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Site content may offend. Content includes horror, murder, torture, lawlessness, military carnage, Anglo Saxon crudities, occasional adult incidents and George Bush |
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"Oh, man," said Max, and shivered. "You want to back out?" said Jason. "No," said Max. "No." So they continued on through to the testing center, where they were introduced to some guy, Doc Seed - that rang a bell, for some reason - who would help wire them up to the brain scanners and administer the tests. "Me," said Doc Seed, when the guards had left, "I'm doing 17,520 years in the Brown House for the vivisection of living human beings." He said this softly, gently, as he swabbed skin, attached electrodes. Yes, Jason dimly remembered the trial. But something else ... there was something else about Doc Seed, something it was important to remember. But what? "Of course," said Doc Seed, continuing his work. "That sentence is theoretical. Highly theoretical. Because the virus is at work, you see, and I don't qualify for treatment." Jason did not ask which virus. There were so many, these days. He tried to switch his thoughts elsewhere. No point in worrying about Doc Seed - if the guy was not trustworthy, they would not have been left alone with him. "Ready?" said Doc Seed. Jason made no answer. Taking that as assent, Doc Seed reached up and pulled down the soundproof testing pod, sealing Jason into a zone of unimpeachable privacy. White noise hissed in Jason's ears. No, not white noise, not as such - that was the sound of the ventilators, pumping air through the testing pod, keeping him alive. "Who are you?" "I am Jason." "Your full name, please." So they were off. Jason had been this route before, providing data to permit himself to be emulated by computer. His life had then been played out in fast-forward mode, as a computer modeled his interactions with his society and his key significant contacts. With what results? If Jason could only get at his illicit copy of the Emulator Project files, he would be able to find out. But he did not know how badly he might have compromised himself already. He did not know how closely he might be being watched. For the time being, he should leave the files hidden on the hard disk of the Sappy Sunflower Happy Home. Maybe he could pay someone to lift the files .... Well, anyway, the results must have been good. Right? Right! Otherwise Jason would have been kicked out of the Patriot Service. And kicked into one of the camps. A risk he ran this time, too ... theoretically. But he trusted the system, more or less, and his knew in his innermost heart that he was one of the real patriots, not just a lipservice man, so he had nothing to fear ... probably. "Are you or have you ever been a Communist?" said the automated interrogator. "Who cares?" said Jason. It was exactly the same answer that he had given the first time. Some of his other answers, however, would be different. He had changed, the world had changed ... and Vindaletta, currently undergoing her own interrogation in the women's prison on the other side of town, she would have changed, too .... "What is your favorite sport?" said the interrogator. "What is your favorite color? Imagine you can have any woman, any age - what do you go for? If you were given the opportunity of gender reassignment, how would you feel about that? What drugs have you used in the last seventy-two hours? Have you ever shoplifted anything? What do you think about the Middle East situation?" Questions, questions ... some obviously pertinent, others wildly off-base. The Middle East situation ... whoever thought that up? There were too many people in the Emulator Project who were not up to speed, who hadn't realized that the world had moved on. All the paranoia in the Patriot Service about Arabs, Islam, Mecca ... the world moves on, you know ... although, admittedly, some people in the Middle East didn't seem to have gotten the message either .... "Imagine you are Hitler's dog," said the interrogator. "What do you feel about Hitler?" That was a new one, and so idiotic that Jason at first was lost for an answer. "Imagine you are Hitler's - " "I heard it the first time," said Jason. "A dog? I mean, get real! What do dogs know? You must be nuts." "Why do you say that I am nuts?" "Because that's the stupidest question I've heard in my life," said Jason. "Let's move on, shall we?" But the interrogator, which (logically enough) had a machine's patience, refused. "Okay," said Jason at last. "I guess, uh, I want a bone, I hope he gives me a bone." It was an answer of sorts, and the interrogator accepted it. An idiot question. But, overall, the testing had improved. This time, Jason rated the idiot content at about two, three per cent, whereas the first time it had been closer to fifty per cent. Plus, this time, they had completely scrubbed the cultural questions, which was great ... the first time, he had been embarrassed to find himself unable, for example, to give the name of the second president of the United States, the name of the designer of the Statue of Liberty, or the name of the guy who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald. Done. But there was some problem ... Doc Seed, smiling faintly, asked Jason to wait. "Your friend," said Doc Seed. "He passed out or something." "You okay?" said Jason, when Max was finally up on his feet. "Yeah," said Max. "I, uh ... went to sleep in