Reconfigure (20 page)

Forward Chain

Human

Contents

SuperEgo

Ego

Id

Memory

Model

Essence

Fractal Location - <1.3,0.5,0>

Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>

Fractal Iteration Level - <2708>

Roisin performed an Examine on the quantum melded David.

Designation - QuantumConcept

Forward Chain

CompositeQuantumDevice

Contents

SuperEgo

Ego

Id

Memory

Model

Essence

Fractal Location - <0,0,0>

Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>

Fractal Iteration Level - <2708>

Seeing her inner self boiled down to a piece of metadata was way more disturbing than seeing herself as a sphere on the screen in <2709>. The forward chain looked promising. It was a pointer to a Human. She was the only one in the room. The doctor was precisely at the <0,0,0> origin. He was part of a composite device, again the only one in the room. It was David and RK Melded at this concept level.

Roisin was no clearer about identifying the lost linkage with Alex. She needed to see what happened to someone or something when their Concept moved from them. She had tried her best not to hurt anyone up to now in her life. These CCSO people had caused this to happen to Alex. They had tried to kill her too. She was in no doubt the CCSO would do something really bad if they got control of RK. Roisin felt it was a valid time to get a little tougher.

She headed back into the lion’s den. The parking garage at CCSO HQ looked as tidy and clean as before. The table was missing a drone this time. She had already scanned the area, she knew it was clear. Roisin wanted to be in a bit closer for what she had in mind. She slid open a tool draw and picked up a screwdriver from the neatly arranged array of tools. She made her way towards the stairwell door. The roller door was not open this time, but the side access door was unlocked. In the stairwell she hid again in her changing room. She placed the screwdriver on the floor. She scanned with FMM and located the screwdriver’s location and cut and paste that to her clipboard.

Upstairs in the briefing room, once again, there was a large organised collection of Human cubes. This time there was one cube out front, a Podium cube near it on her screen. She could not see or hear, but she was pretty sure they were discussing her recent near death escape from the cell. She switched fractal levels on FMM and all the cubes became HumanConcept, each with its own suffix number. She highlighted the one stood alone at the front. That must be the stony faced Commander. She imagined him on the giant screen in the cell again. This time she also imagined him falling out of shot as he collapsed. She Translated HumanConcept62 from her current view pasting the new coordinates in from the clipboard.

She swapped back to iteration <2709>. She saw a number of Human cubes gathering around another marked OrganicShell. Then alarms started to ring. Not directly where she was but they echoed loudly around the stairwell.

“Screw you!” She said as she picked up the tool in front of her and Translated herself back to the lab.

She sat back down at her terminal, and started using the VM again. She had picked up the screwdriver and placed it beside her to the right. She ran FMM and went back a fractal iteration level. There were now two HumanConcept cubes in the room along with Quantum one. Her position was labelled HumanConcept. The screwdriver’s relative position was labelled HumanConcept1. Roisin noted that the number suffixes were relative to the Zone at the other fractal levels too. He was no longer HumanConcept62.

She examined her new disembodied friend.

Designation - HumanConcept1

Forward Chain

None

Placeholder

Screwdriver

Contents

SuperEgo

Ego

Id

Memory

Model

Essence

Fractal Location - <1.3,1.67,0.5>

Fractal Orientation- <0,0,0>

Fractal Iteration Level - <2708>

He had no forward chain set? It was as close to an error condition as she was going to get, she thought. Roisin switched to the command line. She had to figure out what was missing here. On the command line on the Linux terminal she set a Zone to encompass 9999 km again.

“ls HumanConcept* | Examine | grep None”

It was another sledgehammer command, but with the ability of the quantum process to do everything all at once she could afford to be lazy. David would be happy to use as much neural power as possible to help get Alex back too. The CLI showed.

>Screwdriver

MetalContainer79930

In the 9999 km Zone there were only two HumanConcepts containing the word None, one of those was on her desk at the moment, a version of the Commander parked on the screwdriver. She swapped back to iteration <2709> and keeping the Zone she Translated MetalContainer79930 to the lab. It clattered as it hit the floor and rolled over and around. It was, to the best of her view of it, a waste paper bin.

