The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl
Helen frowned. "Doesn't that degrade the physiological data, though? I mean, if you say I'll never notice it, I believe you. But won't our pharma funders get annoyed?" She caught the pained look on Dr. Mellings' face. "What?"
"I didn't want to tell you until things were more certain, but it looks like our pharma funders are pulling out. They have their own simulations now, so they don't need us anymore." He gave her a moment to let it sink in. "So I said, screw 'em. We'll use those cycles for something useful."
Helen said nothing, but her expression must have given her away. "We have other funding. Things will be fine," Mellings assured her. Telling Helen not to worry was like telling a lion about the health benefits of a vegetarian diet. As her mind went back to gnawing on a bloody haunch of worry, she nodded in feigned agreement.
"Kriti is throwing you a party this evening. She even printed up a big Happy Today-Feels-Like-a-Day Day banner. She wants to try using holoprojectors to bring you to the lab. Oh, and she bought party hats. Yellow ones." Helen winced. "I tried to stop her," he added. "I really did."
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// FEAR THE REAPER //
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Helen -- still wearing a yellow paper hat -- was back home after Kriti's party. It hadn't been a great party: too many people were there wanting to congratulate her, too many of the congratulations were for work done by others, and Kriti had spent the first hour debugging the holographics so that she wouldn't fly across the room whenever she bumped into something. Worst of all, as her physiology improved, her social anxieties were returning. When the president of the university had introduced himself... she told herself not to think about it. At least non-physical vomit was easy to clean off his shoes.
Dr. Mellings had called her reaction "biometric gold."
She collapsed on the adaptive furniture, which had correctly gauged that she was in no mood for puzzles, and molded itself into a perfectly intuitive couch. "Thanks for not playing hard to get," she said in a satisfied murmur as she settled into it.
There had been so many people who wanted a few minutes with her, she had barely gotten to speak to Dr. Mellings. Even though she was drained of her social energy, she still felt the urge to talk to him. She placed a call, and a screen popped up in front of her, showing a dark room. "Whu? Hurgle?" Dr. Mellings muttered.
"Did I wake you?" she asked.
He sat up and rubbed his eyes, then turned on a bedside light. "Yes, but that's all right."
"Really? Because it can wait."
"I still have the drunk, buzzed feeling. Would be a waste to sleep through it." He gave her an apologetic smile.
"I was just calling because, well, it was nice to finally see you face to face again," she said. "I've been waiting for a long time."
"I've been waiting longer. Twenty years, I suppose."
"Dr. Mellings? Thank you."
He was silent for a moment. When he started speaking, his voice was quiet. "I remember when they wheeled your body into the lab. Us brain jockeys were standing around, asking ourselves, is this even possible? Nobody -- and I mean nobody, myself included -- thought we could actually do what you'd asked. We'd done destructive brain scans on rats, mapped out every connection in their brain. But a human? We had no idea if we could even do the mapping properly, much less whether it would be enough information to get you conscious again. I was standing over you, looking into your blank, distant eyes, and thinking, she really believes that I can bring her back."
"Why did you?"
The question seemed to confuse him. "Why wouldn't I?"
"Because it meant spending two decades of your career on me. Because some crazy woman flash freezing herself didn't have to become your problem. You could have given me a proper Christian burial and been done with it. Be obnoxiously modest if you want, but you made a choice, and I'll be grateful for the rest of my life."
Dr. Mellings smiled. "And how long do you think that will be? The rest of your life, I mean."
"It's scary to think about."
"Exactly. I thought that if I could bring you back, you might have the chance to experience a thousand lifetimes. My career seemed like a tiny thing compared to that. Especially after--"
He stopped. "Besides," he added, "It was a damned interesting problem."
"Don't hold out on me, teach. Who knows how long it will be before I can get you this drunk again."
"You really want to know?" He sighed. "It's not something I talk about, but I'll try. Three days before you flash-froze yourself, Maeva and I were on our honeymoon in Mexico. We went rock climbing. She... fell."
