Luck and Death at the Edge of the World, the Official Pirate Edition (31 page)

Using a shell can provide a survival strategy for people who are aging, injured, or ill, or can be used to provide a person with an optimized body, like the military shell Gat receives when he enters the California National Forces. Shells are expensive, though, so it's not something that's available easily.

The notion of uploading a human consciousness into an artificial body seems inherently science fictional--even moreso than nanobot swarms--but in this area, too, preliminary research has begun with the goal of making uploading a reality.

For an overview of of some of the issues involved in whole brain emulation -- that is, creating an exact, functional model of a person's brain and embodying it in an artificial device -- you might want to read the paper
Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap
, by Anders Sandberg and Nick Bostrom. It's available
here in PDF
...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is 
available on 
Amazon.com
 (and all other Amazon sites) and 
Kobo.com
.

In
Luck and Death
, the artificially intelligent entity that governs the security system at Cloud City is named Alan.

Alan normally lives within the Cloud City security system itself, with no need for anything like a human body. After the attempt on Max’s life, however, Alan is decanted into a human shell to make it easier for Gat and his team to interact with him. This temporary body is, in effect, a user interface.

The shell that Alan chooses for himself is tailored to look like a real person, British computer pioneer Alan Turing. To understand why, it helps to know something about Turing’s incredible life...

The Short Life and Awesome Times of Alan Turing

Alan Turing
was born on June 23, 1912. As I write this (in August 2012), the hundredth anniversary of his birth has just passed. This is the official
Alan Turing Year
, celebrated with events in more than twenty countries. Turing died by suicide on June 7, 1954, just before his forty-second birthday.

In his brief life, Turing accomplished more than most of us could ever dream of doing. He didn’t do it alone, but it’s probably not going too far to say that world history and the current state of technology would have been drastically different without him...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is 
available on 
Amazon.com
 (and all other Amazon sites) and 
Kobo.com
.

One non-technological aspect of
Luck and Death
that will be new to some readers is Gat's secular dharma practice.

In this context,
dharma
refers to the body of teachings of
Siddhattha Gotama
(also written Siddhārtha Gautama). Gotama is often called the Buddha and the principles he taught are the foundation of
Buddhism
. Gotama was a real person who lived in the Indian subcontinent around 500 BCE.

To have a
secular
dharma practice means to apply the dharma to your life, but in a
naturalistic
manner. This generally means practicing meditation and studying Gotama's insights into human experience, but without any dependency on belief in the mystical elements associated with traditional Buddhism, such as reincarnation...

The full text of this section appears in the commercial edition of this book. It includes a detailed discussion, illustrations, and links to relevant web pages, documents, and videos.  The commercial edition is 
available on 
Amazon.com
 (and all other Amazon sites) and 
Kobo.com
.

Click to get your copy of
 Felon and the Judas Kiss
 instantly from 
Kobo
 or 
Amazon
.

Read samples and get bonus material on the 
Felon and the Judas Kiss 
home page
.

____________________

Dave 'Felon' Fellows is a cheerful sadist. He thrived during his time in the California National Forces, especially during the incursion into Tijuana for 'civilian pacification.'

Calvin Hearn lost his mind in the brutal Tijuana operation, and although he's much recovered since then he's still haunted -- awake or asleep -- by the ghosts of that massacre.

Now Felon is an LAPD officer, while Hearn is a pastor ministering to the Angeleno homeless, and together they're at the center of events that could soon tear the city apart.

____________________

Felon enters the St. Francis Mission dragging a cloud of bad memories behind him like a viscous miasma.  Ghosts, sombras, and yaojing.  Terrible sprites and polluted spirits. Haunted things peer out: curious, hungry, angry, anguished, avid.

Inside the mission is a small meeting room: wooden floors polished smooth by years of footsteps, orange curtains blocking the front windows, mismatched chairs in place of pews, dust motes drifting in the air. It’s tidy, well-kept, but it isn’t much. There’s a pulpit at the back, around which a tiny crowd is gathered.

The crowd isn’t much either, seven homeless and a pastor. The pastor wears jeans and a t-shirt, running shoes on his feet. The homeless – a young couple and five friends – wear whatever they have. The memories surrounding Felon begin to fill up the room. They have a characteristic odor: death and gun oil.

The people at the front notice, turn. The homeless can’t see the nightmares, but they can smell the stink of bad karma. In any event, they don’t need spiritual repugnance to make them uncomfortable: they take in Felon’s uniform and the LAPD motorcycle helmet held loosely in his left hand. They shuffle, then begin to file out through a hallway that leads deeper into the mission. To a back door, Felon guesses. No one uses the front door – they’d have to pass him and his haunts to get to it and no one wants to do that.

He watches them go, looks upward at nothing in particular, raises his arms a little, then lets them fall back to his sides in a listless gesture of exasperation. He shakes his head and looks down again. Walks slowly toward the pulpit, still shaking his head. The pastor watches him, waiting. 
He 
can see Felon’s ugly writhing wake, but keeps his face expressionless all the same.

“Well fuck, father, I didn’t know there was a wedding.”

The pastor is tall and thin, with light brown skin and an Afro that’s begun to recede a little from his high forehead. His most striking feature is a pair of huge, expressive eyes that seem to brim with a variety of contradictory emotions: filled with good humor and limned with sadness, gentle and a little stern at the same time.

“I’m not a ‘father’ Dave, that’s the Catholic Church. I’m non-denominational.”

