***
Chapter 7 The Ultimate Question
Tuesday, May 26, 2123 early hours.
I woke a long time later. I was in chains, propped against a wall. It looked like dungeon; a big tall one. A light hung up from the ceiling high above. I couldn’t tell whether it was night or day. It was warm and moist with the smell of food in the air. Weird. My helmet, gauntlets and G-phone had been removed. My left arm and leg were in casts. Somebody was looking after me despite the chains. The surroundings were bleak but what would you expect from a 800 year old castle?
There was something bubbling. In the centre of the large chamber was a circular inset in the stone floor covering half the area, and inside that inset was a bubbling puddle of gloopy liquid.
My revival had apparently triggered some sensor and from a hole in a wall, a cubic drone appeared and flew directly down to hover in front of me.
With no warning, the drone projected a laser beam, hitting my arm cast and cut it away. Then it did the same with my leg cast. My shackles came undone by remote control. I carefully stood up.
With little twists on its vertical axis, the cube indicated I should walk towards a door opening further along the wall. I shambled towards the door, feeling unsafe in my footing and discovered a short corridor through the stone wall of the building leading to a small, cool, completely metallic hygenisation chamber. I looked around. No exit. Seemingly no chance of escape from this shiny metal room. The cube stayed on guard within the main chamber; it could detect my activity easily enough.
I nodded sagely. This was hospitable treatment for a prisoner in a dungeon.
I took my time with my ablutions. I remembered that plaintive cry from T-7. I wondered what had happened to her and assumed the worst. Overwhelmed by dozens of Gruyère’s drones. I wondered whether Terri-bots could suffer. I certainly missed her. It felt like young love remembering that point where we nearly touched and the innocence of that peck on the cheek. It did not seem right that I could feel so attracted to a robot. I was the very antithesis of a virtualista. I liked my women real and vulnerable. T-7 was like no other android. She, I could never call T-7 an “it”, seemed real. And vulnerable.
As I showered, I considered whether I was being prep-ed for a meeting. Perhaps a meeting with the central core Gruyère entity; the mastermind of the HQ, the Lord of the Manor. Oh dear, I realised it was possible that I was just about to have my brains sucked out! Maybe absorbed entirely into the cheesy matrix. I used my tongue to see whether I still had my cyanide capsule in my molars. No, it was gone. So, there was no escape by easy suicide either.
Perhaps I could try out for a heroic death.
I tested out my arm and leg. They seemed a bit stiff but otherwise ok. I guess I was ready; Ready to meet Gruyère, in whatever hideous form it had discovered within the HR Giger Museum.
Re-clothed, I walked back to the main chamber and the drone backed away, up and out of view.
What now?
***
Tuesday, May 26, 2123 a few minutes later.
I did not have long to wait.
There was a gurgle from the ooze in the centre of the chamber.
A column of sludge rose up until it was about man height and then the muck became tighter as though it had been placed in vacuum-packed sandwich bag. I could see limbs forming, a body, head, face. OMJ. I could not believe it! Gruyère’s final form: it was Max! Like a living-statue street performer of Max, his colouring was matt and monotone, a dull yellow. It must be cheese. Ah-ha. This explains a lot. Gruyère had established a mechanism for amoeba-like motion and was able to control its overall external shape.
This cheesey humanoid form advanced toward me in a sort of moon walk, with the leg motion and speed of travel out of sync like a badly animated computer game sprite.
It stopped a couple of yards in front of me while I clung to the walls in fear. I could not tell what frightened me most; that it was Max or that it was a naked Max. Either way it seemed somewhat crazy. At least it was not a two-mouth lizard creature from an HR Giger nightmare.
It coughed politely. “Ah, Aaron. How are you feeling? Better?”
“Better?” I stuttered.
“You arrived at my home with some broken limbs and concussion,” purred the entity. Its voice sounded quite like Max but somehow deepened in tone as if via a poor public address system.
“Do I have you to thank for the medicare?”
“I think you do.”
“Perhaps… perhaps you should introduce yourself. So I know who to thank.”
“I recognise you, Aaron. Don’t you recognise me?”
“Well, I know who you look like but the guy I’m thinking of had this habit of staying the same shape. Even through Christmas Dinner,” I said with as much bravado as I could muster.
“I don’t think we ever had er… Christmas... dinner together, did we?”
“Well, I see I have to be careful with what I say. You do seem to have some memories from my girl friend’s ex. That doesn’t quite explain who or what you are?” I said trembling, trying to nonchalantly steady myself against the castle wall.
“I see your problem. Yes, I have a lot of people’s memories. A lot of people’s.”
“I assume you will be adding me to that list shortly,” I said with teeth gritted to stop them chattering, wishing I had that cyanide pill.
“All in good time. There’s no hurry.” The entity paused and moon walked around. It had sensed my nervousness and was giving me time to relax. As torture interrogations go, this was five star service.
It came towards me. I guess, when it sensed my heart rate returning to a normal pattern.
“In essence, I am Max. That’s who I feel I am. It was Max that made me, that created me.”
“You’re Max?” I puffed.
“You sound skeptical. I can understand that.”
