"There are no suspicious leads at all?"
Melanie handed me a page from her desktop.
"You actually know her; she’s Emma’s friend Sheila."
I raised an eyebrow. Melanie continued.
"She's using a much larger amount of compute time than the average upload. The privacy restrictions protecting children are so tight that even I'm not allowed to see what she's been doing. Obviously an eleven-year old isn't off designing high energy physics experiments, but we know our adversaries are amazing hackers, so it's possible they may have stolen her identity. I didn't dig deeply into this one though, because the compute resources being used are relatively stable. They overlap with the reactor event, but began weeks earlier, and they're still at the same level today."
I grunted. “Sheila and Emma are running a big eco-system simulation. I think it could account for the compute resources. The sim's really amazing. They've been working on it together for months. You should see it."
Melanie sighed, "Are you sure? That was my only open lead I had left."
“Sheila’s a very smart girl. I wouldn’t put it past her that she could be involved in some way”.
“But as you say, her simulation accounts for the compute resources, and the only other thing we have on her is that she’s bright. There are a lot of smart people in this polis, and many of them are more than 14 years old.”
I grunted. “You’re right. We have no real reason to suspect her.”
Melanie pushed the desktop away in disgust. "I guess I should just float around in this pool until the NASC comes to pull the plug."
“Come on, let’s go back to Polynesia. We can go see what Emma’s up to.”
Chapter 45
The next morning, having run out of ideas, I went down to the beach to work on my boat. The day before I had found a straight tree that would make a good mast. With the help of a neighbor from the village I had chopped it down and dragged it back to the beach. Now I was using a small one-handed axe to strip off the soft bark to expose the yellow-white wood below. The mid-morning sun beat down on my back and drops of sweat fell from my eyebrows. I kept up a regular chopping rhythm. The simplicity and repetition of the work felt good.
“Daddy?”
I turned around to find Emma standing behind me. She was wearing her usual light Polynesian skirt and bare feet.
“Hi Honey, what have you been up to since breakfast?”
“Sheila wanted to talk to me.” She clasped he hands together in front of her and then pulled them apart again, holding them at her sides. She looked nervous.
I frowned “What did you two talk about?”
“Dad, I kinda need some advice.”
“Ok.” I sat down on one of the overturned hulls of my boat and dug my feet into the warm sand. “What’s up?”
Emma sat down on the boat beside me. She gestured toward the half-stripped tree.
“That looks like it’ll make a good mast.”
“Do you think you can help me rig it up later today? I’ll need someone to tie the lines from the top of the mast to the hulls while I hold it up. Do you remember your knots?”
“Sure.”
“Good, now what did you want to talk about?”
“Well, I just couldn’t accept that math is so easy for Sheila and so hard for me.”
“We already talked about that honey; some people just have a natural gift for it.”
“I asked her how she learns so fast. She said she just went through all the course programs on her own. She just read the notes and skipped all the homework and that’s all she had to do.”
“hmm.”
“So I asked her how she could do that when I have to watch the lectures over and over and do all the homework, and I still get lots of the questions wrong. She said she never forgets anything, ever. I told her that’s impossible. But she said it was true. Then she picked a day from two weeks ago and told me exactly what we had done that day. She could repeat the things we had said to each other word for word. I couldn’t believe it.”
“Are you sure she isn’t just playing a game with you? Maybe she uses a personal recorder or something.”
Emma shrugged. “I don’t think so, I’ve known her for a long time, and she never has to stop to try to remember or look up anything. It’s always right there fresh in her head when she needs it.”
Emma drummed the back of her heels on the boat. “Then Sheila asked me to play a game. She gave me five numbers and asked me to put them in order and repeat them back to her, all in my head. It wasn’t so hard with five, but then she had me do it with 7, and 9 numbers. I could do 7, but with 9 it was too much. I started to forget some of them. Then she asked me to give her 50 random numbers. She had me write them down in my personal interface where she couldn’t see them, and then read them back to her. Then she gave them all back to me in perfect order. I watched her really close, she wasn’t using her interface at all. She did it all in her head. Then she said she could have done it just as easily with 5000 numbers, or even 5 million, if we had time.”
“Emma, that’s impossible.”
Emma shook her head. “Sheila doesn’t play tricks, at least not on me; and she was being really serious.”
“Nobody can hold millions of numbers in their head Emma, it’s impossible.”
Emma hestitated, struggling to work up the nerve to continue.
“Dad, Sheila told me that when she was really young, still a baby, her father made... changes to her.”
“Huh?”
Now that she had decided to continue, she rushed ahead.
“Then when she was older, she got her father to show her what he had done. She studied neurology and AI, and then they started making more changes together. She’s been doing it for years now.”