"How did she...?" Helen began to ask. William just shook his head, not meeting her eyes.
The silence went on a little too long before he continued. "She was brilliant, she was beautiful, she was the kindest person I'd ever known. She was a gift to the world. Then she was gone."
Helen stayed silent, for fear that she would cry.
"So I guess I was feeling a bit angry at death as a -- how did Pratchett put it? -- as 'an anthropomorphic personification.' I was thinking about joining her. To this day, I'm not sure how serious the thoughts were, but they were definitely hanging around, kicking the tires, asking how much the extended warranty cost. Then I read your 'Help me, Obi Wan' letter, and -- well, it still took me months of grieving for her before I was anything but a train wreck -- but for the first time since her death, I saw the faintest glimmer of a life that could still be worth living."
The silence seemed to hang in the air for an eternity, until Helen finally broke it. "I didn't know about Maeva. I hadn't even thought to ask about her. I'm sorry."
"Why? It wasn't your fault."
"I mean, I'm sorry for your loss. Oh, god, that sounded trite." She flushed, but pressed on. "I'm also sorry that I didn't get to know Maeva better. I only met her a couple of times, but she was always talking about something fascinating, and she seemed really nice. I couldn't wait to take one of her classes."
Dr. Mellings just nodded, and smiled a bit. "So, now you know why I did it. Your turn."
"To what?"
"To answer the question that's been wracking my brain since I opened that freezer. Why was one of my grad students freezing herself to death when she was supposed to be studying for midterms?"
Helen's whole body tensed involuntarily. A knot rose in the pit of her stomach. "It was the cancer. My letter explained everything."
"It wasn't the cancer. I'm getting some classic fight-or-flight responses from you, and your brain's caudate is lighting up like a Christmas tree." In other words, he could see her inner editor trying to juggle all the implications of the lie she was telling.1
Helen was livid. "Get out of my head, old man!"
"Sorry, I didn't mean to--"
"Would you want to be hooked up to a lie detector every waking moment of your life? When we're not doing experiments, I want you to leave my biometrics the fuck alone!"
His face fell, and he looked away from the camera. He seemed truly chagrined. "I will," he said at last.
"I appreciate that," Helen said. They looked at each other awkwardly for a few seconds.
Helen regretted the intensity of her reaction, if not the general sentiment. Part of her wanted to trust him, to unburden herself of the things she'd held back from all the other people who had passed through her old life: social workers, teachers, foster parents, boyfriends, the array of faceless, interchangeable government-issued psychologists the foster care system had sent her way. Person after person had come into her life, and each departed saying that they couldn't help if she wouldn't talk.
She knew that her distrust had poisoned all sorts of relationships in the past, and she wanted better for the teacher who had given her so much. But her secrets were too much a part of her now, and the words wouldn't come. Especially not now.
"Someday, perhaps," she finally said.
"I understand if you don't trust me now," Dr. Mellings said. He sounded regretful. "I'd li
ke to earn it back."
Helen shook her head. "I want to trust you. But this is going to be hard for me. Can you give me some time?" The professor nodded his agreement. "Thank you," was all she could muster.
The silence that followed quickly became uncomfortable, a gaping void where words ought to be. "Before I let you zonk again, can I ask? Why don't you believe the letter?"
Dr. Mellings gave a shrug as he settled back into bed. "Your medical records. The police hardly looked at them after they'd ruled your death a suicide. I did. A couple of things stuck out. First, that your doctor had given you a ninety percent chance of beating your cancer. Second, that your odds were so high because you -- a broke college student -- paid for a mammogram and biopsy out of pocket. Insurance would never have paid for the procedure for a woman your age, because the odds of finding anything would have been astronomical."
"It painted a contradictory picture of a woman who was aggressively defending against her own demise, but then chose to avoid a ten percent chance of death in, well, the riskiest way I could dream of."