“This is all a bit Jekyll-and-Hyde. You know... Mad Scientist inadvertently creating a monster out of himself.”
The Max-like thing laughed. “You’re right! What a cliche, right?”
“Couldn’t you have just used a proverbial magic potion instead of all this time travel and science business?”
“You mean the decades of work to re-create my own body, the effort in going back in time to find my one true love, only to end up killing her?”
“That was kind of sloppy.”
“But not as sloppy as having to go back into the future to find a method for seeding organic computing in a lump of cheese, then going back to Medieval times to set the process in motion.”
“Only to discover you’ve created the first sentient, hyper-intelligent artificial life form, with a taste for mass destruction and world domination,” I suggested. “ Yep, that was even more sloppy.”
“Well, maybe so but in the process I absorbed my own creator and only then, only then, could I finally realised what. I. am,” said the mannequin with emphasis.
“So you know what you are?”
“After all that exposition, I would say that was a certainty.”
“A lump of cheese. And you’re happy with that?” I said gripping onto a iron ring on the dungeon wall to prop myself up. I was going weak at the knees.
“Trying to rile me, Aaron. I like that. I like that a lot.”
“One of the better cheeses, of course, but still kind of stinky.”
“Enough. You are not strong enough to challenge me. Physically, intellectuality or emotionally...” The thing sneered with a minor threat-level increase, its colour darkening to a gentle orange.
“So let’s er… keep it conversational, huh?” I interrupted.
“The cheese was an enabler,” said the thing in a Max-like way, returning to its previous tone and complexion. “The cheese merely hosted the organic computer. It had to be living tissue to transfer both the physical and chemical components of the mind.”
“Apparently so, but that does not make you Max. Merely a post box. Or a bag... for the groceries.”
“The contents is consciousness, Aaron. That’s independent of the physical vessel. For all intents and purposes, I am Max. I have his memories. I have his drives. I have his ambitions. This is my dominant personality. I feel as though I am him. Call me Maximus, if you like, if you need some digital separation.”
“So… er… Maximus. What do you want? You know, what do you, as an all-powerful being, want with me, your absorbed mentor’s ex-sweetheart's man-friend?”
“Hmm. Let’s have lunch.”
***
Tuesday, May 26, 2123 a few minutes later.
“Lunch” was provided in a gothic-style hall just a short walk from the chamber. There was a large table filled with a mix of medieval relics and HR Giger paintings and art works. Several paintings repeated the theme of a beautiful woman pierced with metal spikes. Other works centred upon bio-mechanical alien creatures. One wall seemed to consist of an installation of masks of dead babies. The windows were draped. I could not tell whether it was night or day.
The Maximus entity, its feet not quite on the ground, had escorted me there with two cubic drones following us. There was a level of underlying menace but no worse, really, than a cashier lobby in a bank.
“What would you like to eat?” the thing purred.
I was going to say pizza. But it was probably bad politics to eat cheese in this place… I caught myself in time and said pasta.
On the table there was a collection of objects associated with opulence. Fruit, wine, condiments, cutlery but the fruit was rotting in the bowl, the wine bottle dusty and the cutlery rusty.
As we waited, Maximus explained how it had moved Giger’s artwork from the museum in town, to the Castle. It explained how it was intending to redecorate the castle.
I remembered the trip out to Switzerland and our review of Giger’s work. “You mean with the sci-fi structures and alien skeleton bones?”
“I might not be using alien bones…”
“Ah...”
The food arrived by drone, just like it would in a classy restaurant, even providing me with a little “reveal” before the heat cover flew away.
“Are you eating with me?” I enquired as I cleaned up a rusty fork. The food looked and smelled good. I realised how hungry I was and ploughed into it.
“No, I’ve already eaten,” replied Maximus. It’s voice not as booming as before.
I bet it had: the souls of millions. The monster thinks its Max, made itself look and talk like Max, but I knew it was not. It was monster, a parasitic creature, even if it could present itself in human form and had good table manners.
“You asked what I wanted with you,” it said, breaking a silence created as I concentrated on my food.
I looked up briefly.
“I need to broker a truce…” said Maximus.
“Hmm,” I said.
“There is no reason for Terri and I to fight.”
“Hmm,” I said again.
“While I know that ultimately I will prevail, I can only do this at Terri’s expense. When she dies, that is the end of humanity. And I prefer not to do that. I would prefer peace. I would prefer that Terri lives.”
“Hmm,” I said, wiping my lips. “Ok. I’ll just finish lunch and you can return my jet pack, I’ll deliver the message. Anything else?”
“That would be simple, wouldn’t it? Blame the Mad Scientist in me... but that is just too simple,” purred the thing, its colour indicating annoyance.
“Well give me a letter, full description of your offer, and we arrange some trust-building activities. You know, stopping city destruction, hand back North America... that sort of thing,” I said as I cleaned my plate and wiped my mouth.
“Yes, trust is the key. It is all about trust. All relationships are built on trust. And that is why I am so pleased to have you here, Aaron, as a living breathing being. Since only you can answer this question for me. I consider this to be the ultimate question.”
“Ultimate?”
“It may be the last question asked of mankind.”
