Shifting Reality

Chapter 3

3

MELATI FOUND THE BOYS in the room talking softly to each other. Simo had his hand on Shan’s shoulder and both were staring at the image of Stephen Grimshaw on the wall.

Melati produced the best careless smile she could manage. “Let’s keep going with your lessons. We’ll pick a different letter. Name any words that start with A.”

“Who is that man, Melati?” Simo asked.

“That is Stephen Grimshaw, your founder. I will tell you all about him later.”

“Can you tell us now?” Tika said.

“I’ll tell you when you’ve done your letters.”

After she said that, the boys were keen to do their work. According to her teaching program, she wasn’t due to talk about Stephen Grimshaw for at least a number of days. The subject of stock founders was another controversial topic in the raising of construct cohorts. People had found, by trial and error, that the earlier the subject was covered, the more a cohort would worship their founder. A bit of worship was good for cohesion, but too much would unbalance the group and make its members resistant to outside orders.

It was a measure for how upset they were that they asked to be told about Grimshaw. They clamoured for direction.

For the rest of shift, the boys worked too diligently on their letters. Every now and then, Melati spotted one or two gazing at the image of Stephen Grimshaw. None of them mentioned Keb. They were still subdued when the end-of-shift gong rang. They just stared at her and said nothing, their faces empty.

Esse swung his legs against the bottom of the chair. Thud-thud-thud-thud.

“No one has any questions?” She glanced at the clock on the wall panel next to the door. It said AB00:42, the last digit ticking over: 3 . . . 4 . . . 5. Louise should be here any moment. Melati needed a good bit of the sixteen-minute inter-shift period to get back home in time for prayer, at B0:03:00. Grandma would have her hide if she missed it for the second day in a row, after promising two days ago that she’d come every day.

Shan raised his hand. “You said you’d talk about Stephen Grimshaw when we’d done our letters. Can you tell us now?”

“I’m going home now. Louise will come soon.”

“But I want to know.”

“Can’t you guess? He’s our father, silly,” Tyro said.

Shan turned to his brother. “But then why isn’t he teaching us?”

“Because we were blue and we lost Keb.”

Nods all around.

Was that what they thought? “No, no, boys, that is not true at all. You’ve been very good today.”

She could see the thoughts churning behind Shan’s eyes. Good is pink. He shook his head.

“But then what about Keb?” Kari said.

“What happened to Keb has nothing to do with you. He will be back, I promise.”

“You promised he’d be better, too,” Abe said.

“Yeah, but he wasn’t. He doesn’t even know our names,” Shan said.

Tyro said in a soft voice, “What if he doesn’t remember anything from Before?”

Playing in the park together and other memory scenarios Melati had written out, and the lab had programmed for her wake-up modules.

Melati was sweating under her uniform. This was starting to look very, very bad.

The door rumbled and Louise, the B-shift carer, came in.

“Hi, Melati, hi boys.” She smiled her usual broad-faced and freckled smile and then frowned when there was no response. Looked at Melati. “Anything wrong?” She looked around again. “Why are there only eight?”

“Because we were blue.” Simo looked up at her. His bottom lip trembled.

Louise frowned. As construct herself, she would understand blue better than any of its translations.

Melati gestured at the door and she preceded Louise into the hall, where she explained what had happened. It was probably obvious that she was feeling very, very rattled about this whole thing.

“Wait—it was clear that one of the boys had a problem, but they still brought him back to the classroom without having done much to him?” Louise seemed as surprised as Melati had been.

Melati shrugged. “I have no idea why, but it seems so.”

“And the boy is convinced that he’s someone else?”

“He’s very certain about it. I’m not so sure. He knows some stuff he shouldn’t, about the station, but it’s general knowledge, nothing a general search wouldn’t turn up. But his speech is different. His attitude is different.” She remembered how he’d sat with his legs spread in a way older men did—not barang-barang, because they were too polite to take up such a rude pose, but tier 1 enforcers, construct employees of the Taurus Army, who were the administrators of the civilian part of the station.

