“That was a love tap,” said Gretyl. “Nothing compared to the Somali strike.”
Some people at the Banana and Bongo were obsessive about the global walkaways, but Iceweasel hardly followed it. She was dimly aware of the sub-Saharan walkaway contingent.
“Somali?”
Gretyl gave her more credit than she deserved: “Not exactly Somalia, I understand the debate, but the last national border the strike zone had been in was Somalia, so we call it that for convenience. This is not the time for pedantry.”
“I’m not pedantic, I just don’t know what you’re talking about.” The university walkaways looked at her like she was an idiot. That was okay: people cared about things that she never bothered with. She’d made peace with having priorities that were different from everyone else, starting with her fucking father.
Sita said, “The campus in Somalia—or in a place that used to be Somalia—was taken out last month. We don’t even know what hit them. There’s literally nothing left. The sat images show flat dirt. Not even a debris field. It’s like they never existed—ten hectares of labs and classrooms just … gone.”
Iceweasel felt prickles up on her neck. “What do you think hit them? Do you think that you might get hit with it next?”
Sita shrugged. “There’s lots of theories—it’s possible they burned them out like us, but were especially expedient about cleaning up, getting it done between satellite passes. That’s the Occam’s Razor approach, as everything else assumes fundamental technology breakthroughs. But there are some of those around, goodness knows.”
Gretyl picked up the conversation smoothly, laying her palms flat on the table. “Which brings us back to your original question: what are we working on that would make someone from default want to reduce us to a crater?”
At that, everyone shifted to look at the guy with the blue frizzy hair, whose name Iceweasel had instantly forgotten. “We’re trying to find a cure for death,” he said, and gave her that mischievous wood-elf smile. He even had a chin-dimple. “It’s kind of a big deal.”
[iii]
They all crowded into a wide side corridor with drinks and snacks. One of its walls was painted with interface surface and the elf-guy and three of his crew—she couldn’t figure out if they were collaborators, students, or self-appointed busybodies—fussed at it, twitching at their PANs and jinking and jiving their fingers over its panels. She recognized a progress bar, moving glacially, and had to keep tearing her eyes away from it, as it was a bullshit progress bar that didn’t move smoothly but gave false precision, skipping quickly from 25 to 30 percent, then beach-balling for an eternity before ticking to 31 percent, zipping to 41 percent, and so on. She knew enough about her psychology to recognize her pattern-matching stuff was uselessly fascinated with it. It was intermittent reinforcement, because every now and again, her subconscious correctly guessed when a jump was coming, and that was enough of a zetz in her dopamine to convince her stupid under-brain of its genius at predicting the random movements of a misleading UI widget.
The progress bar stalled at 87 percent for so long that someone got a spool of fiber, while the wood-elf disappeared to a server room and did stuff that made the now-directly-linked interface jump around a lot.
“Sorry about this,” Sita said. “All the demos we’ve done so far were under better circumstances. No one thought there would be a live-fire exercise under these circumstances. CC’s been freaking out since the bombs dropped and he realized that he wasn’t playing for table stakes.”
CC jogged her memory—the wood-elf was called Citizen Cyborg, such a prototypical walkaway name that she couldn’t retain it. Then CC was back, he elbowed the others from the interface surface and did stuff. There was a click-pop and a chime that made him nod. The other people recognized it, and the noise-floor dropped down to near zero.
“They’ve got you in a terrible lab, CC,” said a synthesized voice. It was a good voice, but the cadence was wrong. The words appeared on-screen—each word hairy with a cloud of hanging data.
“It’s got her sense of humor,” Sita said. “That’s good.”
Gretyl, beside her, told Iceweasel what she’d already figured out. “That’s Disjointed. She was a bombing casualty. Her recording’s only a couple of days old. She thought this might be coming. CC’s got her running across the whole cluster.”
“That’s a brain in a jar?” Iceweasel said.
“Mind in a jar,” Sita said.
“The brain’s ashes.” Gretyl shivered.
“So why isn’t it saying ‘Where am I? What has happened to my body?’” These were staples of upload melodramas, a formal genre requirement.
Gretyl said, “Because we don’t boot the sim into the state that it was scanned in. We bring it up to an intermediate state, a trance, and tell it what’s happened. Everyone who goes into the scanner knows that this will happen—we’ve been experimenting with ways of booting sims for years, to find minimally traumatic ways of bringing them to awareness. Or ‘awareness.’” She made finger quotes.
CC rocked his head, wiggled his jaw. “Disjointed, this isn’t a drill. You’re meat-dead. The scenario you got at load-time? Real. We’re in the bunker.”
A pregnant cursor-blink. Iceweasel hadn’t seen a blinking cursor outside of a historical, but it made sense to give the brain-in-a-jar a way to indicate pauses. The infographics were crazy.
Gretyl whispered, “They’re spawning low-rez sims of Disjointed, trying to find endocrinological parameters to keep the sim from freaking out and melting down, but keeping the neural processes within the normal envelope of what we know about Dis from her captured life-data.”
Sita leaned into her other ear. “It’s like they’re trying to find a sedative dose that keeps her calm without making her into a zombie.”
“Shit. You’re doing something really crazy with my hormone levels, I feel it. Give me a minute of autonomic control, to see if I can survive? If not, roll back to this point and start over.”
“Uh,” CC said. “Disjointed—”
“This isn’t the first time you’ve booted me since you bugged out? I hate Groundhog Day scenarios.”
“She was always the smartest,” Gretyl said. “That’s why we’ve got to get her online—she’s the only one who’ll be able to bring the whole cohort up. See how fast she figured that?”
“Thank you, Gretyl,” the voice said. “Who’s with you?”
“I’m Iceweasel. Came from the Banana and Bongo with relief supplies.”
“Nice to meet you.” Another long pause. The infographics danced. It felt invasive to watch them. Iceweasel didn’t know where else to look. “Sorry, I’m not myself.”