The Lucid: Episode Three Read online

  The Lucid

  Episode Three

  Nick Thacker

  Kevin Tumlinson

  TumThack

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  HOW TO MAKE AN AUTHOR STUPID GRATEFUL

  Read more from Nick Thacker & Kevin Tumlinson

  Copyright © 2016 by Nick Thacker & Kevin Tumlinson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Prologue

  15 years earlier

  Honestly, what was he supposed to do?

  He was sixteen years old, after all. and it was just him and Mother. Just the two of them, since his father left. And that was eight years ago. So it had been four years of her taking care of him, and then four years of him taking care of her. And by far, he had gotten the worst end of that deal.

  David studied her.

  There was something about the way she would act in these situations. There was nothing around to harm her. She was as safe as she could be. But some dark corner of her mind came bubbling to the surface during these ‘episodes.’ And in an instant she’d shift from being Mother—the strong, willful woman who was as quick with a switch as she was with her tongue—to being this daft creature, this hollowed-out soul who was afraid that the ceiling fan was about to drop on her and consume her. Or she was afraid the bedside alarm clock was shooting darts and knives at her. Or she was afraid that David was his father—that he’d come back to hurt her again.

  David hated that most of all.

  And not simply because he didn’t want to be anything like his father. He hated the fact that his own identity was being subsumed by his mother’s disease. He was ceasing to be a person to her, and was instead becoming some sort of metaphor. Or, worse, he was just the caretaker.

  David had an IQ of 170. Einstein only had an IQ of 160, and he was so brilliant they let him wear his hair in whatever ridiculous style he wanted. David had to get a haircut every two weeks or the morons at his school would give him demerits. After enough of those you went on probation, which meant less autonomy and less lab time. Both were completely untenable.

  The school was a nuisance, but it was necessary. At sixteen years old, David was just shy of being able to file to be an emancipated youth. His IQ and his academic achievements were really the only thing that saved him from being put in a foster home in the first place. He had leveraged his genius so that he could take care of his mother and still have some autonomy.

  Of course, that had all happened when his mother was still doing “pretty much ok,” as the doctors put it. She’d still been strong. She’d still had her hard edge. She’d still been Mother. Sometimes.

  But the disease was taking a greater toll now. It had softened Mother, and robbed her of the strength she had. It had made her weak. And, worse, it was jeopardizing everything David had built here.

  But he studied her.

  That was where he took some solace. Because as Mother faded, and became less and less the woman he had both feared and respected, David had found himself with a unique opportunity.

  He knew all the baselines, you see. He knew the ins and outs of Mother’s personality, and of her fierce intelligence. He knew her mind as deeply and richly as he knew his own, having watched it fade over the past four years.

  Psychology was not David’s strong suit. It wasn’t necessarily a keen interest. He was far more interested in machine intelligence. He liked the idea of an artificial intelligence that could make decisions for humanity. After all, human intelligence hadn’t necessarily done much good for them, had it?

  So as Mother faded deeper into the haze and malaise of Alzheimer’s, David started writing code.

  It started as a pretty basic interface, at first. With Mother fading so fast, and becoming so paranoid, he kept to essentials. While she slept he meticulously attached sensors and electrodes to her scalp, and braided the wires carefully so that they fell in a multi-colored pony tail down the back of her bed. She never sat up without the bed assisting her anyway, so she might never notice that she was wired up.

  The program was built to respond to the various shifts in her personality and thinking. It was rudimentary at first—if she woke up and was afraid of the ceiling fan, the program would raise the lights in the room and play soothing sounds until she relaxed and fell asleep again. Or if she woke up more lucid, the program would alert David, and he would bring her tea so she could sip in peace and chat as she felt it was acceptable.

  This was helpful, and it reduced a lot of the stress of caring for Mother. It helped David keep her worsening condition hidden from the school administrators, who came by once a week to do an assessment.

  Even though it was working, however, David was still improving it, behind the scenes.

  The longer Mother wore the sensors, the more data David was able to gather. And before long he had huge sets that covered the entire spectrum of his Mother’s mental landscape. In effect, he had mapped Mother’s mind, complete with the Alzheimer-induced ‘bad lands.’

  Now it was time to start working in the other direction.

  This part was going to be tricky, because reading a signal from someone’s brain is fairly non-invasive. But sending a signal would require a more direct connection.

  David wasn’t a surgeon. He didn’t have the hours or the background to do what he was thinking of doing. And because it was experimental—and, he admitted, because he was a sixteen-year-old boy—there was virtually no hope of convincing any surgeon to do the work. Not through official channels.

  But there were other channels.