“Hardly a well planned place to hide Alex? In a bin?" She then smiled to herself as she realised Alex had trashed her mind, hopefully not kicking the bucket. No time for such a thought, she needed to talk to the Doc again. She wasn’t about to perform any operation on the trashcan and Alex’s brain without his say so.

Dr Henry scrolled up and down the output from Roisin’s latest expedition. He looked across at the desk bound screwdriver and considered all the implications. The metal and plastic tool was a placeholder, and apparently one for the HumanConcept that was one of the highest ranking officers in CCSO. Roisin had described this man several times, now he was on hold, in the lab, on the desk.

He looked at the empty grey waste paper bin, now also placed on the desk. At some metaphysical level he was looking at Alex. He, like Roisin, couldn’t easily make the mental leap. Millions of years of evolution were in place to understand the physical world. Even for a scientist and expert in quantum theory his brain constantly slam shut on the idea. He was less than impressed at what Roisin had done to the bin.

“Look, I thought it might help lighten the shock, I mean the sharpie was there and it looked so plain…” She said.

The cartoon eyes, nose and smiling mouth drawn on the bin stared off into space, almost in the direction of the motionless Alex.

“We need to test the process first.” He said. “We can’t just throw Alex’s HumanConcept at Alex." He found himself labelling everything as Alex despite them only being parts of the whole. “We need to see what happens when you put the screwdriver back where it belongs. There may be side effects, we need to be more sure.”

Roisin agreed. She would have to put Humpty back together again.

It had been less than half an hour since she had plucked the HumanConcept of the Commander from his body. She scanned from the car park stairwell again, she had taken the same Translate route as before. FMM v1.3 showed the OrganicShell had moved up a floor and was with a bed and several machines. They appeared to have local medical facilities. Roisin assumed that whilst there may not be much resistance to CCSO there was always a need to treat something or someone.

She performed her remote camera trick with a spare vanilla Android phone again. She Translated it, whilst it recorded, to the area the OrganicShell occupied. This time whilst it was recording she enhanced her view by Translating and Transforming the camera into different parts of the room. It was like flying a stop motion version of a drone as it leapt from place to place. Everyone was too focussed on their patient to really notice the phone, a few seconds here and there, before she translated it back. On reviewing the footage she noticed a few of the attending physicians in their gowns, goggles and masks, had made a rapid glance in the direction the camera had been. Just getting something caught in the corner of their eyes, but finding nothing. The images showed they were wiring the Commander to lots of devices.

Roisin didn’t want an audience for her next trick. She Translated to the medical room, but not before attaching all the Human cubes in the room to the floor. She stood looking at a diorama of a medical scene. Each static character was mid action either on the patient or examining and adjusting devices.

Using FMM she viewed the iteration level <2708>. She saw numerous HumanConcept cubes, she suspected, but did not know, that they may in fact be locked in a pause mode just as their physical representations were. She copied the coordinates of the current OrganicShell to her clipboard. She placed the screwdriver on top of the beeping heart monitor. She Translated the HumanConcept11, that matched the screwdriver's relative location, to its original owner’s coords using her saved clipboard values.

The Commander’s eyes shot open. The heart monitor beep rapidly accelerated. He looked confused seeing each of the white wrapped figures around him. He tore the breathing mask from his face. He sat up, a lone figure amongst the medical mannequins.

Roisin stepped to the end of the bed looking just around one of the static staff.

“Do you remember me? Oh and don’t call anyone! Or else." She said as she waved the phone and FMM at him. He stopped whatever noise he was ready to issue. She repeated, walking past and around to the next medical practitioner model.

“Do you remember me?” She asked again.

“Miss Kincade, Roisin Kincade. The terrorist armed with an anomaly creating device.” He stated.

The boot was on the other foot, she was the one holding all the cards, but he was being defiant and stalwart. She was no terrorist!

“No, I think you will find you are the bad guys, I am with the good guys. I mean if I was a terrorist, well you would be dead by now? The very atoms of your body fused with a fifty pence piece.” She said.

