Jet Pack

She blinks at pre-set intervals.

Sarah arrives at the office at 0851.

She nods to Tara, the managing editor, as she passes the central terminal unit and enters the rows. No desks; just three rows, each of nine swivel chairs. They face the central terminal and Management, each bolted to the floor to the left of a brushed-aluminium post with a number of sockets and ports near its top.

She takes the third chair. She’s the first asset here, apart from Alen at the far end. Alen’s already logged in and focussed; it’s pointless saying hello. Not that she would; she’s never spoken to him.

Sarah begins the ritual, swivelling the chair down and adjusting it so that she doesn’t get her back twisted up — most of them don’t bother, and just install something to help them ignore the pain and maintain a professional posture, but Sarah insists on having something she can sit in. She takes a secure wireless access drive from her bag — a small round plastic hemisphere with a NuSB plug on the flat side and plugs it into her temple, and goes bdeet and enters focus mode again. Logs in. Forgets her name: she is asset 37542/ALIS/f207bc0 designated reporting sub-editor salary grade 4. Stiffens slightly, stares ahead, blinks at pre-set intervals. Alis — she’s Alis by way of local username — no longer sees the room. Her lips move, soundlessly.

She inspects her in-tray. She completes and signs her expenses claim, digitally signs it and submits it, connects to the office server, uploads this morning’s batch of subbing.

Thirty-two stories; six publications.

Adds a title. Fixes a comma splice. Rewords a sentence. Adds a title. Cuts for length. Checks spelling. Inserts a photograph. Adds a title. Adds a title. Repositions an apostrophe. Rewords. Adds a title.

> No items in queue_

She goes idle; there is only the blinking cursor, black on white. No thought. Blink. Blink. Blink. Blink.

It’s 0925.

It’s 0939.

Tara looks up again from her own work, waves a hand, says

— Alis?

Sarah snaps back into the room. She stands up too fast, rubs the back of her head with her hand, like she was caught dozing.

Tara taps her temple, twice.

— Assignment. Secure line, please.

Sarah nods. She sighs, flumphs back into her chair, unclips the access unit, runs the cable between the post and her socket. She enters focus mode again.

A name. A significance. An address. Some questions. Authorisation to record.

She flips bdeet into normal and stands. She gets her coat from the cloakroom, checks the batteries in her camera, makes sure she’s got the cables and the extra memory stick. Then she’s off.

Most of the other rep-subs are lost in the system. No one says anything to her as she heads out of the office.

In the third floor foyer, Sarah finds herself standing next to Dann, waiting for the lift.

She decides to do something different, says,

— Hi.

— Oh. Hi.

— How- How are you?

— Fine. Yeah.

He pauses, says:

— So.

She smiles.

— So.

He runs his hand over his shaved head, scratching at the stubble. His nail clicks against the port behind his ear. He smiles, haltingly.

— Are you new? I don’t think I’ve seen you before.

— I’ve been here nine months.

— Oh. What department do you work in?

— Editorial and Reportage. Same as you.

— But not on the third floor, right?

— Post Thirteen. Three chairs along from you.

— Oh.

Silence falls, like someone switched the conversation to mute.

He points to his port as they step into the lift.

— Excuse me, do you mind-?

She shrugs.

— Not at all.

He goes into focus mode, and trances out. Sarah goes into focus too and sends a couple of queries. He’s not working at all. He’s sending a tweet.

— Charming.

In normal, she looks at the elevator wall. They don’t say anything to each other as they head out to their assignments.

It’s the third time this sort of thing has happened in a fortnight. Sarah bites her lip, on a whim sends a command to her processor:

— Disable Invisibility Drive.

> Invalid command. No such device. Retry?_

She sighs, says out loud to no one,

— My brain doesn’t have much of a sense of humour these days.

And she’s down the steps and hailing a cab.

He slips into the present tense.

In the cab, she composes the first draft of the interview article:

— Variously a neurosurgeon outspoken advocate of vivisection and voluntary euthanasia writer of popular books on science and religion Jeremiah Grimslade courted admiration and loathing in equal measure. But ten years ago he dropped out of the public eye abandoning his lucrative private practice for —

She exits focus mode.

— No. That doesn’t sound right.

It’s too late. The cab pulls up out of the hotel. She shrugs, pays the driver and gets out. It’s raining. Her hair gets wet and unruly. She suspects that her mascara is running.

She pulls her coat around her and runs into the hotel.

It takes a full five minutes for the receptionist — she’s in focus mode too, busy organising something or in an online chat maybe — to register Sarah’s presence.

Sarah hands over her ID card; the glassy-eyed woman scans it, looks across it with an eyebrow raised at her. Sarah becomes very conscious of the state of her make-up.