  David did not consider himself a hacker. That was a fairly low-brow activity, in his opinion. Using code for mischief wasn’t really his thing. And it was because he loved code. And also because coding depended on rules. Breaking the rules meant doing ugly things, and David couldn’t abide ugly code.

  Despite not being a hacker, however, David was intimately familiar with the world that hackers occupied. And part of that world was labeled “The Dark Web.”

  For the most part, the Dark Web was a sort of hidden Internet—a playground for hackers and other ‘enthusiasts’ who sometimes had interests that didn’t coincide with being law-abiding citizens. It was here that people could exchange information and resources that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. It could be a vile place, actually—every lust and degraded human want was available here, along with people selling their services for just about any endeavor one could imagine.

  David had used the Dark Web to find tools and code he needed to crack a tough programming issue. But this time he was after something that related more to ‘wetware’—the slang term for the human body.

  David needed a surgeon.

  It didn’t take long to find several candidates who would do just about any type of surgery for the right amount of money. It took a bit longer to get past the plethora of security measures and the mountain of paranoia. He had to convince anyone he communicated with that he wasn’t with the FBI, and that he wasn’t a narc. It took quite an effort, b
ut eventually he was successful.

  The man who came to their apartment would only answer to ‘the Surgeon.’ That was fine with David, as long as he could do what he promised to do.

  David outlined for him exactly what was needed. He showed 3D imaging of his mother’s brain, with the insertion points outlined. He showed the devices he had tinkered together—the embeddable sensors that would send these signals directly to her brain.

  The Surgeon nodded along with all of this, as if he’d seen it a million times. Any worries that David had about the man balking on grounds of morality or ethics were quickly assuaged. This man would do the work for the money and then wash his hands of the both of them.

  Money was no problem, of course. David’s IQ was being put to use on things far greater than his academic pursuits. He had used his intellect to create several patents, selling them to companies under contract of anonymity. And he had also played the stock market, under his mother’s name. Both pursuits had brought plenty of dividends, which he had hidden away. He had set up accounts that paid monthly stipends that were greater than many people’s annual salaries, and no one questioned where the money came from.

  Money could be like that.

  David paid the Surgeon, and then arranged for the room, the instruments, and anything else the Surgeon required. Everything was clean and sterile—which had an odd appeal to David. And the two of them stood in surgical gowns and masks, along with a couple of assistants brought along by the Surgeon.

  Mother had been prepped. Her head was shaved clean, and she was given anesthesia. She had been confused and a little panicky at first, but as the anesthesia kicked in she faded quickly. She looked more peaceful than she had in years.

  David stood off to the side during the entire procedure. He only spoke if he was asked a question about the sensors. Otherwise he simply watched as the surgeon used a common power drill to create tiny holes in his mother’s skull, and then insert electrodes on thin wires that would be hidden by her hairline, eventually.

  When the procedure was over, and Mother’s room had been returned to normal, David paid the Surgeon in cash. The Surgeon left with his team, and David now faced Mother as she lay recovering.

  It was seven days before he tried the new code.

  It was the longest week of David’s life. Between school and the administrative visits, David was quickly approaching a ‘kill all humans’ head space. But Mother wasn’t making things any easier herself. The Alzheimer-induced fits and moods came back the instant she was awake. And since he wasn’t using the old code anymore, there was nothing to calm and sooth her in his absence. The hospice care woman was almost useless, other than keeping Mother fed and giving her sponge baths. She had questioned the bandages and electrodes, but David had planned ahead and had a medical chart created—a sort of camouflage for the surgery.

  But on the seventh day of rest, David got to work.

  The new code was different than the old code in one key aspect—it was two-way. Where the old code was responsive, the new code was also suggestive. It read data from the electrodes, and knew when mother was having non-lucid periods. And then it made adjustments. He sent signals to her brain that were meant to help regulate her, to sooth and calm her, and to bring her back to focus.

  David was using a smartphone to interface with the software. This had the advantage of letting him monitor and make adjustments from anywhere—including school. At the moment he was swiping upward to increase Mother’s dopamine levels.

  “What is happening?” Mother asked.

  David felt his heart race. A moment ago she’d been having one of her spells, and she had been barely coherent. “Mother, how do you feel?”

  She looked at him. “What have you done?”

  He smiled. “Mother! I’ve made something for you! It took some time to code it properly but …”

  “I feel nothing,” she said.

  David blinked, and then started to worry. Had the surgery gone wrong? The Surgeon had warned there could be complications.

  “What do you mean?” David asked.

  “I feel nothing,” she said.

  “Your arms? Your legs? Where have you lost sensation?”

  “My soul,” she said. “My mind.”

