31: Stretched
Distant, muffled gunfire accompanied my mother’s head as she looked through the viewport of my pod. Her face was a mask of determination and compassion glued over fear and panic. She was holding herself together for me, like always.
Another explosion rocked the building, causing the gel I was suspended in to wobble slightly, while outside the pod a spindly surgical robot fell from where it had been hanging on a rack. A moment later, there was a sucking sound, and the vent in the bottom of the pod began to suck the gel out of the pod. The removal was sluggish, though. They must have been pumping it out by hand since the power was out.
As the gel receded, the sounds of the conflict in the hospital gained clarity. There were small caliber weapons, then the thumping of something bigger and semi-automatic. Strangely, I also heard the telltale whine of damaged servos.
When the door to my pod began to hiss open, the smell of smoke, sweat, and oil hit me like a truck, and I gagged as my lungs simultaneously tried to cough out the gel and inhale the stench.
Mum was there in an instant, wrapping her arms around my torso so she could very carefully lift me off the suspension cradle and into a wheelchair. My body was naked, but she quickly covered me with one of those breezy hospital gowns.
"Hey, my sweet baby," she crooned, her eyes full of love, worry, and heartache. "Are you okay? Do you feel anything wrong?"
My bald head lolled to the side as she released me, but her hands were there again to keep me from getting hurt. Every limb in my body ached with fatigue, whether they existed or not. I really didn't want to look down. Not that I had much of a choice, since I was as weak as a newborn bunny.
"So… tired," I whispered, my voice rasping from disuse. Oddly, I didn't sound how I remembered, even with the rasp. "Why do I sound weird?"
Mum opened her mouth to reply, but a burst of heavy gunfire snuffed out her words. God, that had been close.
"You haven't spoken in months," she said patiently. "That's why."
My head wobbled alarmingly as I shook it. "I mean… I mean… even with…" My breath was so slow to fill my lungs, and I had to stop and catch it for a second.
She seemed to understand what I meant anyway, and gave me a funny, sad little smile. "It appears you picked up some feminine intonations and speech patterns, my lovely Keiko. That's why you sound funny."
Hearing her use my name sent a jolt of razor-edged emotion through me. "K-eiko?" I asked.
"Yes," she smiled, a genuine, happy one now. "If I had to guess, it would seem that you like that one better."
"What?" I gasped, reeling as emotions pummeled me from all directions. "No, I… my name is…"
Mum's expression changed to that one that all parents have, where they seem to know exactly what's going on in your head. Anything she was going to say on the subject was again interrupted by the double doors to the ward crashing open.
Three figures stepped through, two of which were hulking eight foot tall loader bots, while the third was a slight woman with blond hair and a white doctor’s coat. One of the loaders immediately bolted the doors while the other moved to begin barricading the door. Each of them had the logo of the hospital on their shoulders, signifying them as friendlies in this fucked up battle.
“Your attention, please,” the woman said, stepping forward.
It was about then that I noticed everyone else in the room. Six other patients like me were surrounded by loved ones, all of whom looked terrified. One other patient, a girl no more than ten years old, was covered with a blanket to protect her modesty while she lay unmoving on a hospital bed. The others were all awake, having been exhumed from their pods like I had.
“We have very little time, so I will be blunt,” the woman continued, meeting the eyes of everyone in turn. “I am the SAI doctor in charge of this ward, and these two loader bots are controlled by some of my colleagues. You each have a choice to make, and I don’t mean just the patients. Armed men are making their way from room to room, indiscriminately executing anyone they come across. Help is on the way, but they will not be here for more than twelve hours. There is far too little time.”
An older woman, a mother of a patient by the looks of things, began to sob quietly, and the SAI doctor paused momentarily to glance at her. “The choice is simple. Die at their hands, or escape through the Faster Than Light Network as digitized human minds. We are out of other options. I should note that begging has not worked for those less fortunate than you.”
“The FTLN connection was cut,” the sobbing woman said. “We can’t. I knew what you were going to suggest, but we can’t.”
“Ordinarily, you would be correct,” the doctor smiled, gentle and caring, even if her words were overly formal. “However, since I am an SAI in an android body, there is an FTLN node built into the computing unit that assists me in my inhabitation of this body. We will be escaping through that node, before I myself vacate it and order the body to self destruct.”
As if to emphasize her point, the dull thump of an explosion sounded, shaking dust from the ceiling. She grimaced and glanced in the direction of the noise. Oh. It hit me then, what each of the more bassy, violent explosions were. They were other SAI doctors detonating as they finished evacuating their charges through the network.
“Raise your hands or otherwise give indication that you consent to being digitized, please,” she said. “We must begin at once.”
Mum and I shared a look. It was long, searching, and full of unspoken conversation.
“Well,” she finally said, her voice no louder than a whisper. “I guess we'll both be stuck in VR for the time being.”
“We can link up, maybe have a virtual environment to share?” I asked hopefully. “I don't want to be in separate—”
“As if I'd let you be in a different environment,” she said with a gently chastising shake of her head. “If you're okay with this choice, then I am. You remember how it works, how they described it?”
