Molly Fyde and the Land of Light (The Bern Saga #2)

The place really was busy, she saw. And being run like clockwork. Several species Molly didn’t recognize moved through the lobby, listening to a Stanley as he gave them a tour.

“Fyde, Parsona,” their Stanley said to the Stanley behind the desk. Then he turned to Molly and explained, “Your mother will be told to expect you. How long will you be visiting?”

Molly hadn’t thought about that. How long would she need? How different would this be from talking to the “mom” in her spaceship?

“A few hours?” she asked out loud.

“Put her down for three hours, Stanley.”

“Very good, Stanley.” The man behind the desk produced three visitor passes.

Their guide turned and handed them the passes, which they draped over their necks. Then he turned to Cole and pointed to a large portrait on the wall. “Your question, my good man, regarding Dr. Dakura’s intellect is still awaiting its answer. Let’s go down a few levels and see for ourselves, shall we?”

Molly nodded eagerly and followed along after their energetic guide. She put one hand on Walter’s elbow and guided him through the lobby and down a short hallway, allowing him to play his game without crashing into anyone.

An elevator dinged ahead of them and disgorged an elderly human couple. Molly and Cole both nodded, reflexively, as their group entered the lift. Stanley pressed a button and typed some commands into a keyboard affixed to the wall.

The back of the elevator flickered for a moment, then displayed a video. The first scene showed an elevator descending toward the center of a circular, gray moon. Below this stood a side-on view of the human brain.

“We begin our tour at the center of Dakura’s moon,” Stanley began. “At the heart of LIFE. Of course, ‘heart’ is a poor metaphor, a holdover from the days of anatomical ignorance. We now know primal emotions lie here, at the core of our brains.”

Stanley faced them, but still managed to trace his fingers over appropriate portions of the image. It was an uncanny and jarring sight, similar to holovid weathermen back on Earth.

“Dr. Dakura’s genius,” he directed this to Cole, “was to understand the computer programs and previous attempts at AI were doomed due to their complexity. For hundreds of years, computer scientists tried to recreate an object around which they knew nothing. It took a psychologist who understood that object, and dabbled in computer science, to make the breakthrough.”

The video flashed to a shot of a scientist standing over a man as he slid into a scanning machine of some sort.

“Dr. Dakura knew two things about the brain these other researchers neglected to take into account. First, the illusion of a single program is just that: an illusion. Second, the brain is imperfect.” Stanley’s mechanical eyes peeled away from Cole and resumed their steady flicking over the trio. The video changed back to a graphical representation of their descent to the center of the moon with an overlay of the human brain on top.

“The human brain is composed of thousands of small programs, many of them working against one another. All of them are imperfect. They make mistakes. Dr. Dakura was the first researcher to introduce competition between his simulated brain modules and also program in a degree of randomness. Every now and then, his AI would ‘see’ or ‘hear’ things that weren’t truly there. They would incorporate lies as truths. It was brilliant work for which he never sought recognition, neither through publication nor awards.”

The elevator dinged. It must have been moving swiftly, but there had been no sense of it ever starting or stopping. Molly looked to her feet, wondering if there were gravity panels in the floor.

“Right this way,” Stanley said.

They filed out while another group, a Stanley and two Callites stood to the side. The Stanleys greeted one another politely. Molly smiled at the Callites , assuming they were a couple. She remembered the race from her childhood on Lok and was somewhat surprised the notoriously impoverished people could afford the services. The female Callite smiled back at her while the male struggled forward on two canes, barely able to walk. There was no need to guess which of the aliens was considering enrollment.

Molly stepped out of the elevator and made room for them to pass, pulling Walter along with her. Their group exited onto a long, wide balcony. Two other groups stood by the low wall lining the edge and listened intently to their own Stanleys. Beyond the railing loomed a massive chamber, carved out of raw moon, that stretched out for kilometers. Flat concrete walls rose up, covered with gigantic shelves on which stood colorful drums easily large enough to hold a human body.

“This is where it all happens,” Stanley said, waving his arm across the vast expanse. “Almost forty three thousand heavens.”

“That’s how many clients you have?” Molly asked.

“And counting. As you can see, we’re signing people up every day. Not just humans, either, as Dakura’s advances have translated well to other biological systems. And not all of our clients are sick or dying, I might add. Many of our clients are just bored with their normal lives and ready to plug into ours.”

Molly walked to the balcony and looked at the canisters in the distance. She thought about the analogy her mom had made of people in jars. “Is my mom in one of those?” she whispered.

“Oh, my dear, no. Our clients are sleeping in another portion of the moon. These cylinders are packed with spools of fiber-optic cable. Each cylinder contains billions of terabytes of data, stored as little pulses of light that move in and out of a reading and writing device thousands of times a second. We love to point out that people who’ve had brushes with death always saw a light approaching. We offer that. Literally. An entire afterlife created by light waves, a land of li—”

“It’ss a hard drive,” Walter said. Molly turned, shocked to see how rapt the boy had become. The computer had even been returned to its holster. His silvery hands grasped the railing as he leaned forward, peering across the expansive chamber.

“Why, yes, my boy. They are like old-fashioned hard drives. I’m impressed someone your age would even know such a thing.”

“He’s from Palan,” Cole explained. “Lots of antique equipment there.”

“What would heaven be like?” Molly asked, her thoughts far from the technical wizardry. “For my mom,” she added.

“Excellent question, young lady. I was just getting to that.” He addressed them all in hushed tones of wonder: “Heaven would be whatever you wanted it to be! Imagine that. A place where you can be forever happy, no matter what.”

“Wouldn’t that get boring?” asked Cole. “Or repetitive? And how can you know what makes each person happy? Or even leave it up to them to decide?”

