The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl

By Bryce Anderson

Helen Roderick assumed life would get easier after she died. The plan was simple: scan her neural paths, simulate her brain on an enormous bank of computers, then live an untroubled life free of aging, dandruff, or any of the other drawbacks of hauling her own squishy meatsack around.
But nothing's going according to plan. Even as the government is trying to shut her lab down and steal their research, Helen must use her growing powers to find the culprit of a nuclear attack. She uncovers a force bent not on geopolitical conquest, but on the extinction of all humankind.
Will our heroine be enslaved or deleted by the Feds? Can she avert an impending war with China? When will she find time to complete her doctorate? And we're trying not to judge, but isn't Dr. Mellings way too old for her?
Alternately goofy and dark, The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl is the story of a singular woman and a life lived at exponential speed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryce Anderson
• Release date: May 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310260902

Bryce Anderson

Bryce Anderson, part man, part machine, all...ways typing stuff down on a computer. He mostly writes in the sci-fi/fantasy genres, and throws in the occasional political rant to keep things interesting. His first attempt at writing a book came at the age of six. The book was about time traveling dinosaurs. For reasons which 35 year old Bryce can't fully comprehend, six year old Bryce decided that the T. Rex was some kinda robot. When the dinosaurs emerged from their time travel vortex, they got attacked by fighter jets. That was the whole plot, and as far as Bryce was concerned, that was as much plot as it needed. Thus began an illustrious thirty year career of half-finished literary projects. When I pushed The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl out the door, it marked the end of an era. In an alternate dimension, Bryce rules over the five lunar colonies with an iron fist. In this one, he is a Salt Lake City resident who has a niece, two nephews, and a pet bunny, all of whom appear to have mind control powers.

Book preview

The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl, by Bryce Anderson

singularity (n):

a strange or unique property

a point of mathematical discontinuity

an unobservable point of infinite density, a.k.a. a black hole

a period of sudden, self-catalyzing technological progress which precludes making any firm plans for next Saturday.

Boring lawyer stuff:

Second Edition, Copyright 2015, by Bryce Anderson. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License. In short, you may give it away if you like, as long as you don’t modify its content and don’t make money doing it.

Cover art courtesy of Nick James, nickjam.es.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real events or persons is entirely coincidental. If you are such a coincidental person, living out such coincidental events, your life infringes upon my copyright. Expect to hear from my lawyers.

Any resemblance to future events or persons would be most remarkable indeed.

I am a work of fiction. You and I and the whole world are all projected onto the eyelid of a sleepless dreamer. Any resemblance to myself is accidental, and totally not what I was going for.

To my nearest and dearest, who offer a constant stream of love and encouragement.

And to you, yes YOU, dear reader.

VOLUME I

/////////////////

// CORPSECICLE //

/////////////////

October 08, 2014

The three-A.M. air bit cold through his jacket as Dr. Mellings drove up to the Biomedical Sciences Building, killing his engine and coasting his motorcycle to a stop. He fumbled for the swipe card in his wallet, a task complicated by his cold hands and thick riding gloves. Denied its rewarding splash of dopamine, his limbic system fired off a stressor signal, which in turn caused him to utter a stress-mitigating vocalization.

Most people would have left it at, I swore. Sometimes he hated knowing his own mind.

Key card in hand, he walked up the concrete stairs and swiped himself in. Distantly, he noted the slight tickle in his prefrontal cortex as the light flashed green and the door unlocked. Reward! As he passed through the glass doors and turned left down a darkened hallway, the grid cells in his hippocampus fired off cascades of signals as they continuously updated a mental map of his surroundings.

This is what his brain did when it was avoiding thinking about something: it thought about itself.

As motion sensors triggered lights ahead of him, he took the two flight of steps down to his basement office. His footsteps echoed down the bare concrete hallway. He’d always liked the decor: austere and solitary. Down here, he could cast off William Mellings and put on the guise of the Platonic Ideal of Scholar, letting the world disappear as he lost himself in the thorny, delightful problems of scientific discovery.

Maeva hated it down here. It made her claustrophobic.

The clatter of heavy things hitting solid things came from down a side hallway, followed by a stress-mitigating vocalization in a decidedly female voice. Dr. Mellings went to investigate, and found a young woman struggling to load a pair of compressors back onto a push cart. Helen?

She shrieked, dropping the compressor and sending equipment tumbling off the cart, then slipped on a bunch of metal tubes and landed butt-first on the floor. Helen Roderick—one of William’s more promising, if rather odd grad students—looked up at him, wide-eyed. Recognition crossed her face, but she didn’t seem relieved. If anything, she seemed even more apprehensive. Dr. Mellings? What are you doing here? She pushed a few strands of blond hair out of her eyes.

