Neurolink (2 page)

Elsa pressed the notebook to her chest and trundled off on her short legs. Dominic watched till she rounded a corner. Then he remembered he was standing in front of his father’s office. Why had he stopped here? The office would be vacant. Idly, Dominic read the engraved plate hanging on his father’s door.

“Money defines value. It has no subtlety. It cannot deceive or equivocate. All transactions balance. All statements are true. Money is the immaculate computation of power.”

My father, he thought again.

Richter Jedes had smashed his racing aircar in the mountains above Trondheim. He banked too steeply, trying to cut off an opponent. Still, he emailed everyone to confirm this morning’s meeting. Dominic dreaded it.

Without knowing why, he entered his father’s office, and at once, his glance fell on the gray box. The NP. It rested quietly on his father’s desk—harmless, inert, hardly bigger than two fists pressed together. Dominic felt an impulse to crush it. Instead, he turned his back and looked at the photographs. Richter with women. Richter with his race-car. Richter in full surface gear climbing a mountain in Asia. Richter standing with his son, seven-year-old Dominic, in the Alaskan courtroom of the World Trade Organization. That photo hung slightly off center, and the misalignment nagged at Dominic’s senses. He could almost smell the dusty carpet again and hear his father scolding him to stand still.

“Where are they, Father?” Young Dominic couldn’t stop fidgeting that day in Alaska. He thought Richter had brought him to meet a real live Org.

“Where are who?” Richter was testy and distracted.

“Gig and Meninx and Phil and Sanja. I want to see what they look like.” Orgs were Dominic’s boyhood heroes. They were the superintelligent, quasi-biochemical computer brains that ran the World Trade Organization. Incorruptible. His young mind resonated to that idea.

“You wanna see Orgs?” Richter clicked through a file.

“Uh-huh. Will they talk? I mean, like people?”

Stories about the Orgs filled the juvenile Net sites. Their semiorganic wetware had evolved in bold, mysterious directions, and they circled the Earth in stealth-clad satellites, defending free markets and preserving the rule of law. Dominic drew pictures in his notebook of colossal robotic guardians, streaming radiance.

“Fuck the Orgs,” Richter said.

Seven-year-old Dominic wasn’t sure what that meant. With a boy’s hope, he peered around the courtroom, searching for a hint of godlike presence, but he saw only mortals shuffling among the desks like clerks in a store.

“Will they have faces,” he asked, “and teeth?”

Richter grabbed Dominic’s arm and shook him hard. “Orgs are the enemy, son. God dammit, the Orgs wanna break up ZahlenBank!”

That day, for the first time, Richter spoke to Dominic as if he were a grown man. “Only one bank controls the money and data in this hemisphere.” Richter made a tight fist. “ZahlenBank! The WTO wants to split us into a dozen separate operating units. That’s why I come here to these courtrooms every month. To fight their lawsuits. Damn the Orgs! I’ve been holding ’em off for decades!”

Dominic held his bream and nodded.

“Divestiture,” his father growled in his face. “You know what that word means? It means death, son. The death of ZahlenBank, We’ll never let that happen, will we?”

“Never,” Dominic promised with a thumping heart.

In the stale air of his father’s empty office, Dominic straightened the photo. Almost imperceptibly, he moved his lower jaw from side to side. Without looking again at the gray box, he squared his shoulders, walked out and marched down the hall to the conference room. He pushed through the double doors and took his place at the left of the U-shaped table. Someone—Oscar Blein—was already making a report. The normal Monday group had convened. Eleven senior directors with their assistants. Business as usual.

Karel placed a mug of hot caffie on the table for him, and only after taking a slow deliberate sip did Dominic glance at his father, the ZahlenBank Chairman and CEO. The old man’s injured body dangled within a complicated steel brace at the head of the table. Their glances met.

For one surreal instant, the distance between them seemed to close, and they were alone, face-to-face. Partners again, in perfect understanding. As if no disagreements had ever separated them. Dominic stopped breathing. He felt suspended in time. As he and his father watched each other, he felt the old fear and hope—that he would win a prize he couldn’t quite define. But then his father squinted and turned away, and time resumed. Dominic discovered that his heart was pounding.