Louise asked, “Does he have any shared parameters with the other boys? Does he know their names?”

“He didn’t know their names. He seems uninterested in them.”

“But that’s like—cruelty to them. They need each other.” Louise’s expression went distant, and Melati could almost feel the cold horror that went through her mind. Louise, cohort Azinger 9, would know and understand much better than Melati ever could. The bonding and connecting process was deeply important in a construct’s life. There was no natural equivalent. Not even the bond between mother and child was that strong.

“They’ve been asking me to talk about Stephen Grimshaw.”

Louise nodded, her expression still distant. “Did you talk about him?”

“Not yet. I didn’t want to risk it.”

Louise nodded again. “Yeah, I don’t even agree with talking about the mindbase founder as early as three days in. When I went through it, my teachers never talked about Lori until much later, and then they covered all of the founders, all the way down from Landau.”

Yes, but at the same time, a lot of mistakes were made in Louise’s generation. The construct program had seen constant surges of progress, followed by errors catching up on new processes, and causing procedures to be revised.

“Do you know where the missing brother’s mindbase is?” Louise asked.

Melati shook her head.

That was a question she hadn’t considered yet, and something only a construct would ask. “I’m not sure. It could be installed under the rogue material.” That said, six-year-old brains didn’t have the capacity to hold two complete mindbases. Either the odd memories were fragments, or the intended mindbase had not transferred at all.

“You were there when they were activated, weren’t you? Didn’t you witness the downloading?”

“When I sit in the lab, all I can see on the screen is the data going through. It doesn’t tell me what personality data are being transferred.” Or at least not without studying the details. There had been nine columns across her screen—and one had been irregular. Their heartbeats had been synchronised until Keb’s heart started to speed up. At that point something had happened to cause his activation to diverge from the others.

“You must find out,” Louise said. She gripped Melati’s arm and met her eyes with an eerie intensity. “Imagine if he’s wandering around in the system somewhere.”

Melati touched Louise’s hand briefly. “Don’t worry. Even if he’s still in the system, he won’t be wandering around.” Mindbases without bodies were just large files stored on a computer. They weren’t sentient.

In any case, the boy would show major behaviour problems soon. A shiver went over her back. It wasn’t fair to pass a cohort as broken as this onto Louise. It felt like shirking her task.

Melati said in a low voice, “The other boys will need a lot of care, especially the one called Esse. He seems to have a neurotic tic which we may need to fix.”

“Do you want me to look into that?”

“If you can.”

“OK, I’ll set the scanner on him while he’s asleep. What about their brother in the hospital? Can I tell them anything about when he is expected back?”

Melati shrugged, and looked at the clock again. AB12:16 . . . 17 . . . 18 . . . oh, rats! Even if she left immediately and hurried, she would never make it to the B sector in time, and there was no way she could run into the prayer room in the middle of the session.

And she had to run today’s log files through the data entry program before she could go home, anyway. Grandma would not be impressed.

“I’m afraid I have no idea when he’ll be back. I’ll try to find out. Promise them nothing, because we may not be able to keep those promises.”

“Yeah. OK.” Louise sounded dejected. It was going to be difficult.

“Do the best you can for them.” Melati touched her shoulder. “Tell Christine about your progress. She should be able to get most of the normal stuff via the log.”

“I’ll make up extra treatment notes if necessary.”

“That would be wonderful.”

She glanced at Louise’s Azinger 9 tag, and wondered why ISF never continued the Azinger line, because Louise and her four brothers and sisters were compassionate, intelligent and gentle people. Probably too gentle to make effective military officers.

Melati ducked into the bathroom, stuck her hands in the humidivac to wash them, and while she waited for the dry air to do its job, was overcome with an overwhelming ache to do the right thing by her family, for once.

