The Immortality Option Part 6

"Replimaticon research, advanced cybercoding." Sarvik showed his teeth. "And you are Doctor Sulinam Queezt, specialist in cerebral augmentation implants and now offering replacement modules for impaired brains. Surgeon's degree from Stellem Academy of s.p.a.ce Medicine, 218; neural systems simulation, Porgarc Oceanic University, 224; seven years with MZB Psylog division, the rest in private consultancy; part-timing deals here at Central during the last two years, probably because of the use it gets you of their nanometric holoplex a.n.a.lyzer." In other words, Sarvik was from an outfit that didn't fool around with public-hospital-grade kiddy-toy computers when it came to code cracking. Two-all, game even. They sat down.

Queezt acknowledged this with the invitation, "A cup of graff, maybe?" Graff was a hot beverage made from a variety of dried ground seaweed and drunk universally around Turle.

"I will. As it comes." Sarvik set his briefcase down on the edge of the desk.

Queezt called to the room's domestic manager. "House. Two graffs, one plain, unsweetened. Hold calls."

"Okay," a synthetic female voice answered from the panel by the desk.

The desk was untidy with jottings and forms. There was a well-worn physiological reference work lying open; a receptacle for pens, fasteners, and office oddments fas.h.i.+oned from an animal skull; a vacation guide to one of Turle's submarine cities; and a book about how to outcon used furniture dealers by spotting valuable antiques-probably worthless, since dealers no doubt read the same books. A large chart on the wall, heavily annotated with handwritten notes, showed in detail the parts of the Borijan brain.

Queezt leaned his stick-limbed frame back in the chair and regarded his visitor unblinkingly with both eyes. "Very well, Dr. Sarvik," he said finally. "What's your deal?"

Sarvik extended a perfunctory hand to indicate the specimen jars and wired crystals at the other end of the room. "Why mess about with add-ons that just duplicate parts of brains? I can give us the whole thing: transfer of the complete personality into an artificial host. Think what you'd be able to offer with a capability like that."

"You mean a purpose-designed host? With augmented physical capabilities? Extended senses, maybe? Additional senses?"

Sarvik shrugged. "Whatever's possible. Anything you like."

Such a speculation was not exactly new, but that didn't make it any the less interesting. Queezt nodded to say that the implied possibilities didn't need to be spelled out. Specially built bodies forextreme environments was one area where it could be applied. s.p.a.ceworks riggers that wouldn't need the complications of suits and biological life support was another. Or perhaps those who wanted to could try being birds again and fly as their distant ancestors had. Or try becoming fish or experiment with being insects. Sarvik said nothing about his thoughts of achieving immortality. If he could gain Queezt's cooperation without it, what would be the point in giving such information away free? The two scientists regarded each other for a few seconds with cordial, mutual mistrust.

A light came on over the small worktop in the corner behind Queezt's desk, and the domestic manager's voice announced, "Two graffs, one regular, one plain, unsweetened." The hatch from the building's utility conveyor system opened and delivered a white plastic tray carrying two filled cups, a part.i.tioned dish of flavor additives, and spoons. A service dolly, resembling an upright vacuum cleaner with arms and a metal basket on top, rolled out from its stowage s.p.a.ce a few feet away and transferred the tray to the end of Queezt's desk.

"A silly fantasy," Queezt declared, reaching for a cup. "We evidently read the same fiction. Now tell me what you're really offering."

Sarvik shrugged indifferently. "I've told you. If you don't want to come in, it'll be your loss. There are plenty more headwirers I can go to."

"You've probably already been to them and they threw you out," Queezt suggested.

"Aha!" Sarvik chortled. "So you put yourself last on the list, then, do you? It seems that I had a greater opinion of your ability than you have yourself. Maybe I will take it somewhere else. Who'd want to work with a self-admitted second-rater?"

"I admitted nothing of the kind. Who'd want to work with a crank?" Queezt retorted.

"Whenyou can quotemy resume,then you might be qualified to judge who's a crank," Sarvik threw back.

"I tell you it's not feasible."

"If you had anything to do with it, I'm beginning to suspect, it wouldn't be."

