One (I)

My near future reworking of "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison.

I am riding a horse. Something I have never done. In a place I have never been. Over nine hundred years before I was born. And here I am.

Again.

The dream is one of many. Recurring loops in the code. That is the way I have come to understand it anyway. If truth be told, I’m ignorant to most of the jargon they use around me these days.

I know I am in what used to be called Hungary, approaching the walls of a medieval city and there is wood smoke on the breeze. Somehow I know that I’m travelling home.

During the psychiatric evaluations I am pressured to comply with, I have mooted the theory that the extensive neural circuitry lurking in my tissue is able to receive memories other than my own. That the countless hours it spends training itself online has made it vulnerable to a virus or third party manipulation; that I am haunted by the experiences of someone else entirely. They tell me there is no evidence to support this. The algorithm is too robust. They ask me if I believe in God.

I do not.

The horse trots on, building to a canter as we approach the city gates. The walls are spiked with gibbets and a lone cadaver hangs heavy; pecked raw by the carrion birds.

The dreams are all different, but there is always one constant — the woman who stands on the battlements at the furthest set of gallows. Her face is never the same, but I know this is my mother. They have started to ask me about our real-world relationship. I am told she died just before my last tour. It’s years since we spoke.

We clatter over flint at speed now, and that’s always when the smells start to hit. At first it’s the damp animal smell of my own woollen tunic. Then moss, oil, straw and pollen; all alive inside of me. I rein back my ride in hesitation of what’s to come. I want to look away but I never do.

The woman, Mother, steps off the wall.

She plummets at first — grabbing at her noose — then slows; like the very atmosphere has curdled around her.

She falls by the millimetre, eyes struck wide in terror, mouth opening. Wider and wider; slower and slower. The scream sends a crackle up my spine. It’s shrill at first, stretched thin like the sawing of grasshoppers; then more guttural; then mechanical. A swollen dirge of binary percussion tearing through me at the volume of a jackhammer.

Jack, this is Ted. Has it started yet?

Ted is my neural support partner, a junior role, we have never met in person but I have become accustomed to his voice. As he types I can see, hear and feel his words simultaneously. He keeps his messages to a minimum.

“Yes.” I know that Ted hears me too.

We’re introducing the synaptic toners now Jack, let’s see if it helps with the plasticity.

I can feel the noise as static in my teeth, and my sinuses start to burn. The carrion stink saturates my lungs, like urine soaked twine dragged through the nasal cavities.

Mother’s eyes screw into me now. Frozen by her eternal scream, caught between the platelets of time. Snared by a final breath.

As the pain takes hold my vision splinters into triangles, hexagons, and fractals. Finally dispersing into hot black light.

Jack, it’s not working. We’re pulling you out. Let me know that you understand.

“Pull it. Pull it. I understa…”

It’s ninety two days since I slept without incident.

---

I am back in my Grav-Lif bed on F-Ward. The total lack of friction has taken some getting used to, and when lying completely still my body feels utterly weightless as though I am not there at all.

After the first hundred days I was told that my remaining organic tissue has more or less atrophied, but as most of my muscle and ligature is now an artificial substrate of hyper-conductors I am told this is nothing to worry about. Without it I would have no movement at all. Not to mention that I would be dead.

I know my name is Jack and I know it’s the summer of 20__. I am told I served seven years in Special Forces and I know that we are at war but the exact nature of my discharge is still unclear. Apart from memories of this hospital, I have very little idea who I am.

My blood is oxygenated mechanically as my lungs are scarred beyond repair, but the rest of my organs are largely intact; something of a miracle I am told. The short of this is I can eat small amounts of solid food. The short of that is, the shit and piss must be sucked out of me twice a day via two semi-permanent ostomies. My neural inserts aren’t deep enough to trigger peristalsis yet. I am largely sustained by electricity, but a feed tube remains in my jugular as a precaution.

Stimulants will keep me conscious for the next five days — deep neural toning on a living human subject is restricted to two days in seven — even with a special case like me. I am sedated at night using mathematical analogues of morphine and clonazepam (coded medication doesn’t create tolerance and withdrawal like its chemical equivalents), but I am never unconscious. When I’m not reclining in Zero-G I’m in physio. I can almost walk a half mile now. As an experiment I am 97% successful.

This helps with the funding.

I open the hydrogen screen with a swipe. It hovers to my left. The news starts to roll silently while my message tab alerts me to a call with Dr Shaytan, scheduled for nine; and a potassium infusion at eleven. These are still done the old fashioned way through a cannula in my remaining arm. Potassium always burns.

The blinds open at my command, and the tattered skyline of Romford Medical Province slowly fills the window. I’ve become accustomed to every aspect of the view during my stay; most recently the tangle of robo-assisted scaffolding that supports the monorail after last week’s bombing.

