The Malicarn #4
“You should have told me sooner. Could be a sequestration problem. I can look at his profile, maybe we can get him back into the lab. There could be something neurological.”
“Jules isn’t going to like that, with them leaving on their mission soon.”
“Let me talk to Jules, to the producers. From a scientific perspective. Let me help.” Let me be useful.
Glenn agreed, and on the producers’ call the next day Lilly logged on from her lab office, turned her camera off, and waited.
The meeting began full of prep talk about the Council’s quest. The demon monster animatronics were nearly ready, and the stunt and FX teams were busy laying down the pyrotechnics.
The fight was scheduled to take place in the first village that had been retrofitted to appear as the monsters’ breeding ground.
A great deal of discussion was about rushes and dailies.
Half the film was already finished, a teaser trailer was being released the next week, and Larry wanted to make sure Jules and the other writers were ready to go with the next film more or less immediately after the conclusion of the current story.
“I’m not sure how much rest time the cast is going to need after this,” Clinton Maxwell, the director, said.
“Make any rest into an opening montage of the Council killing time before their next assignment,” said Larry. “We can’t stop or else they won’t have anything to do.”
Lilly waited patiently for the agenda item Glenn had added. “Character Memory Issues” was all he had called it.
“Okay, what’s this?” Larry asked, apparently not having looked at the actual agenda before that moment. “What memory issues? Who flagged this?”
“I added this one,” Glenn said. “Kip approached me with concerns he’s not capable of fighting.”
“Ah yeah, I saw those dailies,” Maxwell said. “You handled it well!”
“Well,” Glenn continued, “it might be a bigger issue. I asked Lilly to speak on this.”
“Who?” Larry asked.
“Lilly Kaminsky. She works in implementations.”
Lilly flicked her video on and cleared her voice to speak. “I looked over Kip’s chart. He’s our third-oldest active A-level character, after Prion and Heloise, but the oldest biological body. Gerry Alderbeist is the oldest of all the Council actors.”
“Yeah,” said Jules. “Gerry’s, what, sixty-five?”
“Sixty-seven,” corrected Larry.
“Yes,” Lilly continued. “So it seems probable that his brain synapses were more degraded to start with. And then add to that the fact that we had to neuroscan him twice—”
“Twice?” Larry shouted. “Why?”
“Didn’t take the first time,” Glenn said, inserting himself back into the conversation. “Happens a lot, actually.”
“Yes, that’s correct,” Lilly said. “So I think it might be good to keep Kip back, if possible, for his own health. Stress may exacerbate his sense of dislocation. Frankly, it would probably be a good idea to restore his original—”
“No,” Larry said. “The whole Council is going. Or else the movie doesn’t have an ending. This is a reunion film, a team-up film. Kip’s a fan favorite, he has to come.”
“I understand the story needs,” Lilly said, her voice steady now. “But I’m talking about the health of one of your actors.”
“But he’s not an actor,” Jules interjected. “He grew up in a northern swamp castle and fought with Prion on his first campaign. His best friend is Jip, a fellow knight with a drinking problem. These are all real to him, you get it? He’s a knight.”
“It’s real because that’s what he’s been told. But you know it’s not. He’s an actor. He’s from Cleveland.”
“Not anymore,” said Jules, “thanks to your team.”
There was a long silence. Jules’s gaze pierced the screen.
“Why not just rescan him?” Larry asked.
“Because we’ve already done that,” Lilly said. “It’s not how it works, anyway. If there’s some underlying issue then you can’t fix it with more scanning. That’s the science. There’s nothing we can do via neuroscanning.”
“She’s right for once,” Jules said. “There’s nothing to be done. He’s been fine in training and he’ll be fine on the quest. We can talk about retirement after this arc.”
Jules and Larry were united against interfering and the meeting ended. Lilly got a text from Glenn moments later: Sorry that got heated.
She didn’t respond, and went back to filing through emails.
Glenn texted again. They’re just really concerned about this story.
Bullshit, she texted back. You hardly said anything. You have to stand up for me. Then she turned off her phone.
