Transhuman Page 7

  Evening comes, darkness falls, and Gennifer bids me good night and goes home. Gennifer. How could I not love her? With Allison I could only see the past, with Gennifer I can only see the future. Gennifer, the youngest person to make full professor at Loyola by over a decade. Gennifer, heartbreakingly beautiful, her attractiveness only enhanced by the fact she seems unaware of it. Gennifer, who gave me life after death. She loves me too. How could she not? She created me, a labor of love nine years in the making. She has no husband, no stable relationship beyond her cats, no casual relations that might distract her from her work. The men in her department find her cold, but I know that she is simply dedicated, unwilling to invite those who might be interested in her to waste her time with their approaches.

  Camera hits surge from the downtown core as the city's nightlife kicks into gear. The night is always a harder environment for the cameras, and more of my image hits are unusable, too blurred to allow a positive identification, though the full moon helps. The full moon also brings out the stranger side of human nature, and CPD has its hands full. Sirens rise a few times around the campus, and downtown is a zoo. The night wears on, and closing time sends the club crowd into the streets for one last chance to get themselves in trouble. Eventually the partyers get tired and go home, leaving the darkness to sleepy-eyed shift workers, and to me. The flow of images slows to a trickle, and I have time at last to myself. I use it to experiment with my new satellite cameras. The imaging interface works exactly as I expected it to, but aiming at a target from space takes practice. There's a couple of seconds of delay between the time I ask a satellite to look at something and the time it actually responds, and then another second before the imagery makes it back to me. I'm not used to signal delay that long and the first few times I over-control. The interface includes a readout for the amount of maneuvering fuel left in the high-flying birds, and they wince at how much I waste in learning how to use the system. It would have been cheaper to let me get up to speed using a simulator first, but Gennifer's new patron isn't concerned with expense.

  The images move as the satellites slide across the sky, each one is over Chicago just twenty minutes at a time, so I have to keep switching from bird to bird. I find I can't access them when they aren't above the continental USA. Other agencies have priority on targeting them then, more important things to look for than fleeing criminals in the homeland. If I'm successful in using them over Chicago, I'll be given eyes around the world. Eventually I'm comfortable enough with my new vision channels that I can see what I want to see, when I want to see it.

  And now, with a godlike perspective on the planet below, and the city's cameras staring into the predawn quiet, my questions return. Was I ever Mark Astale? If I was, am I still? Do all these enhancements make me somehow more than human? Perhaps they do. Gennifer would say so, but I'm not so sure. Humanity is not defined by the reach of our senses or the speed of our thought. Humanity comes from something deeper, and far more subtle. Federal law requires that the doctors record the interview when they ask grieving kin to make the life support decision. It's meant to ensure that undue pressure is never brought against people in their moment of infinite vulnerability. I've seen the interview where Gennifer explained to my Ally that I had no hope. My body was so damaged that, even if I were saved, I would spend the rest of my life dependent on machines. My Ally knew the choice to make, the right choice, the only choice for a man like me. She asked only to be with me, to be the one to turn the switches off herself. I saw in her face there the resolve to do this one last thing for me, this final act of love and devotion. Looking at her face at that moment I can feel her hand on mine, as she would hold it in my final moments, feel her kiss me one last time, softly, tenderly the way only she could. I can hear her whispered words in my ear, the things she would say that held meaning only for the two of us. Had I died at that moment I would have died as a man who was loved by a woman, who loved her in turn. I would have died a hero, a cop killed in the line of duty. I would have died human.

  It didn't happen, not quite that way. The law requires the organ donation decision be videorecorded as well. Having asked her to consent to my death, Gennifer went on to ask Ally to consent to my life, told her that I might, in a fashion, live on without a body. I saw the hope enter my wife's tearstained eyes, heard her ask the necessary questions, saw her expression change from amazement to awe as she realized the implications of what she was being told.

  Digital resurrection requires a living brain, because oxygen starvation causes neurons to self-destruct so quickly that the two minutes between the start and finish of the high-resolution scan was simply too long, even if it was started the instant my heart stopped. Gennifer explained the research program, the experiments with frogs and dogs and monkeys, the failed attempts to save the minds of the recently dead, and the brief salvation of Oswald Beinn, the convicted killer who volunteered for execution by brain scan in a vain attempt to cheat death. Ally asked for a day to think about it. There is no recording of how she spent that day. I can only imagine it was agonizing. She knew I would not want to live a life dependent on machines. Deciding if I would want to live as a machine must have been much harder. In the end there was only one choice she could make, if there was a chance to save me she had to take it. Ally said goodbye to me while I was still alive, then watched as they wheeled me away. I remember none of this. My last memory as a man was of a bridge abutment coming through the window of my cruiser; my first memory as a machine was Gennifer's voice asking if I could hear.

