Sun Eater Ben Donnelly

Sun Eater Ben Donnelly

“The human mind is incredibly robust, we must view the neural net as a flexible membrane, self repairing and self ordering. Gouge a hole here with say, a memory graft, and the net slides and reconfigures to compensate. Memory locks and memory wipes and memory augs, the net can handle it all. It amazes me, professional people walking around with their heads like shelled peas, imagining that they are still human. Sure, they function in a professional capacity, but would you want to spend an evening with someone who can’t recall their childhood, their first love, their parent’s faces? And when the grafts and the augs fail, shit, there is no coming back from that black hole of personality, and this coming from a guy with sixteen different semantic response circuits and a hardwired therapy sheath. You starting to get the picture, miss? The man you wanted to interview has gone away through a door that you can’t follow through, unless you subject yourself to the same lab techs, the same experiences, the same brain augs, maybe then you’d be looking at things from his perspective, but I’d still say the individual differences in brain chemistry and structure would factor heavily and throw all resultant data into question. But hey, ain’t this just so much hot air and don’t you have a scheduled appointment with him? Go right on in please.” Susie slid through a glimmering matrix of bright white plasteen, past identical white airlock doors, marked with barcodes and heat etched with technical symbols. Hearing the language implant skewing spoken Japanese into an American drawl had fazed her, her internal barometer was trying to find out which way was up. An atmospheric purifier was sucking and pumping

somewhere above her head, drawing away microscopic skin flakes, allergens, dust participles. At the next door she passed she started back in alarm as a pale moon face, cracked with a leering grin, stared out from a little glass window. “Look around you honey, there ain’t no people in this place, jus’ memory allocation units, walking consciousness nodes, fucking radio masts is what these fuckers are, you wear your tin foil hat dearie, you drill your mercury fillings outta yer head, keep it secret and safe, hide the real you in that dark corner and let the rest be burned away, it’s the only way you can infiltrate, you have to be as dead as they are to get in the door.” Susie quickened her pace, winding further and further in to the facility, which was shaped like a hexagon, with corridors spiraling round the polygon and linking into stairwells at either end. The ravaged face stayed with her, did a little turn in her mind’s eye, then slipped under and away into Susie’s total recall cache, her memory dump for the day’s work ahead. When she rounded another corner and was greeted with an open door she knew she had arrived at her destination. Essen Narcos lay in a state of the art Honda hospital bed, watching Japanese anime at full volume. On a view screen that stretched across the ten cubic feet of his room two brightly coloured fighting robots were taking lumps out of each other. When Susie stepped through the picture the old man’s attention flicked across her with chilling efficiency, taking in her suit, her haircut, the Sony implants nestled around her right ear. His face closed up like a submarine hatch, battening down for a deep dive. “Mr Narcos?”

Repeating his name several times seemed to pull the old man back to reality, he looked at Susie with the sort of mischief only children and small monkeys can muster. “Mr Narcos, can you understand me? A slight, imperceptible nod came from his bulbous head, his attention was torn between the attractive young woman and the two enormous mecha reducing each other to scrap. “Mr Narcos, my name is…” Susie hesitated, then moved with purpose to the old man’s bedside and snapped off the view screen. With an indolent grunt the old man swiveled his eyeballs round to her general vicinity. Susie grabbed his hand and smelled the acrid sheen of sweat and effluvia from the atmospheric controls. “My name is Sophie Narcos, and I’m trying to find out what they did to you, Papa.” The old man was looking at her with a mixture of fear and ridicule, as if the angel that had appeared might at any moment revert to surly orderly, to harassed doctor, to violent cop. “You, know…” The old man spoke in a croaking whisper. “Them damn fan subber’s need to speed up their workload, episode four hunnerd aired on Tokyo To Sho last night, and me still waiting on episode seventy.” He was looking in the direction of the now discorporate view screen, and Susie realized he was talking about the show he had been watching. “Mr Narcos, can you remember how you got here? Can you remember anything about your life before you got here?”

The old man’s face shifted, looked away at the far wall. “Jinzo Ningen was trying to blow up the world, and Kamen Rider was off in space gathering power for his cosmic technique…” Susie bit her lip, sucked on the bitter pill of emotion that flooded her mind, as an afterthought she dumped her memory cache and felt her perceptions clear. She had to stay objective, all this evidence would be inadmissible if it was coloured by emotion in any way. “…and Kouchu Kabuto was writing a Noh play that would turn the whole world into a fiction, everyone playing a role…” Whatever memories the company had left him with were complete trash, Susie spent two hours in that cold and bloodless room trying to decipher his cryptic fragments of speech, but it was hopeless. Whatever secrets her father had once held had been burned out with an industrial laser, leaving him with random disconnected plot points from shows that spanned decades, discordant radio jingle samples and jumbled pieces of sight record that had no verbal connotation or relevance. Susie snapped a switch on the glossed bulk of the bed, doctor and nurse and morgue assistant all in one, and the view screen bloomed into hologrammatic symphony, polyphonic, multi tonal, all encompassing, the sea of information known as the net. It followed some rudimentary preset and defaulted to To Sho, Tokyo’s biggest T.V. network. The giant robots were back, and as far as old man Narcos was concerned Susie wasn’t there any more. She left the building, left Essen Narcos to his unending procession of distorted and disconnected narratives. Out on the street the language implant became a curse, and she unwillingly listened to all the minute problems and vexations drift past her, carried along with them, all of them just bubbles of consciousness in