— I’m here to see Mr. Grimslade. The manager cleared this as a venue yesterday.

— Yes, yes. I’ll call him now.

— Excuse me. Where are the washrooms?

The receptionist motions with her head.

— Mr. Grimslade will be in the restaurant when you’re done.

Makeup repair accomplished, Sarah heads for the restaurant.

The rain’s stopped outside; the sunlight is bright now, fills the place, which is all thick glass tables and steel chairs and a wall full of windows and no plants, nothing to soften the effect. Sarah reaches into her handbag and, with some relief, puts on her sunglasses, huge and buglike, like a visor. It’s an excuse to hide.

He’s at a table near the window, his back to the sun, already nursing a scotch. He is shorter than she expected, and older. He’s been gone ten years, but he’s aged twenty. His neck is scrawny, sticks out of an expensive but slightly out-of-style grey suit that engulfs him, looks like a ragged shirt on a scarecrow. A full head of grey hair sits awkwardly on top of a mess of creases, a nose with broken blood vessels, bushy eyebrows, a mouth in a permanent frown, a weak old man’s chin. But his eyes are clear and bright.

He doesn’t get up. He barely even moves his head.

— You’re, ah — he looks at something written on a paper napkin — 37542/ALIS.

— Just Alis. If it makes you more comfortable. I’ll be the asset interviewing you today.

He looks up properly now, appraises her, his eyes lingering over her waist, her narrow hips, her calves and ankles.

— Nice piece of kit.

He apparently tries to smile, the shape of his mouth turning it into a leer.

Sarah maintains her posture, does not react, does not show him that her skin is crawling.

Grimslade settles in his chair.

— Can I order you a drink?

— I’m fine. I, ah, understand you don’t have very long.

— What?

He grips the arm of his chair with one hand, moves as if to stand.

— Your schedule.

— Ah. Yes, yes.

And he relaxes again. Sarah adjusts the position of her sunglasses and corrects her posture.

— We’ll start.

She goes into attention mode; Grimslade hears the little bdeet. He jumps. He looks around.

— Why are you—?

In thrall to the software, she is unable to be anything other than professional — click automatic smile click telephone queueing system your call is important to us voice warmth click automatic phrasing —

— I am now recording. It’s secure. I am not currently connected to any network. There is no cause for any concern.

Grimslade nods.

The questions have already been prepared. Prompted by her software, she needs only translate the data presented to her into English.

— It’s been ten years since you dropped out of the public eye, Mr. Grimslade. The obvious question is: what happened?

He begins. It was about his research, he says. The first book had come out, and he was suddenly wealthy enough to do some more research.

He slips into the present tense.

It’s the book. Jeremiah has done so well with the book. But he had not been in the lab or the theatre for a long time. The royalty cheques kept coming in.

Jeremiah’s fascination with the human psyche is lifelong, particularly those aspects of it that echo bodily functions. He believed that people were all biology; that there were only chemicals and bodily functions. Jeremiah was the first to experimentally separate the halves of a person’s brain, for example, enabling him, along with several colleagues, to come up with the theory allowing the creation of — well, allowing for companies to enhance their human resources.

He waves his hand at her.

— Like you.

It was early in his career that he began to theorise that there was a factor which existed alongside those already catalogued; so that two people with the same upbringing, the same education, and similar parentage could still end up as completely different people. Sure, he knows that there are complex, random aspects of a person’s life that can change people, and that no two lives are wholly the same; but still, he is convinced that there is a biological factor that the anatomists have missed.

He sets out to prove it.

His interviewer transmits to her processor:

— Pause. Insert question.

> Successful_

The implant goes bdeet, and in the same so very pleased to be here voice, she says:

— But doesn’t scientific method depend upon drawing a theory from the observation of data? Isn’t coming up with a theory and then trying to prove it scientifically dangerous?

He stares at her for a long time; she is unable to wince.

— What would you know?

— My apologies. Please continue.

The breakthrough comes when Jeremiah Grimslade discovers that the human soul, far from being intangible, is in fact housed within an organ the size and shape of a pea somewhere inside the sternum.

He immediately begins to investigate the possibility of a soul transplant.

The interviewing asset inserts another question.

— How did you know?

— I knew. It was staring me in the face.

Jeremiah begins with the dissection of dead bodies, but he soon realises that a person’s soul — for want of a better word; he eventually settles on the term augoeides — rots away into a watery liquid shortly after death.

So he decides to experiment on living subjects.

Short of volunteers, and unwilling to canvas, realising that without hard proof his theories might appear no better than those of the creationists he holds in such contempt, Jeremiah experiments on living patients. None of them are aware that they are in the theatre for more than their scheduled operations.

