Persister: Space Funding Crisis I

  Chapter 14

  “A recording session?” Arianne said, “Why did the card disappear?”

  “I think we were just zapped as you threw me the card.” Sura said, “The system puts you back in the right position with anything you were holding, but the key card must have fallen to the floor after we were put under.”

  “So where is it now?” asked Arianne, also casting about.

  “The cleaning robots probably scooped it up.”

  “Wait, so we were just out? For how long?”

  Sura was already heading towards her desktop. Arianne turned back towards the robot arms, with a creeping awareness that she had just been knocked out, gripped by massive metallic hands and then carted off to sleep in a cold tin can. The robot arms jumped again, and Arianne’s skin tightened.

  Sura was hitting terminal keys. The arms blinked again.

  “A recording session has been started” Sura said, “Six months downtime every … hmm … every 3 seconds.”

  “WHAT? We’re only living 3 seconds out of every six months?”

  “Better than grad school.”

  Arianne looked towards the testing area, and indeed the scene was changing every few seconds. Patterns of white creatures were being rearranged before her eyes.

  “How long has it been running?” asked Arianne.

  “About a minute, subjective.” Sura glanced over the terminal screen towards the antechamber.

  “We’ve spent most of the last 10 years in those chryo chambers.”

  Arianne was suddenly overcome with an outrage at her chronometer ramping up, a languid guilt that her investigation deadline was marching towards her and a perverse curiosity in the experiment running by in the testing area.

  “But I haven’t signed any chryo-inducing privileges” said Arianne.

  “Nor me,” said Sura “I’m guessing we’ve been hacked.”

  “Sleep hacking? But that’s illegal - how could someone get that onto the hub?”

  “I don’t know. Could be military, could be Bloggoration, or the black market.”

  “Well, let’s get out of here!” said Arianne, striding to the door. She tried the handle, but the door wouldn’t unlock. The light in the antechamber shifted a fraction.

  “We need the key card.” said Sura, hitting some more keys. She frowned, then turned abruptly to a red button on the wall and hit it. Both of them looked instinctively up and waited. Nothing happened. Gingerly, Sura picked up a pen from the desk and tossed it into the air. It vanished in mid-spin.

  “The safety override isn’t working” Sura’s words were only whispered in confusion, but finally broke through Arianne’s hope that there was a misunderstanding.

  “Professor Sura, I believe they is a threat against your life.”

  Sura barely glanced up.

  “Like the others?”

  “Ah - you know.”

  “Of course. Damn.” Sura hit the table with her fist. “Get over here!”

  Arianne sprinted around to Sura’s side of the terminal. Sura was rapidly typing at a command line as she spoke.

  “I’m trying to shut the program down manually, but I’m running into version update problems.”

  “Huh?”

  “Every 3 seconds all the software is updated and the interface changes.”

  As Arianne watched, the entire desktop suddenly changed. The screen became filled with bright icons, then was replaced with bars of menus in shades of slate gray, then changed again to show a three dimensional rendering of a vehicle drifting through a sea of swirling neon clouds. A terminal window spat out some errors and stopped responding.

  “And now the base language has changed and my programs have stopped working.” said Sura.

  “I’m calling Holt.” said Arianne, reaching for her pocket terminal. She turned it on, and it immediately ran out of battery.

  “Hmm, looks like my terminal didn’t have 6 months of juice in it. Can you contact anyone?”

  “There aren’t actually that many people who work here that aren’t in cold storage, or so deep into the Administration that it would take decades for them to respond. I’m sending a message to the tech team.”

  As soon as Sura had hit send, a reply appeared in the inbox, dated several months ago.

  “TSF!”

  Sura and Arianne stared at it.

  “Do you know what that means? Tech support failure?” asked Sura.

  “Er … actually, maybe it’s ‘That’s so funny’! How informal was your email? We’ve been here for -” Arianne checked her chronometer “Damn, nearly 50 years. Perhaps conversational norms have changed and they thought it was a joke?”

  “It’s not all that’s changed - most of my tech team have retired. Even if they did get the message and came down here to look, all they would have found is us in the chryo chamber and everything else in working order. They probably assumed that it was a practical joke or that we’d sorted the problem. I’m trying again - I’ll be more specific.”

