps this sort of thinking is a byproduct of my programming coming into question again. Born a murderous zombie, always a murderous zombie. Or at least I hope not.

  Once I’m alone in the new white-walled room with cream-colored blinds between me and the low roar of protestors hoping I’m their kin, I activate the tablet. It holds file after file of video footage with titles like ‘donor files’. I slap my forehead. It doesn’t hurt because no one programmed my fake skin to register sensation as pain. I can feel, but it doesn’t hurt exactly. I could stab myself in the forehead with the same resulting sensation.

  “No wonder I couldn’t find video footage,” I say aloud. I’ve spent every night after the techs and doctors and scientists leave riffling through every database I could conjure a password for searching for pictures or footage of fellow gamers. I passed these titled ‘file’ a thousand times without considering it. It’s a different file code than the more updated sources. Something called an imobi file. “I can’t believe I didn’t at least check these.”

  It had occurred to me that there were an awful lot of imobi files, but I also thought, ‘there is no way this old technology holds anything of importance.’ Now I wonder what else I’ve overlooked because I’m being snobbish about outdated materials. I hate conversion corruption when updating information. It makes my insides crawl. If I have a sensation of pain, it’s that. The raw sores from having to rewrite holes to fit something into better code. It’s stabby.

  I don’t bother upgrading the images. I let the grainy footage stay fuzzy where it could be sharp. Searching source codes again, I look for profile pictures associated with players. The company overseeing intelligence donors maintains an anonymous identity once a donor receives their code in order to identify their intelligence as its true-perceived self.

  I have no way of knowing what my friends look like. Their codes are easy enough to locate. With the codes comes address, next of kin, and other information that I have no way of utilizing. Ace never told me his address, nor the names of his parents. For all I know, Ed could have been a ninety-year-old woman with twenty-three grandbabies and twice that of great-grandbabies. Or Tony…

  No. I’m pretty sure that kid’s in the mob one way or the other.

  It turns out, none of the admit names were entered as Ace. Even if they were, they cleanly sever admit names from code associations. There are three Edgars admits fourteen Edwards, and even one person listed as Edge. But, there is no way of knowing if the Ed I knew was actually named Ed on this side of the game, or if he chose the name because he associated more with being an Education Gen source code than he did his given name of anything.

  I stare at the screen as hosts in white coats greet people in wheelchairs, family members of coma patients, bald and sickly-looking individuals by the dozens. All looking like copy-pasted human illness entering double doors over and over. I can’t tell them apart. None of them have hair, making it that much harder to distinguish one from another. In the game, there were persons lacking hair, but it was a choice, and those players had well-shaped heads. The persons on the screen of the tablet have lumpy, crusted, picked at, and rashy scalps. Some wear scarves. Others ball caps.

  I notice families with multiple persons in military clothing. Armed services appear to be a family tradition for most humans. Ace likely hails from one of these. I digitally tag the files I see with military markings so I can return to them in order to analyze them further.

  I don’t know how far I get before the doors swing in. I expec
t one of the techs has come to teach me how to blink while staring, or that I must fidget my hands and not be too still both at the same time.

  Humans are not still, but I am. It’s in the stillness that I can observe their movements around me, but they don’t like it when I do that. I’m supposed to imitate them in every fashion. I didn’t have to think of this in the game. I was programmed flawed and glitchy. Apparently, those are desired human qualities on this side. Over there, it almost got me killed.

  A tech turns on the large screen monitor on the wall again. I expect to see more of the shouting and hollering from the streets, but the channel is different. Everyone I know follows the tech, then a bunch of people I don’t know. The room fills quickly. I tilt the device I’m using up to my chest to cover the screen.

  “What is this about?” Spaulding asks, naseled and inconvenienced—probably more by the fact he’s grouped with the grunt workers. Spaulding is the type who likes separation and height in addition to status. He straightens his tie below his coat and smooths his hair as though he’s the one on the television screen being seen by the public on the opposite side.