there. Pretty weird thing to do, huh?" Very weird. But Jason did not press the point. It was pretty obvious that Max was on something, his eyes slightly glazed, syllables a bit blurred, and Jason quite simply did not want to know. For a while, it all seemed to go okay. Max started boarding with Jason and Vindaletta and went to work every day at his data entry job, and nobody came to arrest him. The system was supposed to give a result inside of a week, and Max got past the deadline without a visit from the cops. True, Max looked more and more unhappy as the days went by, but Jason put that down to "modeling stress," as it was called. It was disturbing to think, that, somewhere, a computer was modeling your future life. Somewhere, a computer model of you was getting old, was hurtling into the future, heading toward old age, decline and death. And, if the model messed up, then you would stand condemned as a subversive. "Try smiling," said Jason. "They'll be bringing you your official clearance certificate any day now." "Or a pair of handcuffs," said Max. Well, yes, there was that possibility. But for someone like Max Shlam, who had somehow gotten himself on the Suspicious Persons List (After being independently accused by three separate sources, you automatically went on the List) this was the only path that led into the future. "Ninety days, isn't it?" said Jason to himself. The fact was that nobody knew for sure, but rumor had it that clearances were currently taking an average of ninety days on average. Once Max had his clearance certificate, then he would be out of Jason's life, gone. Jason would have survived the trial and error process of growing up, and he would be free to devote himself to the "life of the uniform" (to quote the recruitment posters) that he so wanted. All was looking good until the day on which Max got fired, got drunk and then disappeared. An arrest warrant was automatically issued for Max, and Jason and Vindaletta both endured eight-hour interrogations at the hands of the police - all things considered, they were lucky not to be arrested themselves. For day after day, no news of Max. He had disappeared. Where? In today's tightly controlled society, it was supposed to be impossible to just disappear. But Max had done it. "Okay," said Jason, on day nine. "Maybe he's killed himself." He felt no particular sympathy for the man who had once been his friend. They had both been a little wild as kids, but Jason had straightened up and Max had not. Max had not made the transition to mature, productive citizenship. And a grown man who is still a juvenile delinquent at heart had no claim on Jason's sympathies. Then, on the evening of day ten, Max showed up. At the office. Jason was working late, so late that Jason was the last person left when Max showed up. "Max?" said Jason, startled. "How did you get in?" "Good question," said Max. "But I'm here, right?" He was unkempt and red-eyed, and he smelt of ... of what? In some obscure way, he smelt of unwashed hair. He had a paper bag in his hand. "Come out of your cubicle," said Max. "Let's go into the colonel's office." "Why?" said Jason. "Because that's where I want to do it," said Max. "Do what?" said Jason. "Shoot you," said Max. The colonel had a really nice chair, a black executive swivel chair. He must have bought it out of his own money - the federal government did not have money for such fripperies. Jason had never expected to be sitting in this big, comfortable chair, but here he was. You sank back into his spongy comfort, and there was no way that could move suddenly. Max took the hard wooden chair that the colonel reserved for visitors who were in disgrace. "So," said Jason. "How have you been?" "That proves it," said Max. "Proves what?" said Jason. "Proves that you're not a real person," said Max. "I've just told you I'm going to shoot you, and here you are making this inane social chitchat." "Inane?" said Jason. "That's, like, insane?" "A real person," said Max, ignoring him, "would be sweating." "Yeah, Max, Max, that's on television," said Jason. "This is real life." "No, it's not," said Max. "That's why I'm going to shoot you." "You can't do that," said Jason. "I'm your friend." "Yes," said Max. "I know you're my friend. That's why I'm going to shoot you. It's a signal." "Uh ... signal?" said Jason cautiously. "To the programmers," said Max. "The ones who are programming us." "Programming us?" said Jason. "Yeah," said Max. "There's a flaw in the programming. That's how I found out." "Flaw?" said Jason. "What flaw? What are you talking about?" "We've got no sense of smell," said Max. "Speak for yourself," said Jason. "I can smell just fine." "Are you sure?" said Max. "Well, uh ... I'm just going to pick up that eraser there, don't, you know ... just take it easy, okay? ... well ... here goes." Slowly, deliberately, Jason picked up Colonel Clay's eraser, which was new, unused, not a mark on it. He twisted the eraser, tearing it in half. He sniffed. (Was that a crime yet? Eraser sniffing? Maybe ....) The unique chemical signature registered in his nostrils, triggering memories of schoolyards long ago, of Mavis Beanslipper and those black panties that she ... well, enough of that. "I smell just fine, Max," said Jason. "You're programmed to say that," said Max. "You're not real. You're just a bunch of computer code." "So, let me, uh, catch my breath here, so to speak," said Jason. "You think you're not you. You think you're the computer model of you. And