Index | First Chap­ter | Pre­vi­ous Chapter

Shinsei’s ‘office’ through those dou­ble doors turned out to be quite the oppo­site of what he was expect­ing. In his mind, as he had imag­ined it lying in bed the pre­vi­ous night, he would have been open­ing those doors onto a labyrinthine cor­ri­dor net­work full of bleep­ing access pan­els and doors that denied access to the unwor­thy. There would have been offices, smooth-panelled and white just like the cab­ins he’d lived in, just big enough for one per­son. Maybe a desk to put a few things on, but oth­er­wise noth­ing but ver­ti­cal sur­face for his Angel to pre­tend it was pro­ject­ing data onto. Though the job came with the grandiose title of ‘Neu­ro­sci­en­tist’, he sup­posed he would have the same cubicle-bound data analysing job of all sci­en­tists; well sep­a­rated from the robots that per­formed any actual experiments.

Rather, it was one huge room that greeted him. The walls were white and smooth, the same plas­tic that the whole ship used, but that’s where the sim­i­lar­i­ties ended. Raised on a pedestal in the cen­tre of the room was a sin­gle chair, comfortable-looking but ren­dered unnerv­ing by its sur­round­ings. Some­thing com­pli­cated hov­ered near the top of the head­rest, from which cables flowed like a water­fall into the floor. All of them were neatly tied and labelled in both Eng­lish and Japan­ese. The whole appa­ra­tus was under­stated in a way that sub­tly drew the eye to it, remind­ing the viewer that it was much more expen­sive than they could ever afford, and also much more com­pli­cated than they could ever understand.

These same cables rose out of the floor again towards the edges of the walls and at free-standing con­soles, where they flowed into boxes that con­trolled giant viewing-screens and blink­ing touch-panels. There must have been hun­dreds of screens, all at heights and posi­tions that seemed entirely ran­dom to Illuminated’s newest recruit, but must surely make sense to someone.

“Impres­sive, isn’t it?”

Shin­sei jumped, and imme­di­ately felt self-conscious for doing so. “Damnit, Shin­sei!” he reminded him­self, “be professional!”

He turned, and met the gaze of a man almost as wide as he was tall, and bear­ing a grin that seemed some­how wider still.

“You’d be Shin­sei Hikari­gawa, right?” the man asked.

“Er… yes. Sir?”

“Easy on the ‘sir’, kid. My name’s Tom. Fol­low me, I’ll get you sorted out.”

“It looks like I’m going to be your men­tor,” Tom con­tin­ued as Shin­sei fol­lowed him across the room.

“Men­tor?”

“It’s kind of like being your boss, I sup­pose, but… friendlier.”

Shin­sei sighed with relief.

“Oh? What kind of boss were you expect­ing?” asked Tom.

“Well, I was sort of… I was wor­ried that the guy in the black suit would be my boss, and I’d have offended him on my first day.”

“Guy in the black suit?” Tom paused. “Oh. Oh, him. Yeah, sorry about that. He’s some toy that the cor­po­rate bunch are lov­ing at the moment.”

“He’s a toy?”

“Yeah. Holo­gram. He’s not real. It’s an image they force your Angel to show you, bypass­ing the request func­tion. Like what hap­pens when the fire alarm goes.”

“Oh. It’s very real­is­tic. Wait, hang on, I shook his hand!”

“Yeah, they fake the touch too. It’s new tech. They haven’t put it on gen­eral release yet — they’re say­ing it’s still exper­i­men­tal, but I reckon it’ll sud­denly be ready as soon as the porn indus­try ponies up the cash for it.”

That was not the best of thoughts to be putting in a 15-year-old boy’s head before expect­ing him to pay atten­tion, and Shin­sei tried very hard to push it to the back of his mind as he and Tom reached two chairs at the cor­ner of the room.

Shin­sei sat oppo­site his men­tor, and the viewscreen on the low table between them flashed awake.

“I should warn you,” Tom said, “you’re already kinda’ famous around here.”

“Famous?” he asked, quickly turn­ing to see if any of the other sci­en­tists he’d seen while cross­ing the room were look­ing at him. They were.

“You grad­u­ated with some of the high­est scores on the Ship in neu­rol­ogy and in net­work sys­tems, and on top of that, to have Cap­tain van der Kierchoff’s per­sonal rec­om­men­da­tion too — no-one’s ever seen that hap­pen before!”

“Cap­tain van– oh,” Shin­sei said, and sighed. How did Johann always get away with pulling strings like that?

“You didn’t know?”

“No,” said Shin­sei, decid­ing not to dis­close that he was friends with the Captain’s son.

“Well, I’m sure no-one’s going to come and ask for your auto­graph,” Tom said with a chuckle. “But if you won­der why we’re throw­ing you in at the deep end, that’s why!