  David shook his head. “It’s probably just a slight side effect. I’ll work on the code, and see if I can fine tune things.”

  She looked at David then. Really looked at him.

  All his life, Mother had been cold and hard. It was part of her nature. When his father had left, she hadn’t blinked. She was glad of it, of course. David’s father had bene a monster. But she had shown no emotion whatsoever. She’d simply started caring for David the best way she could. She recognized David’s intelligence, and she was intelligent enough herself to know how to leverage it. She got him into a very exclusive school, and into programs that would nurture him into a man who would never be dependent on others. Or … well, never dependent on anyone but her at any rate.

  And he was dependent on her. He hadn’t realized it fully until now, but seeing her here, more lucid than before—it brought him such a feeling of joy. He’d missed her.

  But something was wrong.

  The look she was giving him now bore through him. It passed through him like a laser through a sheet of ice. She was looking at him, but she was seeing something beyond him.

  “I feel nothing,” she said.

  And David shivered.

  It went like this for days. David continued to care for her, to bring her anything she needed. But no matter how he adjusted the code that fed her sensors, she never reconnected with that bit of her that felt any emotion at all. And unlike before, when she simply kept her emotions in check and kept her distance from things that could hurt her, now she was truly separated from it all. She was no longer Mother, as David had known her. And she was no longer Mother as the disease had made her.

  She was a wraith. She was a spirit clinging to the world long after it should have passed. And she had no connection to any of it.

  But she was alive. She was responsive. When the school sent people to check on him, they could see a woman who was clearly ill, but who could have a conversation and answer questions. That helped David’s situation tremendously. He could go on doing his work, while the school assumed his mother was making all of the household decisions.

  That kept things going smoothly for quite some time. Months, in fact. Long enough for David to have his seventeenth birthday, and to legally file to be an emancipated youth. Long enough for him to test out of the exclusive school and enter an even more exclusive university program. And long enough for David to continue his research into how machines might better integrate with flesh and blood. He had time to improve the code.

  But that time was brought up short on his Mother’s birthday.

  She had never been much for celebrating her birthday, but every year David had made sure to bring her something special. He wasn’t much for grand gestures himself, but he did like routine and tradition. And the tradition in their household had always been for him to bring Mother a single orchid in a glass vase.

  Mother was fond of purple over pink, and so David always took special care to find just the right hue. He would sometimes search flower shops for days to find the right varietal, and within that exactly the right solitary flower, with the perfect shape and tone. It was his annual gift to her—the effort, more than the flower itself. It was his continuing commitment to her.

  This year he brought her the vase and the orchid on a tray that also held her breakfast. She had developed the habit of eating by rote—and quite mechanically. She always had the same meal of a single hardboard egg—eaten with a knife and fork—a single triangle of plain whole wheat toast, and a small bowl of sliced honeydew mellon. She drank only green tea, and that only half a cup. And she was fastidious about keeping all crumbs and bits of food on the plate. Her napkin, once used, was folded neatly and covered the plate and silverware.

  The
orchid sat in a crystal vase that had a trumpeting opening at the top and a long and thin stem of glass that led to a tear-drop bulb at its base. It was elegant and perfect, and had taken nearly as long to find as the orchid had.

  “Thank you for my gift,” Mother said.

  “You’re welcome Mother,” David smiled. “I’m leaving for classes now. Do you need anything else? The woman from hospice care will here in just fifteen minutes.”

  “No,” Mother said. She was staring at the far wall of the room, which had nothing of interested adorning it. David had worried about this habit at first, but it didn’t seem to be detrimental.

  He still fretted over the fact that he couldn’t quite perfect the software that was keeping Mother lucid. But perhaps this was just how she was now. Perhaps Mother had reached a new stage of her life. One where she could be aware, but not feel anything. Surely that was better than being under the thrall of a disease that destroyed her mind. David would take an emotionless existence over losing his intellect any day.

  He left her then, and went to the street where his bicycle was tethered and waiting. He rode quickly through the streets of the city, dodging dangerously in and out of traffic. He was aware of all of it—the cars honking, the people yelling—but he couldn’t be bothered by it. Riding time was precious thinking time, and he found himself supremely preoccupied at times like this.

  He was in class when the phone call came.

  He kept the phone on vibrate, so as to avoid disrupting the lectures. This class was an advanced theory course that was actually a bit beneath his level—a required class that had irked him when he’d learned of it. But interrupting intelligent people was rude, and David was determined to respect the professor of this course, who was also his professor in more advanced courses.

  He sent the call to voicemail.

  When the class finished and he listened to the message, his blood became cold and he felt sick.