Richter always piloted his own aircar in the Trondheim Sunday races. He was famous for it. Famous for many things. Even trussed up in a body brace, he still dominated the room. Everyone knew it was Richter whose vision had built ZahlenBank. The only bank in the northern hemisphere. The sole arbiter of money-data exchange. Richter built the bank’s all-seeing surveillance web and engineered its enormous data-warehouse—the Ark—that captured and stored every byte of information passing through the Net. Because of Richter’s foresight, ZahlenBank literally owned recorded history—by legal license. Dominic watched him with admiration.

When Klas Lorn whispered in Richter’s ear, the old man flared up and shoved him away with a weak, bandaged arm.

“The surgeons can wait!” Richter bellowed. “1 need to capture this meeting for my NP. Don’t you people understand!”

Blein, who had been speaking, sat down without finishing his report.

“Jesus Krishna Christ!” Richter croaked a laugh and tried to slap his chest, but when his arm fell limp in its sling, Dominic winced. Don’t let these jackals see your weakness, Father.

Richter went on in a tightly controlled voice. “Relax, guys. The docs can patch my carcass later. With my NP, I’ll live forever.”

Klas Lorn gave him a thumbs-up and a fawning smile, which clearly annoyed the old man.

“You guys still don’t get it, do ya?” He waved his bandaged arm. “I was born in 1970, and I look younger than my boy there. I’ve had every organ replaced at least once. But that’s old news. Flesh is optional now, thanks to my NP.”

This time he’s going to die, Dominic thought. Does he really believe that crap about the NP? Maybe he does. After all, he invented it. The Neural Profile. A new kind of bank account for storing a person’s mind. Dominic pictured the gray box perched on his father’s desk. He’d heard Richter’s sales pitch to investors so many times, he could repeat it by heart.

“Scientists are fools, boys. They keep trying to upload the human mind to a computer. Any idiot knows you can’t translate brain matter into binary code. My way is easier and cheaper—and more profitable for the bank. We just record a person’s life in real time. Document the memories as they happen, instead of trying to slice-and-dice neurons later. Hell, why not? Our cameras and scanners cover every square centimeter of this hemisphere. Video, audio, email, financial and medical history, employment records, every freakin’ iota. Think of the fee we could charge!

“Boys, we’re talking a complete digital record of perfect memories, better than real ones because time won’t distort ’em. And we’ll have designer packaging. Every customer gets their own portable safe-deposit box in brushed platinum, branded with the ZahlenBank logo. When a customer dies, we transfer their deposit into a blank AI program inside the Ark. And voila! A high-resolution copy of the customer’s mind rises from the dead.”

But it’s just a copy, Dominic wanted to shout. The person still dies.

Yet exactly as Richter predicted, the Neural Profile became ZahlenBank’s hottest product. Hordes of status-conscious executives paid the whopping fee to have their lives documented. Second by second, day after day, ZahlenBank mined their personal data from the Net, hypercompressed it for easy storage and beamed it to their personal safe-deposit boxes, in tasteful platinum gray with the golden ZahlenBank “Z” embossed near the base—a must-have trophy suitable for display on desks or caffie tables.

As the marketing brochures pointed out, surgeries extended life only a couple of centuries at most—but the Neural Profile guaranteed life everlasting. So far, no NP account holder had died to test the theory. Richter might be the first.

Now as he shifted in his steel brace, he snickered at the Monday gathering. “I’m 279 years old, and with my NP, I’ll outlive you all!”

Dominic pressed his hands on the table and took a deep breath through his nose. Father, he wanted to say, call the surgeons. Even the most perfect digital record won’t save you from death. He tried to imagine that blank wall, with nothingness on the other side. Was it possible the old man didn’t believe in death? He made me, Dominic thought. A flesh copy to back up the data copy. He must have doubts. Dominic tried to swallow, but his mouth had gone dry.

Across the U-shaped table, Klas Lorn whined about their ongoing wrangle with the WTO, and Dominic watched his father’s face. It was a standing joke that Dominic and Richter could have been twins. They shared the same wide jaws and sea-colored eyes, although Richter had been through so many cosmetic fixes, he did look younger than his son. But now his lips were turning blue, and Dominic saw him shiver in his steel brace. Could he be in pain, Dominic wondered. Could the imbecile doctors have left my father in pain? Without realizing it, he clutched the edge of the table.

