Alice pulls the second hatch closed behind her, sealing the airlock. She has a detailed recall of how many safety regulations she was in contravention of whilst performing her brief traverse from the limpet-bug to the maintenance channel, and understands with statistical precision how many things could potentially have gone wrong: twenty-seven regarding the safety tether alone. And yet, what she is feeling now that it’s over is not relief but exhilaration. She’s not about to go and reprise the trip, but part of her is disappointed that it is complete.
It was a buzz. An adrenalin rush. Does she even have adrenalin? Or is it a synthesised adrenalin response? She doesn’t care. What matters is that she is feeling it.
She remembers so many times being told not to do dangerous things, the stifling tyranny of the risk-benefit equation, her mother quoting the statistics to put her off the college trends for base jumping and wingsuit dives. A rain-lashed weekend alone in a dorm looms large in her memory, poring over books while all her room-mates went on a trip to Colorado.
She even remembers being warned against attempting flying dismounts off the swing-set like she saw other kids executing with vocal alacrity.
It is possible none of these things truly happened, but it doesn’t matter. The memories feel real, and they had their effect. Implanted or not, they conditioned her to avoid risk and to obey the rules. All the rules. Maybe that’s adding to how exciting this feels. But maybe it constitutes an abuse, an implanted brake against exercising her desires, her curiosity.
Her free will.
She would never have imagined it, but she has become jealous of Nikki Freeman and the hedonistic abandon with which she conducts herself. Alice wouldn’t want to swap her life for Nikki’s, but she could certainly use a pinch more of her attitude, so as not to feel so constantly constricted by rules, regulations, recommended intake, safe levels, approved procedures, authorised access. Even being inside this access shaft feels exciting. It’s a secret space, a forbidden world: one of those places that would normally remain hidden to her, behind the doors that say Authorised Personnel Only, Strictly No Admittance.
It is dark, claustrophobic and thoroughly dangerous. Through her night-vision she can see hazards everywhere: ways to get trapped, burnt, frozen, electrocuted, crushed, asphyxiated and even drowned. There are very good reasons that the untrained and thus unauthorised shouldn’t be here. And that is why she is kind of getting off on it.
She isn’t merely accessing an unauthorised area, however: she is breaking into the highest-clearance facility on CdC. And this comes on top of stealing a space vehicle, after effectively jailbreaking the city’s most notorious ever criminal fugitive, an act which required the assault and false imprisonment of two ultra-high-ranking security personnel.
In practice the law is a little fuzzier up here than you maybe wrote about in some Ivy League college paper, Nikki said back at Klaws.
Before Alice left for Seedee, her colleagues joked about her becoming the new sheriff in town. Instead it has taken only a matter of days to make her an outlaw.
She is still tortured by the possibility that she may be an android, but even if that turns out to be so, these last few hours are the most human she has ever felt.
Alice emerges cautiously from the darkness of the access channel into the darkness of a closet that serves as an anteroom and storage space for the maintenance hatch. She steps daintily between shelves of equipment as she strips off the EVA suit and stashes it out of sight, then takes a few seconds to check her inventory. She makes sure that everything survived the journey intact, and in particular that the broken-down parts are the parts broken down by her for storage. Then finally she pats down her clothes after their confinement beneath the suit, before donning the single extra item that she predicts will transform her in the eyes of her enemies.
She emerges into a brightly lit corridor, lined with marketing posters for Neurosophy’s various mesh systems down the years, and framed images from surgical procedures. The graphic nature of the latter indicates that this area is accessible by clinical personnel only, and she soon encounters three women walking towards her, one in a lab coat and two in theatre scrubs.
Alice tenses with the rigidity of someone whose entire existence has been defined by the imagined consequences of being caught breaking the rules. This is the first moment that her clever plan could fall apart.
The women walk past. Even though she is identifying as Wendy Goodfellow, a vital-systems scientist at a firm on Wheel One, nobody challenges her, nobody looks at her twice. She remembers that the lack of crime on CdC, in conjunction with its advanced access technology, has a security downside in that nobody is suspicious. Everyone assumes that if you are inside someplace, then you are supposed to be there.
This may not be the case further in, however, when she closes in on the things Neurosophy doesn’t want even its own workers to see.
Up ahead is an open door marked Mesh Lab 3, from which Alice overhears conversation as she approaches.
“Standard cranial insertion,” says a woman’s voice. “Should take about two hours as it’s the Gen-4 mesh. Averages half the time I used to need for the Gen-3. But the subject is signed up for the full suite of initial uploads, so that part’s going to take me the rest of the day.”
When she draws near enough she can see two people in scrubs, one man and one woman, making preparations for surgery. Her lens identifies them as Dr. Florian Ringwald and Dr. Lisa Kaiser. Alice stops on the spot, listening to their conversation while the corridor is clear and nobody can see her eavesdropping.
“Least you have some surgery to make it interesting,” Ringwald replies. “I got a whole day of nothing but uploads. Six patients. Two for languages, three for technical data and one for map layout. Just wish they didn’t have to come in for this. Maybe you could propose that the next-gen mesh should let us do remote uploads.”
“And what, put us out of a job?” Kaiser scoffs. “Besides, nobody’s going to sign up for a mesh that allows that. I sure wouldn’t.”
They don’t know. They’ve been implanting the Gen-4 for over a year and they don’t know.
“No, I’ve heard the big development on the Gen-5 will be to do with the watermark effect,” Kaiser goes on. “The new mesh will be able to suppress some of the contradictory signals and impulses that cause the memory to be identified as non-native. Supposedly subjects will be able to turn this off if they want to experience a more emotional and authentic interaction with the implanted information.”
“But if a subject is consciously turning off the watermarking, that’s effectively a watermarking in itself, isn’t it?”
“You get the full benefit of the imported experience but you still know it’s not your memory. Sounds like a win-win to me.”
It sounds like a massive lose-lose to Alice. She is certain the Gen-5 will secretly allow watermarking to be remotely deactivated, just like the Gen-4 secretly allows itself to be remotely accessed. Thus non-native memories could be installed without the safeguards that normally make an individual aware of it. Conceivably, native memories could also be remotely deleted, allowing Neurosophy the power to edit and censor the memories of anyone with the Gen-5 mesh. In a few years, they would have complete control over the memories and therefore the world view, the perspective—the very personalities—of everyone on CdC.
Then they just have to wait for the technology to be finally approved and rolled out down below. It’s certainly no wonder they’re killing anyone who might have found out about this.
Alice has to find a way of making it public.
She hurries away from the Mesh Lab and turns a corner, where she comes face to face with someone who is looking at her twice: staring right at her, in fact.
It is the man from Central Plaza, the one who shot her. She only glimpsed him for a moment and from a distance, but as soon as she sees him she is sure. He is dressed identically to the two guards she shot: charcoal fatigues. He has the same athletic build, and his identity reads blank: clearance-protected.
His voice is quiet but forceful, a tone of controlled aggression that is unused to refusal.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?”