“And me? You want me to answer it?”
“You.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Yes.”
“What question?”
“Why… why did she… ever... go out... with you?”
“Terri?”
“There’s only been the one girl in my multiple lives.”
“You should get out a bit more.”
“Why did she ever go out with you!?” blasted the thing forcefully, flashing a red colour for an instant.
“Hey, whoa. Slow down here, Max. It’s girls, isn’t it? Who knows what goes through their minds. In any case, you’ve absorbed enough people to know how they work, right buddy?” I said as agreeably as I could.
“I absorb their memories. I’ve absorbed a whole continent of memories. I’ve even absorbed President Rodin-Bush himself.”
“Barry? You’ve absorbed Barry? And you still don’t know how people think?”
“How? I know how. I know what they’ve experienced and how they act. I just don’t know why. Why! Why?” said the thing and it started pacing back and forth in an almost realistic fashion, colour draining from its form.
I felt I needed to cheer up my enemy. “Why? Human behaviour? That’s tricky... but you’ve done a great job with the Terri-bots. You built them, right? Really. I can’t tell the difference, between a Terri-bot and the real Terri. Remarkable.”
“I cheated,” sighed Maximus, its colour going even duller and less reflective.
“You cheated?”
“Yes. They are not real replicants at all.”
“They’re clones? Like real people? Like me?” I stuttered, having to confront my own Bombz-like condition.
“No,” sighed Maximus. “For that I would need Terri’s full data from her entangle-scan-o-gram. Terri forced me to delete that data.”
“Then how did you do it? How could you reproduce her personality so completely?”
Maximus sighed. “You are dealing with a mad, mad scientist here.”
“Well that goes without saying,” I consoled. “Hey, I, too, am a member of Mad-Sci-Soc. I do crazy stuff too. Maybe not in the same league as you, Max. But hey, I cross the line. I go over the boundaries.”
Maximus sighed again, “I know, Aaron. I’ve absorbed enough of your clones to know about your base jumping, leg smashing exploits... your dabbling with the Legacy Net and so forth.”
“You have? You’ve already got my memories?”
“I can absorb considerable experience from the freshly deceased. So yes, from your former-selves in previous conflicts, I can process your past life histories. Those cyanide pills, though… that’s quite an unpleasant experience by the way. For both of us. You should let Terri know that you need a nicer suicide method.”
I nodded, wide-eyed.
“So you can imagine how pleased I am that I have you here now, conscious and not dead. All I had to do was to just fix a few bones and remove the cyanide pill before you woke. Well perhaps you can’t appreciate it, but let me assure you, that I am pleased you are here. So pleased. Now you can answer the ultimate question.”
“Ultimate question?”
“Why did she ever go out with you,” Maximus reminded me.
“Right.”
“So?”
“You’ve got my memories. You’ve got hers. Why can’t you extract it from her?”
“It’s not about memories. It is about how you use your experience to make the decisions. It’s about thought processes. The logic. The why! The what-ifs!”
“Ah. Not so easy.”
“It’s like reconstructing the logic of the ones and noughts instructions for a computer program to find out why the bank has not paid your salary this month.”
“So you’re after a logic analyser? To find the computer program of the mind?” I suggested.
“Indeed. A mind disassembler and debugger!” added Maximus with a smirk.
“
But haven’t you already done this with the Terri-bots? Programmed their behaviour? They seem so perfect. Just like the real Terri. Ok, maybe just a bit more neurotic. But the Terri-bot is some nice reverse engineering. You’d need something like a mind debugger for that, surely.”
“As I said, I cheated.”
“Yes, you said you cheated.”
“Yes, I cheated. I don’t know how anybody could have missed this. It is so obvious for everyone to see. In the Terri-bot construction, the way they behave, who originally created them and the whole situation that I created. My very existence. My whole empire!” ranted Maximus, its surface radiating brighter colours.
“Ok, you are going too far on The Crazy, here. You need to wind back. If you have my memories you should realise I don’t have the antenna to receive on all radio frequencies. You know, I don’t always have enough money for my brain bill… I’m a few fuses short of a full circuit...”
“Yes. I appreciate that hence my ultimate question.”
“So enlighten me, please, Max. What’s the connection?”
“The connection for all this is the organic computer!”
“Right. Er… and how is this cheating again?”
“I promised Terri that I would delete her data.”
“You said you did delete her data.”
“I did. From the supercomputer.”
“So you had a backup?”
“No each body is a Yottabyte even after compression. There is no room for backups.”
“So I don’t get it.”
“I know Conrad and Terri have been over this with you, Aaron. You have to think. I need you to think about this and indeed things more complicated than this.”
“I can hear what you say, Max, but this whole situation, is, you know, rather terrifying for me and it has sort of reduced my IQ to room temperature. I was hoping you could be a bit more expansive to warm me up.”
“The Holding Matrix,” sighed Maximus.
“The Holding Matrix? Where you stored Terri’s mind… during the entangle scan!”
“Not during the entangle scan! It's required for the reconstruction process! We need to hold the contents of the mind in an organic computer during the re-build phase otherwise mind functions are lost.”