The Malicarn #2
We were going house to house, looking for a group of insurgents we knew were hiding in the village.
Our CO gave us orders to apprehend but also not to put ourselves at unnecessary risk.
So we knew we could shoot to kill, no questions asked.
Well, we came upon this one little house.
Dark, smelled like shit. Someone had been using it as a toilet, just living in there for days.
It was empty when we got to it, though. At least it seemed so.
We still had to clear it, so I went in first. Nobody in any of the bedrooms, but I noticed a shelf, not flush against the wall, in the back kitchen.
I showed it to our captain, who ordered us to move it.
Well, we pull it back and there’s a hole cut into the wall, and a small little space inside there, like a closet.
Piled with guns and explosives, lots of material for IEDs.
But the only person in there was this little kid.
He must have been about eight. I looked at my captain, wondering what we should do with him, when the kid lifted a gun and shot him in the face.
I shot back. They were both dead, my captain and the kid.
But we had found where the insurgents were hiding, and when they came back later that night we captured them all.
“Christ, Lilly,” Whitman said when she read over it. “This is dark.”
“Well, aren’t some of these guys veterans of the Wizarding War? I saw those movies, they were violent.”
“Yeah, I guess. Just change the details from Iraq to something more medieval. Don’t tell the writers, though, unless you’ve gotten your father’s permission for this.”
“Oh, I certainly haven’t.”
The Brain Coders fed Lilly’s story into a PersMat for a character they named “Frank Douglas.” It was not a name, Lilly thought, that sounded especially Malicarnesque, but there were so many extras now that the teams were just generating basic names for everyone, not worrying since these characters would never appear onscreen anyway.
“Frank Douglas” was meant to be about thirty years old, but the man who was selected was only twenty-four.
Lilly didn’t worry about it too much. Frank was going to be a farmer, and after a couple of years working in the sun he’d look at least ten years older than his biological age.
The volunteer was brought in, already dressed in a hospital gown, hair cut to fit the character, and placed in an examination room, where he sat across from Lilly.
“Hello, I am Dr. Kaminsky. Can you please verify your name?”
“Yes, Terry Prokoff.”
“Full name, please.”
“Uh, Terrence. Terrence Howard Prokoff.”
“Thank you. And can you please confirm the procedure you have been selected for today?”
“I’m going to be, um, implemented.”
“Yes, thank you.” On the table next to her sat a gray box, like a computer hard drive, with an LED display, various knobs and buttons, and a green cord winding out the top.
“This is a Cerebral Cortex Implementations Processor, or ‘neuroscanner,’ as we call it. It creates new synaptic connections which, once finished, will seem to you as memories and personality traits. Likes, dislikes, social conditioning, that sort of thing. Your present personality and memories will remain intact, but as part of the implementation these will be sequestered to parts of the brain which will not have any active role in your cognitive abilities. Does that make sense?”
“I think so. They explained it like, I’ll be watching myself do stuff but can’t do it myself?”
“Precisely. We sequester you within yourself. Once your contract expires, we’ll undo this sequestration, restore your full self, but you’ll always have the memories of your character’s actions.”
“Incredible.”
“Yes. So legally I have to register any objections you may have to this.”
“None whatsoever.”
“You’ve already signed consent documentation, but I need to affirmatively receive your consent one more time.”
“Oh, I consent!” Terry smiled widely, like an idiot.
Lab assistants administered an intravenous sleeping drug and laid Terry onto a gurney. Lilly left, filled out some paperwork, and returned with the PersMat disk. One of the assistants placed a neural node onto Terry’s forehead. Lilly loaded the PersMat onto the neuroscanner.
Lilly took a glass of water from the assistant, who left Lilly alone in the room and closed the door.
She set the glass of water down on a table in the middle next to Terry’s gurney, then hooked the green wire from the gray neuroscanner box onto the node on the body’s forehead.
She gave a thumbs-up through the one-way mirror and then flipped the box on.
She waited for the electrical signals to slowly charge up, and the readout from the body’s brain to appear on the small LED screen on the box.
All of Terry’s vital functions worked fine.
