The bar was quiet as the transmission on the screen above began. She was sitting in the back, sipping from a glass of beer. The feeling of alcohol running through her system was comforting, but she had to be careful. She still had work to do.
She rented a room on Cambridge, hoping to complete what she had to do. A part of her mind was still locked down, as she was afraid to start Vergil again. Her only contact was hidden in a PAD on her wrist. She got used to feeling him in her mind all the time – communication with just words was so limiting.
The people around her started a quiet commotion and soon later everyone was focused on the screen above. A little text informed the viewers that it was a live broadcast from Denver University, from Worlds Fair – a bi-annual expo hosted by various universities to promote development of science. It was all but scientific, though. Image-warming popular science and promises, just to make the corporations seem a little more human and promote their products. A man took the stage. A man she recognised. She clenched her teeth.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “It is my greatest pleasure to welcome you again to the Worlds Fair” Applause. “My name is Jack Tran and as most of you will know, I am the CEO of Cryer Pharmaceuticals. We are incredibly glad to be able to sponsor and host the expo this year here at Denver University and I hope you will come out of here at the very least amazed.” The public applauded as he sent them one of his famed smiles. Bastard was handsome, she had to admit, yet she knew how vicious he could have been at times.
“Those of you who know me, know me as a visionary. And while I like to think of myself as such, I hadn’t before accomplished anything of such magnitude as the project I am about to present to you today. Before I begin, I need to first give my sincere thanks to all of our R&D teams here at Cryer and our subsidiaries as well as our partners at Ageira Technologies. Without their help none of this would have been possible.” Applause. “Cryer”. Why don’t you call things by name, you scum?, she thought.
The screen behind him lit up. “It is my greatest pleasure to present to you another scientific breakthrough – Project Vergil, brought to you on behalf of Cryer Pharmaceuticals!” Applause again. Tran cleared his throat and continued. “Vergil is revolutionary. Before, we have seen devices which allowed the user to engage with a digital system using their mind. Never before, though, we could do it with such precision and capability.” Applause. “And never before had it been so easy to do, as well.”
She wanted to get up and leave but she had to stay. Of course there would be no mention of the person who really did this. Who really researched this. Who killed someone to finish the project. It’s all just “Cryer”. Regardless of it, Tran was little more than another nameless executive. Another talking head who would disappear in a few years replaced by another “visionary”. People would forget, they always do.
As she got lost in her own pondery, she missed a part of Tran’s talk. He explained some of the inner workings of Vergil, how easy it was to use and brought a couple of “assistants” on stage to demonstrate. It was the first time she had actually seen someone other than herself to use Vergil. It was simple, utterly so – moving a couple of shapes on the screen behind them. It could have been so much more.
“To give you understanding of how great we think this project is,” he spoke as his talk was coming to a close, “there is a special part of this entire project. We want the people to create Vergil with us and we cannot wait to see how amazing you can make it. This amazing piece of technology will soon be available to you – make the best of it.” He bowed as though the entire universe applauded him. And to a degree, he would be right.
* * *
She lied in bed, looking at her PAD. She had gotten so used to just hear his consciousness in the back of hers that this way of communication felt incredibly alien.
<__n> Did you watch the talk? <fairchild> yes <fairchild> boring <__n> I found it quite fascinating honestly. <__n> Well, aside from the part when he attributed Vergil to Cryer. <__n> You're still afraid that they can call home? <fairchild> arent you? <__n> There are ways to negate that. <fairchild> how? <__n> Well. I would just need time. I wrote the software. If they really added this, I can see what they modified. <__n> That would be stupid though. Everyone could do that with regular network tools. <__n> And I could do it even faster. <fairchild> what if they didnt? <__n> Then I could chr... hm. How do I say this... <__n> I could update your Vergil so that it's got what I've done after we ran. <__n> It should be safe. <fairchild> how long? <__n> Let me see. <__n> I would probably be done by the time you wake up by the looks of it. <fairchild> any risks? <__n> Well, it is a low level operation. <__n> I'll do my best not to break anything. But you'd have to trust me. <fairchild> do it <fairchild> im going to sleep <__n> Sweet dreams.
The sunshine peeked into her hotel room, illuminating a stack of Synth Paste tubes and a couple of used up prepaid PADs lying on her bedside table. Her mind's eye turned to where Vergil should be. It was still there. But it was different this time. The version had changed. She put up her wrist close to her face and checked her messages on the PAD she actually used.
<fairchild> nick?
A couple of moments passed.
<__n> I'm here. You've woken up I see. <fairchild> ur done? <__n> I think so. <__n> Have you tried accessing yet? <fairchild> should i try? <__n> Go ahead.
She sighed and pulled up the login screen.
Vergil v2.5.1 tty1
username:
She hesitated for a second and filled in the field with her previous username.