I needed some things from my office. You? He offered her a hand up.

This is… well, sort of a side project for the folks in cardiology. Helen stood and brushed herself off. They wanted it for a study, and it was a bit of a rush job, but nobody over there is remotely mechanical.

William boiled at this. So they pilfer my grad student? You work too hard as it is. Not many students I’d say that to. He pulled out his phone.

Helen’s face went ashen. What are you doing?

Calling Dr. Whitmer. I go on vacation for two weeks and he retasks my people? No.

Please don’t! She closed her hands over the phone, flipping it shut. Really, this is all my fault. They put out a general request on the mailing list, and I need the money. I know I should have cleared it with you, but I didn’t want to interrupt your honeymoon. Please, please don’t call him, she begged. Her hands were still wrapped around his.

He pulled away abruptly and tucked his cell phone into his pocket. "All right. I’ll let him get his sleep. Somebody ought to be getting some around here." He thought about asking her if she wanted some help. It was his job to put the students first and all. Ordinarily he would have. But then, ordinarily a little interdepartmental turf scuffle wouldn’t have him smearing on the war paint.

Ordinary. What a word. Just clean up after yourself, okay? He did an about face and began to walk away.

I’m really sorry, Helen called after him.

Dr. Mellings looked back over his shoulder. Don’t worry, I’m not mad at you. There’s… it’s not really related to this at all. Displaced aggression. He shrugged.

You okay? she asked.

No. He drifted to a stop. She would find out eventually. At last he muttered, I’ll explain later.

Helen nodded sympathetically, then went back to work.

He arrived at his office and flipped a switch. The fluorescent lights buzzed in protest as they reluctantly brightened. William let his eyes wander over the cramped, cluttered space. A series of posters hung along the far wall. The largest showed a 19th-century anatomy illustration, a human head and brain in profile. The limbic system was highlighted in red, with an arrow pointing to it that read YOU ARE HERE. Books lined the walls and lay stacked on every available surface, climbing to precarious heights. Most had a bookmark in them. A few had two: his, hers.

A line of framed photographs decorated the shelf nearest his chair. Dr. Mellings slid around his desk—a battered departmental hand-me-down that took up most of the office—and looked the photos over. Maeva and William on the summit of El Capitan. Maeva screaming her head off at an anti-war rally. Maeva and her brother Boris in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow.

Maeva falling toward me.

Each photo opened another floodgate of memories, ratcheting the hole in his heart a bit wider, as he placed them in a cardboard box to take with him.

It was done, and he hadn’t cried. That was a small victory, he supposed. But his eye caught one last portrait of her, this one sitting next to his computer screen. He reached to take it, but his hand paused at a glass vase filled with flowers, desiccated to the point that they’d become a fire hazard. They might have been chrysanthemums; he’d never cared to learn the difference.

I bought these for you. Your office, so colorless. Her words were crisp and precise, despite her heavy Russian accent.

Really, Maeva, you shouldn’t have. I like it fine down here.

Fignya! Your mind, it longs for color. I send you the citations if you do not believe it. She set the vase full of lush yellow flowers on his desk. You will see them each day, you will think of me, you will be happy.

You’re supposed to wait until we’re married to start changing me.

I am not patient woman, William, and there is much work ahead. I need these forty-three hours to mold you into proper husband. She laughed and kissed him.

His body succumbed to great, racking sobs that made it difficult to breathe. He crushed the flowers to his chest, where the stems snapped and the petals crumbled into dry fragments. The vase dropped to the floor as he buried his head in his hands, letting the weeping come.

When his composure returned, he picked up the vase and put it back on the desk, spinning it to eye the newly chipped rim with disinterest. He flipped open his cell phone. 3:52 A.M. Damn, he’d fallen apart for about a half hour. It had felt, well, not good, but cathartic at least. He thought about heading home.

Or…

Knowing full well that it was a mistake, a misdirection of his grief, he brought up Dr. Whitmer’s contact on his phone. Home line. Dialing. Three rings.

Who the hell? slurred a barely conscious voice.

Hey, Whitmer. It’s Mellings.

…son of a… Do you know what time it is?

Four A.M. A perfectly uncivil hour, wouldn’t you agree?

There was a pause on the line. Yes it is.

Then why in god’s name do you have one of my grad students up at four A.M. working on equipment for you? It looked like she was building Frankenstein a pacemaker.

An exhausted groan came through the phone. What are you talking about?