In her mind, she saw the block’s prayer room with its mismatched collection of carpets on the floor. On the wall was an arrow pointing in the direction a message would take through the electrical wiring to get to the hub, which the modin Wahid had declared to be the focus for communication with Earth, and Mecca. She saw Grandma and the aunties kneel on the carpet, and saw the disapproving looks they usually reserved for the times when she turned up late to family gatherings.

She was trying to be good, she was trying so very hard, but she always managed to upset people. Uncle and Grandma had been so angry when she signed up. She hoped that somewhere in the dark void of space God was watching, and that He would make them understand why she did the things she did. But she didn’t think that God looked in the direction of New Jakarta too often.

She hurried back to the CAU, hearing Grandma complaining about the amount of time she spent at work.

Work, work, work. The whiteshirts are buying all the hours in granddaughter’s life. There will be no more time for family.

Grandma didn’t understand that she enjoyed it here, and that she might one day have a chance to meet the ISF officer entrance exam, and then she might be able to do something for her family in ways Grandma couldn’t imagine. Like paying for Grandma to travel back to Indonesia. If nothing else, that would make everyone listen to Grandma and respect her. It might even help her become head of the block association.

She found the initiation room in the CAU shrouded in a comfortable yellowish light. All the cots were empty, bedding and equipment taken off, except for one. Keb lay on the cot furthest from the door, closest to Dr Chee’s workstation.

Melati couldn’t see the doctor himself. Laura Jennings worked at her nurse’s station, her back to the door.

Melati knocked on the open door.

Laura turned around and frowned at her. “Melati?”

Melati was going to ask about Dr Chee, but she felt compelled to say something about that morning. “Look, I’m sorry about this morning—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I just wanted to say I shouldn’t have gone over your head.”

Laura shrugged, clearly still angry over the matter. “It doesn’t matter anyway, with what’s wrong with the boy.”

An uncomfortable silence followed.

“Is Dr Chee still in?”

Laura raised her eyebrows. “I thought you were about to go home?”

“I am, but I need his current security key to copy the log file to the DCX4000.”

“He was called to a meeting at the coding lab.”

Just her luck. A task that should take thirty seconds ended up taking thirty minutes.

Melati went a few doors down the corridor to the coding lab, a large airy room where people worked at clusters of computers. The room’s soft carpet—light grey and too new to show any signs of staining or wear—absorbed her footfalls. One or two people looked up when she passed, and greeted her. All the people in the room were familiar faces, the regular programmers for the construct unit.

A man said to her, “Isn’t it your off-shift?”

“I was told Dr Chee is here.”

“He sure is. Can’t you hear them?”

She listened. A man was shouting in one of the offices along the back of the room, the words muffled through the door. “What’s going on?”

“Dixon’s tearing a strip off the team who prepared the last activation.”

Melati’s cohort. She noticed the empty spots at the workstations. “Did someone make a mistake?” That would clear up so much trouble that she almost hoped it was the case.

“I’m not sure that I’d want to know.” He shrugged. “There’s talk of an inquiry. Go and listen in, if you want. No need to go into the office. You can hear them yell outside.”

He was right. Barely halfway across the room, and she could already hear a male voice yell, “. . . I want all of this cleaned up. When the system is in as much of a mess as this one, mistakes are bound to happen.” That was Major Dixon, the head of the Activation Department and their boss.

“But no one made a mistake, and I’ve shown you the proof of that, so I don’t know why you keep accusing our team.” The female voice of Rosalie, the system administrator.

“The system froze up. How do you explain that?” Dixon again.

“Because we are forever working with second-grade computers that are not up to the job. We were promised new machines by the end of last year. Where are those upgrades?”

And so on; Melati had heard all the arguments before. Like Dr Chee, most lab staff had no love for the computer system. It was slow. It required jumping through ridiculous hoops. Blah, blah, blah. Melati was sick of it. If these computers were so bad, they should try the StatOp computers stationside. See how quickly they’d want to run back to their powerful machines. Most people born to privilege did not realise what they had.

