DR. METMURI PAUSED inside the door of the neuralforming lab in Section Four.
Ugoli was an unexpected presence at Med 2, idly watching what data feeds were visible to those not jacked into the AI. Beyond him the med bay beds glowed in their soft blue aseptic fields, recumbent forms of the Biancar multiples visible atop them. The doctor was eager to deal with the clones, but the adjutant stood, literally, between him and his work.
“Simikan? What can I do for you?” Esimir asked. Ugoli’s rank meant “raid leader,” a designation that suited his martial bearing and air of disdain for the scientists he helped manage. Esimir tolerated him because he was the eyes and ears of the station commander, not because his presence invited cooperation.
The simikan moved to the control island and stood by the interface station, casually blocking Esimir’s access to the command chair. Ugoli was a short-necked, red-haired, ruddy-faced man, trim in navy blacks, standing straddle-legged in a way that felt confrontational. The bioempath reached out with a tendril of psychic touch, just enough to taste the mix of emotions in the officer. Defensive arrogance, unease, a hint of self-doubt … He nodded to himself. Ugoli was new, and surrounded by brilliant scientists engaged in projects he barely comprehended. Esimir had a mental image, suddenly, of the man working doggedly to master warp drive physics in the Imperial Naval Academy, resenting his brighter classmates to whom such discipline came easily. He craved action, not the mental exercise that made him feel less worthy than others.
The doctor rubbed the blue-and-green rus on his forehead as the imaginary moment faded. No telling if that was a true vision of Ugoli’s past or merely a fanciful one. In his experience it was just as likely to be either, but it gave him an empathic connection with the simikan nonetheless. The adjutant was the kind of man who was distrustful of what he did not understand, and in the realm of applied research, there was a great deal that he did not understand.
Esimir made a sudden decision. It would be better to have Ugoli as an ally, to help him grasp what must appear arcane. Build up a little rapport, even. In recent months there had been a certain lack of administrative sympathy for the Splintegrate project, and Esimir was increasingly frustrated by admin’s unreasonable demands. But if he could get Ugoli on his side, the man could advocate for the Splintegrate project. A little time invested here could be well worthwhile.
The doctor relaxed and saw Ugoli glower. The officer was not used to civilians standing down when his posture was intended to put them on guard. Esimir smiled to himself. It was time to change the rules of engagement.
“So, Simikan,” he repeated, “how can I help you?”
The officer cleared his throat. “You’ve put in a request for field testing,” he said, his tone accusatory.
“I have,” Esimir replied complacently. “We’re finally ready to test our splintegration results in the real world.” He sidestepped the adjutant, put a hand on the back of his command chair.
“You’re claiming there’s no more you can accomplish under laboratory conditions,” Ugoli grumbled. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the multiples in the med bay. “But it’s apparent you’re not done with all your lab work yet.”
Esimir took his place before the control console. “That’s a different phase of the work.” He nodded towards the slumbering clones. “We can imprint the personality aspects we desire into our subjects. Beyond that—what can they do here? We can’t give them an ordinary life in a laboratory.” He shrugged. “Certainly nothing that will let us judge how a personality fragment will operate in society. That is our essential next step: to assess a tailored persona in the real world.”
Ugoli’s brow creased. “You’ve reported that the splintering procedure is successful. Is it, or isn’t it?”
“To answer that, Simikan, I need to talk a bit about clone imprinting. And while I do that I need to power up these console systems. Would you mind having a seat here while I do? You’re blocking my access panel on the interface board.”
Ugoli blinked, stepped away from the console he stood by.
“Please.” Esimir gestured to a chair. “Join me while I run through the systems checks.” There; that was better, to have the adjutant seated in a companionable way nearby, rather than looming in a confrontational stance. The doctor began systems prep, bringing data traces online from the interface board. The AI could have handled it, but the manual routine gave him something to do, let him draw Ugoli into his work in a nonthreatening way.
“I worked in the imperial clone labs on Corvus for several years,” he remarked, bringing the medical data feed alive on the board. “You know the difference between body clones and vivified clones, yes?”
“Of course,” the officer replied testily. “Organ replacement versus live human being. Different legal categories entirely.”
Esimir nodded. “The ones destined to come alive are created only in strictly controlled conditions under imperial license. Not a simple process. Expensive.”
“Not too expensive to stop them from being used as soldiers,” Ugoli grunted. “There are clones in the Imperial Marines. I’ve served with some on board ship. Don’t a lot of them come from Corvus, where you were?”