Helen Roderick is in the building, putting together some contraption down by the freezers. I don’t care if she volunteered to do it, you can’t retask one of my grad stu—

Now he sounded more alert. I still have no idea what you’re talking about. I never asked Miss Roderick to build me anyth—

William hung up, then burst out of his office in a dead run. His phone started ringing, but he ignored it. Roderick! he shouted, now completely panicked but not completely sure why. He sprinted back to where he’d run into her, but the equipment was gone, and Helen with it. Room by room he searched, finding no sign of her. Maybe she’d packed up and gone home, or taken the elevator to another level. But a feeling of apprehension prodded him toward the deep freezer, the only place on the floor he hadn’t checked. He slid the heavy door on its rollers and flipped the light switch.

It was like stepping into a horror movie. Helen lay naked under harsh fluorescent lighting, stretched across some sort of gurney. A halo of thick needles ringed her head, each one buried deep in her skull. Her body was connected to a pair of machines by a profusion of wires and tubing. The machines gave off occasional whirring and sucking sounds. Something went ‘parp.’

Dr. Mellings willed himself to step closer. The woman’s skin was already pallid and ice cold to the touch, her mouth open slightly, as though frozen in mid-sentence. Her eyes were wide and staring straight up at the light, her expression serene, almost hopeful.

He didn’t remember getting his phone out, but as his finger hovered over the ‘9’ to dial 9-1-1 he noticed two envelopes taped to Helen’s chest. One read, TO DR. MELLINGS, and the other, TO WHOEVER FINDS ME. Figuring that both were for him, he opened the second one first.

To Whoever Finds Me,

Sorry about the mess, and for startling you. Please read these instructions carefully before doing anything. First and foremost, whatever you do, do not unhook me from this device. It would be really gross if I thawed out.

Second, bring Dr. William Mellings here and instruct him to read his note before you involve the authorities. Dr. Mellings will know how to get me back up and on my feet, although it might surprise him to hear that.

Lastly, if the gauge on the machine dips into the red, replace the liquid nitrogen tank with the one under the table. The freezer is cold, but not cold enough.

I know it’s a small consolation, but I left a tub of ice cream on the shelf for you.

Helen Roderick

Hands trembling from the shock and the cold, he opened the other letter.

---

Project Ice Cream Headache was a neuroanatomy research program conducted by the University of California, San Diego in conjunction with DARPA and Google. The goal of the project was to simulate the brain and neural structures of a human being, specifically a deceased graduate student named Helen Roderick.

Headed by Dr. William Mellings, the project was plagued by early scandals. Dr. Mellings was initially arrested on murder charges, which were eventually dismissed. The legal battle over the corpse of Helen Roderick lasted from 2014 to 2017, when the Supreme Court of the State of California signed over the body for the purposes of scientific research, in accordance with the written wishes of the deceased.

Ice Cream Headache (research project). From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Retrieved August 04, 2037, from grid://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cream_Headache_(research_project)

Note: The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the talk page.

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// WAKING UP IS //

//  HARD TO DO  //

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January 04, 2022

Synch ratio: 1,641,600/1 (0.05 sec/day)

Helen awoke into darkness and blinding pain. She tried to scream, but couldn’t find her throat or lungs. It was a claustrophobic, suffocating feeling. She tried to struggle, but couldn’t find anything to struggle with. Before she could make sense of any of it, the sensations ceased, leaving her entirely numb, which was a big improvement. A few seconds later, her nose caught a warm whiff of freshly baked bread. As she began to relax, shards of memory rose one by one into her consciousness, slipping away before they could form a coherent picture.

February 11, 2023

Synch ratio: 931,408/1 (0.09 sec/day)

The memories were disjointed, elusive, full of needles and cold. She’d hit a button and fallen asleep.

It wasn’t suicide. That’s what she’d kept telling herself.

The sound of static grew louder, then slowly cohered into music, like an old AM radio struggling to catch a frequency. It suddenly resolved into Handel’s Water Music. She remembered asking to hear it, but she couldn’t quite remember who she had asked or when. It was on the tip of her tongue.

Oh my god, where is my tongue?

A voice came to her, mixed into the music.

July 15, 2024

Synch ratio: 443,010/1 (0.19 sec/day)

Helen, do you hear me? The voice was male, and spoke in staccato bursts that reminded her of a machine gun fire or an auctioneer on meth. When she didn’t reply immediately, the request came again, a hair slower this time but still far faster than any real person could speak.

She tried to reply, but for some reason her throat wouldn’t work. She tried again. The third time, she felt a dry, choking feeling in her throat. She heard her own voice say, Water.

February 14, 2025

Synch ratio: 337,932/1 (0.26 sec/day)

The instant she’d finished the word, the pain in her throat disappeared. What the…

The verbal gunfire came again. Helen, this is important. Are you in any pain?

She thought for a few moments. No, she only felt numb, coupled with a strange feeling of involuntary euphoria. It reminded her a bit of the time she’d dropped E her freshman year. I did it for science, she said. She felt dizzy, and the motions of talking felt unnatural.