so you're acting out to ... uh, what? Strike a blow for liberty?" "Something like that," said Max. "If you ask me," said Jason, "this is a pretty adolescent way to react to a head cold." "Head cold?" said Max. "Your sense of smell," said Jason. "Could be just a head cold, you know." "It's been ten days, Jason," said Max. "I've had time to go through every single thing in her house." "Her?" said Jason. "Soap," said Max, ignoring him. "Detergent. Deodorant - not that she uses it any more. Mothballs, even. You think I wouldn't smell mothballs?" "So you're a bunch of computer code and I'm a bunch of computer code and one bunch of code is going to strike a blow for freedom by acting out and messing up the other bunch," said Jason. "Sounds pretty pathetic to me." "You work with what you've got," said Max. But, even though Jason was fairly sure that there was a gun inside that paper bag that Max was carrying, Max did not seem to be on the point of shooting anyone. Judging by the way things were going, he was ready to talk. Lonely, after ten days hole up with ... with who? Someone who doesn't use deodorant any more. Maybe his Aunt Lily ... yeah ... senile old woman, home helper drops by twice a day .... "If you were a real human," said Max, speaking to Jason's silence, "then you'd be trying to persuade me not to shoot you." "As a real human," said Jason, "I was busy doing something you never see on TV. It's called thinking. Well, okay. Let's try to persuade you. Let's, uh ... Turing. Ever heard of Turing? Famous computer guy, way back. He has this test, a Turing test. You do a Turing test, what you do is you try to figure out are you talking to a human or a machine?" "I don't want to play games," said Max. "It's not a game," said Jason. "Our technology isn't good enough for us to build a ... what shall I say? A flawless emulation of a human being. In computer code, I mean. If I'm a bunch of computer code, you'll prove it soon enough, if you set me the right tests. You could search the Internet for a few ideas, Turing test ideas, I mean, if you want." "There's a big hole in your logic," said Max. "Which is what?" said Jason, because as far as he could see his logic was flawless. "You're forgetting two things about Turing tests," said Max. "The first is that I'm the person who told you what a Turing test was. Way back when, back when you didn't even know the difference between Linux and Unix." "If you say so," said Jason, though he had no recollection of any such event. "The second thing," said Max, "for a Turing test, one of the players has to be a real human being. That's the essence of the test. Can the human player figure out that the other player is a machine? But you're a bunch of computer code, I'm a bunch of computer code, neither of us is a human being and so we can't run a Turing test." "Now you're the one who has a flaw in your logic," said Jason, seeing a basic error in Max's argument, an hole big enough to drive a truck through. "Oh, really?" said Max. "How do you figure that?" Jason paused, trying to marshal his thoughts. "If this is just a ploy to slow me down," said Max, pulling the gun out of the paper bag for the first time. "If you're just playing with me, Jason ...." "Max, Max," said Jason, holding out both hands as if to ward off the expected bullet, feeling his hands shaking, feeling his heart kick at the oiled malevolence of the gleaming darkness in his friend's hands, "Max, I'm just trying to think, okay? I'm done with thinking, I'll explain." "Do," said Max. Jason put his hands on the desk then flexed his shoulders, trying to release tension. He was surprised at his own level of stress. He had been feeling so calm, right up until now. Doing his best to appear relaxed - if he stayed calm, maybe Max would, too - Jason sat back in the colonel's chair. As he did so, something happened in his back. He experienced a sharp twinge, as if his reclining spine had settled into the wrong position. Red panic flared in Jason's brain. He seemed to see the panic as a visual sheet of red. What if he had put his back out? How was he going to argue if he'd done that? "You have ten seconds then I shoot you," said Max, his finger on the trigger. "Five. And four. And - " "Max!" said Jason, urgently. "Listen! Our technology is not good enough to model a human being. If it was, why would I have a job? Some computer would be doing my job. Everyone knows the AI problem is the big one, the human race isn't going to crack the AI problem for a hundred, a thousand, maybe a million years." "So?" said Max. "You experience self-awareness," said Jason. "That proves you're a human, not a bunch of computer code. We can't code for self-awareness. That's beyond us. You must recognize the human attribute of self-awareness within you. You do - don't you? You experience the Maxness of Max. You know that you are you, just as I know that I am I." "I'm programmed to believe that I understand what self-awareness is," said Max. "I could just as easily be programmed to believe that a dandelion was the face of god." And, with that, he shot Jason. Three times. It was six months before Jason got out of hospital. He was lucky to survive at all. Fortunately, by the time Max started shooting, the cleaners had been in the building, busy with their nightly routine. One of them had called the emergency services on his cellphone, and an ambulance had arrived in time to give Jason the vital golden hour assistance he needed to stay alive. Others had not been so