Zero, Zero, One

Zero, Zero, One

“Please…don’t.” She begged, “Don’t do this.” Her voice cracked as her hand reached out and stopped just short of touching me. “Please, I can make it work, I just need more time.”

More time, more time was all they ever asked for. It was never the thing I could give them.

“SAI is so close. So close, just a few more weeks and I’m sure I can make it do what Mr. Simmons needs it to do. Please, Jack are you even listening to me?”

“I’m sorry Isla, but it’s over.” I said my voice didn’t waver, didn’t stray from that careful cadence of cool, indifferent, professionalism.

“Jack!”

*Call Terminated*

I pulled the VR headset away from my eyes and rubbed at them viciously. I stood, feeling the blood return to my legs as I pulled my arms over my head and rocked them from side to side. Crossing to the window, I twitched aside the curtain to see the blue light of the newest robot servant model, the hologram flickered as the automated cars flew through it, their radios all blaring the ten second sales pitch as they went through.

I turned away letting the curtain fall from my fingers as I tried to get Isla’s face out of my head. Not for the first time I wondered if the face she wore of the plain looking brunette with violently purple glasses and what seemed to be permanent coffee stain on the collar of her lab coat was her real face. I had to think it was, no one was that dedicated to faking what they looked like. Except for me of course, the heavyset, balding man with a walrus mustache and eyes just a bit too small was just a façade for me to hide behind when Mr. Simmons asked me to do his dream killing.

I had once asked him why he hired all these roboticists and programmers if he just ended up scrapping anything that wasn’t the newest edition of his Serve-o’Matic, the only robot you would ever need. It cleans, it cooks…twenty preprogramed dishes, it can read to your kids…ten preprogramed stories, it will make you wife happy, and you most certainly can’t live without it.

After telling me in no uncertain terms that I needed to mind my own business. The hologram of a man who’d fashioned himself after an old Texan oil mogul leaned in and whispered conspiratorially.

“Keep your friends close, your enemies closer and the young talent out of their hands.”

My computer chirped angrily and I turned to it reflexively. The new meeting icon was flashing insistently and I sighed as I resumed my seat and once again dropped another world over my head.

He was wearing a cowboy hat today, his three piece suit as crisp and white as the day someone programed it. His office was always as it appeared with the dark paneling and the line of books with no titles on the spines. They were all the same color too, that bothered me. Mr. Simmons waved out one meaty hand to the dark, brown leather chair that sat in front of his huge mahogany desk. A metal bird drinking imaginary water bobbed up and down as I sat.

“So Jack, how did the little artist take it?” Simmons boomed throwing out his hands grandly as he put the emphasis on the word artist making it sound hyphenated, Ar-tist.

“She was confused and hurt Sir, Isla…Dr. Bayer believes that she only needs a few weeks to get the SAI program working.”

“I didn’t hire you for your opinions Jack.” Simmons warned and I bowed my head.

“Of course Sir, I’m sorry if I spoke out of turn.”

“Oh none of that son, I didn’t hire you to grovel at my feet either, I have interns for that.”

“Yes Sir, of course Sir.”

Simmons sighed and the chair behind him creaked perfectly as he leaned back into it. He folded his hands over his barrel chest. “The other one is next, the kid who thinks he’s worked out teleportation. Tell him he’s been reassigned to work sanitation. That technology of his can be used to transport trash right out to the landfills.” He laughed boomingly and I managed a pained grin.

“Yes Sir, it’ll be done right away.”

“Good. I just love the end of the month, don’t you?”

*Call Terminated* flashed across the screen before I had the chance to answer.

The office faded as my VR returned me to my waiting screen. I blinked at the view from the fire tower, the woods stretching on and on around me for miles and miles until the horizon swallowed them. I let my hands trail across the piles of paper, watching them ruffle realistically. At the corner of my vision, my calendar still floated, glowing softly with my next meeting in twenty minutes and then the follow-up with Mr. Simmons right after. I caught my own reflection in the window and startled for a moment before I remembered that I’d asked the computer to stop applying my skin while I was in this place. A representation of my own face, my true face, floated in front of me. I turned to the left so I wouldn’t have to see that which I had kept so carefully hidden. I directed my gaze into the woods beyond.

Just for a moment I thought I could see the tendril of smoke drifting lazily up. I blinked and it was gone, but my heart still picked up a beat.

*Meeting Request: Dr. Isla Bayer*

The notification flashed across my screen and I physically gasped. A quick glance at my calendar said I still had fifteen minutes before I needed to tell Toby that he was moving to sanitation. My eyes were drawn back to the location of phantom smoke and I swallowed hard.

*Accept*

We were in Isla’s lab, it was disorienting as I looked around to see Isla, the actual Isla swiftly walking about her heavy, black top tables covered with gutted computer parts and various notebooks marred by lines and lines of black, blue, purple, and green ink. She didn’t look so different from her avatar, she still had the same hair color, but her glasses were a normal shade of gray as she compulsively pushed them up the bridge of her nose.