The voice came again. Repeat that, please?

No. No pain, she said.

Do you know where you are? She recognized Dr. Mellings’ low, friendly voice within the bursts of speech, and the recognition triggered another flood of memories. She latched onto them and hung on for dear life.

Finally, Oh my god, it worked?

Welcome back, Helen.

What year is it?

July 11, 2027

Synch ratio: 101,371/1 (0.85 sec/day)

2027.

Fourteen years. I left my wakeup call for 2024. I’d like a word with your manager.

She had hoped for at least a chuckle. Instead, Dr. Mellings sounded apologetic. The problem is simulation speed. We started you up in 2022, but the simulation is so complex that it took three weeks to simulate one second. DARPA is sending more computers. We’ll speed you up.

She took a few seconds to parse the words, then a few more seconds trying to come to grips with the idea of three weeks passing every second. Then she felt self-conscious about not having said anything for months on end. Don’t call me ‘the simulation,’ she blurted out.

January 05, 2029

Synch ratio: 18,902/1 (4.57 sec/day)

Another fast auditory burst came her way. Now Google has chipped in some spare cycles. It’s 2029 now, but now a second of your time is more like a few hours of ours. Depending on how hard you’re thinking, of course.

I’m always a bit sluggish when I first wake up.

The Internet loved that line. You’re a major celebrity now.

January 10, 2029

Synch ratio: 18,759/1 (4.60 sec/day)

Helen froze.

Helen?

Are they… is everyone listening to us now?

Our conversations are part of the dataset that we have to release. You know how grants are.

She quelled a rising sense of terror. Helen used to get panic attacks from time to time, especially in very public situations, and she could feel the first stirrings of one now. Her mind raced. How many people were watching her? Thousands? Millions? What did they see? What were they thinking?

But even in this moment of extreme self-consciousness, the usual physiological responses were almost absent: no weight crushing down on her chest, no overwhelming need for more air than her lungs could move, and no adrenaline-fueled burst of speed as she high-tailed it out of a crowded auditorium. She began to relax.

January 14, 2029

Synch ratio: 18,750/1 (4.60 sec/day)

Being incorporeal had its advantages. She could feel the attention of the world upon her, but it hadn’t crushed her. This is a bit embarrassing, she admitted. Could you maybe put up a video of an adorable kitten to distract them?

Try not to think about it.

That won’t be easy.

Let’s bring your optic nerves online.

Pure white light overwhelmed her consciousness, all the more terrifying because she couldn’t look away or shut her eyes to it. It resolved into a picture, and before she had time to adjust to the sensation, Prof. Mellings’ rapid-fire voice was peppering her with questions about what she was seeing.

She began answering. Red. Blue. Black. Diagonal stripes. The Mandelbrot set. A lake. A quarter moon. Julia Roberts. Four score and seven years ago. At the end of it, Dr. Mellings asked, Are the images blurred, distorted, or discolored in any way?

A little. Should that concern me?

Your brain will compensate. I’m playing a video now. Tell me what you see.

For the first time, she saw motion of a sort. At first it looked like a slideshow, with the image changing two or three times a second, but it soon smoothed out. Two zebras being chased by a lion, she said.

Zebras? Lion? Please confirm the description.

The lion is wearing a yellow party hat. There was a long pause. I see a beach. I’m just messing with you.

It would be funnier if we hadn’t spent the last two days trying to hunt down the glitch.

Did you find it?

Yes. The software seems to be submitting fake bug reports. Try to be serious.

Try to not call me ‘the software.’

Deal. I want to try something a bit different. Tell me what you see now.

I’m still at the beach.

Describe it.

Helen looked around. Well, it’s a beach. White sand, waves coming in. Lots of foam.

And to your left?

There’s a column of rock off to the left. Limestone, I think. As if I’d know, she added to herself. Dammit, Jim. I’m a brain in a vat, not a geologist.

There was a note of elation in his reply. Wonderful! That means you can turn your eyes! We’ll have more of your muscles hooked up very soon.

The thought came to her, I have muscles? But I’m a brain in a box. But she dismissed the thought immediately. Of course she was a brain in a box, with eyes in a box, and muscles in a box, hooked up to her box-brain.

It sounds like you’re all having a lot of fun being clever out there. Helen giggled a bit. I knew you were the right person to entrust my corpse to.

"Speaking of how clever we are—which is very—what you’re seeing now is a… did we call them virtual worlds back then? We call them ‘alts’ now—short for ‘alternative.’ Try to think yourself forward."

Helen repeated the words, trying to make sense of them. Think myself forward? How, exactly?