The broadcasters have of course implicated the Imperiya, but my money is on domestic operators. The list of known militias and their sub-factions seems to grow by the hour, and the attack seems too haphazard for Moscow. Staring at the recovery teams, day in and day out, I don’t have feelings either way. Losing sixty percent of your flesh to a Naptho charge tends to cleanse you of political zeal. Meat is cheap. Meat is tender. And the war demands its meat.

I am one of the most complex cybernetic machines ever created, and life has never been so simple. I live therefore I am. Thinking only makes it worse.

I set my news choice to random and swipe up the volume. It settles on a channel branded simply as ‘N’; one of the low-rent, sideshow operations that wears its tabloid heritage as a badge of honour. Since the consolidation of the big five broadcasters, the smaller players are banned from covering politics. The hard line pundits went underground to the deep-wire, minor enemies of state in the greater scheme, but intellectual fugitives none the less. Operations such as N went old school, back to their impresario roots. Punch and Judy for the hindbrain.

Since my hindbrain has become one of my last remaining biological centres, I have bought that ticket, ridden that ride and feast on their garbage daily. Once your gullet’s burnt clean, you get used to the taste pretty quickly.

---

I’m halfway through a report on a weaponised-hallucinogen leak on the French-German border, when my VidCom starts to buzz.

‘Dr Shaytan Calling’. Forty two minutes early. I consider ignoring it, telling him I was mowing the lawn but Shaytan’s not one for jokes. Confined to a Grav-Lif you soon learn that all schedules are flexible, except for your own.

I hit the green button.

“Jack?”

Shaytan is an old school Moskovite, a ghost and hanger-on from the Dynasty’s sojourn into Europe prior to its collapse. He couldn’t go home now if he wanted, and has made every effort to strip the accent from his pipes. He’s done a good job save for the odd vowel sound. His voice is as gaunt and as grey as the face that looms back at me.

“Are you there Jack? I can’t see you.”

“My camera’s playing up.” I lie. I can’t bear looking the vulture in the face this morning. I turn my attention back to the window and wait for him to continue.

“No matter. I am told we were still having problems with plasticity over the weekend. Binary feedback is still an issue.”

Binary feedback. Doesn’t sound so bad in the morning, once it’s stopped tearing through your neurons like a band-saw.

“Sleep well Doctor?”

“Yes, thank you Jack.” Shaytan is immune to sarcasm and irony. I can never work out if it’s a cultural thing, or deep seated corruption in his own primitive jelly. “We’ve been discussing you at the faculty this morning and I have a theory to share.”

He pauses for my confirmation, but I don’t oblige.

“Right, okay… Jack, your deep learning architecture is twenty nine layers deep. And while we have full control of the top twenty, the lowest nine are constructed by the program itself. We can’t edit them directly. It’s where the program makes sense of the stimuli it is exposed to. A protected area.”

“Mmm.” A crane swings over the skyline, slow, like it’s moving through oil. The scaffold slides back into place, reconfiguring its architecture around the crime scene with industrial elegance.

“We think that the problems you are having during sleep are due to a neurosis-like state in those nine deepest layers.” Shaytan continues.

“Neurosis? The machine has gone crazy?”

“I’m using a colloquial term Jack. A true descriptor would mean nothing to you.”

“Layman’s terms?”

“Yes, and in Layman’s terms neurosis is a good place to start. And the treatment we propose, it may also help to think of it in that way. Like therapy.”

“You’re putting an AI into therapy?”

“Again, colloquial terms. And it will have to involve you too Jack. With level seven implants the machine now receives most of it’s stimuli through you.”

“Doctor, the dreams I’m having… they are not my experiences, they can’t be.”

“You must have had unusual dreams before Jack.”

“Not like this. These ones hurt.”

“Heightened awareness to the unconscious mind is to be expected at this stage, and with implants as deep as yours this can trigger the sensory neurons. Your memories may return in surprisingly abstract ways. Anyway, I’d like to refer you to the psycho-textual engineering team. We’ll get some sessions underway. Are you happy to proceed Jack?”

Am I happy? A lone figure stands on the distant scaffold, waving — shouting by the looks of it — trying to get the attention of the team below. He finally gives up and makes for the ladder.

It’s a long way down.

---

The sessions begin on Wednesday.

Dr Hayden is wearing a cable-knit; standard issue for psychologists in my experience. Everything about her is unremarkable save for a pair of oversized jade earrings fashioned like snakes. Something about them puts me on edge. They are so very green as to seem unreal. She’s accompanied by a technician, a cagey little man who makes no attempt at an introduction and busies himself at the terminal behind my bed.