Vergil v2.5.1 tty1
username: jera
User does not exist. Retrying...
<fairchild> whats the usrname <__n> Oh right. I have changed it to "fairchild" as well. I didn't touch the password. <fairchild> good for u
She filled in the login prompt again.
Vergil v2.5.1 tty1
username: fairchild
User exists. Proceeding to the authentication pattern...
So that's my name now. She still remembered her own password but she forced herself not to think of it, just in case. The login prompt displayed four light icons, all glowing red. They started changing colours as soon as she focused on the images that were her password. Elephant. Skyscraper. Maple leaf. Eagle.
Authentication complete.
Starting display server...
She let out a quiet sigh. Her mind was complete again. She relaxed and smiled as a familiar presence appeared in the back of her head.
"You know, it's quite comforting to see everything with a human's eye again."
She smiled in amusement. "It's nice to talk to you... this way. Again."
She strolled slowly and peacefully through the illuminated white hallways of an art gallery. Located somewhere in Archer Park on Manhattan, she was not here of her own volition. But the professor asked nicely, so she agreed.
The gallery was rather large, hosting collections of ancient, pre-Sirian art replicas previously stored somewhere deep in the hard disks of the Sleeper Ships and later manually repainted, as well as many contemporary pieces from various corners of Sirius. The traditional canvas combined gracefully with holosculptures and neon colours of light paitings. She just looked, appreciating the beauty but not understanding the meaning. And through her eyes, the professor watched as well. They both communicated very little, without words. Sporadically one sent an emotion to the other, but that was it. Silent admiration.
After nearly two hours of sightseeing, she indicated that she needed a break. The professor agreed. She walked to a dispenser and waited a couple of seconds until it prepared her a hot cup of coffee. There was a small, round hall nearby, with a bench at the centre. As expected, a holosculpture appeared as she sat down.
The sculpture was a dome surrounding her, with many light reflections on its surface. Some larger, some smaller, they seemed to move chaotically around her, without a purpose or without a set path. She glanced around for several seconds, but every part of the dome was the same. After another couple of seconds, she lost interest. Her eyes became tired, so she closed them and sipped the coffee in silence.
After another silent minute she finally asked. "What now?" The professor indicated he didn't understand the question. "I mean, we've run from Atka. We have the original Vergil blueprints. We don't have the materials or equipment to replicate it. And Cryer is still on our tail. So: what now?"
The professor pondered for a minute. "Indeed... What now?... Well, perhaps I have lost touch with reality. Two years stuck in a jar, you know? Takes its toll."
She took a long pause. "You have me."
"It's not the same. I want out. I need out. I cannot constantly lean on other people. I cannot live like this."
"How?"
"I've thought about this. Chrome, for now. Until I can think of something better."
"Better?"
The professor hesitated. "I suppose you haven't heard of the Nisei Project back at Wisp?" After she denied, he continued. "It was a project started by one Cryer scientist named Ken Tenma. Its object was to engineer a fully functioning biological android, a clone if you prefer. When I worked at Wisp, I had a look at the archives and found this project, then took it up. It was a big one, and I had ideas on how to make it work. But then... you know."
"I know. So, chrome? You're sure?"
"I realise chrome can't be trusted, this is why I never allowed cybernetics in my research teams. Too easy to screw something up, too easy to backdoor, too easy this, too easy that. But really, do I have anything to lose? We all have to make sacrifices."
She finished her coffee. She noticed that for a while the little points on the dome stopped chasing each other and froze, placing themselves conveniently on the edge of her field of vision. Must have been a part of this piece of art. She made sure not to move her eyes.
After several more minutes of deep thought, she finally replied. "Chrome it is, then."
"For now though, let's see more of this place," the professor asked. She confirmed and stood up. The points on the dome started moving again, eventually dimming down and shutting itself off after she had left.
The Scimitar landed on the sands of Crete. They were in the largest city of the planet, Cayambe. She left the ship on the pad for it to be taken to one of the large hangars, sliding her cred-chip in front of a reader. Her balance was slim, but not slim enough not to afford a vacation on the Corsair homeland.
"So, explain to me what we're doing here. And this time in plain English." She felt like she knew the answer to this question, but she wanted to be sure she understood him correctly. To be honest, she trusted him enough to tell her how not to let him into her private memories, but not enough to not look through them in case she messed up the privileges.
She knew how her brain stored her memories. There were two storages, referred to by the Professor as "wet" and "hard". "Wet" was her natural memories, stored safely in the neural connections of the brain, coming with all the positives and negatives of her meat body. Hard storage was the video and audio feeds from Vergil as well as something that the Professor called "blobs". Blobs were strings of raw neural data that could not be modified or examined in any way other than reliving the entire experience.