Any way you like. The interface will watch your neurons firing to get a sense of how you think it ought to work. Try floating forward. It should feel natural.

Helen tried and failed a few times, only to begin moving forward when her conscious mind had given up. Maybe she’d been overthinking it. She turned around. Mountains rose behind her, tall and jagged, their foothills carpeted in trees and the higher reaches buried in snow.

Helen smiled. She felt herself smile. It’s really very pretty here. She looked down, and saw empty air. Can I get me some feet here? A few seconds later, a body appeared below her, numb and alien, with all the curvy femininity of a scrawny twelve-year-old. It seemed to be refusing commands, and she was appalled by the ill-fitting jeans and T-shirt.

She tried to scowl. Better than nothing. She tried floating herself upward a few inches, and succeeded instantly. With a whoop of joy she launched herself skyward, flying faster than she had imagined possible. In seconds, she was among the clouds and sailing over the mountains.

Helen, we have more questions. Are you paying attention? Dr. Auctioneer-on-Meth sounded annoyed.

Not even a little! she yelled over the roar of the wind. She kept rising until the clouds were tiny dots and the sky turned black. Stars hung like millions of brilliant lamps amid the blackness of space. But no matter how high she climbed, the horizon remained perfectly flat. Shouldn’t I see a globe eventually? How big is this place?

It goes on forever. They use a generative fractal landscape, so it never ends or repeats.

She shrugged, which was a weird sensation. That’s all technobabble to me.

"Please come back down."

Helen reversed course, diving toward the ground, but she had climbed to a great height, so it would take a while. "Where is this place?"

Altworld. It’s a virtual world.

You mean like Second Life? People hang out here? Chat? Build full-scale replicas of Versailles? The ground was getting closer.

It bears some similarities, but there’s an open protocol that lets anybody publish content. Not my field. Will you be slowing down, or hitting the ground at ramming speed? Dr. Mellings didn’t sound concerned.

The latter. Tell me more about ‘there’s an open protocol that lets anybody publish content.’

"Sure thing, ELIZA.[1] Millions of servers publish bits and pieces of the world, and the Altworld protocols dictate who sees what and how things interact. Right now you’re in a ‘private mode,’ where you can’t see anyone else—or most of the content—and nobody can see you."

She hit the ground and stopped. There was no sensation of slowing or impact: one moment she was dive-bombing, the next moment she was floating inches off the ground. The lack of splatter was a little disappointing. So when do I get to see the world?

It would be unwise to let you out in public this early.

February 25, 2029

Synch ratio: 1800/1 (48.0 sec/day)

C’mon, unleash your creation on the villagers!

"The trouble is, you’re currently running at 1/1800th speed. One second for you is thirty minutes for us. Computers are getting faster, what with Moore’s Law[3] and all, but it may be years before you’ll be in temporal synch. Until then, interacting with the world is going to be difficult."

How are you even talking to me? She figured out the answer before she’d even finished speaking the question.

We record messages to send to you. I promise, it won’t feel like long at all.

---

Notes:

1) ELIZA was an early chatbot which would formulate responses by taking things the human participant said and rephrasing them as new questions. Its techniques were entirely syntactic, involving no real understanding of the things the human said, and the results often ungrammatical. Yet she somehow got elected to Congress three times in the 2020s.[2]

2) Humblest apologies to Mr. Pratchett for stealing his footnotes bit. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of larceny.

3) Moore’s Law—though technically less a law than an interesting trend—says that the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles every eighteen months. Moore’s Law suggests that computers will keep getting faster, and that your specific computer will be obsolete before you can get it unwrapped. That’s why I buy all my electronics directly from The Future.

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//  SIX MILLION  //

// DOLLAR MONKEY //

///////////////////

February 15, 2034

Synch ratio: 300/1 (4.8 min/day)

Helen’s days were packed with fast-paced tedium. Her handlers in the lab were constantly making small improvements to her new body, a satisfactory imitation of the body she’d worn when she died. The lab staff were forever adding and removing sensations, integrating her muscles to give her better control, and generally fiddling around. She marveled as her own physical presence coalesced around her piece by piece.

It made her want to scream. Out there, they were doing groundbreaking neural interface research, the research that she’d hoped to do when she graduated. And what was her contribution? Stand. Sit. Breathe in. Breathe out. Grasp the object. Lift the object. Lick the object. Answer a few questions for our quarterly grant update. Hey, can you whistle? How about now?

The breaking point came when she looked at Dr. Mellings through the lab’s video feed. He was noticeably older than when they’d started.

Damn it! she finally screamed at him, after yet another round of dexterity drills. A trained monkey could do this job!

Could you please express your frustration by throwing something? Dr. Mellings asked. The firing data would be helpful.