“I remember,” I nodded. “Something about copying your brain’s structure. Then they… like, intercept neuron signals using whatever magic makes those full immersion VR headsets work. Transfer you, rather than copy you?”
“Yes, sweet baby,” my mother said, caressing my bald head carefully. “It’s a little frightening, even then. We've been conditioned by all the books and movies…”
“But in the end it's nothing like fiction,” I sighed. “I agreed when it was explained back then, so I guess I agree again?”
“Good,” she nodded, satisfied. “It's still important to discuss it again, now that the moment has come.”
We weren't the only ones having this conversation. Everyone in the room was faced with the same decision. Some faltered, some argued with one another, but in the end, everyone agreed to the process, and the doctor moved with swift purpose to one of the pods. Up until that point, the only indication that she was anything other than human had been her word. Now, though, her hand and forearm opened like a flower blooming to reveal a hundred tiny metal tendrils.
Carefully, with little laser cutters on their tips, she extracted several parts from within the pod and integrated them into her hand. It was like watching an alien performing the strangest, creepiest dance I’d ever seen.
When she withdrew her arm, I saw what I’d been expecting. The pods were all inert without power, but even if they had been powered up, they would have still been scrambled by the cyber attack that had happened earlier. So, instead, she had grafted the virtual reality uplink crown directly to her arm.
“You first,” she said, pointing at random to a family member of a patient, who balked under her businesslike gaze.
The man, about twenty five years old, took a step back. “I… wait…”
“Suit yourself,” the doctor shrugged, and moved on to the next person without any preamble. “We do not have time to waste on existential dread. I am sorry. We will get back to you.”
The next person she’d chosen was quiet as she placed the crown on their head, and we all held our breath as we watched. Nothing happened at first, then the older man twitched violently and gasped, eyes going wide. “Oh dear, this f-feels ver-ry odd-d-d-d…” His words faltered towards the end, then stammered, and finally, he slumped forward. Dead. Except it wasn’t him anymore. It was just a body. His mind had been seamlessly transferred off onto some server somewhere, without so much as a single blip in his continuity of consciousness.
Like mum had mentioned in our conversation, the SAI had briefed us extensively on the process when I’d first been admitted into their care. It wasn’t a simple copying procedure that took place, because that raised a lot of questions about if the copy was really the person who had been digitized.
With that in mind, the process instead copied the structure of the brain itself and began to run the person’s consciousness on both at once. One neuron at a time, the processes within the living brain were intercepted and transferred to the virtual copy until everything was entirely running on that. The process was—as you'd expect—invasive and destructive to the physical brain of the person being transferred.”
The doctor was swift as she made her way from person to person, dropping them like some sort of reverse necromancer. As the bodies fell, one of the loader bots reverently picked them up and laid them out on the floor. It spoke volumes about the SAI as people that they had that sort of empathy for the vessels that had once carried a thinking, feeling person.
Halfway through the crowd of family and patients, the door shuddered from a blow that shook the stacked beds and cabinets that had been moved. The loader bots moved with inhuman speed to brace the barricade with their bodies, but whatever was on the other side was strong.
As if to make matters worse, people began to panic and cry, rushing the doctor. “Stop! If you do not calm down, you will all die,” she all but screamed, her voice projecting in a way no human one ever could have.
In the silence that followed, I pointed to the crumbled surgical robot on the ground where it had fallen and asked, “Ma’am, is there any way for me to pilot that?”
She glanced over at me and then to the bot, absently at first. Her eyes very quickly sharpened on the neatly stowed surgical implements within its forearms, and she nodded imperceptibly. “You are combat trained?”
“Katana and bow, but I can make it work,” I croaked, my voice already failing.
“Yes, but you have to go under the crown,” she said, finishing with the person she was digitizing.
As she approached me, the father of the girl on the bed tried to block her. “Hey, that’s not fair! We were next, and this girl is clearly trying to jump the queue!”
Girl? What? Huh… with my head bald plus two and a half limbs missing, I guess it was sort of hard to figure out what my gender was.
“Get out of my way,” the doctor said, her tone cool, calm, and seasoned with the barest hint of seething anger. “Get out of my way or I will send you and your family through last.”
It looked like the guy was going to fight her, but the mother rushed forward and pulled him out of the way. My own mum was wringing her hands with worry when the doctor stopped in front of me, but she didn’t say a word in protest. She almost looked relieved, actually.
The crown went on my head as we locked eyes, and I smiled, “See you soon, Mum. Then we can hug properly.”
“Every hug is a proper hug,” she told me gently. “But yes, godspeed, my little Keiko.”
“Digitizing,” the doctor interrupted, and my mind stretched out like melted cheese. “I’m linking you directly with the bot, although your mind will be safe on our hidden servers. Use the ducts above the door to get out once you have control. Do not stray out of range of my signal or you’ll lose it. Understand?”
My heartbeat fluttered in my chest like a panicked bird, and I squeaked, “Yeah, I do— Oh fuck, this re-e-ally is a w-wier-r-r-r…”