“Now, don’t worry,” he con­tin­ued, not­ing the look of alarm that briefly flashed across Shinsei’s face when he men­tioned the ‘deep end’. “The first few days will just be ori­en­ta­tion, get­ting to know peo­ple and what we do, yeah? And I might as well start now, and explain what this room is all about, and what you’ll be work­ing on.”

“First off, you’re prob­a­bly won­der­ing why there are all these screens about the place,” said Tom. “Well, we don’t use the Angel sys­tems a lot for work here. Of course, you’re free to have yours on and do what­ever you like with it, but for our main job, you won’t be need­ing it. Now it’s not that we’re low-tech — I’m sure you know, Illu­mi­nated prac­ti­cally invented Angels way back when. It’s pretty much that we’re too high–tech. Our big project chucks out and con­sumes so much data that it’d just over­load the Ether net­work, so we built our own. Most of the cables you’ll see around the room do the same job as the Ether, just within a small local net­work, and a thou­sand times the data rate.

“Now,” he con­tin­ued, wav­ing a hand across the table. The viewscreen switched from out­putting a flat muted grey to a blue-white schematic of the human brain. “Here’s the brain, yeah? Yours, mine, generic human brain. Here’s where your Angel sits.” A tiny red dot appeared on the screen next to the brain stem, with tinier fil­a­ments extend­ing out of it. When a fil­a­ment touched another area of the brain, that area turned pur­ple. “The pur­ple areas you can see rep­re­sent areas that the Angel maps into, has I/O to.”

“I/O?”

“Input-Output,” Tom explained. “It can read and write data to clumps of neu­rons.” His fin­ger stabbed at each of the pur­ple areas in turn. “Visual cor­tex. Audio cor­tex. Hip­pocam­pus — that’s short-term mem­ory, though I expect you already know that.

“Now the Angels have arrays of elec­trodes, at the end of each line, which mesh with the exist­ing neu­rons, right? So we can insert impulses to make you think you can see and hear things, and we can mea­sure and cause deple­tion pat­terns of neu­ro­trans­mit­ter vesi­cles in the hip­pocam­pus, and that gives the Angel I/O to your short-term mem­ory — it knows what you’re think­ing, and can remind you of things. Understand?”

“Yes,” said Shin­sei after a brief pause — not for the infor­ma­tion to sink in, but just because he hadn’t been expect­ing Tom to ever stop talk­ing. And, true to form, the older man imme­di­ately continued.

“Well, that’s the limit of what Angels do at the moment. It’s pretty sim­ple stuff, really — we just inter­face with the bits of the brain that we under­stand in what are fairly sim­ple ways.

“The idea of going fur­ther, bet­ter inte­gra­tion, has always stalled shortly after this point. We just don’t under­stand long-term mem­ory, or autonomous func­tions, that kind of thing very well. We can’t reduce their func­tion down to some sim­ple set of things we can inter­act with.

“But what we could do is a full block read — that is, we stretch the Angel out so that it can read from every area of the brain rather than tiny lit­tle areas. And if we can read that, we don’t need to under­stand what each tiny bit does at the start — we can just induce exter­nal stim­uli in the per­son, watch what changes in the brain, and try to improve our under­stand­ing from that. And of course, in doing so, we pretty much have a func­tion­ing model of a human brain rep­re­sented as data. A copy, in fact.

“Now peo­ple have thought about this for hun­dreds of years, yeah? Not a new idea. But there’s not been the pro­cess­ing power, or the stor­age, avail­able for that kind of thing. The num­ber of neu­rons in the brain is sim­ply so vast, there’s no way we could store it all.

“But, and this is not some­thing that can ever leave these four walls, some very advanced com­put­ers were devel­oped for these Ships, the Celes­tial Fleet. Way back, before you were born and almost before I was. They’re very advanced proces­sors that run pro­gram­ma­ble pro­cess­ing net­works con­nected to huge stor­age banks. Most of them are mon­i­tor­ing parts of the ship right now — it turns out those proces­sor net­works are remark­ably good at pre­dict­ing and coun­ter­act­ing prob­lems in com­plex sys­tems. The other com­put­ers? We have them. Turns out, their inter­nal archi­tec­ture is very sim­i­lar to what we have in our brain, that’s why we call them Neural Nets. They have bil­lions of tiny soft­ware neu­rons strung out in com­plex pat­terns. And that archi­tec­ture is pretty effi­cient at stor­ing the entire sum of what’s in our heads.

“So that’s why we’re doing this research now, we’ve finally got the hard­ware avail­able that can cope with the data. We’re call­ing it the same thing that they called it when they dreamt up the idea cen­turies ago.”

Tom reached over the table to shake the boy’s hand.

“Wel­come to the Con­scious­ness Upload project, Shinsei.”