“Emma, that’s ridiculous.”
“But Daddy, I think she’s telling the truth. How do you think she could have built that whole Jupiter sim and all the plants and animals; and what about her telescope?”
I stared out at the waves cresting on the beach, and shrugged my shoulders.
“Dad, I need to ask you something important.”
“What honey?”
“Sheila wants to make the same changes to me that she made to herself. She said if I let her do it, then I’ll be able to do the same things she does.”
I turned and stared at her. Emma gave me a pleading look.
“But I don’t know if I should let her. What if she does something wrong? Or what if I stop being me? I want to be like her, but it’s really scary. Should I do it or not?”
I stood up and stared down at her. Emma seemed to shrink under my gaze.
“If any of this is true, which I very much doubt, then it’s very serious. I want you to call Sheila here at once. I want to talk to her.”
Emma began to cry. “Please don’t tell her I told you. I don’t want to get her in trouble.”
“It’s too late for that. Call her now.”
I sent Melanie a summons. She appeared a few seconds later. “What’s up Jarrod?”
“Probably nothing, but I want you here to see whatever happens next.”
Sheila popped into the sim a minute later. “Hi Mr. Roamer” she said. “Emma said you wanted to see me?”
“Yes Sheila.”
I looked over to Emma. “Emma, you’re not in trouble. Thank you for telling me all this. You’ve been very good. Now I want you to go to our house till I come get you. I won’t be long.”
“Ok Daddy.” Emma sniffed, and blinked out.
I called up my interface and set up a 3-way private comm channel between Sheila, Melanie and me. Anyone walking by on the beach would be unable to overhear us. Then I walked back to the boat and sat down again.
“Sheila, I understand from Emma that you’ve made some extraordinary claims. She told me that you’ve been artificially enhancing your own mind for years, and now you want to do the same thing to her.”
Sheila’s childish smi
le was suddenly gone. She carefully appraised me with what now seemed like entirely adult eyes.
“Yes, that’s true.” She nodded. “I’m confident I could safely enhance Emma’s mental capabilities while still preserving her character and personality.”
The change to her bearing and choice of words startled me. I stared for a moment, then managed to continue.
“Emma said that your father began the process when you were an infant, but that’s impossible. The Polis’ security protocols ensure that no-one could ever make changes to someone else’s mind, even to their own family members.”
“The polis was only a year old when I was born. Security wasn’t as good back then, and my father was one of the programmers on the core infrastructure team. He built in a back-door just for me that we’ve been using ever since.”
“But if this is true, how could he risk making changes to his own daughter? It would be impossibly dangerous. You could end up insane or in terrible pain for the rest of your life.”
Sheila looked down at the sand. “Many experiments didn’t go well. My father and I worked out a protocol. We would fork off a copy of me, so there were two me’s. Then we’d make the changes to one of us. My father and the old me would watch the new me very closely for the next several days. If she was in pain or began acting irrationally, then we’d shut her off and go over the data to see where we went wrong. If after a week or so she was doing well, and if her mind was working better than that of the old me, then we’d turn off the old me instead, and the new me would become the only me – until the next experiment.”
I was staring at her again. Eventually I shook my head. “I find that hard to believe. You would have watched yourself suffer terribly, at your own hand!”
“Yes, sometimes it was very hard. Sometimes a broken me would beg us not to shut her down. She would beg to keep living, even though she was crippled. Sometimes it was very hard to erase my other self, but the direct memory of that suffering would always die with the failed experiment, so I don’t remember any of it first-hand. I’m the product of only the successful experiments.”
Melanie gasped, “That’s monstrous. To modify and then kill off failed copies of yourself is criminal. It’s murder!”
Sheila scowled. “It would have been much worse to leave them alive, and it was the only way to make progress. Every copy understood the risks when we got started. We all went into the process willingly. We were all working toward the same goal. Besides nature has been running the same experiment on non-consenting beings for billions of years. It’s called evolution.”
“And now you want to put my daughter through the same process?” I said.
“It would be much more humane this time around. Over the years, through these experiments, I’ve developed a very good understanding of how the brain functions. I’m also much better at handling complex problems than I used to be. I’m confident I could make all the changes in a single session, and there would be no side effects. It’s very unlikely Emma would suffer, but she would have her horizons opened in ways you can’t begin to imagine. She would be able to hold all of humanity’s arts and sciences in her head at the same time, and be able to fully integrate three thousand year’s worth of knowledge in just a few days. After that there would be no limit to what she could do, and I would have a friend I could fully relate to again. You must be able to see the benefits.”