“What are your demands Miss Kincade?” Was that the best he could come up with.

“Well, I would say World peace but I doubt you can stretch to that?” She quipped. “No, I will just settle for you leaving me alone, but again that’s a tall order isn’t it?”

He nodded. He was analysing the room, the situation and the possible ways to disable her. Roisin knew he was a very dangerous man, and was beginning to regret putting him back in one piece.

She waved a cute little girly sarcastic wave, the best she could muster and Translated back to the stairwell. Roisin detached all the medical staff from the floor remotely. She listened out, the sirens and alarms started again. Smiling, she Translated back to base and consulted with Dr Henry after a Unmeld.

“It worked, he seemed pretty much the same to me, he knew who I was, he engaged in conversation.” She explained and added “Of course he did look like a homicidal maniac, but I don’t think that’s a side effect, he is just like that.”

“Let’s get Alex back together.” Said David pointing at the same time in both the direction of the bed and to the smiling bucket.

Fixing Alex had to be a more carefully planned operation than the Commander and the screwdriver. He had been an expendable test subject. She had still felt guilt as she had torn him apart and thrown him back together again. For Alex they needed to be ready to stabilise her physical body. At the moment it was locked away, immobile at every level. No blood was pumping, no breakdown of sugars to power muscles. As soon as they detached her there would be a momentary lapse where her OrganicShell was without any support. Her Human Concept would be reunited with her body but neither of them had any idea how quickly it could take over the regulatory functions. The Commander had come back to his cheery self pretty quickly but he had been a screwdriver for a lot less time than Alex had been a metal bucket.

With Doctor Henry piloting from his Meld, Roisin located the nearest shopping centre. She could have gone anywhere, but it was quicker to go to a place she knew. She arrived in the small multi-storey car park just near the doors to the shops. There was constant traffic but no-one pays much attention to anyone in car parks, so they did not notice her blip into existence. She knew drivers were generally inattentive in car parks. A number of times they had swung around narrowly missing her before, with their paid parking tickets held in their mouths. Each locked into the act of reaching the barrier to escape in time.

She headed into the main shopping area. It was pleasant to see lots of people milling around, different faces. No one, except one lone unarmed shopping centre guard, in anything approaching a tactical military outfit. As she turned to the left she stood near her target. It was the standard resuscitation unit that public places were duty bound to have. It was a large orange cabinet with a first aid cross emblazoned on it. She checked her FMM, identified the box and its contents. The defibrillator, the breathing mask and the adrenalin shots were all present. She walked on with the crowd whilst looking at her phone, she blended in. She hit Translate. The orange box arrived at the lab leaving a blank space on the wall of the shopping centre, save for the two clips that had supported it. Roisin looked into the window of the bookstore, she glanced across to see the security guard radio in. His patrol had taken him past the now missing emergency kit. His job was to tap his barcode scanner at each patrol point, if everything was ok. This, he clearly deemed, was not ok. Roisin was relieved, it meant a new kit would be on its way. The chances of anyone getting hurt and needing it and it not being there were slim. David and Roisin had discussed raiding a hospital for the kit, but they had decided the shopping centre ones were less likely to be needed. It meant innocent people were not going to be affected by their actions.

Roisin wandered into the bookstore. She walked past the fiction section towards the much more intriguing graphic novels. Superhero beings, good and bad filled the pages. Some could manipulate space and time, minds too. Others had super strength, and could climb walls. She felt an even greater affinity with her comic book heroes. She looked across to the left to see the self help section. Book upon book about discovering yourself, winning friends, getting rich. She moved on past the graphic novels gently tapping the top of a few to make contact and acknowledge their presence. She headed to the psychology section. Weighty text books occupied shelves with more mainstream authors, those known to TV documentary audiences for their various insights. She looked further and found a section on popular science. She even saw a Quantum Mechanics for Dummies book. Smiling to herself, she thought she could have done with that a few days ago. Roisin doubted the book would have had any of her more recent experiences in it.