  The message that came back was simply a standard request for the message to be translated into a current language. Sura hit the desk with her fist.

  “Can we cut the power?” asked Arianne.

  “The emergency killswitch is outside.” said Sura, pointing.

  Arianne saw a bright red lever switch in a plastic housing mounted on the wall of the antechamber beyond the glass wall. Above it was a symbol - a red circle with a triangle at its centre.

  Arianne sized up the glass wall separating them from the antechamber. She picked up a chair and took a run at the wall. She swung at the glass and felt the impact. The glass wall cracked but didn’t shatter. Sura shouted in horror at the sight of her lab being vandalised, but Arianne wasn’t about to sit down and discuss this. One more swing should do it. She was halfway through the swing when the crack appeared to instantly heal itself. She hit an intact pane, which cracked again. She hadn’t even started the wind up for the next swing before the second crack also magically vanished.

  “Space Fuck!” shouted Arianne, throwing the chair aside, which promptly teleported itself back to its original position at a desk. “It’s being repaired before I can get another swing in.”

  “Arianne, you have to stay calm.” said Sura.

  “What! There’s a robotic tentacle that’s cramming me into cold storage every three seconds!”

  “Right” said Sura, “Pretty soon you’re going to starve or succumb to freezing fatigue.”

  “Huh?”

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  “This morn- Oh, actually over two centuries ago.”

  Sura slowly folded her arms, and Arianne suddenly became very aware of the beating of her own heart.

  “You don’t spend energy in Chryo, but you can’t absorb very much in 6 months either. Every time you try to smash a window, you’re using energy, and it’s not being replaced. At a frequency of 3 seconds, we can’t even eat - anything in our stomach will be evacuated before Chryo sleep, and anyway even protein bars would rot as soon as we opened them. But that’s probably not what will kill us.”

  Sura’s stare was quite level. Arianne was holding her breath.

  “Feel the back of your neck.” said Sura.

  Arianne slowly brought her hand up to her neck, unsure if she’d find a weird device or a horrible creature. Instead, she just found a patch of dry skin.

  “We’re going to die of dry skin?”

  “Chryo fatigue. No one knows exactly how beta wave zapping works, but when you’re zapped, your whole body is just put on pause, ready to be reactivated - circadian rhythm, somatosensory system, short-term memory, everything. It’s what makes the whole seamless chryo system work. However, when people started experimenting with this kind of recording system, they found there were limits. If you kept zapping yourself with too little live time in between, your body starts to habituate. After a while, your short-term memory won’t carry over.” r />
  Sura turned to look at the rows of cages

  “Eventually, your body doesn’t even retain pulmonary rhythm.”

  Arianne’s left eye twitched.

  “It won’t be long before we’re basically having a mini heart attack every three seconds.”

  Arianne couldn’t think of anything to say, but was distracted by movement on the floor. When she looked, there was nothing there, but a moment later there was another small scuttling thing just to her left. Sura was also looking at the floor around her. Then Arianne saw a pair of figures pop out of nowhere right in front of her. Mice.

  “The mice have escaped the testing area.” Sura said.

  Suddenly, there were a dozen mice crawling around the floor, on the benches and lab tables. Seconds later, they all switched places. Now there were a number around her feet.

  “How interesting” Sura said, “They probably got out through the ventilation shafts - I should have fixed it myself. But why would they come in here?”

  Arianne felt a scratching on her leg, and jumped away, only to find nothing there. She began wheeling around in paranoia, but the suddenly shifting arrangement of mice started to make her sick. Sura was studying the testing room.

  “Their food is automatically replenished, so there’s no motive to leave.”

  Sura automatically reached for a tablet to take notes.

  “Professor! We need to think of a way out of here.” Arianne shouted.

  “Hmm?” Sura wasn’t listening.

  Arianne closed her eyes and tried to think. Blocking the arms? Too strong. Could she climb into a cupboard? But there were none, and it wouldn’t stop her from blacking out. She had to jam the system somehow. What about the visual system?

  “Professor! How does the chryo system know where we are?”

  Sura’s answer was almost lazy as she stared glassy-eyed at the mosaic of mice.

  “The cameras in the ceiling.”