No! I’m sick of this!

We haven’t given you a break in a while. I apologize. But there’s a huge backlog of things that people want to know, and only you can answer.

I haven’t slept in three days.

The professor’s next message sounded confused. You don’t have to sleep. We keep your neurotransmitters at peak—

You know what I mean!

You really want to sleep?

Helen deflated slightly. I want to not think for a while. I mean, I don’t want to be shut off, but—

But you want to feel time pass without any demands being made on you. I get it. I think I can give you a little time. We do learn a lot just from passive observation. But remember that you’re tying up approximately fifty million dollars worth of hardware.

Helen fumed. Sorry to be an inconvenience.

My apologies. I could have phrased that more diplomatically.

Then do.

You’ve been outstanding. It’s just that getting and keeping funding has been a nightmare. We’ve been coasting on the fumes of a couple of prosthesis patents for over a year now.

People are trying to shut me off?

Nothing so extreme. Don’t worry about that. But some are arguing that it would be perfectly ethical to hibernate you for twenty or thirty years. By then computers would be so fast, we could run you on somebody’s cell phone.

Is that supposed to make me feel better?

It didn’t?

No! No it didn’t!

I just wanted you to know that your life isn’t in any danger.

She shook her head, hating how ungrateful she felt toward the man who had made it possible for her to shake her head. That’s not the point. All the interesting research is happening without me; you’re not going to leave me so much as a taste bud to design on my own. Everything I learned in school is decades out of date, everyone is zipping around me, and they need answers now, now, now! I’m slow, and I’m stupid, and I hate this so much! She knew it would give her professor satisfaction, but she grabbed a ball and hurled it at the ground anyways. It said squeak.

A warm feeling of compression suffused her entire body. What was that?

The closest thing to a hug that I could come up with on short notice.

Could you hurry up and build my tear ducts? I need to cry a little.

Helen, I know this is difficult for you. But what you’re doing is tremendously important. There are people whose vision and hearing have been restored because of you, people whose brain damage has been healed because of you. You’ve opened up so many new avenues of research that we’ll spend decades trying to flesh them out. And I promise there will be plenty of work left when you’re synched up.

A reluctant smile crept across Helen’s face. If I seem to see further than other men, it’s because I’m standing on Helen Roderick’s corpsesicle.

Isaac Newton would be proud. Do you want to watch some video? We need some more optic pathway data, and a trailer for Joss Whedon’s next movie just came out.

Shiny.

When the trailer ended, Helen demanded to be turned off until the movie was released. Dr. Mellings denied the request. The anticipation would be brutal.

////////////////

// GEEK SQUAD //

////////////////

Moments after that conversation, Dr. Mellings had promised to see what more could be done about the temporal differential. One perceived-hour later he announced that, well, she could expect an announcement in a few hours. Several hours after that, he appeared in a floating frame in front of her, interrupting her block-stacking exercises. A few other familiar faces from the lab crowded in behind him. Ta-daaaaa! he said.

July 05, 2034

Synch ratio: 33.1/1 (43 min/day)

She flicked over the block tower she’d been instructed to fuss with and watched it spill off the table. What’s up?

Dr. Mellings brimmed with excitement. Notice anything different?

Hey! You don’t sound like an auctioneer anymore!

The picture jumped as a new recording started. Do you like it?

No, you sound weird. Bring back Doctor Sold-To-the-Highest-Bidder.

Another recording started. I need to introduce you to someone. She’s earned the right to explain. Dr. Mellings scooted out of view to let a young Indian woman take his seat. Do I talk? she asked, looking off-camera. Then she turned to it and said, Hello, Helen. This is a blessing, meeting you. Then she winced, as though she’d said something wrong. My English. I apologize.

Thank you, Helen replied, trying to give a reassuring smile. She had no idea if it worked. What’s your name? she asked, breaking an uncomfortable pause.

The picture flickered, replacing the original crowd with four young men of the nerdish persuasion, all standing behind the woman. "Kriti Chindarkar. I join the lab when the year starts… started. I have worked with the young men—these young men—to make your simulator… is it really your wish that I speak the phrase? she asked, turning to confer with the nerds behind her. They grinned as they nodded. …to make your simulator glorious paragon of kickassitude. Behind her, they laughed and gave each other high fives. Kriti gave a calmly apologetic smile, as if to say, They’re boys. What can you do with them?"

After the boys introduced themselves, Kriti talked for a while. Bit by bit, she emerged from her initial awkwardness as she explained the optimizations and features they’d added to the simulator. Many of her explanations went over Helen’s head, held aloft by the woman’s broken English, but the gist was easy enough to grasp: she was now running nearly ten times faster, so each day would feel like forty minutes rather than four or five. The rushing world had slowed down a bit for her.