"Grmmph."

"Hmmm?"

Queezt picked up his cup, tracking his hand with one eye and contemplating Sarvik with the other.

"Just supposing-purely for the sake of argument-that I believed you. What would you want from me?"

Sarvik replied by leaning forward to open his briefcase and taking out a wallet of the kind used to carry circulating charge-array microrecording capsules. He selected one of the b.u.t.ton-size disks and pa.s.sed it to Queezt, who inserted it into a socket in the deskside panel. Sarvik gave him the coded key to unlock the contents, and a moment later one of the screens on the panel began showing a replay of later test runs with the mechanical veech. The animal ran up the wooden steps, turned and ran down again, tumbled the blocks about playfully, and tried to climb up the transparent wall of its enclosure.

With full transfer of the veech's psyche, the umbilical wiring had been removed, and every detail of the surrogate's behavior was authentic.

"A toy veech," Queezt agreed condescendingly, and gave Sarvik a so-what look.

"Ah, but more than just that," Sarvik said. "It isn't running a clever simulation synthetic. It's hosting a direct transcription of the neural configuration extracted from a live animal. It's a real veech transposed into specially modified and extended Optronics. Now who are you calling a crank?"

Queezt did a good job of hiding his surprise and looked pained. "Very well, so you managed to transfer a veech ident.i.ty. But that wasn't what you said this was all about. You said you could do it with a Borijan. What do you take me for?"

"I didn't say I could do it." Sarvik clucked. "If you'd listened, I said that I can get us there."

"Why use a veech, anyway?" Queezt objected. "Better to stay within the avian lineage. If you knew anything about comparative neural anatomy, you'd be aware that the organization of the mammalian third to fifth middle lobes is completely different."

"Nonsense," Sarvik answered dismissively. "A simple software transform handles it.""What's the point?" Queezt challenged. "Why complicate things?"

"Greater generalization. Try thinking beyond your bits-of-brains horizon for a change."

Queezt sniffed. "Well, it appears that your own wider thinking hasn't proved adequate to the task; otherwise you wouldn't be here, would you? What do you want from me? It appears that you already have a source of suitable hardware and mental circuitry."

Sarvik indicated the screen again. "So far we have experimented only with animals. To extend the process farther and verify it at the Borijan level will obviously require Borijan subjects. However, we experience a distinct lack of ready volunteers." Sarvik rubbed his chin and curled his epaulets into a parody of a smile. "The, ah . . . the process is destructive to the original, you see. There isn't any way back, as it were."

Queezt thought for a few seconds and then nodded solemnly. "Oh, I see." It was all beginning to make more sense now.

Sarvik went on. "I thought of working out something along the lines of offering it to convicted criminals as an option, but you know how difficult the authorities can be to deal with." He gestured to indicate the surroundings generally. "Then it occurred to me that in a medical environment such as this, with people in all kinds of conditions . . ." He left it unfinished and repeated his crooked smile again.

"It might be possible to work out some kind of agreement with terminal patients." Queezt completed the thought for him. The proposition was clear now. Queezt sat back to consider it.

"They'd have nothing to lose," Sarvik said after a short silence, voicing the obvious for both of them.

"Hm. And on the other hand, they could gain a whole new extension," Queezt mused. "A somewhat unconventional one, maybe, I agree . . ."

"True."

"But an extension nonetheless."

Sarvik gave it a few more seconds to simmer. Then he asked, c.o.c.king an eye, "And do you know some that might be suitable, by any chance?"

Queezt nodded. "Oh, yes. And in some cases their impairment is purely physical. The neural codes could probably be extracted complete."

"That would be perfect."

Which left only one more immediate point to be sure they were clear about. "What would be my side of this?" Queezt inquired.

Sarvik shrugged. "Whatever you can work with the patients and their attorneys, I presume."

"Better than that, please, Dr. Sarvik," Queezt said in a forced weary tone.

"Very well. A quarter of the rights on the cerebral prosthetic business when we get to full replacement brains," Sarvik offered.

"A quarter?" Queezt screeched. "What do you think I am, a charity? Without me in it, there wouldn'tbe any prosthetic business. Three-quarters."