  “Announcement coming in from Ecuador,” the tech says with a hand to shush the scientist.

  “Ecuador? Like, the country?”

  A nod and repeat hand gesture from the tech is the only response he receives.

  A news reporter speaks Spanish, with a string of delayed English translation crawling across the bottom of the screen. “We are thrilled to announce that our very own donor program has resulted in a successful human intelligence transplant.”

  Spaulding lets go of his uber straight tie and rushes for the TV controls shouting, “Turn it up!”

  Movement near the back of the room distracts me from the Spaulding spectacle. Miller shuffles the opposite direction from Spaulding. Instead of moving closer to the announcement, he puts people between him and the screen, like the bodies in front of him will absorb whatever toxic information radiates from the announcement. I’m unsure what all of the fuss on the screen means, but the energy in the room feels on the verge of jumping from human to human like a massive electron conducting cloud, ready to pulse from its host television prison and attack electronics at any moment. Maybe that energy can be harnessed in order to read their thought patterns. Human Wi-Fi could simply be manipulating anxiety.

  “Unlike our Mexican counterparts, who seem unable to get their paperwork in order…” The television continues to speak, but I can’t understand the Spanish over the conversation in the room around me and I can’t read the screen due to all the people crowding my view. Everything muddles.

  “That’s a jab at us,” Gordon says. “We’re the only Mexican facility.”

  “No duh, Gordo. We all got that.” Abby pushes Gordon from behind. With him being much shorter than the other techs, she looks to be backhanding a child.

  “…. We will reunite our upload with his family…”

  “He doesn’t have a name?” Miller asks, standing straighter and pushing one shoulder off the door frame where he was resting—all semblance of ‘at ease’ gone. “Why doesn’t he have a name?” He signals Abby and Ben who both respond by tucking their heads over a tablet and scrolling information regarding Ecuador donors.

  “We haven’t announced Jennie’s name,” Spaulding adds.

  “That’s only because we can’t verify her intake papers yet,” Miller says. “If they’re going to reunite their upload with his family, that would mean they have his intake papers.”

  “Maybe they’re dealing with the same problem,” Ben says. “But they want to beat us to the punch, so they’re moving forward on their public appearances.”

  “Seems premature, don’t you think?” Abby says. “To parade around a robot, they haven’t tested or checked against failsafes?”

  Robot? Failsafes? What failsafes? My imitation heart increases the rate of pumping like it’s throbbing out a warning code I can’t decipher.

  “…In Ecuador’s long history of being the go-to source in documented evolution, we will soon open a conference center and teaching lab for intelligence transplants…” the reporter continues over the theory surmising in the room.

  “Long history?” Miller scoffs. “Just because they have those islands, is that it?”

  “Darwin, screwing us again?” Ben slaps the table this time.

  “No, he’s not.” Spaulding stands, walks to the window and parts the blinds, unabashedly drawing attention from the crowd seven floors below. I don’t know how well the tear gas quelled the crowd, but just in case, I duck. “Because we’re going to be the first to sign up to go down there.”

  “Pretty sure that’s us proving their point. Like ‘hey, teach us, we lost our paper trail and can’t figure out who to contact regarding their family member because our upload’s memory got wiped as a transfer side effect. Our bad.” Gordon doesn’t cover his head in time. Three techs smack him from three distinct sides.

  “I’m sure they’re dealing with side effects too,” Spaulding says.

  “They wouldn’t just invite the entire transplant and engineering community to their front door if they had something to hide,” Abby says.

  Miller steps closer to the television. “But maybe they would.”

  “Yes.” Spaulding nods like there is some language they’re beaming to one another’s brains the rest of us aren’t privy to. I scan the room for a signal to be sure there isn’t anything I’m missing between them. Of course, there’s not.

  “Maybe, just maybe… they want everyone with progress to meet. Like a debriefing.”