She peeked in through the window into the office. Dr Chee sat at the far end of the table, his arms crossed over his chest, looking very much like he didn’t want to be there.

His eyes met hers; he said something to Major Dixon, who nodded. Dr Chee rose and came out, accompanied by a waft of sweat-scented air, and shut the door behind him.

“Melati. Anything wrong?”

“No. I need your security key for DCX4000.”

“I’ll come.”

“Don’t you need to go back?” He could easily give her today’s code.

In the office, Major Dixon yelled, “I’ll take this all the way to Cocaro if necessary!”

He grinned. “I excused myself. I can’t see the point of staying for this slingfest. We’re just the front end of the computer operations and they talk about a lot of stuff I know nothing about. My time is better spent in the ward.”

Dr Chee led her across the lab floor, where people looked up as they passed, maybe hoping for juicy snatches of gossip about what was going on.

“Does anyone know what happened?”

“Not a clue. Everyone claims they did the same things they always do. But I read the boy’s mindbase after you sent him back. I’ll show you. See what you think.”

They entered the lab, walked past Laura Jennings’ office and into the activation room. The boy had his head turned to them. His eyes blinked amongst snaking leads of the BCI pads.

That was strange. “I thought he needed to be unconscious.”

Dr Chee shook his head. “Not when I’m only reading his memory modules.”

Was that all he was doing after the boy had attacked her?

In his office, Dr Chee pulled a chair from an adjacent workstation and gestured to it. Melati sat down and she was thrown back a few years in time, when she’d often seen him in here while she was studying. He’d aged a fair bit in that time, because when she first met him, his hair had been as black as hers.

Dr Chee punched the login command into his computer and navigated through the menus.

“I haven’t needed to knock him out, because there is no need to fix him. His mindbase is highly coherent.”

“But he attacked me.”

“I know, and I also know that there is something odd going on, but in this lab, we fix the constructs’ coherence problems and give them knowledge. We don’t tell them what sort of person to be.”

A feeling of shame made her cheeks feel hot. Of course, that was the first commandment of all professionals working with mindbase technology. They were working with people, not slaves. Mindlessly obeying half-human robots were the domain of Allion, and the people on Mars could attest to what evil they were capable of inflicting. Heart thudding, she glanced at the screen. “Is that the data?”

“Yep. Took me enough trouble to get that far. The computers have not been cooperative today. I had to restart my coherence calculations twice and then the entire lab environment collapsed and I needed to restart everything. Rubbish system.”

On the screen were blocks of code in the verb-noun shorthand that was EPV, Electric Pulse Verbalisation, tiny electrical differentials across brain synapses translated into language.

All mindbase modules she saw and altered regularly had a strictly ordered appearance. All the lines were of similar length, each representing a thought or concept in verb-noun shorthand. If they looked artificial it was because they were; someone had physically written the code.

The block on Dr Chee’s screen consisted of lines of varying length, usually a sign of piggyback junk code which was sometimes generated by the coding software, and which was why mindbases always needed to be checked by a human before transfer. However, the code was not junk. The lines shown on the screen still parsed, but many of the thoughts and concepts had been modified with nested verb-noun combinations.

She knew the signs.

“This is an adult mindbase,” she said. Only someone with experience would have the maturity to modify a concept like do not lie into do not lie to people you want to trust you. Labs didn’t make adult mindbases; there had been far too much trouble with that process. To have an adult body with a juvenile mind did, in general, not work well. The split off of the Taurus Army was proof of that, when a single error in a mindbase, copied across an entire army, had led to ISF losing control over a force of seven thousand. They’d been lucky that the fault involved feelings for a woman rather than war-thoughts, and that the Taurus Army had become independent mercenaries under that woman’s leadership; things could have been so much worse.

“An adult mindbase indeed,” Dr Chee said.

“See?” Keb said from the bed. “Even he says it. You have to believe me.”