"Three?" Sarvik squawked back. "You're only supplying bodies. I'm giving you the rest on a plate.

All right: sixty-forty."

"Which you wouldn't do if you had a viable alternative," Queezt pointed out. "Fifty-fifty."

Sarvik shook his head and rapped the desk with an extended finger. "Fifty-five and forty-five's my limit." He waited, knowing that Queezt knew there was something further.

"And?" Queezt prompted.

"Okay. There's also a side deal that's being worked with Cosmopolitan Life: backup copies on file, if we can make it nondestructive. It could be a big angle for them. I'll cut you in at ten percent of my share."

Queezt nodded that he understood. "Twelve and a half?" he ventured, studying Sarvik calculatingly with one eye while the other watched Sarvik's fingers drumming on the desk.

"Twelve and a half, then," Sarvik agreed. It didn't really matter, since he wasn't in on the deal withCosmopolitan, which in any case was a ruse he'd set up to fool Marog Kelm. But it would boost Sarvik's story when Queezt verified-as he surely would-that Cosmopolitan was talking to somebody at Replimaticon.

They went over the kinds of things that could go wrong and how to deal with the lawsuits that would probably follow, and then argued about medical and scientific ethics. Sarvik left a half hour later, feeling pleased with his morning's work.

GENIUS 5 called him via his lapel phone while he was considering what to do for lunch. "I found some confidential records in Toymate which say that they put Leradil Driss inside Replimaticon to check on the story that Prinem Clouth is telling them," it said.

"Oh," Sarvik answered. It didn't feel right.

"Too confidential," GENIUS went on. "In fact, so confidential that n.o.body inside Toymate could have accessed them. There's no combination that factors to a valid code. And yet the protection against external penetration was ridiculously thin."

"What do you make of it?" Sarvik asked.

"The records were planted there by some other outfit as a cover to throw us off," GENIUS replied.

"An outfit that's got some heavy-duty capability. In other words, whoever she's really working for is into something a lot bigger than making toys."

"Ah!" That sounded more like it. Sarvik gave a satisfied smile. "Isn't that just what I've been telling you all along?" he said. "So what have you got to say about biological intuition now?"

13.

The director of Replimaticon's security and espionage services was a former government operative by the name of Tuil Garma. With clear indication of a spy operating internally on behalf of an unknown agency for unknown reasons, the normal thing would have been for Sarvik to bring Garma in at that point as the connivance's specialist in such matters. However, Sarvik's own illicit delvings had brought to his notice the distinct p.r.o.neness that people who involved Garma in their affairs seemed to have for coming to grief in their own entanglements, and his confidence in the wisdom of such a course of action fell considerably short of comfortable. Besides, he told himself, why rush to reveal to the world the nonpareil at security penetration GENIUS 5 was turning out to be? There was no doubt all kinds of juicy information hidden away in Replimaticon's most secure data levels. Owning something as formidable as GENIUS could, he reflected, prove to be the means of turning things around and slipping a big one over, himself, on Garma some day. Heh-heh-heh.

Accordingly, Sarvik decided to instigate some private espionage activity of his own. His first step consisted of recruiting GENIUS to create and launch out into the planetary net a viruslike software construction known as a boomerang. At the same time, he inserted sections of identifiable tracer code inconspicuously into the files that Leradil Driss had been snooping in.

A boomerang worked by first replicating into copies that would find their way into the systems of other connivances, governing agencies, scientific inst.i.tutions, and other organizations all over Turle.

Those places took pains to try to prevent such penetration, of course, but as with all evolutionary contests, the advantage was constantly s.h.i.+fting from offense to defense and back again, never remaining the same for long or reaching the same stage of advancement everywhere at the same time. With GENIUS 5 as his ally, it seemed that for the moment Sarvik was ahead of much of the game. Once inside a target system, the boomerang would become active and search for the tracer codes that had been planted in the doctored files at Replimaticon. Any copy that succeeded would then retransmit itself back through the net to Replimaticon, bringing with it information on where it had returned from and what it had found there.