So this is your senior project? Helen asked. The picture jumped again, and the four guys nodded.

We got a B-plus, said the lanky redhead with glasses. She had already forgotten their names. The teacher didn’t think we wrote enough documentation. Helen wondered if the glasses were an affectation. She’d been told that implanted contacts could be had for about the price of a good pair.

We tried to explain, added one of his teammates. When you write documentation, you write your way out of lucrative support contracts. That came from the muscled guy with a black goatee and a T-shirt that kept changing slogans. At the moment it was touting his eagerness to replace his enemies with small shell scripts.

He’s our token chaotic evil, the redhead said, a bit apologetically. Don’t worry, though. Kriti is more than capable of picking up where we left off.

Tell her about Version Five, said a diminutive Asian kid, so quietly that Helen wasn’t quite sure she heard him correctly.

You mean Pentamonium? said the muscle-y guy.

The redhead gave him a disgusted look. We agreed not to call it that.

"You mean you agreed. Catching his teammate’s impatient look, he added, We can table that discussion. Ol’ Fivey is the next sim revision. It integrates with the BOINC-5 real-time distributed computing architecture. Once that’s in place, anybody from anywhere in the world can let their computers participate in the computations. Like SETI at Home. Science went looking for signals from bug-eyed monsters so Captain Kirk could boldly come where no man had come before. The others were busting up. Or something. The records from that age are mostly lost to us. The point is, it was the first big, distributed computer program, from back when people still hunted down their files with spears and arrows."

She probably remembers it, the redhead reminded him. She’s older than us.

You’re even older than my mom, Muscles said. Helen wished she could interrupt the recording at that point. Oh, how she wished it. Anyhow, he continued, once it goes live, if we can get a million participants or so, we should have you up to speed.

The recording stopped, and Helen scrambled for something technologically astute to say. Won’t latency be an issue? she asked.

Another scene swap rearranged the four students, who were now giggling among themselves. Latency? That’s a good one! said the redhead.

Oooh! What if we run out of disk space? another chimed in. Or forget to free our memory after we’re done using it?

We might run out of punch cards! Or glass for the vacuum tubes!

Muscles grinned, but finally explained. Ever since the Grid swallowed the Internet whole, we’ve had the luxury of ignoring latency and bandwidth issues for most applications.

What’s ‘the Grid?’ You mean the alts?

Muscles seemed pained by the naiveté of the question, but also happy to show off his smarts. No, it’s not like that at all. The Grid is just a network for routing information from one place to another. Altworld is a network of virtual worlds that communicates via the grid. He was making vague explanatory gestures. So Altworld is the application layer, the Grid is the networking layer. Read up on the OSI networking model. It explains everything.

Yeah, Helen thought. I’ll get right on that.

The point is, Redhead seemed desperate to redirect the conversation, you’ll be godslapped by awesome when we fire it up. Promise.

The recording stopped, and it was her turn to reply. You guys did great work. I can’t thank you enough.

Kriti deserves most of the credit, Redhead pointed out. I’ve never met anyone with a higher smarts-per-word metric. We’ve begged her a dozen times to move over to comp sci.

Join ussss. Join ussss, they chanted. Kriti hid her face, mortified.

///////////////////

// BOOT SEQUENCE //

//   COMPLETE    //

///////////////////

September 09, 2034

Helen was working from home today, home being a small adobe hut set atop a high cliff, bleached white by eons of sun and surf. The cliff overlooked a thin strand of white beach, literally a thousand miles from the nearest development. Helen had quickly fallen in love with the house: compact, full of secluded nooks, with lots of windows that lured in the breeze. She had downloaded the 3D model from a franchise of ecovillages operating all along the Baja Peninsula.

At the moment, she sat awkwardly upon a piece of adaptive furniture that Kriti had helped her build; it was her first success programming an object to use in an alt. The ‘couch’ accessed her biometric data and a simplified brain scan. Then—using a different genetic algorithm for every mood—it discovered new ways to be the most attractive and comfortable piece of furniture it could be.

Well, it tried. Today it had gone avant garde, sending out a tangle of rising stems that terminated in spheres of various sizes, floating a couple of feet off the ground. The spheres looked like white glass and gave off a warm light, but they were pliant to the touch. When Dr. Mellings opened the video feed between them, he found Helen hanging upside down off one of the balls.

She craned her neck to see the video. A little help here?

Dr. Mellings studied the couch for a moment. I think you’re supposed to lie with the small of your back on the—

No, I mean get me the hell down from here!

Oh, right. Helen disappeared, then reappeared standing on the floor. She stumbled a bit, then corrected. Dr. Mellings smiled. You said you wanted to be told when the distributed system went online.