To be continued…

Index | First Chap­ter | Pre­vi­ous Chapter

Com­ing from Free City and from Jupiter Orbit as I did, I wasn’t par­tic­u­larly acquainted with con­cepts such as “rust” and “grime”. At Jupiter, I was a net­work tech, my world abstracted as far as pos­si­ble from the real world. Our offices and labs were spot­less, as the only tools we ever used were right inside our heads. Back on Free City, it was quite a shock to be thrust back into semi-skilled labour, and more of a shock to be work­ing with real things — meat, veg­eta­bles, knives and saucepans and so on. But apart from dur­ing actual food prepa­ra­tion, it was just as clean as my offices used to be. Nanopar­ti­cle flu­ids had long ago removed any dif­fi­culty from keep­ing sur­faces clean at the mol­e­c­u­lar level.

All of this is the rea­son why step­ping into the Maria’s cargo hold was pos­si­bly the clos­est I’d come to cul­ture shock in the pre­vi­ous twenty years. It was rusty, the kind of deep all-the-way through rust that makes one ask ques­tions about struc­tural integrity. It was dusty too, with bare metal just about show­ing through in the areas where large crates had been pushed around seem­ingly by hand.

An inter­com crack­led into life, sound­ing just as decrepit as the rest of the ship.

“Wel­come aboard, Jenny! How do you like her?”

I shouted back, assum­ing there was some sort of two-way com­mu­ni­ca­tion involved in the system.

“How do I…? José, how old is this thing?” I could hear Junko chuck­ling in the background.

“Two hun­dred and fifty-seven years if she’s a day!”

“Two hun­dred? This thing flies?”

“Sure she does! Found her in a heap one day, restored her myself. Now she’s good as new!”

“This is restored? What was it like beforehand?”

“No hull.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, clearly not qui­etly enough.

“Heard that!” said José. “It hasn’t killed me yet. Look, if you want to go back to your café, you know where the door is. On the off-chance you want to make some­thing of your life, come up to the bridge. You’ll find the way.”

The inter­com clicked, I assumed mean­ing the con­ver­sa­tion was over. Not exactly the best start to our jour­ney; clearly the guy was pretty touchy about this old rust-bucket. Still, I fig­ured Junko was sane, and if she put up with it then I prob­a­bly ought to too.

I cast a cau­tious eye over the mea­gre con­tents of the cargo bay on my way past, won­der­ing if per­haps they were cart­ing me around just because they’d fallen on hard times and couldn’t find any­thing else of a dubi­ous nature to trans­port. Not so, though. Next to one crate reas­sur­ingly and child­ishly labelled “JOSÉ’S STUFF!” sat another three, shorter and fat­ter and cov­ered in warn­ing labels. ‘Cor­ro­sive’, ‘harm­ful’ and ‘explo­sive’ were all there, topped off by one I’d never seen before: ‘Active nanoma­chines’. Well, that just topped it all off. These were the crit­i­cal tech­nol­ogy inside mak­ers, and inside the Celes­tial Fleet’s waste repro­cess­ing facil­i­ties too. Nanoscale robots, pro­grammed to assem­ble and dis­as­sem­ble mat­ter molecule-by-molecule, turn­ing one thing into another. Of course, such were the poten­tial haz­ards of these things going wrong, that you had to have a spe­cial and very expen­sive licence just to pos­sess them, let alone to use them. Chances of José and Junko hav­ing that kind of licence? Pretty much zero, though I sup­posed that some­where out there, some com­puter or other thought they did.

José was right, I did find the way to the bridge — mostly because there wasn’t really any­where else to go. Once I’d headed up the walk­way out of the cargo area, there was only one cor­ri­dor. To either side, cab­ins and a mess room declared them­selves from fad­ing labels on rusty doors, leav­ing only the unmarked one at the very end. It opened as I approached.

Inside, the bridge was a mess beyond any­thing I had encoun­tered on the rest of the ship, and I strug­gled to remem­ber ever in my life encoun­ter­ing some­thing so dis­or­gan­ised. It must have once been designed for at least four or five crew each with their own con­sole; big lit-up screens and touch pan­els. These archaic-looking pre-Angel era con­soles had been stripped out, but not to be replaced with some more effi­cient con­trol mech­a­nism. It looked like they’d sim­ply been moved over to the Captain’s chair by hack­ing together any­thing that was lying around. Above the Captain’s con­sole, sev­eral lay­ers of touch pan­els and teleme­try data screens rose up in an arc, welded to big steel pipes that stuck out of the floor at odd angles. Con­nect­ing them to their orig­i­nal posi­tions were wires, often bare, some­times so long that they coiled on the floor, some­times so short that they hung taut in mid-air. One of the lat­ter had laun­dry hang­ing from it. The whole setup, mer­ci­fully exclud­ing the wet clothes, was caked in dust and oil. It gave the impres­sion that one day José decided that fly­ing the ship was too easy, so he fired the rest of the crew and just moved their con­soles over to his seat so he could do it all him­self. This was, of course, pretty much the case. The cap­tain him­self was vir­tu­ally lying down on a tat­tered old reclin­ing chair, star­ing up at his five peo­ples’ worth of screens and tap­ping away on pan­els. He didn’t look up as I entered.