The next day Lilly finally got a full lesson in the lab’s new extraction protocols.
“This is the new input channel,” Whitman said, pointing to the red cord that had been installed on each of the neuroscanners, feeding into the same port where the original green cord also emerged.
“We can still load PersMats from the servers the old way, but now we can also read scans from live individuals and load them straight onto the hard drive. This data can then be fed back into our databases, giving us more realistic PersMats with more diverse thoughts and memories than ever before.”
R & D had retrofitted every machine with the new technology, and wide-scale extraction would soon be rolled out.
The entire workflow for implementations was about to change.
Every personality could be built from someone else’s actual memories, which meant memories could be more specific.
It also meant they could more easily build and add technical skills to the cast.
Lilly was pulled off regular implementations management to help calibrate the machines.
They started by bringing in a group of outside consultants, people who had been selected and flown to the Malicarn set because of some special skill they possessed.
They had to do it in the lab. There was no chance the studio was going to let a neuroscanner off the island.
The first man who came worked at a summer camp where he taught kids how to make baskets—a skill the producers noticed no one in the Malicarn actually possessed and had led to a stark shortage of suitable baskets throughout the realm.
“Sounds ridiculous,” Whitman said, “but it turns out it’s actually important to have baskets.”
Lilly sat the man down in the observation room, asked him to think about basket weaving very intently for several minutes, working his mind step-by-step through the process of making a basket.
Then Lilly attached the red cord to his forehead and flipped a new switch on the scanner’s box that had been hastily labeled INPUT with a sticker and marker.
The man blinked a few times but sat mostly still, staring at the table in front of him. A couple of minutes later the buzz of the machine slowed down, and clicked off, and Lilly told him he was finished.
“Is it really safe for them to be awake?” Lilly asked Whitman when the man left.
“They have to be, otherwise who knows what the scanner will pick up? We need them to think about specific things. But the machine is only programmed to scan them for about three minutes. We don’t want anyone getting brain cancer.” Whitman laughed at this, but Lilly did not.
They spent the morning gleaning information from more outside consultants: a doula, a musician, a man who knew how to skin a bear. The downloads all went smoothly, only one or two people complaining of a slight headache after.
After each subject, the scanners were carted over to the Brain Coders, who uploaded the data into their servers and started building them into what they were calling PersMat Supps—Supplemental Personality Matrices, which could then be mapped on to preexisting characters.
“We’ll start with the extras,” Whitman explained. “See how the new information binds. Writers think it might be a good tool to build up B-levels with more backstory when and if they get more story time.”
Lilly thought the whole exercise was lacking in scientific rigor.
It felt messy, and Whitman seemed to be rushing through it in order to finish up and report back to the studio.
The original scanning procedures had been developed by the Pentagon, rigorously peer reviewed, and had even gone through several rounds of questioning by the House Intelligence Committee on the ethics involved.
When the studio picked it up and the whole program fell into legal limbo, it was at least a well-understood scientific process.
This new Supps procedure was no such thing.
The entire protocol was researched, documented, and deployed only within the Citadel lab.
The American studio heads were briefed on its progress, but none of the technology had been developed in the United States, which Lilly knew was necessary due to the neuroscanners’ questionable legal status outside of Madeira.
Lilly’s colleagues were doing cutting-edge research with very little oversight, and no one beyond the walls of the Citadel knew anything about how it worked.
Lilly did not even have proper documentation about the machine modifications.
But her concerns went unheeded, Whitman sighing when she brought it up and waving her off with a condescending eye roll.
Even Glenn, when she texted him about what was happening, did not provide the expected concern or remorse.
Oh, yeah, Jules is really excited about that. Gonna help with being able to do rewrites on the fly. Hey, you want to get dinner later?
The first character brought in for supplemental implementation that afternoon was an extra named Jasper, a middle-aged man who had been working as a hired hand on various farms. Today he was going to learn about tanning hides.
The tanning information had been downloaded from a Colonial Williamsburg employee and retired history teacher who spent many summers in historical reenactment camps demonstrating dead trades for bored children.