“Indeed.” Esimir stifled his usual lecture on the economics of custom-bred warriors versus natural-growth recruits. “The Emperor favors certain warrior types as shock troops. That is the kind of work I did.”
“Oh?” Interest tinged the officer’s voice.
“Yes. I was involved with the full spectrum of clone growth. A viv cloning has six stages of processing. We’re in the fifth right now.” He gestured to the med bay floor. “Did you know it takes five weeks to grow a body to adolescence? Though the clones don’t grow a brain in that time, or not what we think of as one.”
“They have gray matter, don’t they?”
“Oh yes, but barely any neural pathways, you see. The brain is not formed by childhood experiences or emotions, so there are no engrams.” He caught Ugoli’s blank look. “Memory traces,” he amended. “Without them, no personality evolves. If we left the body like that, we’d have only an organ-bank-grade clone.”
“That’s not what you’re creating here.”
“True. To create a clone with a personality, we need to reproduce the neural pathways of the original. A cortical array can do a brain scan, record neural activity, play it back later. That gives us a blueprint, but the map is not the terrain. To create that terrain, we add NNs to the mix. Nanoneurals.”
“I’ve heard of those.”
Esimir nodded. Popular science on the news these days talked about NNs used to repair brain damage, an increasingly common healing technique. “Nanites are injected into a developed brain; they wed with neural chemicals, track the flow and behavior of this chemistry at the molecular level. Once they’ve mapped the original, we extract them and inject them into the clone. There, they duplicate the patterns they have just learned. They remap the brain so that it mirrors the original. We call that neuralforming. Like terraforming, in the gray matter itself.”
“Ah.”
Esimir could read nothing from the simikan’s expression. He extended a tendril of empathic touch and felt the officer’s queasy fascination with the concept. “That’s phase four of cloning: neuralforming replicates the original’s cognitive functions and motor control.”
He gestured to the Biancar clones in the med bay. “For the Splintegrate project, we do this with LNNs—limited nanoneurals. They’re smartchems that don’t remap the brain massively. They leave it in a half-finished state—still open to new mapping, as it were. At the end of this stage, the clone is not yet highly neuroactive.”
He sensed Ugoli’s confusion. “It’s like shaping a mass of clay,” he added, “but not detailing the sculpture.” Esimir pointed to a brain trace on the board. “The biostate is like that of a person in a coma.”
“I see.” Ugoli looked at the display he doubtless could not interpret.
“Today we start stage five of the process: neural maturation.” Esimir engaged AI systems, calibrating smartchems that would soon flood the craniums of his subjects. “We let LNNs create neural pathways in memory recall areas. This makes a brain landscape that can support the cortical and synaptic data we’ll activate later.”
“The playback phase.” Ugoli perked up. This he knew about.
“Er—yes.” Esimir smiled condescendingly at the slang term. “Precisely.”
Ugoli nodded to himself, satisfied.
“Here is how splintegration differs from traditional cloning: There is one vast difference with our neural maturation.”
“And that is?”
“The LNNs we use are sorted and controlled by Prevak, the project AI. Prevak separates out the personality pattern we want to duplicate in the clone. Undesired behavioral pathways are just not copied at all.”
Ugoli looked confused.
“See, limited nanoneurals map only what we want them to. This is how we splinter a personality—we reproduce just a select part of it. Then we create clones with only the aspects we desire to see.”
Comprehension dawned. “Ahhhh.… This LNN step is what your report was referring to when it said the project was a success?”
“LNN mapping is one part. The other is the ‘playback’ you referred to. Prevak isolates the personality fragment we want out of the original engram set and cortical map. Our AI is the intelligent designer; a filtered cortical dump is the motive force; the LNNs are the scribing medium during imprinting, and the brain is the already-prepared canvas ready to receive the work.”
Ugoli studied Biancar1 in the closest med bed. “So you are duplicating brains, but only partial brains. Or is that partial personas?”
“That is one way to say it. The brain is whole and functional, of course. We’re introducing limited aspects of the whole into the clone. Then there is the final step, the awakening, that is like calling someone back from a coma to reinhabit the body. The ensoulment, if you will.”
“And you and Terel do that?”
“Dr. Avenoy has only a modest capacity to sense life,” Esimir said tartly, “not the skills to call a specific soul fragment. That is my task, since we wish the clones to be as much like their original as possible. That is what I did on Corvus, as well. The birthing.”