She knew the reason they came here. Wet storage was inherently unreliable and hard storage was inherently unwieldy. There was nearly unlimited storage space in the human brain, or so he thought, but the data was compressed in a very lossy way. Hard storage was, on the other hand, perfect in terms of information but storage-intensive. There was a practical limit to how much data could fit inside one Q-coherence chip storage and even despite advanced quantum compression algorithms the chip under Pincoya's skin could not keep more than about two weeks worth of continuous video, audio and blobs from the Vergil archiving software.
The Professor wanted to analyse how neural data is compressed and compare it with how blobs are structured to eventually create a universal protocol that would allow for storing wet-like memories in hard storage. He called this protocol "Constellation". She knew he had already worked a bit on something similar, the technology that allowed her to project video transmissions straight from her Vergil, but it was far from perfect. Eventually, he said, the Constellation should be able to project full-on memories and create new ones.
"Jack in, run the program labeled as beale, point it at the external disk and go about your day. I'll just be watching."
She did as he said, still feeling his presence somewhere between her ears. The program signified that it was running. Beale mind-map was a sophisticated software coded all the way on Atka by Ageira and Wisp cooperation, capable of monitoring neural signals nearly everywhere in the brain. Along with the hard feed the Professor would be able to eventually have enough material to correlate neural signals with certain memories and from that understand the wet compression needed to develop Constellation protocol.
First thing she felt as he started the software was the familiar warmth of Cretan sunrise, coupled with the gentle wind ruining her combed hairstyle.
"Everything is green, as far as I can tell. We're good. Let's move."
She smiled, confirmed and in five minutes, lost herself in the small streets, alleys and avenues of Cayambe.
It was six days since their arrival on Crete. She didn't speak to the Professor since they finished the mapping. He was clearly very absorbed working on the Constellation and she did not want to disturb him. However on the evening of the sixth day he finally contacted her.
"I think I've got the Constellation working. Would you like to see?"
"Go on."
The Professor sent her two files. One was called one.cst, she presumed it was some kind of data or save. The other labelled simply as constellation and was clearly a program.Without much thinking she added execution privileges and ran it, pointing at the data.
The world around her faded instantly. She was where they started mapping, near the hangars on Cayambe. She could freely move around around the square and she saw herself, her own body moving through the simulation.
But the constellation was not perfect. She clearly saw most of the square lacked detail. Faces of the people in the simulation did not look real, neither did the buildings around the square. She asked the Professor why that was.
"The constellation was generated from your memory. You do not remember some things, you don't remember the face of everyone you saw. You do not remember every architectural detail of the buildings around you. The program tries to fill in the missing pieces but it will never be perfect if you don't remember what you saw."
"That's quite impressive."
"And, what's more, each simulation takes up an absolutely tiny amount of space, so you can fit in pretty much your entire life inside the internal storage of the q-chip."
She continued to look through the simulation, walking behind her own simulacrum, in awe of how everything looked. The Professor outdid himself once again.
She finally got a chance to sit down. Moving all of their things from her tiny Scimitar to the Palantir was a long and arduous task, especially without help. Scimitar didn't have much, but now it transformed from being her bedroom, transport and storage into a small scouting ship - what it was meant to be from the start. Meanwhile Palantir would become Professor's new lab. They would still have to retrieve their things from their old workshop on Crete but she didn't concern herself with that at the moment.
She paid a pretty penny to buy the Democritus liner from Forlorn but she hoped it would be for the best. It was large, but not spacious enough to feel clumsy. An all-around good flying house, the thing they needed. A mobile lab, home and transport in one. It originally required at least two people to effectively pilot, however with Vergil she reckoned she could work the ship much like she did with the Scimitar.
Palantir had three decks. The top one was originally intended for crew and guest bedrooms, however, she figured it would be best to re-purpose them as Nick's lab. As soon as they'd retrieve his hardware and robotics from Crete, it could be arranged as a good enough workshop. She could sleep anywhere -- the vagrant life already hardened her enough not to need such luxuries -- and Nick didn't have to sleep at all so a bedroom was unnecessary.
The middle deck was originally intended as the living quarters as well as the bridge. It could accommodate at least fifteen visitors. Perhaps originally intended to be arranged in a typical posh aristocrat style, it was now just barren carboncrete walls, dim lights and a few regular pieces of furniture screwed to the floor -- a couple of tables, chairs, couches and a bar.
The largest lower deck was the cargo bay, large enough to transport good shipments of supplies they would need for most of their projects as well as the engine room and other utility rooms. She hoped that since Democritus was a rather high-end class of ships, she wouldn't have to worry much about repairs on the Palantir.
"So what do you think?"
"We'll make do. Not what I got used to working at Wisp but it's better than what we had on Crete."
She sighed. The ship already started to feel like home.
Blood... hand... knife....... knife, knife, I need the knife... all the people... Lunara! No... no... no!