“Pre-flight checks,” said Junko, beck­on­ing me over to where she was sit­ting in the bridge’s only other seat. She must have noticed my bewil­der­ment at José’s rapt atten­tion to the dangerous-looking array of con­soles. “The only thing I’ve ever seen him take seri­ously. Come over here a minute, let me show you something.”

Junko sat on her own, no con­sole in front of her, look­ing for all the world like a pas­sen­ger, but a white box above her head — trail­ing bare wires, as every­thing seemed to here — made it pretty clear what her func­tion on the bridge was. It was marked with the hand-written phrase ‘ANGEL RELAY 1′.

The other woman must have noticed my curios­ity once again. “Turn your Angel on,” she said.

“But won’t they-”

“Know where you are? No. Trust me, try it.”

What did I have to lose? Not a lot, I sup­posed. If they could locate me here, Junko and José would be in much deeper trou­ble than I could ever be. I turned my Angel on.

Noth­ing.

“It’s not work­ing!” I exclaimed.

“Ask for ship schematics.”

“But-”

“Try it.”

“Okay,” I said, and thought about ship schemat­ics. Sound­lessly, a model of the Maria appeared in the cen­tre of my field of vision, and pro­ceeded to de-construct itself into neatly-labelled parts.

“It is work­ing! Sort of. So why don’t I get my nor­mal dis­play?” I asked.

“You’re not on the net­work as you. The relay routes your Angel data through the ship’s con­nec­tion into Free City.”

“But the ship’s relay should get my pro­file, shouldn’t it? As soon as I switch on here, it ought to fetch my pro­file from the peer net­work. Unless…” Knowl­edge was com­ing back to me, bit by bit, mem­o­ries that had been worn away by twenty years of drudgery. “Oh, that can be dis­abled, can’t it? At the relay level, so it just comes through as anony­mous traf­fic. But isn’t that ille­gal out­side of the military?”

Junko gave me a look.

“Yeah, good point,” I said, her mean­ing hav­ing been plenty clear with­out the need for words.

“I sup­pose,” I con­tin­ued, “that I’ll have to avoid look­ing up any­thing per­sonal, right? Even though we’re routed through the ship, if we start search­ing for Lance, they’ll trace it to Maria at least.”

“Not nec­es­sar­ily,” Junko said with a smile. She was clearly in her ele­ment here, much as I would have been back on Jupiter Orbit. “Not while we’re docked, any­way. We route straight through to the Explor­ers’ HQ under crypto. Search all you like for you, him, even us two. Noth­ing sus­pi­cious about that com­ing from cor­po­rate HQ, we’re all sup­pos­edly their employees.”

“But won’t they be able to trace your crypto stream? They must employ dozens of peo­ple just to look out for that kind of hack.”

“They do,” said Junko primly. “And I am bet­ter than all of them.”

There was an uneasy pause for a while after that, and Junko went back to what­ever dubi­ous busi­ness she had on Free City’s Angel net.

“Junko, fin­ish up,” said José, sit­ting up and peer­ing out between two sec­tions of what would once have been the Navigator’s console.

“One step ahead of you,” she replied, tap­ping a lit orange light on the wall next to her seat. “I wired this light into the Nav com­puter, remem­ber? It tells me when a course is plot­ted, which is always the last thing you do pre-flight.”

José grum­bled, unim­pressed at hav­ing such a pre­dictable rou­tine, then reached back to the Navigator’s con­sole and delib­er­ately deleted then re-entered a course. The light blinked. More grum­bling ensued from the Captain’s seat.

“Any­way,” said José, “we’ve got launch clear­ance. Buckle up.”

It was a fig­ure of speech, of course — nei­ther of their seats had any kind of safety fea­ture what­so­ever, and in my fif­teen min­utes on board I had not even heard any hint of there being a third seat any­where. Clearly they didn’t often have passengers.

José counted down from three, and with an uncer­e­mo­ni­ous thud of the dock­ing clamps, cen­tripetal force car­ried us out of Free City and into the carbon-black night of the universe.

As the ship banked out of her spi­ral course and headed for the ship­ping lanes I felt blood rush up to my head, and I instinc­tively grabbed for the near­est solid-looking bit of metal. “Shit. Of course,” I mut­tered to myself as I strug­gled to stay what I con­sid­ered to be the right way up. Not only did that heap of junk pre-date Angels, it pre-dated arti­fi­cial grav­ity, too.

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