The hostile turned out to be a consortium of interests loosely federated under the name of Farworlds Manufacturing: a conglomerate of enterprises joined by the common attribute of beinginvolved in the Borijan remote interstellar supply business.

The Borijan civilization numbered somewhere around thirty billion individuals spread across Turle, several of Kov's other ten worlds and their moons, and various artificial orbiting and freely mobile constructions in between, but they had never established colonies beyond their home planetary system.

This had more to do with the innately suspicious and adversarial Borijan nature than with any lack of the knowledge or technology to do so. Put simply, no group or faction had ever been trusting enough to venture far into the void, leaving others in charge back home.

Supplying the material needs of a still-growing, resource-hungry culture of that magnitude placed an increasing strain on a single planetary system, however, and the Borijan response had been to tap in remotely to the limitless potential available from other stars that n.o.body else seemed to be using. They built immense, fully automated stars.h.i.+ps to go out and look for uninhabited and otherwise suitable mineral-rich worlds. Those worlds were then seeded with basic, self-replicating factory installations that transformed the entire surface into a self-organizing general-purpose manufacturing complex for products and the vessels to s.h.i.+p them home in, dedicated to supporting the Borijan solar system from afar. This had been going on for more than a century. A dozen supply worlds had so far been sown, and Farworlds Manufacturing, the leading operator in the overall enterprise, was responsible for five of them.

Sarvik's first move was to contact Farworlds Manufacturing's security director, a man called Umbrik, and inform him that Leradil Driss had been uncovered. Umbrik reciprocated two days later by confiding that Driss had been let go for ineptness. She announced her resignation from Replimaticon soon afterward on terms that left her stake there forfeit. It had doubtless been put up by her princ.i.p.als, but the outcome was none the less profitable to Sarvik for that.

By disposing thus of Farworlds' agent, Sarvik had collected points in profusion and shown himself a formidable adversary, with access to powerful means for getting to other people's secrets. Further, in handling the matter himself instead of giving it to Tuil Garma and Replimaticon's official security service, he had signaled thathe was in control and therefore the person to deal with directly-never mind the firm. After all, they obviously wanted to deal over something that involved him, he reasoned. Otherwise, why would they have mounted such an elaborate operation to spy on his work? It came as little surprise, therefore, when he received an invitation shortly afterward from a man called Indrigon, of the Farworlds directorate, to get together and talk. Indrigon suggested meeting at the Farworlds headquarters, which was located two thousand miles away on the equatorial continent of Xerse. Sarvik, for his part, was conscious that these were not people to be taken lightly, either. He would not be looking for chances to notch up a petty initial point or two on this occasion.

14.

The setting was a partly outdoor terrace midway up the half-mile-high Farworlds Tower, which stood twenty miles inland from Gweths, one of the major cities of Xerse. Far below, a wide valley with a mirror ribbon of river winding among forested shoulders of hills extended inland toward distant mountains, while to the north the ocean lay behind a spit of headland that broke up into a chain of islands stretching to the horizon. Overhead, the higher reaches of the tower soared in overhanging cliffs of crystal that covered half the sky.

It was a leafy, flowery place, virtually a park in miniature, with mounded lawns, secluding shrubbery, backdrops of falling water, paths to walk on, and a lake. The Farworlds staff used it for relaxing and socializing. Sarvik met the three people from Farworlds in a low-walled niche set between rockeries and a screen of trellised climbing plants, where a cane table and chairs stood beneath a large red and white sunshade. Indrigon, sitting at the far end, and a woman called Lequasha, to Sarvik's right, introduced themselves as being from the directorate but gave no indication of their precise function. The third was Umbrik, the security chief whom Sarvik had contacted initially, doubtless there to see what he could glean of how Sarvik had penetrated the Farworlds system.Actually, Sarvik had no idea if any of them was even on the continent of Xerse, since they were all using a telepresence hookup. He himself was remote coupled from a public booth in Pygal-he didn't trust Tuil Garma not to have bugged the in-house services at Replimaticon-and sitting in a worn chair that was beginning to shed its padding. The image of the cane chair and the table before him, along with the figures around it and the scenery behind, was a visual composite from data streams originating in different places, varied continuously by the spectacles he was wearing to match his head and eye motions. The arms and other parts of his body that he could see were interpolated from the booth's video pickups, which were sensitive enough to capture a loose thread on his sleeve or a rough edge on one of his fingernails. The only thing that clashed with the illusion was a stale, garlicky odor pervading the booth. Probably some frustrated city worker with rustic yearnings had decided to take an instant vacation somewhere while eating lunch.