  Arianne spotted two small black domes on the ceiling at opposite ends of the room. She grabbed a chair and climbed onto a desk beneath the first. She swung the chair at the dome. The glass broke. Arianne counted three heartbeats. It stayed broken. She swung again and the dome detached, disappearing before it hit the floor. Underneath was a small camera on an adjustable arm attached by some wires. Arianne detached the wires and stood back. The wires did not magically re-attach themselves, and no replacement dome arrived. The clean-up droids evidently weren’t programmed to deal with this.

  Arianne scrambled down from the desk and went towards the second camera. Again she struck it twice and revealed the cables. She took a deep breath and unhooked the camera. Nothing happened.

  Then everything span around, like she was waking from a dream within a dream. She found herself sitting at Sura’s desk with the Professor on the other side. They both blinked in surprise. Sura’s affiliation plaque ticked away between them. Sura was forming her lips into an ‘o’ when they both had the sensation of being jerked awake again. Arianne stood up and turned towards the door, but only managed one step before she was transported back into her seat, in exactly the same posture as before. The dissonance between where she was and where her brain thought she should be left a tense jangling throughout her body.

  “Well,” Sura said, “it looks like if the robot arms can’t see us, we just get zapped anyway and then returned to a default position.”

  Her words were punctuated by slight slurs every few seconds as her mouth was re-set.

  “The chryo droids must have their own cameras.” Arianne said, feeling an awful grating feeling as she spoke. “And now we’re stuck here”

  Arianne cursed herself, and looked up to the cameras. One was just above the next desk over. If she could just re-connect the cables… She took a deep breath and began counting the reset cycles. One, two, three. Immediately as the next jarring sensation began, she leapt from her chair, jumped onto the desk and grasped at the camera. She had time to glimpse the cable before she was sucked back to sitting in front of Sura. She was expecting momentum, so lurched clumsily forwards onto the desk before being snapped back to an upright sitting position.

  “Looks like you chipped a tooth.” Sura said.

  Arianne felt around her mouth with her tongue.

  “Without the arm to catch you, you just fell face-first onto the floor when you were zapped. We’re probably hitting the floor every few seconds just sitting here.”

  Arianne screamed in anger, frightening a mouse that happened to appear on the desk in front of her. Arianne was herself startled by the mouse, only to be startled again by having her body glitched back into place.

  “Since we’re sitting here” Sura slurred, “Let’s have a conversation.”

  Sura folded her arms to try to emphasise her seriousness, but they were instantly broken apart and placed back on her lap. She sighed.

  “What do you know about the other murders?”

  “What?” said Arianne, with a tear repeatedly falling from her eye like a loading icon.

  “The other researchers - what did they have in common?”

  Arianne shook herself and tried to focus.

  “They were all level-5 fundees, working on cultural evolution or evolutionary linguistics.”

  “Were they involved with consultancy work for CAFCA?”

  “Yes, Professor Long said something about that.”

  “Hmm, I thought so.”

  “What were you working on?”

  Sura hesitated before going on. It was difficult to read her face, since it kept jumping back to a neutral expression every three seconds.

  “We were asked to look into the problem of cultural evolution” Sura said, “and try to find a way to mitigate its effects.”

  “You mean like a Nash equilibrium language? Hasn’t that been tried?”

  “Yes, but our brief was not to work on finding stable languages, but to eliminate the process of cultural evolution altogether.”

  Arianne attempted to hold a frown, which felt like there were tiny muscular mudslides oozing down her face.

  “Cultural evolution” Sura continued, “just like biological evolution, only emerges under certain conditions. Variation in the signals, meanings which are negotiated rather than inherent, imperfect replication and population turnover. Our goal was to find ways of eliminating these factors so that human communication would remain stable over time.”

  “What? But the process is just an emergent property of cultural systems, you can’t stop it without ...”

  Arianne’s voice trailed off.

  “You’re right - we can’t change the software of culture, but we can change the hardware.” Sura said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, isolation causes drift, so we keep people connected all the time.”

  “Viable e-brains?”

  Sura nodded. “A pangalactic net”

  “Huh? How can you keep people connected all the time with lightyears between them?”