First of all, he extracts the augoeides from a teenage girl who has come for the removal of a brain tumour.

She dies.

The tumour operation went without any trouble; Jeremiah is unsure whether she died of the operation or of the removal of the augoeides. He decides to try again.

In fact, none of Jeremiah’s patients, no matter how healthy, no matter how routine their operations survive without a soul. The extracted souls dissolve within minutes of their owners’ death, which fact proven he moves on.

It is just as well; the hospital manager has expressed concern at the number of patients he has lost. If it were anyone else, he’d be investigated. Jeremiah is too well-known, too much of an asset to the hospital.

They send him on holiday.

When he comes back, he tries another tactic. If he removes a patient’s augoeides, examines it and reinserts it within a few minutes — the limit is about ninety seconds, he finds — his patients survive with no ill effects.

In his research, Jeremiah finds some variation of appearance and texture in the organs he extracts. The augoeides of an accountant he finds to be the colour and texture of any other internal organ. The augoeides of a reformed career criminal who now makes his money through writing confessional memoirs is flaccid, damp, colourless, as is the one belonging to a well-known evangelical minister. On the other hand, there’s a priest, and for no apparent reason that Grimslade can define, his augoeides is as bright and hard and translucent as an uncut ruby.

It’s only when Jeremiah goes beyond the records and examines his patients’ personal lives that he sees the trend. It surprises him.

Individuals with a reputation for honesty and plain-dealing often have augoeidai which are hard and bright; the selfish, the petty, the criminal, have souls which are flaccid, slimy, grey. It’s not always the case, though. There is a high court judge, well-known as a man of the utmost integrity. His augoeides says different.

Education, native intelligence, fitness, have no bearing on the state of one’s augoeides; Religion does, but only inasmuch as it seems that those who profess a religious faith tend to either of the extremes: bright and hard or flaccid and grey, with little or nothing in between. The latter he expected. The former surprises him.

Jeremiah first becomes perplexed. Then he suddenly becomes very frightened.

He comes out his reverie, turns to his interviewer.

— You see? I was observing the data.

Powered by artificial bonhomie she click smiles click, says,

— Please go on.

All this is over the space of about eighteen years. The world changes. He gets a new assistant, a kithead — he stops, says,

— No offence.

click smile click

— None taken.

His assistant, 00113/zara, is trustworthy. She has to be.

— The systems weren’t as secure back then.

— Please, explain.

— I’d come up with the medical basis. I knew the early systems better than anyone. It wasn’t so difficult to change her attitude to the work.

Grimslade smiles to himself, looks out of the window for a moment.

— She was a good assistant, was Zara. I wish you could still do that. It’s hard to do work in confidence these days.

Inside her head, the asset wants to sneer, wants to spit at him and leave. But the program’s still running and she can only smile a doll-smile and say,

— So what happened next, Mr. Grimslade?

Jeremiah programs Zara with the necessary information that she might aid him in his next step: the temporary extraction, examination and re-insertion of his own augoeides. He goes under anaesthetic. He wakes up to be told by Zara that the operation was a success.

He looks at the scan and the notes. As he expected, his augoeides is small, shrivelled, and almost liquid. Jeremiah becomes obsessed with his own health. Another year passes before he decides that something must be done; like all true researchers, he first finds a guinea-pig.

By this time, he explains, he has managed to perform his side-operation, with varying success, on more than two hundred subjects. It happens at this time that two of Jeremiah’s unwitting experimental subjects come into the hospital at the same time.

One, a Member of Parliament of his acquaintance, is here for another minor but essential operation. Jeremiah says a name; the asset pauses, checks an archive, nods. The system notes that the name is sensitive, and deletes it from her memory. The other is a more interesting proposition. She is a terminal patient. Before things went too far, she had campaigned with a great deal of energy for the rights of those who suffered with her illness. By now she has had so many operations that she scarcely notices.

And now she has barely a week to live.

Jeremiah gives another name. Again, the archives supply the necessary information: click smile click nod click.

Jeremiah and Zara remove the grey, flaccid soul of the honourable member and the bright hard soul of the woman, and exchange them. The woman dies, of course.

In the next few months, Jeremiah follows the career of the newly ensouled MP with interest. A miracle: by the end of the year, the man has admitted to a charge of corruption: cash for questions, knighthoods bought and sold, the usual. The minister appears in court, in the newspapers, on TV repeatedly over the course of three weeks; he takes all the blame. He accepts a prison sentence with equanimity. His name is mud; he doesn’t seem to care.

Jeremiah’s experiments are, or course, leading up to his own soul transplant. With Zara’s unquestioning help, he seeks out a suitable subject. This he finds in a twenty-one-year-old charity worker named Mark BJont, who, now that his illness — contracted tragically young — is more acute, is at the mercy of his surgeon.