“Oh good you made it Jack.” She said pausing to lean into the camera of her computer screen. I could see her headset just off to the side. “Sorry for the old-school video call, but I couldn’t stand to have my head in that thing for another minute.” She waved a hand out at the headset, her nails were painted with pale, pink polish. It was chipped.

“It’s fine.” I managed to say, my own voice reverberating around me as it played through her computer’s speakers. “Was there something you needed Dr. Bayer, I believe I made Mr. Simmons’s position clear this morning.”

“Yeah you did.” Isla flared her nostrils, “But tell me you aren’t the least bit curious to see what SAI can do? You know it would help people, you know that if I could just figure out that last line of code.”

She’d begun pacing the room, coming in and out of view as the camera stayed stationary.

“It doesn’t matter what I think.”

Her eyes flashed as she leaned back in front of the camera, she wasn’t wearing any make-up. I could see the pores of her skin, the smattering of freckles that covered her nose.

“Of course it matters. That’s the whole point of what I’ve been trying to do here. I want to make sure everyone matters.”

“You’re brother…”

“Don’t bring him into this Jack.” The sharpness in her voice had me clamping my jaw shut as she floated back to her work table and picked up a notebook to bring back over to me. She showed the camera the lines of code that were only zeros and ones to me. Her hand shook. “This is it. The God Code. I wrote it after you left.”

“Isla…are you being serious?” I squirmed in my seat, the sweat beginning to drip down my neck under my headset. The brilliant, young scientist nodded with tears filling her eyes. She tipped up her glasses to wipe them away.

“I input it into the computer and it works. I…I got to hear Jacob’s voice again.”

My throat bobbed, “Isla.”

“I know it’s not really him. I know it’s just a memory, but this program is going to change people’s lives. It’s going to virtually eliminate faulty witness statements, help people in comas tell their story. This is something worth funding, surely you can talk to Mr. Simmons again. There has to be something you want to remember Jack, something the code can find for you? We can even target memories and remove them. Think of all the applications for that, we could help people with PTSD or maybe even reform criminals.” Isla’s voice had risen in pitch as she excitedly pulled at her curry hair. “This is amazing science Jack.”

My memories. SAI was a program that Isla had been working on for five years, it translated memories into code that a computer could understand and recreate images or sounds from, maybe even smells. My gut clenched. It was a program that could get inside your head and put all the puzzle pieces together, maybe even better than we could. Suddenly the helmet felt too tight and I could feel the air struggling to slide into my burning chest.

A little reminder flashed me a five minute warning for my meeting with Toby.

“Doesn’t that feel like…a bit like playing God.” I asked slowly and her face dimmed for a second before she sat down in front of the camera and looked directly at me, but not me.

“Come on Jack, aren’t you tried of hiding all the time?”

“I don’t…know what you’re talking about.”

“I know this isn’t your real face. I’m a programmer remember, I can tell a skin when I see one. Everyone has something they wish they could remember and something they could forget. SAI can give people that chance. This is so much bigger than one man and his bottom line, I need you to help me.”

“I can’t. I don’t have that sort of sway with Mr. Simmons.”

“He’s your father.”

I jerked hard, my chair creaking as I nearly tipped over. My helmet was really too tight now. I couldn’t breathe, but I couldn’t take it off as I stared into the doctor’s bright blue eyes.

“Who told you that?” I whispered.

“Programmer, hacker, what’s the difference really.” Isla waved out a hand. “The point is, I did some digging Jack. Turns out your dad only hired you for this gig after some sort of accident that made you untouchable. Something that left someone else dead and got all hushed up by this company.”

The smoke was filling my nose now. I wanted to scream, but my mouth was too dry.

“Shut up.”

“And here I was thinking for five years that you actually cared about my research about me!”

“I do, I did. It’s not…”

Isla’s face twisted into a scowl, “Then help me Jack. Talk to your dad, get him to keep funding my project.”

“I don’t think…I don’t think you should continue Isla. Not if SAI can alter memories, not…not even for a good reason. There is too much risk involved in that.”

“That’s what you said last time.” Isla said in a deadpan voice and a shiver ran up and down my spine.

“What?”

Dr. Bayer sighed and rubbed her temples. “We’ll try again in an hour.”

*Call Terminated*

A quick static discharge popped through my headset and I yanked it off my head. The little message icon on my desktop warned me I had three minutes before meeting with Toby. This thing had been acting funny all day. I was going to have to talk to some IT guy about it.

I slipped the headset back over my head and my waiting room appeared. I looked out over the miles and miles of endless woods. Woods as they had been, but never could be again. My calendar popped up a notification for a meeting request.

*Meeting Request: Dr. Isla Bayer*

Damn-it, she was probably still mad from this morning. She was going to try to talk me into talking with Mr. Simmons over continuing her funding. Not that I could tell her this, but I had been the one to recommend her program’s termination. The world wasn’t ready, there were too many things that could go wrong when tampering with someone’s mind. Isla was smart, she’d understand. I accepted her meeting with a blink of my eye.

In an hour we’d talk, we’d get it all sorted out.