“Quite right, and you are extremely sharp, young man. If Dr. Dakura were still around, the two of you would get along quite famously. And he encountered those very problems before he stumbled upon a simple solution.”

Cole narrowed his eyes. “Which was?”

“Leave the brain in charge! Dr. Dakura’s algorithm is tied to the pleasure module of his brain program. As soon as the client becomes less happy than it was earlier, the environment shifts. If the unhappiness continues to increase, it tries a new tactic. It keeps doing this until it maximizes data output from the pleasure center. It’s the same way a robot—much simpler than myself, of course—learns its way around a darkened room by bumping off things and trying a new direction.

“And the best part is, every interaction is recorded to make the process go smoother and smoother. Since the problems Dr. Dakura ran into never surface until after an initial honeymoon phase, the algorithm has you figured out before you even begin to challenge it!”

Cole raised his eyebrows at this. Molly knew the look well: he wasn’t impressed—he was skeptical.

She asked a question of her own: “When I visit my mom, will she be happy to come out of there?”

For the first time during their brief tour thus far, Stanley seemed at a loss for words. He pointed out to the barrels behind him, his head cocking to one side.

“My dear lady,” he replied. “She will not be joining you out here. You will be joining her in there.”

24

“I’ll be going into one of those canisters?” Molly asked, pointing over the rail.

“I’m so sorry, you requested a tour of the facilities, but I can see now that I really should have broken you into two groups. Ms. Fyde, you need a visitation tour. This is more of a facilities tour for prospective clients. Let’s go up to the guest suites and get you caught up and plugged in, shall we?”

“Before we do—” Molly hesitated. “Can I see her? Her body, that is.”

“Oh, my dear, no. I’m afraid that’s strictly forbidden. If you would like to continue the facilities tour, I can show you where the clients sleep and how that procedure works, but it is just a demonstration. Most of our customers pay dearly to be remembered in a state other than the one in which they arrived. It is a responsibility we take quite seriously here at LIFE.”

“Yeah, I’d like to see that. Before my visit.”

“Of course. Let’s hail one of our elevators, shall we?”

There were at least a dozen shafts that opened onto the large balcony. Despite the congested feel of the place, they didn’t have to wait long for one to arrive. Once inside, a video of a female in a patient’s gown popped up on the rear wall. She conversed happily with Stanley-doctors in a silent promotional video.

“We provide the best medical care offered anywhere in the galaxy,” their guide intoned. “Whether you are coming to us with an intractable disease or in top condition, our painless preservation procedure will maintain you and your brain for all of eternity. Neural growth is stimulated with the latest hormone therapy and stem-cell technology. Our own studies show conclusively that your brain will grow younger even as your body hardly ages at all.”

The video switched to a shot similar to the person being scanned, but this time they were slid into something resembling a morgue drawer. “Inside your personal rest compartment, you will find an eternity of peace and wish-fulfillment. Family members can network with one another, and you may even reserve the rest compartments next to you so loved ones may be just as close in body as they are in spirit.”

“How do you network the people?” Cole asked.

The interruption didn’t faze Stanley at all; he smiled and seemed to launch down another branch of his tour logic-tree. “We let our guests know when family members have joined them at LIFE. How they incorporate one another once a link is made is entirely up to both members and their individual pleasure algorithms. We have had very few cases of family members rejecting one another or not wishing to combine their experiences into a shared environment.”

“But you can’t include people that aren’t here, can you?” Molly asked.

“My goodness, no. How could we? They haven’t been scanned. No, the people that inhabit their own heavens are personalities they make up. Just like when you dream.”

The elevator dinged again; the video screen showed them three quarters of the way to the surface. Stanley waved Molly and Cole through the door, then looked back at Walter, who was reaching for the keyboard by the elevator terminal. “Let’s not touch anything, okay?” he said cheerily. “Excellent. Follow me, please.”

Molly shot Walter a stern glare and waited for him to exit the lift. She looked around at the large lobby they’d entered, the same bank of a dozen elevators lined up along one wall. The other three walls were broken up with hallways leading away in various directions, each cordoned off by a solid glass barrier. Stanley walked toward one of these and waved them along.

Through the glass, Molly could see the edges of the corridor, but not its end. The hallway stretched out so far in a straight line that the opposite wall became an illusion of converging planes. She watched Stanley reach into his coat and produce a card similar to their visitor passes; he swiped it through a reader, and the glass barrier slid silently into the jam.

Walter hissed with delight and reached for his own pass.

“I’m sorry, my dear boy, but your pass will only open limited doors on the surface levels. Now, allow me to show you one of our unoccupied rest compartments.”

They followed him down the hallway, which Molly now saw as just a long line of other hallways connecting at right angles. The layout created as much surface area as possible, just like the folds of a brain. Stanley turned down the first of these branches, and the rest of the group followed.

The sight humbled Molly.

Ahead of her, and stretching out for hundreds and hundreds of meters, lay a passage lined with square doors, each of them about a meter to a side. Stacked four high, the top row would have been difficult for even Edison to reach. Small LCD screens on every door flashed with a series of numbers along with the word “Unoccupied.”

“Is my mom here somewhere?” Molly asked.

“Down a different main branch, yes. This is our phase four expansion. We use it for demonstrations and meetings with prospective clients.” He swiped his card through a reader on the door nearest them and the cover hinged open with a pop and a hiss.

“This rest compartment could be yours one day,” he intoned. The door opened fully and a long metal tray slid out. “Imagine all the amazing dreams you could have here. An eternity of happiness. Is that something you’re willing to wait for? Why not start creating your heaven today?”

“Not interested,” Cole said, a tad rude for Molly’s liking.

“Of course,” said Stanley. “Just think about it. There’s a lot to take in and we urge you to return for another tour at any time.” He turned to Molly. “Have you seen enough of the facilities? Would you care to visit your loved one now?”