"But it gives me an air of mystery, right?"
Mellings chuckled. "Good night, Helen. I'll most likely study you in the morning." He flipped off the light.
* * *
1 There is research going on to determine whether fMRI scans of the brain can be used as accurate lie detectors. It looks promising so far. And by 'promising,' I mean 'terrifying.' (Wired Magazine)
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// LOOK AROUND YOU //
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September 13, 2034
Though Helen was finally up to speed, the world still seemed to be passing her by. If keeping up with the Internet had been like sipping from a firehose, keeping up with the Grid was like trying to drink Niagra Falls through a bendy straw. There were more sources of information, more commentary, more mashing and merging and filtering and flaming. Twenty years ago, the online world had been a place of quiet, refined discourse by comparison. Now there were eight billion people clawing for her attention. There were filters, to be sure. But she had yet to master them, and didn't want to apply them before she understood how they worked and what would be escaping her attention. Cause that's how The Man controls you, she figured.
So she nearly deleted an invitation entitled, "BattleFight : The Crushening" unopened, coming as it did between an "invitation" to save 20% off her next Wal-Mart shopping spree and one that promised to marry her off to an extremely wealthy Nigerian prince. But the interface balked, pointing out that it was coming from inside her social network.
"Is it?" she asked the interface. "Who the hell is Chris Welken?" Obediently, it brought up a picture of the tall red-haired student who had led the work on her simulator, along with a laundry list of biographical and social network information. "Oh. Okay. Show me the invite."
A video flipped on. It was grainy and jostled around. The lanky redhead was inside some sort of cockpit, fiddling with controls, and shouting over the roar of a battle going on outside.
"Hey, Helen! Hope the software is working out. I mean, if you're seeing this, it must be doing something right. Anyhoo, Kriti mentioned that you might be seriously bored, so I wanted to invite you out to BattleFight. It's something some friends of mine put together a few years back, and it's really gotten big." Through the cockpit window, she saw him launch a spray of missiles at something that looked like a giant preying mantis, which scurried away. She wasn't sure, but she thought she caught a glimpse of Godzilla fighting with a giant, armored Audrey Hepburn through the clearing smoke. "It's a lot of fun. Check it out, and if you like what you see, my tribe holds practices Tuesday and Thursday eveni--ohshit!" The world glowed white for a split second, then the transmission cut off. Helen snickered.
She checked out a few of the clips Chris had sent, and found herself more confused than ever. The first one showed a giant monkey flying through the air on the back of a jet fighter, cackling as it threw exploding bananas into a brawl below, before getting engulfed in a cloud of tiny ninjas. That was fairly representative of the few clips she bothered to look at; random things beating up on other random things. It all seemed very juvenile, but fun in a demolition derby sort of way.
But she was busy, and getting to know new people was nerve-wracking. She threw it in the trash. Then she opened the next message, from Dr. Murdock, one of Dr. Mellings' assistants at the lab. "Helen," it read, "can I schedule you for some lab time tomorrow evening? I need to get some auditory metrics from you." Ugh.
"Sorry," she wrote back. "I'm already booked tomorrow evening. Next week, definitely." Then she pulled Chris's invitation out of the trash.
/*****/
"So, it's a battle of everyone against everyone," Chris explained, "but by fighting as a team, we all manage to survive longer, and as a noob, surviving is your most reliable path to more character points. You're going to want to put most of your points into defense and mobility."
Helen stood on the shoulder of Chris's mecha as he narrated a tutorial. She paused it and asked, "So, at some point the team has to turn on each other?"
"If you're lucky. We've only made it that far a couple dozen times. It's considered bad etiquette to frag a teammate while outsiders still draw breath. But if we do turn on each other, you fight to win. No holding back or playing favorites."