  “The hub would become the centre of a new galactic empire. Chryo technology would be built into individuals. The closer you are to the hub, the slower you live - not unlike our present situation. By the time those living on the hub got a message, it would have reached the outer edge of the empire, too.”

  “Hang on, what about people on opposite ends of the galaxy? They won’t get each other’s messages for ages.”

  “Social Relativity:” said Sura, “Your rate of living depends on how much social interaction is going on around you. Live time would be distributed around the galaxy. We’ve run simulations -”

  “Woah. But surely communication systems will still change over time? How could you stop culture evolving?”

  “Full biological overhaul. Imperfect learning produces variation between people, so we give people perfect memories. Weak biases can be overridden by cultural consensus, so we give people strong innate preferences. Population turnover causes
change, so ...”

  Arianne’s blood ran cold. The professor was talking about unthinking, unfeeling, undying, predictable robots. Worse than that - just nodes in a gigantic neural net.

  “We call them Persisters.” Sura said.

  “Why would you want that?” whispered Arianne.

  Sura’s face soured.

  “It’s almost impossible to be a researcher these days.” She said, angrily. “Funding applications have always taken up our time, but now you can’t even send a message for pizza without spending weeks of research making sure the people on the other end can understand it.”

  Arianne had noticed that there were quite a large number of empty Space Noodle cartons on the desk.

  “Just look at this hub!” continued Sura, “A monument to runaway bureaucracy. Every piece of paper, every gram of ink intended to oil the machine, but it just clogs it up instead, so they keep throwing paper and ink at it to try and unblock everything. It’s crushing our civilization.”

  Sura attempted to slam her fist on the table, but was re-set mid-thrust, so just wobbled akwardly.

  “It’s a miracle that we haven’t entered a dark age. The PERSISTER project is the only way forward.”

  PERSISTER? Arianne suddenly remembered the chip that Richard had given her. Fortunately, the constant zapping stopped her surprise registering on her face. So this was at the heart of the murders somehow? But the feelings of motherly support from Professor Sura had gone, and Arianne tried to sidle up to the implications.

  “So all the consultants were being targeted - by who?”

  “Take your pick” Sura answered, “There are plenty of hub folk who know that their power derives from all these problems. If everyone is synched up and able to communicate, a lot of paper pushers and foresters lose their jobs, not to mention some of the more powerful people. We basically stole a lot of the tech from the Bloggoration, and they’d oppose this project anyway, but I don’t know how they could have found out. We wouldn’t exactly make our colleagues happy, either - nothing to study anymore. But if either group wanted the project to stop, they could do it much more efficiently. Why go to all the trouble of exchanging dictionaries and training wolves? Why all the drama?”

  Sura was starting to rave.

  “Why are we being slowly freezer-burned to death, waiting for the moment when we’re unable to keep our thoughts straight from one moment to the next, just like those mice, each generation starting all over again with no link to the past?”

  Sura began trying to slam her fist on the desk, but just ended up wobbling.

  “Professor! We need to stay focussed!”

  “Ha! On what? Funding applications?”

  “I don’t kn-”

  Arianne stopped mid-sentence, and it wasn’t because her jaw was being snapped shut by robotic arms.

  “That’s it - we can submit a funding application.” Arianne said.

  “What? You want to hold a symposium on our predicament?”

  “No - we submit a funding application, a really terrible one. It gets rejected, triggers a reanimation condition and busts us out of the chryochambers before the recording system can put us back in here.”

  Sura blinked and attempted to stare into the distance.

  “It could work - even if it’s not understood, it’ll get rejected.” Sura said.

  “Can you send an application from your terminal?”

  They both looked to the terminal on the desk - an action that required them to keep turning their heads which soon became dizzying.

  “I think so.” said Sura.

  Sura reached for the keyboard, but was instantly reset.

  “Try to get in the rhythm.” said Arainne, as calmly as she could manage.

  Sura took a breath and began bobbing her head until she became synchronised. She lunged for the keyboard. Her first stroke woke the terminal display and she managed to type her password to unlock the screen. Next, she tried to access the main CAFCA database. She managed on the third attempt. The main database commands appeared, but changed font and layout every few seconds as the website theme was updated. Sura tried to catch the ‘submission’ button, but it kept dodging around the screen and hiding in sub-menus.