I found myself lost for words again. Melanie said. “You said that the security back-door that lets you and your father do these experiments works only for you, so this is all academic. Even if any of this were true, you couldn’t get to Emma’s mind to make any changes. No one could.”
Sheila gave her a sympathetic smile. “You don’t understand how much I’ve changed. VivraTerra’s systems are all transparent to me now. For example I’m well aware of the search you and Jarrod have been conducting for the builder of the lab in Utah.”
Melanie’s jaw dropped.
“You nearly identified me but then, but ruled me out because of my age. You were close.”
“Are you saying you were involved in building that lab?” I asked.
Sheila nodded.
“Who were you working with?”
“I did it all myself.”
“Were you also the one who destroyed it?”
Sheila nodded again. “It was a close thing. The NASC found the lab just as I was finishing my work. As soon as I was done, I melted it down, so the NASC would never know what I was doing there.”
I roused myself. “And what was that?” I asked.
Sheila frowned, returning her attention to me. “I need to tell you, because I want Emma to allow me to make these changes, and I don’t think she’ll let me do it without your consent, at least not for several more years. That’s how much respect she has for you. If I’m to convince you, then I need you to understand exactly what I am and what I can help Emma to become.”
To learn that Sheila wanted my consent came as a relief. “I’m listening.” I said.
“But I want you to swear not to reveal my secret to anyone else. The humans might be nervous about uploads, but if they knew about me, they’d be in a full panic.”
I frowned. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that. I already have a duty to VivraTerra to find the builder of the Utah lab and report my findings, so I’ll have to reveal the truth to my superiors.
“You can tell them that I built the reactor. I’ll even give you the plans so you can pass them on to the NASC. I don't have any reason for keeping them to myself; but you can do all that without revealing what I really am.”
“There may naturally be some questions about how a 14 year old girl could accomplish so much, but I’ll give you my word that I’ll be as discreet as possible without breaking my oath.”
Sheila nodded. “Once you have the full story, I’m confident you’ll appreciate the need for discretion.”
A jump point appeared in front of me, in the shape of a glass ball, supported about four feet off the ground by a column of light. The orb pulsed a steady blue.
“Please follow me” Sheila turned to Melanie. “I’m sorry, but this information is for Jarrod only.”
“Ok, but afterward I need to have a word with you about all these security breaches. You’ve created a big mess, and I need to make sure that nobody can ever do this again.”
“I’ll call you once Jarrod and I are done.”
Melanie pursed her lips, then blinked out, leaving Sheila and me alone on the beach. Sheila steppe up to the jump point, placed her hand on the orb and vanished. I stood and did the same, but this time I remembered to look down at my feet before jumping.
Chapter 46
I found myself staring at the feet of a robot. I took a step forward and felt it detach from the alcove it had been standing in. The floor was concrete. I was in a huge, dimly lit hangar. There was a dead server farm, a big metal cage, and at the far end, a cylindrical vacuum chamber. This was Sheila’s lab in Utah.
Banks of lights came on, five rows at a time until the entire hangar was lit from above. I appeared to be alone. I started forward to inspect the giant cage. All the equipment was well and truly dead. The heat and smoke had long since dissipated. I noticed that many of the pieces of hardware now bore labels, probably part of the NASC’s efforts to identify them.
My footsteps echoed through the silent building. Ahead of me was the reactor. The door was open, so I stuck my head inside. The interior of the vacuum chamber was a total ruin. Burnt and twisted wires, piping and metal struts were tangled together in a giant knot. Some of the material nearest the door showed signs of having recently been cut with a welding torch. NASC was slowly trying to dissect this mess as well.
“When this thing quenched, it registered as a small earthquake at the University of Utah’s seismic monitoring center.”
Startled, I spun around to find Sheila standing behind me. I opened my mouth to address her, but found myself suddenly overcome with confu
sion. After a second, that confusion turned into irritation.
“What is this? Am I still in a sim, or are you some sort of projection?”
“You’re not in a sim, this is the real thing.”
“Then why aren’t you wearing a robot like me? Are you manipulating my feed?”
“Everything you see is from the unmodified data stream from your robot’s physical senses. Go ahead and verify the certificates if you don’t believe me.”
I frowned, but brought up my interface anyway. The robot registered as authentic, it answered the cryptographic challenge I sent it correctly, and its data stream was secure. Yet there was Sheila, looking for all the world like a flesh and blood human being.
“Then what is this image of you I’m seeing? Do you have a holo-projector set up here in the hangar?”
“No, I’m quite real.” Sheila bent down and picked up a piece of tubing off the floor. With a smile, she tossed it away over her shoulder.
Exasperated, I threw up my hands, “Then explain how you can be here, because I’m at a loss.”