The bookstore was not the centre of all human knowledge, but it did give her a feeling of superiority looking at all these theories and ideas collected in one place. Somewhere there would be a mention of Many Worlds theories and even quantum choices, but the text books would not be dealing with HumanContext and Fractal Iteration Levels. There were only three people in the World who knew about that. Right at the moment two of them were locked out of this physical iteration, one a bucket and the other a metadata co-processor for a quantum computer. Roisin was pretty much it, ‘The one and only’. Damn, she now had an ear worm. Chesney Hawk’s ancient song rattled around amongst her threads of thought. She tried to hum the national anthem under her breath. That was, probably according to one of these pop psychology books, supposed to remove any ear worm repetitive tunes. Instead she ended up with a very distracted mashup of God Save The Queen, in a traditional grand occasion style, mixed with a punk rock version and chiming in with an ‘I am the one and only’ riff. She ignored it, but it played on, a backing track for her to walk with as she left the shop and found a quiet place to Translate from.

The non medical Doctor Henry had looked up lots of first aid procedures once Roisin had Unmelded him. He already knew basic first aid, but he wanted to be sure about the adrenalin shot and its potential timing. The defibrillator came with vocal and written instructions. He rehearsed with Roisin all the elements she would need to do once they initiated the script. He had hand coded a specific Translate, double checking the numbers and getting Roisin to sense check it too. He had explained to Roisin it was better to specifically automate the detach and transfer from the smiling bucket with a script so that she could stand by and perform any CPR. He would be Unmelded as soon as the Translate completed too, as part of the script. He could take over and Roisin could assist. Roisin had to rehearse. She needed to have the machine ready and charged to shock Alex’s heart back into life. There would be no time, if it was needed it had to be there and then.

Roisin opened the defibrillator box. The two paddles sat clicked in place. She followed the pattern she had already practiced with David and began the preamble. Press the start button, release the paddles. Apply the gel, rubbing the pads together whilst holding onto the plastic handles. The thick curled electrical wires pulled back giving a little resistance. Any adrenalin shot would be Doctor Henry’s to deliver when he came back. The air mask, with hand pumping bag, was balanced beside Alex’s head on the pillow.

“Ready.” He stated and Doctor Henry Melded.

The process timer ticked over and then the ‘./Alex.sh’ script ran the rest of its commands. It instantly detached Alex, she was no longer part of the bed. Her body was once again a living machine. Roisin hovered with the paddles. The next command ran in the script. It changed to a different fractal iteration and transferred the HumanConcept from its bucket placeholder to the hardcoded coordinates of Dr Alex Wight’s OrganicShell. Roisin started to move the paddles towards Alex’s chest.

“Stop!” Came the voice from the previous inactive body of Doctor Henry. He was dashing towards Roisin, waving his arms as she held the paddles over Dr Alex.

Alex Wight took deep breaths through her nose and out through her mouth. Her eyes opened. Roisin stood back carefully with the paddles, as if carrying a box of explosives. Doctor Henry clicked the off switch on the box, and looked at Alex.

“Dave?” Said the new third human in the lab, “They were.” Alex stopped, she looked confused. She looked across at Roisin who was stood like a boxer with two very flat gloves. “Who?” Added Alex, again drifting into confusion.

“Alex, you are back in the lab, here with Ray K.” He said as he held each of her hands, lifting them slightly and bringing them together with his. “You are safe.”

Roisin felt tears of joy and of relief welling up as she placed the paddles back down and clicked them home.

“How did you know I didn’t need to zap her?” Roisin asked David.

“I saw her, I felt her back in one piece. Everything felt right, balanced. I could almost talk to you.” He said as he changed his focus from answering Roisin to looking at someone he obviously cared deeply about.

Dr Alex Wight was back, she quickly seemed to flush away the confusion.

“Oh Dave!” She said as she sat up and pulled her hands from his to give him a huge hug. “They found me, I had to…” Her clear annunciated words indicating her background and education.

She had a story to tell but it was fighting to get out and was mixed with many emotions. For her whatever had occurred had all happened in an instant. Roisin knew some of the confusion she might be feeling. Roisin’s Translates had a brain jarring effect, but Alex had been a waste bin for a significant part of the past month or so.