Helen waited for him to finish, but nothing came. Dr. Mellings just looked at her expectantly. Oh! she said. You mean it’s on now? She looked out a window; the waves below had slowed to a more sedate pace.

It’s been running for a few hours. We were just waiting to see if anything, you know, exploded. We’ve hit a couple of bottlenecks, but you’re very close to synch. Also, we’re cutting some computationally expensive neurotransmitter interactions. Trust me, you won’t miss them.

Helen frowned. Doesn’t that degrade the physiological data, though? If you say I’ll never notice, I believe you. But won’t our pharma funders get annoyed? She caught the pained look on Dr. Mellings’ face. What?

I didn’t want to tell you until things were more certain, but it looks like our pharma funders are pulling out. They have their own simulations now, so they don’t need our data. He gave her a moment to let it sink in. So I said, screw ‘em. We’ll use those cycles for something useful.

Helen said nothing, but her expression must have given her away. We have other funding. Things will be fine, Dr. Mellings assured her. Telling Helen not to worry was like explaining the health benefits of a vegetarian diet to a lion. As her mind went back to gnawing on a bloody haunch of worry, she nodded in feigned agreement.

Kriti is throwing you a party this evening. She even printed up a big Happy Today-Feels-Like-a-Day Day banner. She wants to try using holoprojectors to bring you to the lab. Oh, and she bought party hats. Yellow ones. Helen winced. I tried to stop her, he added. I really did.

/////////////////////

// FEAR THE REAPER //

/////////////////////

Helen—still wearing a yellow paper hat—arrived home after Kriti’s party. It hadn’t been a great party: too many people had been trying to congratulate her, too many of the congratulations were for work done by others, and Kriti had spent the first hour debugging the holos so she wouldn’t fly across the room whenever she bumped into something. Worst of all, as her physiology improved, her social anxieties were returning. When the president of the university had introduced himself… she tried not to think about it. At least non-physical vomit was easy to clean off his shoes.

Dr. Mellings had called her reaction biometric gold.

She collapsed on the adaptive furniture, which had correctly gauged that she was in no mood for puzzles and molded itself into a perfectly intuitive couch. Thanks for not playing hard to get, she murmured in satisfaction as she settled in.

There had been so many people wanting a few minutes with her, she’d barely gotten to speak to Dr. Mellings. Though she was exhausted, she still itched to talk to him. She placed a call, and a screen popped up in front of her, showing a dark room. Whu? Hurgle? Dr. Mellings muttered.

Did I wake you?

He sat up and rubbed his eyes, then turned on a bedside light. Yes, but that’s all right.

Really? Because it can wait.

I’m still a bit buzzed. Kind of a waste to sleep through it. He gave her an apologetic smile.

I was just calling because, well, it was nice to finally see you face-to-face again, she said. I’ve been waiting for a long time.

I’ve been waiting longer. Twenty years, I suppose.

Dr. Mellings? Through the screen, her professor perked up, suddenly curious. Thank you, she said.

He was silent for a moment. When he started speaking, his voice was soft. I remember when they wheeled your body into the lab. Us brain jockeys were standing around, asking ourselves, is this even possible? Nobody—and I mean nobody, myself included—thought we could actually do what you’d asked. We’d done destructive brain scans on rats, mapped out every connection in their brain. But a human? We had no idea if we could even do the mapping properly, much less whether it would be enough information to get you conscious again. I was standing over you, looking into your blank, distant eyes, and thinking, she really believes I can bring her back.

Why did you?

The question seemed to confuse him. Why wouldn’t I?

Because it meant spending two decades of your career on me. Because some crazy woman flash-freezing herself didn’t have to be your problem. You could have given me a proper Christian burial and been done with it. Be obnoxiously modest if you want, but you made a choice, and I’ll be grateful for the rest of my life.

Dr. Mellings smiled. And how long do you think that will be? The rest of your life, I mean.

It’s scary to think about.

Exactly. I thought that if I could bring you back, you might have the chance to experience a thousand lifetimes. My career seemed like a tiny thing compared to that. Especially after—

He stopped. Besides, he added, It was a damned interesting problem.

Don’t hold out on me, teach. Who knows how long it’ll be before I can get you this drunk again.

You really want to know? He sighed. It’s not something I talk about, but I’ll try. Three days before you flash-froze yourself, Maeva and I were on our honeymoon in Mexico. We went rock climbing. She… fell.

It took some effort to keep her jaw from dropping. This was the first Helen had heard of it. So… when you ran into me in the basement… She trailed off. Dr. Mellings gave only the slightest nod. How did she…? Helen began to ask. William just shook his head, not meeting her eyes.

The silence went on a