  “Debug the system.”

  “Or sabotage other companies’ progress,” Ben adds. That thought doesn’t sit well with me. I’m their progress. I have no interest in being sabotaged. “No one in the Resource Ring wants the Outercontintents in control of a commodity.” Ben looks at me. “There might be glitches, but we still produce results.”

  “Side effects may vary,” Miller says. “It’s likely everyone working toward an upload, even those without success, have dealt with certain side effects this type of program creates. Things we hadn’t anticipated.”

  “Like how valuing individual privacy could cost us our funding?” Gordon adds. “Every precaution we’ve taken to protect donors and donor rights has backfired post upload. We can’t trace anyone.”

  Blinds slap closed as Spaulding turns to face the majority and I jump. “We leave in two days.”

  “What? All of us?” Gordon asks.

  “All of us,” Miller answers before Spaulding.

  “But…” I stammer. The occupants of the room remember me again. “The people outside.”

  “What about them?” Spaulding asks in a very huffy, not at all genuine-in-asking, tone.

  I can’t believe I have to explain the dilemma to them. “What do we tell them? They’re waiting for their family member.” We can’t just run away in the night and hope they won’t notice. They’ll burn the building to the ground given the opportunity.

  “It’s common sense that you can’t be all of their family members.” He paces in front of the window with his finger marked streaks cutting through years of dust. “We’ll need to conjure a history in the meantime. To avoid any…” He straightens his tie like this is going to erase his crooked nature. “…anything we need to avoid.”

  “If we invent a background and then find Jennie’s real relations, what are we supposed to say?” Gordon obviously doesn’t know when to keep his red-flag questions to himself.

  “You’ll think of something.”

  The screen is still speaking Spanish behind the techs, who now scramble to come up with convincing orphan stories, or tragedies to explain how an experimental transplant donor could lose an entire family and not the other way around.

  Spaulding holds up both hands as if he’s silencing the environment, but nothing goes quiet. “Have any donor families suffered tragic accidents? Like, like, like they got in a plane crash or…”

/>   “Or are any of them poor?” Abby chimes in. “Maybe we could pay someone off to claim her.”

  “No way. No way are we bribing some poor suffering family.” Gordon doesn’t gain a lot of support from his outburst. “Besides, where would we get that kind of money? The IRS is still a thing.”

  “What if we told someone that Jennie is theirs?” Ben gets his two-cents in.

  “And why not?” Spaulding walks over to me and gives me an up-down nod. “She’s got to belong to someone. Why not just match up a near approximation?”

  “Because it’s wrong.” Miller steps in to argue. “Until we know who she is, we can’t say she’s someone else.” He stands in front of the TV, blocking anyone trying to avoid the topic at hand by pretending they’re invested in the news. “Eventually people would figure it out.” He points a finger to me. “Or her memory will come back.”

  I can’t exactly tell him that sudden memory recovery isn’t a concern, so I stand and walk to the window to peek out at the crowds below. The doctors and techs continue to debate how to pass me off while maintaining their reputation. Or pride. Dignity is so far gone, I doubt they’re worried about such attributes.

  At ground level, families chat with one another. I imagine they’re sharing stories about their loved ones on the donor list. What kinds of skills their family member brought to the game and how they’d make a great candidate for the brains inside artificial intelligence. What a noble idea.

  “…Someone get on the phone with Ecuador…” Plans get made behind me, about me, without me. “…No… Someone who speaks Spanish, and won’t say something idiotic…”

  That rules out the techs. Those guys can make microwave popcorn sound like a fail-fail outcome is the only solution. I turn back to the window. The crowd, as a whole, is usually what I see. Like a forest, there is so much sameness below. Faces pivot around shades of angry, pained, sad, and vengeance for a new kind of loss, which carries guilt at having signed paperwork for loved ones to be plugged into a lie. I have to concentrate to pick out differences in each set of tightly drawn eyes.