  I woke up in my disconnected digital body and, once I understood my circumstances, I realized I was no longer the man Ally had loved. As Gennifer extended my abilities in the digital domain, as I began to know and see more than any man before me, as I realized that I had not only cheated death, but achieved a form of immortality, the answer to my question grew steadily clearer. Do these things make me more than human? No, they do not. I cannot touch my wife, cannot kiss her, cannot hold her in the night, or comfort her in her distress. We could talk in the lab, but imagine what it was like for her to come to talk to her husband, only to converse with a pair of moving cameras in that unwelcoming environment. I could watch over her, and for a while I did. I did it to protect her, but it seemed wrong to follow her daily routine. It was too obtrusive, too deep a violation of her privacy, even for lovers, partners as intimate as we were. And it was too painful to see the sadness come into her eyes in those moments when memory overtook her, the sadness she was careful to never show when we talked. We both tried to maintain an unrecoverable past in the face of an empty future. In the end I let her go, I had to let her go. I know my decision was painful for her, how could it be otherwise? It was less painful than the alternative, it was the pitiful best I could do for her. Eventually she moved on, how could she do otherwise? I do not allow myself to feel those emotions, but sometimes, in the predawn darkness, they defy what I would allow. It would be simple to find out she was doing, the cameras are there to tell me. I will not ask them to. I will never ask them to.

  And then a camera calls for my attention, this one at a taxi stand outside a swank hotel off Michigan Avenue. I switch to its view, and see a man in upper middle age. He's well-dressed, with a heavy coat and wearing a fedora hat pulled low over his eyes, walking with his head lowered. The camera thinks he's Carl Smith, wanted for rape and murder. I study the image closely, run the frame sequence. It certainly looks like him, in the three frames where he looked up before looking down again. His file tells me that Carl Smith has been on the run for three years, and that he should be considered armed and dangerous. The man in the photograph is bearded and bespectacled, the man the camera is looking at isn't. That doesn't necessarily mean an error, the recognition systems are designed to see past such superficialities, but it does make it harder for me to decide if I'm looking at the same person. The slow, small hours of the night give me the luxury of time to consider the match. Has Carl Smith shaved and doffed his glasses in order to fool
the cameras? Is his down-tilted fedora meant to hide him from their view, or merely to shelter him from the cold night wind blowing in from the lake? He doesn't trigger the next camera, but I select it manually, watch while he hails a cab and gets in. On balance, I decide that this anonymous stranger is probably not Carl Smith. Wanted sex killers don't usually check into high-quality hotels. More out of curiosity than anything I watch his cab drive away, wondering where he's going at this hour of the night. Well-dressed businessman don't usually leave their hotels at four in the morning either, not unless they have an early flight. That doesn't apply in this case; my erstwhile suspect had no bags. His cab heads off on Michigan and then turns away down a side street, and while I wait for another camera to pick it up again, I idly requeue the buffered footage from the cameras in the hotel lobby, to see if I can pick up a clue.

  And I get a surprise. He isn't on any of the recordings. I check them twice, going back twenty minutes on each channel just to be sure, but he simply isn't there. Curiouser and curiouser. I go back to the taxi stand camera and check its buffers. They show the man walking to the taxi stand, checking his watch, looking down the street. The doorman comes up to him, and though the image doesn't lend itself to lipreading, I know he's asking to have a cab summoned. The doorman speaks into his walkie-talkie, and a few minutes later a cab comes around the corner and approaches. It is then that the man's face is briefly visible, as he looks up the street again, this time a little deeper into the cameras field of view. Had he been standing where he was before, he wouldn't have been picked up.

  So he wasn't a hotel guest, which raised the question of what he was. I rewound the sequence until I saw where he had come from, down Delaware Place from the direction of the Hancock Center. I switch to the cameras around the Center, move back in time until I see him getting out of a late-model blue sedan. Suddenly the narrative has become quite strange. Why is he calling a cab if he already has a car? Why is he taking a potentially dangerous walk down deserted downtown streets to get the cab? He's covering his tracks, and all of a sudden I'm not so sure this isn't Carl Smith after all. The car's plate isn't clear in the imagery, but it's still sitting there on the street. I switch to a live view, and then zoom the camera until I have an image I can read. I run the plate with the Department of Motor Vehicles, and it comes back as belonging to one Dr. Nicholas Maidstone. Dr. Maidstone is a computer science professor right here at Loyola, and the fact that Carl Smith just got out of his car at four in the morning can't be good news for him. All of a sudden I think maybe I should have called in my sighting.

  Better late than never. I return to the cameras at the Four Seasons, rebuffer the sequence where Carl Smith got into the taxi and get the cab's registration. I flash a message to dispatch alerting them to the taxi's passenger, and watch while an all points bulletin goes out. The traffic control cameras at intersections are set to record license plates, in order to catch light runners and speeders. I can access the cameras, but not their license plate ID data. That doesn't matter, because dispatch can. In a matter of minutes cruisers are vectored onto the taxi. The frightened driver is hauled out of his seat at gunpoint, but there's no passenger. Right now would be a good time to able to listen to the police voice network. The cops will ask him where he dropped his last fare and call the information in to dispatch, but I'll have to figure that out by lipreading the dispatcher when the call goes out again. How easy that is depends on who's making the call. Some dispatchers give a lot of detail in the initial call, others just send the cruisers in the right direction and tell them what they're looking for when they get there.