  “Turn on voice activation!” Arianne said.

  Sura managed to do so and took a few breaths after her exertion.

  “OK, terminal!” Sura said, “Open existing submissions - submission 596.” Sura lowered her tone and spoke to Arianne “I have a half-finished submission I was working on. We can use that as a starting point.”

  The terminal screen displayed the bones of a funding application form. A deep repulsion arose in Arianne’s stomach from seeing the myriad fields and sub-sections.

  “Enter collaborator” Sura said. “Karen Arianne, Io University”.

  Arianne could feel her blood racing. This was not how she imagined her next collaboration. Then again, she didn’t expect to be hoping to almighty empty space that her next funding application would be rejected.

  “Now,” said Sura. “What are the goals of our project?”

  Arianne’s left eye twitched and she exploded in rage.

  “Professor! We don’t have time for this!”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Sura said “this is going on my permanent record - I can’t have something that’s - that’s - you know ...”

  “We’re going to die if we don’t get out of here - just hit send!”

  “Well let’s at least give it a decent title. I was thinking “Ultimate meanings and -” er … “Ultimate meanings …””

  Sura stopped mid-sentence, blinked and looked straight at Arianne.

  “Sorry, I lost the thread of my … um.”

  Arianne was trying to remain calm, which was surprisingly difficult given that she was essentially having a very long nap every three seconds.

  “Professor Sura! You’re beginning to lose your short-term memory.”

  “Hmm? Who are you?”

  “Professor! Send the application.”

  “What? Who are you?”

  Arianne let out a low whimper before trying to talk to the computer. “OK terminal! Send the application”.

  Please confirm submission.

  “Professor! Give your access code so we can submit the form and get out of here!”

  “Eh? Arianne, we can use one of my half-finished submissions as a starting - Arianne! I’ve got a half-finished submission here -”

  “Professor! Give the terminal your access code.”

  “Eh? Why? What access code?”

  “Professor! Your access code!”

  “Eh? Who are you?”

  “Professorsayyouraccesscodeorwedie.”

  “Huh? What was I -”

  Arianne was about to slam the desk when a mouse appeared on it. Then two mice in the corner. She felt tiny feet on her leg. Suddenly, there was a scrabbling thing in her hair. Arianne shrieked and tried to shake the thing away. But the recording system wouldn’t let her even cover her eyes.

  “Oh hello. Who are yo -?”

  Arianne grabbed Professor Sura’s affiliation plaque and tried swatting the mice away. The plaque disappeared from her grip and put itself back on the desk.

  “Oh hello, I didn’t see you come in, have you come to fix the fans?”

  Arianne almost laughed. Right back to the start, only - she stole a glance at her chronometer - 78 years ago. And how long would it go on for? Would they continue to be put down and scooped up after they died? Who would find them? And what would they make of this situation? Two bodies in a perfectly clean lab, surrounded by mice. What signs would they look to in order to unravel their macabre demise? A nice scandal for the tabloids, anyway: two academics dead of exhaustion, their own research turned against them - an iconic image.

  Somewhere from the back of her skull came an idea. The kind of wild idea that professor Golden kept telling her to leave aside in orde
r to finish her central work. She blinked, and the idea became just a dim feeling of shapes interlocking. She tried to focus.

  “Oh hello, are you - er ...”

  The idea came back in full form. Arianne turned to look through the glass wall towards the emergency shut-down switch and the bright red sign above it. She grabbed the affiliation plaque again and dug the sharp edge into the surface of the desk. The plaque reset itself on the desk as if it were repelled by the act of vandalism, but the mark remained. Arianne waited to get back into the rhythm, then lunged for the plaque again and continued the scratch a few more inches. After a few attempts she had scratched out a circle.

  Sura was now just letting out a slow, unending moan, her lungs being filled between the few seconds they were awake. Mice were everywhere, blinking in and out of existence like sunspots. Arianne saw bite marks appearing on her arm. She tried to stay focussed as she began drawing the first side of the triangle.

  A few times she found herself staring ahead in a daydream.

  Sura’s drone became punctuated with dry gasps.

  Arianne actually remembered starting to forget.