Somewhere in the background, a throat cleared. Karel Folger, Dominic’s young assistant, touched his shoulder. The room had gone deathly still. Dominic glanced at his colleagues and realized it was his turn to speak.

“We can delay this till another time,” he said.

“What other time?” the old man barked.

“My report can wait. I suggest—”

“Nothing can wait!” Richter’s eyes widened to show angry whites all round his irises. He seemed to be straining to stay upright in the brace. A thread of spit trailed from his lower lip, and people at the table shifted to look elsewhere.

“Tell me now, boy. What about the Nord.Com foreclosure? Be quick. My NP’s recording!”

He’ll kill himself to update his damned Neural Profile, Dominic thought. Or has he had a premonition? Have the doctors told him he won’t make it?

Dominic held his expression still. He opened his notebook and glanced around at the cynical faces of his colleagues. He no longer bothered to stand when he addressed them. He didn’t care how they voted. All transactions balance. All statements are true. He couldn’t even gather the energy to laugh.

Nord.Com was a routine bankruptcy worth less than three billion deutschdollars. Reading aloud from Karel’s brief, he eyed the closed double doors and wondered how far away the surgeons were waiting. Nearby, he hoped. In a flat voice, he recited the list of Nord.Com’s repossessed assets. He’d liquidated everything except for one rusty submarine, a raining ship that crawled along the bottom of the Arctic Sea, the
Benthica
.

“It’s a petty cash issue,” he said, “not worth the time of this board.”

“Don’t tell me what my time is worth!” With a violent effort, Richter hawked phlegm and spat on the floor. Klas Lorn pursed his lips, and most of the others studied their notebooks.

Dominic read on. A Tortuga-class submarine, the
Benthica
crawled along the seafloor chewing up rock, extracting mineral deposits and spitting out the slag. The submarine was too old for repairs and should be scrapped. But two thousand protected employees lived aboard, the miners and a large number of nonproductive dependents. Oversupply in the labor market meant their contracts weren’t worth the cost of relocating them. It was all in the numbers. Whatever ZahlenBank did, the
Benthica
and her crew would cost money.

“So how do we turn it around?” the old man wheezed. Just then, he began to slip sideways in the brace, and he let out a little cry. Dominic half stood to call for help.

“Don’t keep me waiting!” the old man wheezed from his crooked new position in the brace. “How do we turn this to our advantage?”

Dominic leaned with his knuckles on the table, staring at Richter and working his lower jaw. You fool, he wanted to shout. Let the surgeons help you. Why do you sit here concerning yourself with this trivia? What does it matter?

Then Richter spoke in a tone Dominic had not heard before. Perhaps his injuries constricted his throat. He seemed to be pleading. “Show me what you’re made of, son.”

Show me what you’re made of? Again, the air caught in Dominic’s lungs. The old man’s eyes leaked tears, and his appallingly youthful head wobbled. Dominic tried to read the message in his watery eyes: Show me what you’re made of?

“Spin them off,” Karel whispered in Dominic’s ear.

Yes, the
Benthica
. Spin them off. Dominic felt Karel’s hand on his shoulder. He sat down and smoothed the wrinkles from his suit to calm himself. Last night with Karel and Elsa, Dominic had joked about simply handing the
Benthica
to the miners. Spin them off. Set the protes free, and let them fend for themselves. The solution would save ZahlenBank a couple million deutschdollars. Of course it might be a death sentence for the protes. They weren’t equipped to take care of themselves. Dominic didn’t mean it seriously.

But earnest Elsa had taken his words at face value. Freed protes would have no legal status, she pointed out, and no access to the markets. Without fuel and supplies, their life support would rapidly fail. On the other hand, Karel loved the idea. Karel called it an innovative experiment. Spin them off.

Now under the beseeching eyes of his father, Dominic spoke the words aloud.

“Whas ’at?” The old man slipped lower in his brace, leering and slurring his words. “Spin ’em off, d’you say?”

As Dominic explained the unprecedented idea of freeing protes and giving them a ship, the old man’s smile grew wide. He positively smacked his lips. It struck Dominic then, like balm to an aching wound, that he had made his father proud.

The old man reached for the gavel, and his mouth quivered. “It’ll save us two million bucks? I like it. Vote now.” But his arm went limp again. He couldn’t grip the gavel. With a gentle grunt, Richter Jedes fell across the U-shaped table and bled.