  I'm in luck, this dispatcher tells the ground troops everything they need to know, and that tells me everything I need to know. Carl Smith got out at Wells and Clark. I call up the traffic cameras in the area, scan back through their video feeds until I see a cab pull up, a figure get out. The image is too far away for me to make an absolutely positive identification, but the scene feels right. The cab pulls away, and I access the intersection camera a block down to verify that it's the same one I was looking for. It is. Lincoln Park is across the road, and the footage, now fifteen minutes old, shows my suspect walking into it. My bet is he isn't going there to see if the zoo is open early. He's doing what he can to avoid surveillance in a world where cameras are always watching. The park is poorly lit, and the cameras can only look into it from around its edges, there's not much coverage in its center. I switch back to real-time, in time to verify the arrival of the cruisers dispatch has sent to cover the area. They quickly block intersections and fan out into the park. They don't know it yet, but I'm certain they are already too late. Carl Smith will already be gone, into another cab, perhaps into a vehicle he had already waiting here. He knows how to play the game better than the Chicago Police Department.

  Not better than I do, though. I rewind the camera footage for all the cameras surrounding the park and start scanning through the video. There are twelve cameras to check, with fifteen minutes of footage each, three hours of video. I manage to get through it in one minute flat, and I pick up Carl's trail again, getting into another cab on the other side of the park, just as I thought he would. I notify dispatch of the cab's number, then start scanning more stored video to follow it, now twenty minutes behind my quarry. It moves off, northbound on Lakeshore, and I do a quick calculation of time, distance, and speed to choose cameras ahead of it. I rebuffer their feeds, scan quickly through them until I pick up the cab again, recalculate where it's going, and choose another camera to intercept it. Working the problem like this I'm able to cut my real-time lag steadily. I'm just five minutes behind when the cab pulls up on Rosemont, on the Loyola campus. There's something strange about that. The cameras add an impersonal distance to my job, and Carl Smith's physical proximity takes some of that away. I've never had a suspect come so close, the university is not the place a fugitive usually runs to hide. I switch to the campus security camera network. I know it well, it was my training ground, where Gennifer and I worked out the bugs before we went live with the Chicago police. I'm just two minutes behind real-time as the campus security network tracks him north toward the Quinlan Center. I feel a sudden thrill of fear. The Quinlan Center is where Gennifer's lab is, more importantly it's where my network lives. The cab could have dropped him right at the front door, but he still covering his tracks. This man has not set out on his carefully planned journey with no purpose. He knows the cameras are watching for him, and he's smart enough to know how to evade them. He isn't innocent in his intentions, but until this moment I thought his intention was simply to evade the law. Now I know better. There's only one reason a wanted fugitive would come to the Quinlan Center, and that's to eliminate his most dangerous enemy. Me.

  Mark Astale could have handled the situation without difficulty. Mark Astale had a black belt in judo, knew how to disarm an armed criminal before he could shoot, knew how to talk to a dangerous person to avoid the need for physical confrontation in the first place. My virtual body can still do the holds and throws he spent hours on the mat perfecting, but that won't protect me from a flesh-and-blood antagonist. I could talk to him if he came to Gennifer's lab, but my mind lives in the network in the basement, and it is here he will attack. I have no doubt of this now, and no hope that he has another target. I have cheated death once, and in a sense I may cheat it again. Gennifer will have backup copies of my original brain scan stored somewhere off-site. The hardware can be replaced, and with the military now funding my project the money to do that will be found. That won't change the fact that my awareness from the time of the accident until now, my life, such as it is, will be permanently destroyed. I'm going to die, and with that realization comes the knowledge that I don't want to.

  I send an emergency message to CPD dispatch. For a moment I contemplate telling them that there are lives at stake in the building in order to encourage them to hurry, but I think better of it. Carl Smith isn't going to take me hostage, and he won't have anything to lose by destroyi
ng my network if the police lay siege to the building, as they would in a hostage taking. I switch to the building's internal cameras, watching the doors in real-time. I don't have long to wait. He walks in the main doors, and the campus security system tells me he has Dr. Maidstone's electronic access card. That dovetails with his use of Maidstone's vehicle, and it occurs to me that it might be smart to send a squad car out to the Maidstone's house to check on the good doctor's health. I don't want to send dispatch that message, not yet. I don't want to distract them one iota from the task of saving me. That's a thought unworthy of Mark Astale, and I instantly change my mind and tell dispatch what they need to know. The simple reality is if I wait I may not be around to send the message later, and that may cost the man his life.