The low light from the monitors reflected in his eyes. While Melati went to the bed, he twisted his head to wipe his cheeks on the pillow. There were wet tracks across the skin.

She sat down next to him, and took his hand in hers, on her lap.

“Yes, it seems part of your mindbase is adult.”

“All of it.” His eyes were intense and burning and she had to look away. “You have to believe me. I’m not Keb.” He looked at Dr Chee, who returned his look and something said they’d had a number of arguments over this already.

“Who do you think you are, then? Who is Jas and where does he live? A worker somewhere in the labs?” Although security in the mindbase programming labs was very tight—and if one of Rosalie’s programming team had made a mistake, it should have shown up in the form of nonsense code.

“I live with my brothers.”

“What are their names?”

His expression became distant. “There’s, um . . . um . . .”

“Cohort?”

He didn’t reply.

“Where are they?” Melati tried again.

Another tear welled up in his eyes. His lip trembled. “See, I’m turning into a little boy. I can’t remember anything.” He burst into tears.

Melati stroked his hand. She met Dr Chee’s eyes. The doctor punched a command on the screen behind him, likely delivering the same calming routine that Melati had tried to administer. The boy’s sobs slowly became less until his eyelids started to droop and then closed.

Dr Chee went into his office, and Melati followed him after gently putting Keb’s arm by his side.

“What can you do to help him?” She felt more distressed than she wanted to admit. If constructs had faults, they always behaved in a clearly non-human way. This was . . . different, more disturbing.

Dr Chee sighed. “It’s hard to say without knowing what is wrong with him. That is going to be the first step: finding out where the material came from. Unfortunately, we’re racing against time. The longer it takes us to locate the material, the more the mindbase will have adapted to his body and the less he will remember.”

As Keb said, he was turning into a little boy.

“Have you checked for anyone by the name of Jas in the base or programming lab?”

“That’s what I was doing there when Dixon turned up demanding that I come to that useless meeting. There is no one. I’ve also checked our entire processed mindbase archive. We’ve never had anyone by that name.”

“Do you think the Jas part of his mind real or fabricated?”

“I suspect it’s real. His mind is highly coherent.”

“Apart from his distress at the moment, do we need to worry about this? I mean—if the mindbase is going to adapt to his body, the problem will go away with time.”

Dr Chee shook his head. “He doesn’t want to be here. That emotion is strong enough that I don’t think it will change, just the reason for it. Now he thinks he has to look for someone, later he might think that he has extra brothers outside the force. He still won’t want to be with us.” His eyes said, He’ll suffer psychotic episodes and We’ll lose him, and with him, the entire cohort. The boys would be written off before they even started their military training. Sometimes the Taurus Army would take on failed ISF cohorts that were not too badly-damaged, and let them do mundane jobs stationside, but it would be a dreary existence.

She had never failed a cohort. Keb, asleep on the bed, deserved better. The boys who were now with Louise deserved better.

“So what else?”

“If the lab continues to plead ignorance on this issue, I’m going to have to manually check all his modules one by one. The only other alternative is to deactivate him, do a complete dump, run diagnostics and reactivate, but without any behavioural parameters, we’re going to be stabbing in the dark, so I’d really like to avoid doing that, because it might make things worse than they are now.” He looked at his hands, folded in his lap. “Much worse.”

“Yes.” When that happened, they might as well swap the mindbase for someone unrelated. It was a routine procedure to transfer an entire mindbase. Fiddling with individual components was much harder. They could simply put an entirely new personality to replace the current one, but it would leave the cohort damaged. It would leave him alone. Constructs did not function well alone.

He sighed. “We might still need to do that, but what I want from you, Melati, is to get as many behavioural notes and memories from him as you can before he has a complete meltdown.” Because faults were much easier to detect after a meltdown.

“Will a meltdown happen in time for him to recover his full functionality within the cohort?”

Dr Chee blew out a breath through his nostrils. “I hope so.”