Zara performs the operation; Jeremiah, under local anaesthetic, supervises. The operation is a success, although at one point, Zara’s software, unable to keep up with Jeremiah’s increasingly urgent orders, causes her to freeze. She fumbles and drops Jeremiah’s augoeides, which, when it hits the floor, bursts into several droplets of greasy liquid. They dissolve into the floor tiles, leaving a stain which the hospital cleaners will later be unable to eradicate.

The healthy augoeides now having been implanted in Jeremiah’s body, Mark BJont is left without a soul; he dies.

With what amounts to the soul of a good man now contained within his body, Jeremiah continues with his life, all the time, waiting to see what happens. He feels no different.

After about a year, Grimslade decides that Zara must once again perform an examination of his augoeides.

And this is where Jeremiah ends his story. He crumples.

The interviewing asset, inside wondering if he is quite, quite mad, outside stiff and smiling and your-call-is-important-to-us, says:

— Please, more information.

— Why bother?

— Please, more information.

— It doesn’t matter any more.

— Please, more information.

She panics, thinks I don’t want to be stuck here please say something sends frantically to the processor:

— End Process.

> Process incomplete. Please re-enter information and retry_

And she hears herself saying out loud in that awful fake-happy voice,

— Please, more information.

The old man sighs.

Jeremiah, it turns out, made sure that Zara showed him his augoeides; disappointed, he arranged for another transplant. Later examination proved that this, too, was a failure.

The interviewing assset understands perfectly, but the process will not, and she is still click smiling click and she doesn’t know what’s more grotesque this vile old man with the obviously mendacious story about transplanted souls or her own processor glitching and stuttering and making her like a faulty machine she says

— Please explain.

He leers at her again.

— Why?

— Your story is incomplete. Please explain.

— Over the next three years, I did it six times. Each time, I arranged for Zara, and my next assistant, his name was Alun — Zara caught a virus and… ceased to work properly —

(The asset shudders, invisibly, even as outside she nods eagerly, at exactly the same degree as she always nods.)

— I got them to do the operation six times. Each time I arranged for the examination of the augoeides three months after the fact.

— And?

— And every time, my “soul” was still grey, flaccid and weak.

Jeremiah sinks back into his chair.

And that is all Jeremiah Grimslade has to say and bdeet Sarah is free and not recording and not a doll any more. He offers his hand and she does not take it, adopting a different kind of professionalism, becoming cold and poised and hoping he cannot see her shaking.

And she is glad she is still wearing her sunglasses, because after being forced to maintain eye-contact, she cannot bear to look in those eyes any more.

She goes to the ladies’ on the way out and fixes her makeup again. Then she heads for the underground. Before she gets to the platform, her processor makes the ditdit for an incoming message and she sighs and goes bdeet into focus mode again and stops dead in her tracks. She’s out of the office before she’s even back from the office; another notification of an assignment, after lunch.

She arrives five minutes after lunch begins, and goes straight to the canteen, buys a BLT at the counter, sits down at a table with some of the other assets from the rep/sub floor: Flis, Zoey, Genn Jaxx, Lali. She doesn’t know most of their actual names. Just the callsigns. She can barely tell them apart: five high tight ponytails, five perfectly grey suit jackets over lowcut vests and hyperbras, five sets of sockets gleaming, five Slimfast shakes, talk punctuated by the ditdit ditdit as they converse in text and speech at the same time.

— Hey Alis.

— Hey, everyone. How’s it going?

Sarah’s input ends there. She eats her sandwich and tries not to pay much attention to the girls.

— Hey Alis.

— Bradley’s going to cheat on Janine. It was in the download today.

— Did you see the Jade AI they brought in?

ditdit

— Hey Alis.

ditdit

— Yeah! So who’s getting evicted? I bet it’s Karl.

— Hey Alis.

— I like Karl, please don’t let it be Karl.

— That Myleene can really dance. It was in the download today.

— I sexxed last night.

— Hey Alis.

— It should be Jorja. It totally should be Jorja.

ditdit

— Oh! Tell us the juicy details!

— Janine’s planning to kill him though. It was in the download today.

ditdit

— Oh! Was it a boy or a girl?

ditdit

— Next Thursday I think.

— Oh! Where did you meet her?

— Oh! How many times did you orgasm?

ditdit

— The Jade AI’s getting upgraded. It was in the download today.

— Oh! What software did you use?

— Oh! Was it good?

— I sexxed last night.

ditdit

ditdit

Sarah doesn’t enjoy the sandwich. The bacon’s overcooked. The lettuce is limp. She throws half of it away.

© HD Ingham 2009

Look for the next episode of Memory Sticks on Monday 29th June.