Esimir looked away from his console and caught Ugoli staring at him. Unease showed on his face. The abilities of a bioempath to affect the life-force of an entity were the stuff of mystery and folktales. Seeing Esimir on a daily basis had demystified the doctor, made him seem a mundane aspect of the Naval Weapons Research Station until something like this came up.
He watched the officer’s assessment of him shift in that moment. Ensoulment. Coma revival. Nice tricks, if you could do them, and Esimir could do them very well. It was why Prevak had requested him for the Splintegrate project five years ago.
He smiled at the adjutant, a polite expression that did not touch his eyes.
“You were asking, Simikan, if we have been successful with splintegration, or not. This is our last test batch, the final run we need to validate our results. We’ve had no aborts for six series now. Fine-tuning, yes; significant problems and mis-maps, no. In that regard, splintegration is successful.”
“No more psychotic breaks? I heard about the biotech who was killed by one of your clones last year.”
Esimir shrugged. “That was the result of incorrect aspect filtering before the imprint process. It was not a problem with the process itself. We’ve corrected for that. As I said: six series, trouble-free.”
Ugoli shook his head. “This work is impressive, Doctor, but I’m still not clear what you want. Do you mean you want to release the Biancars when you’re done with the awakening?”
Esimir shook his head quickly. “Not at all. In laboratory conditions, Biancar2 and Biancar3 interact sociably enough—”
“Of course they do. Biancar1 contains the predator aspects of the original personality.”
The doctor frowned at the interruption. “Yes, and that is not a persona I would release into the world, ever. But we can’t tell how completely we’ve filtered these aspects until we observe their real-world behaviors, correlate them against the mapping schema. If we’re mistaken, we could be putting clones on the streets that would perpetrate crimes again.”
“Is that likely? With these nanoneurals you use?”
“We filter as strictly as we can, given this stage of project development. But this is development, and I cannot guarantee the results. Hence my need for a field test.”
Ugoli regarded the doctor soberly. “You refuse to use convicts for this test, but convicts are really all we can supply you with.”
Esimir pulled a rigger lead out of the headrest of the command chair and paused with it in his hand. “Our dilemma is this: we need to splinter someone who is not a criminal—or not so criminally inclined that they’ve acted on the impulse. We need a clean control subject to validate our personality redesign.”
He inserted the lead into the base of his skull, leaving systems idling, and regarded the adjutant. “Can a splintered clone function as an independent unit at all? It is our belief that they can, but we need to test that with a non-pathological subject. If that works, then we are very near success.”
Ugoli tilted his head. “And what does success look like to you, Doctor?”
“Like it always has, Simikan. When we can strip unwanted personality aspects from a person, combine the remaining threads into a new whole, and have that individual function well in the world, then this will be a proven technology for eliminating pathological behaviors.”
The officer sat expressionless for a moment before a faint look of amusement came over his face. “A commendable goal, I’m sure. Station Commander Olniko will be glad to hear the Splintegrate project is nearing completion.”
Esimir shook his head sharply. “We’re not that near. This project has been underway for five years. This is only the splintering process you see here; we haven’t perfected the integration phase yet. That’s the bit where we recombine desired aspects back into a single body.”
“Meaning, you integrate your clones back together into one person?” Ugoli clarified.
“That’s the goal.”
“Why do you even need to do that? Surely your AI can pick and choose the aspects you want, and put them into just one clone the first time out, yes? Since it manages to parse out the personality threads in the first place, it seems a waste of time to strip clone minds to combine them back into one person.”
Esimir bit back a retort, and reminded himself that he was dealing with a layman. “Of course it would be ideal to have all of this handled by the AI. It would be best if we were only imprinting one perfectly tailored personality into one clone. But we’re years away from that yet, Simikan. The AI is still learning how to manipulate personality engrams. This is easier done with an external vehicle—multiple clones—until we figure out all the challenges involved. But we are much closer than ever before. You can tell the commander that from me.”
“I will certainly do so, Doctor.” The adjutant stood abruptly. “And I will recommend your request for field studies be approved.” He gave an uncharacteristic smile, nodded sharply, then left the lab.
Esimir watched his retreating back. Ugoli positively radiated smugness, and the doctor had no idea why. But there were more pressing matters at hand. He shrugged it off and returned to the splintegration process before him.