Breathing, heartbeat, sensory perception.
He was simply asleep. The sleeping aids would last about another thirty minutes, so Lilly got started.
She flipped a switch on the front of the machine, and the soft hum of the box grew into a loud buzzing. The body began to quiver slightly.
In theory, a PersMat implementation could occur when a subject was awake, but the fast flow of images and thoughts would be disorienting, so the procedure was always done when asleep.
An A-level subject could take nearly an hour to properly upload, and those implementations were always supervised along with an anesthesiologist and usually one of the writers themselves.
Extras only took about ten minutes to implement, and nobody was present except Lilly.
The buzzing eventually slowed down back to its original soft hum, and a small light on the console flicked off.
The PersMat upload was complete. Lilly turned off the machine and removed the wire and nodes from Frank’s head.
An assistant came in and took the machine away.
The neuroscanner’s hard drive would be wiped, to ensure no future implementations were cross-contaminated with another person’s memories.
Lilly then sat quietly in the room for the rest of the hour as the effects of the sleep drugs slowly waned.
The next step was the most crucial: QA. Quality assurance.
Once this step was complete, the subject would be drugged again, sent to props and wardrobe, outfitted with proper clothes and personal items, and then placed at their location on set.
The next time the character woke they would be in their normal life, with nothing but a bad headache and memories of a strange dream.
Terry, now Frank, finally stirred and sat up, blinking and looking around the room. To avoid disorientation, the interior of the observation room was painted to resemble the inside of a wooden hut. His gaze finally fell upon Lilly, the first person he had seen in his new life.
“Hello,” Lilly said. “This is a dream. I am going to ask you a series of questions about your life. When I finish, the dream will end. You will wake up in your bed, and your sleep will be over. Do you understand?”
Frank nodded. “Yes.”
“What is your name?”
“Frank Douglas.”
“What is your occupation?”
“Farmer.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes.” This was true. His wife was implemented earlier that day.
“Where did you grow up?”
“In the southern reaches.” Everybody grew up in the southern reaches, because they did not exist.
“Why did you leave?”
“I fought in the war.”
“Which war?”
“The Great Wizarding War.”
Lilly worked down through a dozen or so more questions about Frank’s life, then moved on to the basic knowledge questions.
“How do you use a plow? When do you plant grains? Beans? Potatoes? How do you deliver a calf? How much would you charge at the market for a bushel of wheat? In what direction from your farm is the Old Village? The castle? How do you make love to your wife?”
Frank answered each question easily, a simple pass. Lilly extended the glass of water to him.
“You must be thirsty. Please drink this.”
Frank took a swill of the water. Almost right away, his head began to droop.
“You are tired. Lie down.”
Frank lay back down on the gurney and was asleep again.
Lilly left the room, passed off her paperwork, and pressed a buzzer for someone from the props department to come down.
A minute later, two runners emerged from the elevator, rolled Frank out, and took him upstairs to begin his new life.
Lilly finished entering her paperwork into the system, then reported to Whitman.
“Next one’s an eighteen-year-old orphan who lives in the hills,” Whitman said. “PersMat’s in your inbox. The volunteer’s already on his way down.”
They were clean, these implementations. Orderly. There was no mess to it. It meant Lilly didn’t have to think about what she was doing and what was going to happen tomorrow. This, of course, was all before she met Glenn Mackey.
2.
Glenn’s wool cowl itched. He pulled at it but it stuck to his neck, the brim soaked with sweat.
His chin itched as well, with stubble from the beard he was growing.
He glanced down at the sheet in front of him, the bullet points written out in Jules’s messy scrawl.
“Knowing surprise. Tell him your name. ‘Necromancer has returned.’ Get him to commit to helping.”
Glenn folded the paper and placed it inside his cloak.
The room felt like a crypt—airless, windowless, on the lower level of a recently constructed building the writers were calling “the Old Castle.” There was nowhere to sit, so Glenn leaned against the cold stone wall under the lone hanging lamp.
It didn’t actually make sense for his character to be here, but Jules assured him the lighting would be dramatic.