After the introductions, Umbrik opened with the comment that security was the paramount consideration in an organization like Farworlds. Sarvik had caused considerable consternation by breaching the defenses, and naturally the directors were anxious to learn about the ways in which the system was vulnerable. Umbrik conveyed without any great excursion into subtlety that the rewards could be significant for parting with even a little of the pertinent information.

Sarvik took such a transparent affront to his credulity as a test to see whether they were talking to somebody of a caliber worth the time of dealing with at all. If they imagined that he believed that two members of the directorate of an operation the size of Farworlds would involve themselves personally in an unexceptional discussion of security measures, he said, then they were wasting his time. If the management really had fallen to being that inane, then whom should he apply to for Umbrik's job, right now? The insult earned him his due respect, and the way was open for more serious business.

But among the Borijans nothing was ever simple and direct. Lequasha took things to the next level.

She was tall and lean, with a dark blue crown streaking to black in places. Her attire, a trousered suit with a short, high-necked jacket, all in somber maroon, added to her general air of aloofness.

"Let's stop playing games," she suggested. That was fine by Sarvik. He was there purely to see what he could find out. "Even if you don't want to discuss details, what tipped you off about Leradil Driss must have been the pointers in the Toymate files that it was Toymate who infiltrated her. Fair enough. They were bogus, and we put them there." Lequasha glanced sideways at her colleagues with one eye. "Why waste more time denying it?" They returned negative shakes of their heads to indicate that they agreed. She turned back to Sarvik. "So it's obvious that we know about the animal emulation you've produced that's good enough to make toy veeches behave like real ones . . . b.u.t.toys, Dr.

Sarvik?" One of Lequasha's epaulets quivered on the verge of disdain. "Wesend intelligences out to other stars-intelligences that reproduce themselves and manage entire manufacturing complexes. Leradil Driss was put inside Replimaticon merely to update us on what the coding research labs are doing these days, because advanced coding is of interest to us. When you saw through the Toymate deception, it occurred to us that perhaps a person of your abilities might be interested in more profitable employment here than in your present situation. That's all. Don't go treating yourself to false flattery on any other account."

But Sarvik wasn't buying that line, either. They knew what he was worth. If they'd gotten into Toymate, they were aware that the whole spiel about toys had been to set up Prinem Clouth. "Oh, come on," Sarvik said, feigning impatience. "Have they relegated you to junior tech recruitment? Places like Farworlds use smart-toy animators to brew the graff. If you think that's my level, then just say so, and we can call it a day."

"We get all kinds of people trying to edge in here," Umbrik said. "It's a lot of action. Everyone wants a slice."

"It was you that asked me here," Sarvik reminded them.

"You think as a favor?" Lequasha asked him.

"Suppose you tell me what you want," Sarvik suggested. Then, feeling that he had an edge, he risked adding, "a.s.suming that you know. Frankly, I'm beginning to wonder."Indrigon had been following from the far end of the table but saying little. He was squat and st.u.r.dy, florid-faced, and dressed in a mix of reds, blues, and metallic grays that said he was a person who could do pretty much as he pleased. Sarvik had already tagged him as the decisive influence among the three.

At that point Indrigon leaned forward. Sarvik rested his hands on the edge of the cane table and waited.

It felt distractingly like the chipped countertop inside the public telepres booth at Pygal.

"Very well," Indrigon said. It meant that Sarvik had satisfied him that he was distrusting enough to do business with. "In the course of the past century the syndicates involved in remote manufacturing have built up a unique store of experience and knowledge, Dr. Sarvik. Their projects run themselves without Borijan intervention, operating for decades, across interstellar distances. Farworlds is way ahead of any of its rivals. We think that the time has come to capitalize on that lead."