She woke up rapidly. The image of Lunara's final expression was still etched in her memory from the dream. It was one thing she could not forget, through all these years. Her only fear.
"What happened?" The Professor seemed to have noticed her waking up. They installed a few cameras inside the Palantir so that he would not only have to rely on her own eyes.
She stayed quiet for a while. "Can you block nightmares with Vergil?" She felt like she already knew the answer.
"I doubt that. Not with our current understanding, anyway. Dreams are chaotic, they are produced by so many different parts of your brain that blocking them out individually would probably do a lot more harm than good." She seemed visibly unhappy with his answer. "Do you want to tell me what you saw?"
She shook her head. They held an unspoken agreement, not to talk about anything that happened before Wisp. He knew she came from Crete, but didn't know anything about her childhood, the Black Sun and Lunara. She knew he had his background in the Sirius Coalition, but never asked about what he worked on there.
The Scimitar safely docked into the only bay of the Palantir. She had a package to deliver. "Home sweet home. You're here?"
"Yeah, I am. It's not I can do much without you around, anyway." She heard the Professor's voice in her head. His concerns would be remedied.
She opened the Scimitar's cargo bay and retrieved the package. It was a large box, the blue paint it had once been sprayed with now visibly faded. She felt his presence in her mind, much like someone was looking over her shoulder. "How do you open this thing?" She looked around the box, letting the Professor see more as well.
"Those latches there, on the back," he sent her a mental signal to what he meant. "Pull those, up and towards you."
She did as he instructed and the lid came off, revealing a human-like figure stored inside the box. She felt uneasy. It resembled the Professor's body very closely, or at least how he had looked three years prior. Only upon closer inspection there were subtle differences. The eyes were empty, dark grey and dim and the entire face was much less detailed than a regular human one, almost as if it had been made of wax.
There also seemed to be a some sort of controller for the android in the box. "Ah. I guess what we need is to plug this thing to the network. I'll deal with this myself, just turn it on and connect it to the wireless." She did as he asked. He disappeared from her head momentarily, and after a few moments the eyes of the android turned on. It moved in the box, first its head, then arms, finally legs. "This is gonna take some practice."
She laid with her eyes closed in the corner of the Professor's lab, on a small mattress. She generated a meditation program of randomly dropping drops of water. She concentrated on trying to guess when the next drop would fall. She failed almost every time.
She hadn't been sure what the purpose of this program was, aside from killing time. Perhaps a focus trial. She instinctively knew it was useful, somehow.
"It's strange, you know," she spoke to the Professor suddenly and opened her eyes. "I don't remember how we used to be before this. It almost feels like forever since we ran from Atka."
Nagrebetskiy's simulacra moved around his lab like puppets. They were clearly doing something, but she just couldn't grasp precisely what. Before the shipment from Ageira, his presence was only felt in a small point in the back of her head. Now, it was everywhere, omnipresent in the ship. She wondered how it felt.
"I do. It was much more limiting," she looked over at the android Nikita used, as he said -- temporarily, as his body. She knew his consciousness was everywhere else, in all the small devices of his lab, in the cameras and grabber arms, but it was at least a point of focus.
"It feels like this when I talk to others. People without Vergil," she pondered. "Constellation does a great job of formulating my thoughts for me. But it feels like others don't understand."
"You should probably use your tongue a bit as well. How long was it since you spoke to someone? I mean, physically." The arms stopped moving for a while.
"Days, weeks, months... I've lost count," she turned over. "How long has it been since you even communicated with someone other than me?"
She could sense what would be a chuckle if they talked verbally. "It's a flaw of wise men that they rarely want to talk to people less intelligent than themselves, so they stay quiet."
"Last thing we need is a mad scientist on this ship," she sighed.
He walked around a garden. The fabricated constellation looked as real as he wanted it to be -- almost like a lucid dream. He approached a tree and plucked a leaf from one of the lower branches. It looked unnatural. He focused and the leaf started gaining detail, the small veins running through the green tissue.
He pondered something that he'd only realised shortly before, and yet it fascinated him ever since. He knew -- obviously -- what his own mind looked like and how it worked. His imagination worked in a specific way, in a mindset rather similar to that of a scientist. He was able to think creatively, picture mental images vividly and accurately, without much effort. In this way, he concluded as he looked around the garden - a creation of his mind, no less - that his mind was almost like a cloud of aether, out of which he could create anything he wanted and he remembered.
But then, he thought, inevitably he spent a bit of time in Pincoya's head. And hers was wildly different. If his was a cloud of aether, hers was a network of strictly connected points of reference. He remembered that once, during his research for the constellation, he asked her to picture a ship. While his mind would likely just jump to, indeed, an image of a spaceship, hers connected all points of that mental network to do with ships. It was a mental image, as well, but of a much different kind.
They were both strange this way, learning about each other more than they ever could in any other way, knowing more than the most intimate of lovers.