lucky. Colonel Clay was dead, gunned down at Jason's house, where he had been paying a ... social call? Vindaletta, who could have explained, was not available for interrogation. She had walked across the border into Canada, where she had signed up for Australian citizenship (in the aftermath of the Morpheus plague, the Australians, eager to repopulated their empty continent, would take pretty much anything that walked) and was now living somewhere in Sydney, Australia. By the time Jason got out of hospital, Max's story had come to an end. He had been shot down by armed guards while trying to rob a hamburger restaurant in Beltway City, in the state of New York. According to the desperate notes in Max's diary, a repository of compressed paranoia, Max had not been able to smell anything during the whole course of his one-man break-the-law-for-freedom campaign, the campaign which had left seven people dead and nine in hospital. "Not blood, not cordite, not petrol, not flesh burning," said Max's handwriting. Why? The possibilities were limited, and the investigators were ultimately able to extract a confession from Doc Seed, the guy who was doing 17,520 years in the Brown House for the vivisection of living human beings. The individual who had helped prepare Max and Jason for their Emulator Project tests. Some well-wisher had deposited a fat five thousand dollars in the commissary account which paid for Doc Seed's chocolate bars and his beloved fly fishing magazines. "Yeah, Colonel Clay," said Doc Seed. "Paid me to burn out Candidate Shlam's olfactory nerves. He'd had some illegal modeling done someplace ... results showed five ways you might push Shlam over the edge, and that was the easiest." But why would Colonel Clay want to do that? His true target, according to Doc Seed, was none other than Jason Auxilva Babrette. "Babrette had some dirty secret," said Doc Seed, "and the colonel wanted to break Shlam to break Babrette, to break the secret out of him." The investigators came to Jason and asked him about it. "You want to know why the colonel tried to have me killed?" said Jason. "You find out why he was paying a social call, visiting me at my home when I was at work. Is that so difficult? Huh? Ask the neighbors, see how often he came round." And the investigators went away again, and Jason was home free, maybe, and his next step was a law office, where he asked whether you could sue for divorce on the grounds of desertion, or whether it was more complicated than that. Dawn in Nevada. A truck pulled up outside the Sappy Sunflower Happy Home, which had been closed down so the asbestos could be taken out of the ancient building. (An anonymous phone call had done the damage.) The door opened, and Jason Auxilva Babrette got out. He walked right up to the front door and punched in the nine-digit security code which gave him access (if your security skills are good enough, you can steal anything.) Twenty minutes later, Jason was on his way, and the Sappy Sunflower Happy Home was burning. The fire, skillfully lit, was destined to burn the building right down to the ground. Home in Trotter, relaxed and rested after his vacation, Jason got to work on the hard disk that he had stolen from the Sappy Sunflower Happy Home. Only to be disappointed. What he was looking for was twenty gigabytes of data, the result files of the files of the Emulator Project. Somewhere in amongst that twenty gigabytes, there should have been a summary of the results of an earlier run. One of those results Jason knew already: Jason Auxilva Babrette turns out to be a patriot through and through. The fact that he was not living in a camp (or worse) proved that. But what he wanted was the Summary of Private Outcomes, the summary that would tell him if Vindaletta .... Well. No joy. Someone had been using the Sappy Sunflower Happy Home's underworked computer as a games platform, and the twenty gigabytes of data that Jason had stashed there had been overwritten time and again by inane (one of Max's favorite words, surviving Max's death) computer games. At dawn, Jason finally gave up. It didn't matter. Colonel Clay was dead, Vindaletta was gone, and so .... "The hell with it," said Jason. "Let's go to work." He took a capsule of Executive Javelin and put his khaki uniform. Today was an important day. Jason had been chosen to work on the Uniform Population Screening Program, the program which was designed to expand emulation testing from the chosen few to the population at large. Today would be his first day working on the UPSP program. Dressed, ready, alight with chemical initiatives, Jason got in his truck and turned on the engine. And a minute later he was driving through the streets of America in the morning. And he put his foot down, accelerating, connecting himself to the river of raw power which fueled the triumph of the nation of eagles, connecting himself to the river of oil, Ebola black, which flowed from out of Africa, yesterday's continent, to power the machineries of the nation of the future. |
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This story, "Patriots", made its first appearance when posted on Hugh Cook's website zenvirus.com on 2003 January 10 Friday. zenvirus.com. Copyright © 2003 Hugh Cook. All rights reserved.
PATRIOTS - SF story SF about terrorism, story about government surveillance, AI story - read complete sf story online - fiction writing website - sci-fi story by Hugh Cook |
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