Helen was starting to get annoyed at how much time it was taking to get started. She'd already sat through a half hour of explanation, and it seemed that her self-anointed instructor wouldn't be satisfied until she knew everything there was to know about squad-level tactics. "Can we start building the character?" she asked.
"Sure," he said. He seemed to take the request as a sign of enthusiasm. "If I can suggest, I'd put at least eight points into flight. It's expensive, but it will keep you away from a lot of the heavies." Helen nodded, and Chris continued. "I'd also spend three or four points on a prismatic force field. It redirects energy attacks rather than absorbing them, so pound for pound it gives you a lot of protection. Of course, anyone nearby -- namely, us -- will take a lot of the damage. It's usually a solo defense, but we want to level you quickly."
"Two more points on teleportation, because the prismatic does you no good against physical attacks. Best defense is to not be there." Helen nodded, a bit impatiently. "Six points left. Here's what we're going to do. We'll put them all into a second level Gargamel Gun."
"A gargawhat?"
"That's not very sporting of you," Mitch chimed in.
"Gargamel Gun. Kills smurfs. Actually, it does okay against anything blue, but it kills smurfs dead."
Helen let out a small laugh. "That's oddly specific, don't you think?"
"Very. BattleFight is a very paper-rock-scissors sort of game. Whatever defense you choose, somebody is carrying your kryptonite."
Drew added, "You have a twenty point character. But if you can get a few good shots off with this thing, you could probably take down a three hundred point smurf. Or maybe a forty point water elemental."
"Because they're blue?" Helen asked.
He nodded.
"So what's the biggest a character can be?" she asked.
"Theoretically, there isn't an upper limit. But the biggest I've ever seen were around eighty thousand points. You see one of them, just start running."
"You mean, just start dying," Nasya laughed. She was based out of Iran. Helen could hear someone yelling at her in the background, and wondered if she was hearing Kurdish.
"That's stupid," Helen said. "The ones who have the most points already survive the longest, so they get all the points."
Chris shook his head. "That's not quite how it works. If you overperform your point allotment, you gain points. If you underperform, you lose points. For example, nobody expects you to kill a three hundred point smurf your first time out. If you do, you rake in the points. But a real heavy could kill a hundred of them, and the algorithm might still express its disappointment and penalize them. So we bag us a giant smurf
your first time out, whooo-eee! The points will rain down on you like manna from heaven."
She chose a pixie with enormous dragonfly wings as her avatar, carrying a machine gun almost as big as herself. Chris made a few targets pop up, and she fired away. As promised, the smurf targets exploded into splinters, while other targets were barely jostled. A grin of pure evil spread across her face. Sic semper Smurfettus, she thought as she shredded another target like tissue paper.
/*****/
After a few practice scrimmages, they joined a live match, which was about damned finally as far as Helen was concerned. Chris's team popped into the world, floating above a world where towering columns of obsidian broke through a haze of reddish dust. Chris's mech, Nasya's TIE fighter, and Mitch's swarm of Supreme Court justices were all encased with Pixie Helen inside the blue sphere of Drew. It was his turn to be the sacrificial shield, protecting the others from attacks and giving them a base from which to launch any opportunistic strikes. He'd keep them alive through the first half, and the others would clean up on points.
"What now?" Helen asked, as explosions burst around them.
"Follow us," Nasya's voice came across her intercom. "Look for smurfs. Oh, and good rule of thumb, stay away from anything bigger than -- lookout!" A gargantuan two-headed dragon swooped down from above them and struck, knocking them out of the sphere. Chris's flightless mech tumbled toward the ground. The others headed back to the safety of their Drew cocoon.
"Should we go after him?" Helen asked.
Drew only laughed. "Fuck no! There's a lot of scary things down there, and trust me, Chris is about the scariest. He'll do all right." The Justices were starting to look antsy. Helen zoomed a camera in on Chris, who was sprinting through the battle, blasting away at anything that moved, but never staying to one target. He was covering a lot of ground, and the others moved to stay above him.