Déjà Vu: A Technothriller by Hocking, Ian (ebook reader that looks like a book .TXT) 📗

mattered very little to her that she sympathized. It mattered less that a jury might nullify his conviction because, in the event, it was unlikely that David would see trial.

Her thoughts returned to Bruce’s parable. What did it prove? Jennifer had risked so much to steal them into Met Four but there were a thousand ways of proving this computer-version of Bruce existed.

“Jennifer, Bruce told you to bring me here, didn’t he?”

Jennifer did not reply. Instead, Bruce smiled. He did not take eyes off the bonfire. For Saskia, the flames held no heat. “You have a good intuition,” he said. “I wish I could see your face.”

“Allow me to describe it,” Saskia said. “I am scowling.” “Do you understand the point of the parable?”

“Yes. You believe that an artificial life form is truly alive and subject to proper ethical considerations. That is rubbish. You say this because you yourself are artificial.”

Bruce grabbed his spear and began to stab idly at the bonfire. Saskia sensed both Jennifer and David stepping back. “Well put,” Bruce said. “Tell me, how long have you had that chip in your head?”

Saskia laughed and shook her head. Shook her physical head; her virtual one remained utterly still. “No, tell me how you know that. And tell me how you came to know my name. You must tell me immediately and clearly or I will have no further part in this discussion.”

“Fine. I know it because you told me about two weeks ago.”

Saskia felt a squirt of adrenaline in her belly. This digital man seemed so sure. “Go on.”

“Let me see. You are German in origin, though your English is excellent. You work for the FIB. You wear you hair long. I have no idea what colour it is. I could tell you more about yourself, but I’ve already reached the extent of your own knowledge.”

“Stop this,” Saskia said. She fought to transform her fear into anger. “Any of this information may be have been acquired from Jennifer, via her father.”

David said quietly, “Saskia, you know that I haven’t been in contact with Jennifer since we met.”

“An act,” Saskia replied, but her voice had grown quiet too. She was in stalemate. Bruce had control of the situation. Now she would wait.

“That chip, Saskia. Describe it to me.”

“I can’t describe –”

“Tell me what it does,” Bruce said firmly. He looked into her eyes. He was still prodding the fire. Embers were carried upwards on the rising air. They were not real embers.

“It contains a new personality.”

“How does it contain it?”

“I…I don’t know,” Saskia stammered.

She did know. Abruptly, she realised why they had brought her here. They were all conspirators: David, Jennifer and, of course, Bruce. They were agents of Jobanique. No…one of them was Jobanique. She had never seen his face. It had always been replaced by a computer-generated façade. Perhaps Jobanique was Bruce. She had to get out.

The cubicle door rang under the impact. Snowflakes appeared at the edge of her vision. She fell to one knee, gasping.

“No, Saskia,” Bruce said. Then he added, in mispronounced German, “I am your friend and I am going to help you.”

Her vision cleared. Her fingers dug into the headset and she was ready to cast it aside, but her fingers stopped and fell away. She stood. “I’m listening.”

“Each of us has a brain that is wired up individually. There are fundamental similarities, just as New York and London have fundamental similarities: streets, a sewage system, electricity, water, gas, and so on. But taken as a whole they are quite different. The brain is similar in as much as, say, David’s brain and your brain have anatomical differences because you have led different lives. But they are similar for the most part.”

“Like a city,” Saskia said dreamily.

“Somebody, somewhere, was scanned by a computer. A wiring diagram of their brain was recorded and put on that chip. Understand, Saskia, that the person is dead.”

Saskia asked, “Why?”

“The donor brain would have been sliced into wafer-thin pieces, analysed, and the results put onto the chip in your brain. You would have been in an office operating theatre under sedation. A surgeon would have fired the chip into your head. It’s at the rear, in the centre, just above the cerebellum. Over the next two or three days, while you were still sedated, a network of filament-like elements would have worked their way into your brain like an aggressive cancer. Each filament grows for about a millimetre and then divides in two; this happens once every hour, so that within six hours there are over four-hundred million million of them. They form a net that increases the weight of your brain by one-hundred grammes. Then the next phase begins: the net starts to retrain your brain. It happens a little at a time. The chip activates some cells, compares the actual activation with the desired activation, and then changes the wiring to make it more likely that the desired activation will occur next time. It’s like rebuilding a house by swapping bricks; it takes a while, but you’ll avoid having to knock it down.

“As a child, your brain was quite plastic – that is, you could learn many things quickly. That property diminishes as you get older. The chip mimics it. Instead of learning slowly over a long period, you learn another person’s lifetime of experience in hours. You also learn their skills. If they could ride a bike, so can you. If they had been a concert pianist, you will be too.”

“…But I don’t have any memories,” Saskia said.

“The degree of change can be varied. Imagine it as a seesaw, with the opposing personalities at either end. Your chip pushes the balance towards the new personality, but the seesaw won’t tilt the whole way. There is another force acting within you. An unconscious one. A relic of the past. That’s the way Jobanique likes it.”

“So who am I?”

Bruce paused. He looked into the fire again, as though his answers were written there. “Your mind