“Whatever. Okay.”  Felon waves a placating hand, and the phantasms swirl in its passage, the smell of smoke wafting. “I did check the sign is my point. Out front. Didn’t say anything about a ceremony today.”

Pastor Calvin Hearn cocks his head to one side, assessing the man in front of him. The memories cling to Felon, covering his face in a caul of unwatchable images.

“They don’t put up signs and send out invitations, Dave,” Hearn says softly, “they’re homeless.”

“Well then I guess they can start up again as soon as I’m gone, seeing as how it’s so informal” Felon says. He intends this to be rough good humor, but there’s a sour expression on his face.

Cal Hearn sighs. He’s trying to keep his temper under control and so far he’s doing a pretty good job. He seems more tired than angry. He gives no indication that he sees the brutal visions Felon’s dragged into his place of worship, profaning it.

“What do you want Dave?”

“Me?  Nothing. LAPD wants some information, though, so here I am.”

“Information about what?”

“Some homeless have been doing these little break-ins. It’s all nickel and dime stuff, stores that can’t afford modern security. Wired alarms, antiques. Homeless show up, smash a window or two. Before the P.D. can get there they run off with some food, bottles of booze. Maybe clothes, whatever. Honestly?  I could give a shit. There’s murders out there I could be working. Chief doesn’t give a shit either, but he’s gotta throw the people a bone, you know?” He shrugs. “Shopkeepers, fishmongers, what have you. Let them know he isn’t only looking after the big corporations.”

“He isn’t?”

Felon gives a humorless smile, points a finger.

“Dry wit, Cal. Dry wit. With a straight face too. Fact is, the Chief doesn’t care any more than I do, but it’s an election year. President is up in Sacramento with the CEOs of the 500. He needs a majority in the Council of Electors, so he’s horse-trading and threatening and bribing and pulling skeletons out of closets and pouring booze and paying for hookers and all the other good stuff that makes California a great and democratic nation. He needs a majority, two-hundred and fifty-one minimum, and for that he’s gotta convince them that he can preserve the 
civic peace
, right?  Disorder is bad for business, hombre. So his bogeymen spread the word: keep the krill in check. Last thing he needs is a simcast story about how some gang of homeless in L fucken’ A have decided to just 
take
 what they want.”

Hearn eyes Felon, lets a pause hang in the air. He puts his hands behind his back. To him it feels like an authoritative stance, defiance of the ghosts and fears that dance in the air in front of him. To Felon it makes the pastor look like he’s handcuffed.

“And how am I supposed to help the President win re-election?”

Felon shrugs again.

“It’s your neighborhood. Last break and enter was two blocks from here, liquor store on Yucca.”

“So?”

Felon gestures around him with his arms.

“So every street-rat in the area comes here, everybody knows that. They lip-synch a few hymns, snore through a sermon, and then you feed them. Sometimes, as I discovered today, you marry them to each other. You 
know 
them.”

Hearn rolls his eyes. It’s getting harder to appear blasé as Felon’s ghosts call to his own, to the memories buried deep inside him.

“You actually think I know who did it?”

“Fuck no. But you know the people. I got street names. Cairo, Caníbal, Dark Dan, a few others.”

“And you want me to put faces to the names.”

“Well I can’t look up their addresses and come pay them a visit, can I?” Felon growls, frustrated. “A couple of names is all, maybe places where they hang out. Or I could put a camera in here, covert. One comes in, you give a us the nod, be subtle. We won’t even take them from here, you have my word. We’ll pace them for a while once they leave and grab them somewhere else. No one will know.”

Hearn finally steps from behind the pulpit. He moves forward and stands face to face with Felon. He’s a gaunt man, but he’s the same height as Felon is. It costs him a lot to come this close. The air around Felon is thick with chaos, with murder.  With sound: swearing, crying, whimpering, slavering. Inwardly Hearn is losing control, but outwardly it doesn’t show yet.

“No.”

“I saved your life, Hearn.”

“Yes you did, but I’d give it up for these people if I had to, do you get that?”  Now an angry flush rises to his face. “I’m ready to die for my flock if I have to. I’m certainly not going to betray them to you.”

“Betray?” Felon bellows, inches from Hearn’s face. “Betray what?  The people I’m talking about are criminals, or didn’t you hear me? It’s right in your damned commandments: thou shalt not steal.”

Despite the feeling of standing on a precipice, of nearly being absorbed into the ugliness Felon carries with him, Hearn laughs through a sneer.

“You getting moral on me Dave?  You of all people?” He shakes his head. “Do you really think that people like you and me have any right to judge these people for a few petty thefts?  No way. No Judas kisses from me old buddy.”

“Don’t make me fuck with you Hearn.”

“You don’t outrank me any more Felon, and you don’t scare me any more either.”  His voice has become thin, a dangerous hiss, despite his attempts to control it. “You think we’re still back in the Forces?  Take a look around you.”

Felon, suddenly calm, does a slow turn, taking in the whole room, then looks Cal Hearn up and down.

“I don’t see jack, Hearn.”

Cal Hearn stands in a room filled to the ceiling with ghosts, crowded with them. The spirits of children run in fear from one wall to another, then on to the next, endlessly, as though trapped.  They climb the walls like geckos and hide behind the pulpit. Phantom horses charge in the aisles. The echoes of gunfire, years old, reverberate in the small room.  Somewhere in the distance is the thud, thud, thud of mortars.