another rigid binary system. Her memories of her Papa were disordered and fragmented, hard to access, shoved down into some non-essential organelle of the brain, leaving more room for fat RAM and neurons with a faster recall and exchange rate. Who was that man, in his hospital room, with his shattered mind like a lost and found box in some dingy bar? Who was she? Who was this sick automaton in slick business clothes, with a million hungry data analysts clustered around her optic nerves? What was the driving force that had ushered her through training regimes designed to punish, through applications designed to demoralize, through interviews designed to interrogate and workloads designed more for their psychological stress factors than anything like profit and loss in the conventional sense. But he had been whole once, Papa, hadn’t he? Hadn’t he been the sole executor of Yamamoto’s so called Slice and Dice division for his whole career? His memories were too valuable for a slash and burn brain op, they had to be somewhere. All that precious data must exist still, either flowing as part of the liquid net, or locked and sealed in some private company data hub, buried under miles of black ICE and armed guards.

Susie stopped off at a phonebox in Shinjuku, jacked direct from brain implant to LCOS and back again, spoofing the machine into thinking it was making an automated system response to some long dead alarm algorithm. Susie spoke to Hektor Schlichter, her department manager for Reyvolk Data & Acquisitions. “Susie, please tell me you have some new interpretation on the events of the past four hours.” This was Hektor’s way of saying that he had looked her data over from every single angle and found it lacking in actionable material.

“Just look at him Hektor, do you need to see steam coming from the ears to believe he’s been hacked?” Hektor’s face was a death mask of null emotion, his job required total composure and it was easier to just have brain parts excised than actually train oneself not to do something. “Don’t be trite Susie, the man is a write-off, that’s easy enough to see, but without even a hint of what was stripped out we can’t action any more time on his case, the data could be junk, sexual proclivities of Yamamoto execs, his own indiscretions, insider trading, without even a hint no-one is going to action it.” Susie was running at least twice as fast on neural kinetics, but Hektor had a knack of seeing the whole data bundle and pulling on the one string that could make it collapse. “Did you not see the care he’s under, Hektor? Yama are paying for that through a proxy company that once officially employed him. Let me spend one day down there and we’ll call it quits.” Hektor’s face was inscrutable, the only expressions he had were minute variations on vaguely bored and vaguely surprised, with only a slight interplay between the two. “Do you think you’ll find anything in some proxy corp? You’re emotional involvement is already being called into question, don’t screw up further by taking any kind of vested interest. That is all. Be on the next flight to Amsterdam, there’s a data broker of ours threatening to go rogue and spill his guts on the net. He’s got company payrolls and transfer records for so many corps that he’ll be safe as long as the data is.” “What do you want me to do Hektor? I’m only licensed for standard ops.”

“We just want a very covert and quick escort for the guy to our Kent Headquarters. That’s it. He’ll trust your credentials.” As Susie was about to hang up Hektor flashed her synapses, sent a pulsing wave of coded frequencies direct along her basal ganglia. Objective update download. The info streamed in at max speed, the fat pipe of the phonebox, with its COMSAT uplink, could handle a real time I/O exchange with headquarters. “If he’s already dumped the data, or looks like he’s about to, then we need him neutralized. The data is just too specialised, useless outside of our operations. If all else fails make sure it gets nuked.” “Right boss” Susie hung up, leaned against the window of the booth, darkness was falling on the Shinjuku district, and the outflow of harassed looking sararimen was refilled by an inflow of gaudily dressed teenagers and bewildered looking tourists. She sat in a karaoke bar and listened to some Japanese exec belt out “Kick Start my Heart” by Motley Crue, his English mangled by a lake of sake. Without even thinking Susie took the mic that he offered and got up to do a number, but when the music started she stood on the stage and cried, she couldn’t remember the words. A kindly old Ji Ji helped her back to her seat, bought her a vodka tonic with an ice cube in the shape of a panda bear. And Susie woke in a cold sweat, in a capsule hotel room not much bigger than a coffin. The dream was fast fading, but the overall feeling was persistent, circuit boards mirroring city layouts, mirroring energy exchanges on the subatomic level, mirroring the paths of neurons in her own brain, mirroring the paths the people took on their daily journeys through the city. A gross feeling of fatal synergy was building in her mind, typical signpost of a schizophrenic episode.

Susie gasped, retched, thumped the walls and ceiling of her burial pod. She was miles underground, fathoms undersea, lost in the discordant hum of interstellar travel. With great care to keep her eyes closed she felt under her mattress and pulled a thin metal case from its hiding place. Inside the case were a row of brittle plastic hypodermics. Ignoring conventional wisdom Susie jabbed one of the needles direct into her Femoral artery and sucked back a sob, the drug going to work like a dutiful lover, like a practiced ritual. Susie floated in her bathysphere, plunging down into a black morass of sparking neurons and the chiming ghosts of emotion.