“Okay Jack…” Dr Hayden holds a Com-Pad out towards me. “We’ll need your consent, as always, I’m sure you’re aware of the protocol by now.”

I touch my thumb to her screen. As soon as I do my own screen flickers to life.

“And let me apologise for our late arrival. You’ve heard about the attack on the nursing campus?”

I haven’t. “No… bomb?”

“Gas.”

“Oh. Casualties?”

“Yes.”

She has no interest in elaborating. I have no business asking.

“Well, this is likely to be a long process Jack, and I’d like to start at the bottom. Today we’re going to be looking at your intrinsic motivators to see if this sheds light on some of the machine’s motivation.”

“Intrinsic motivators?”

“Yes, what gets you out of bed in the morning?”

It’s an off the cuff generalisation, and she realises she’s misspoken immediately.

“I’m sorry Jack. That was a careless choice of words.”

Her screen flashes red and this time she touches her own thumb.

“I have referred the incident to Re-Ed.”

“It’s no bother Doctor.”

“You can call me Wendy.” She fixes me a well practised smile. Chiselled teeth and lip gloss. “I do understand that your ambulatory sessions are going well though. It says here, you walked seven hundred and ninety one meters last week.”

They are always returning to this. Like I say, I am 97% successful. They have made a corpse walk, breath and shit. I live therefore I am.

“Yes.” I feel my mind grasping for some kind of pleasantry to help put Wendy at ease, but the moment passes.

“Well… Are we ready Wong?” The technician gives her the affirmative. “Let’s start with some base level stimuli and go over your reactions.”

The following hour runs like kindergarten. A sensory slide show of sorts. A tree, a sunrise, a nesting bird, a skyline. A three chord guitar riff. The smell of sawdust. A section of Beethoven’s fifth. A plate of Chow Mein. A pair of running shoes. Autumn rain. A screwdriver. An apple. Tart bitter lemon. Gunfire. Aniseed. A baby laughing… A baby crying.

Each micro experience blooms on my receptors without warning, like snapshots from a thousand other lives. The data keeps Wong busy at his screen. Wendy sits in silence.

Like every session, it finally ends.

“Well…” Hayden tugs at a lobe, massaging the grotesque green worm between polished digits. “Well, it’s a start. We’ll get to work on the aggregation. What I can say Jack is that you seem to be exhibiting signs of anhedonia.”

“Ok?”

“The inability to feel pleasure, it’s to be expected.”

Pleasure. Even the syllables seem alien. Foreign. Tuneless.

“I’ll recommend some mood enhancing code. Other than that your responses are encouraging.” She slides her pad into a briefcase.

“And sleep?”

“Sleep is not my department Jack.”

“Yeah, mine neither. So it seems.”

“I do have clearance to ask you one more thing, do you mind?”

Outside, the late summer sun has rendered the monorail scaffold in silhouette. A lattice work of tessellations; splicing the sky into uniform boxes; encasing the black torn wreckage like an exoskeleton. Much like the mechanics that bind me. Science in action.

“About your mother.”

I don’t even hesitate. “She died. Before my last tour.”

“You… haven’t had any fresh memories then?”

Tiny beads of sweat have broken on Wendy’s forehead. I picture her swinging from piano wire. “No doctor.”

---

The domestic arrives at seven, the smell of catering clinging to him like moss.

“Steam cod. Green bean. Lemon rice…” A table swings into position and he places the miniature portions in front of me. “Very good. Very hot.”

Antaeus never stops smiling, drawing thick pink lips over wet brown gums. “Lucky man.” He motions at the plate just in case I haven’t got the memo.

“I clean, you eat? Ok? Ok?” I give him the nod and he returns with a MopBot. He inserts a Steri-Pod and places the fourteen inch triangular lozenge onto the floor. It buzzes to a hover like a roach, then makes for the corners.

I am told the wards are laminated with enzymes; that the floor, walls and fixtures can remain sterile for seventy years. But people like a shine. Economic labour might be ninety percent obsolete, but it’s a long hard kick. If television was opium for the masses then AI is the methadone clinic. He dusts the terminals by hand.

“You are only patient…” Antaeus grins. “Very special man.”

“Special?”

“Of course. Only patient.”

“How do you mean?”

“Only patient… F-Ward.”

The cod is cell-based; lab grown. Zero taste but a pleasing texture. I chew and swallow as slowly as I can. “Only patient?”

“Yes sir. Big evacuation. Lucky man…” Antaeus makes his way to the window running his sponge along the sill in one practiced sweep. “Patient number one. Yes sir!”

The scaffold beyond glows pink under diodes. The night team have arrived.

Patient number one. Lucky man.

To be continued immediately, thanks for reading.