Port Casper

Chapter Twenty-One

When Grace inserted the gel, his gel, into ITB's network, Tim's first sensation was of the smooth, polished public persona of the Italitech-Bransen company, Tadi Varghese. He stretched deeper into the network and heard echoes of a speech Varghese made last quarter. The accent bothered him. The words sounded like Varghese, but the accent was wrong. Wasn't it?

Tim explored other ITB media pathways, troubled. He found speeches on file he knew he had witnessed, spoken by strangers. Or people he knew to be gone speaking in voices not their own. He checked the file dates. Old. New. Few of them matched his memory.

Simone Pastore. Oh, the voice. That perfect voice. And to see her eyes again, though it was a trivial news conference for the new Belt route. He could still smell her hair. Wait. He had been standing next to her at the news conference. He wasn't there. His initial joy crashed into sadness and confusion as Simone faded. He could still hear her voice.

Maud Van Decker. Tim brushed against her security protocols in his confusion. The work steadied him. He catalogued Maud's simpler encryptions: those, he could coax open in his free time. She also had tunnels that linked far-flung storage units via quantum encryption. Impressive. A challenge. He would like to meet her.

Wait. He should have known her. From before. He looped back to the media files.

"Hey, T. It's been three days. Grace is getting antsy. We need to figure out a plan."

Raj's daily interruption. The same question, slightly rephrased. Yes, they did need to figure out a plan, Tim thought. But first, he needed to figure out himself.

Tim pulled back from the ITB system. Through his closed eyes, he saw Raj's apartment in reflected ultrasound. Grace wasn't there. Raj was bending over him. There was a furrow in his brow. Ever since he woke as a PodPooch, Raj had stayed nearby, constantly fussing. He remembered Raj's worry when his speech was initially slurred and his gait was wobbly. Raj was there during his panic after bootstrap. Tim supposed he was grateful.

Snap.

Tim hated when Raj snapped his fingers in front of his snout. No matter how many times he told Raj, the man needed eye-to-eye contact. Too normal a preference for a Bod Town inventor.

Oh well. Tim opened his eyes.

"What did you find?" Raj asked, no preliminaries.

"Much," Tim said. "But it's the disjointed memories that bother me."

Raj sat down on the floor beside Tim. "Example?"

"Tadi Varghese. His voice is wrong. It makes me feel like I'm hearing an imposter. And others. They aren't right."

"Well, Tim, you know how you were initialized. I couldn't let you cook forever. The error function asymptotically approaches zero. It never reaches it."

Yes, Tim knew. But it troubled him. If Raj had doubled the permutations presented to his gel, perhaps the set of initial conditions would have had much lower error. Of course, Tim knew that was folly, too. He had seen the charts. The error function had nearly flattened out when Raj turned on his consciousness.

"You even thought my voice was different, remember?"

Tim tried to remember his initial reaction on hearing Raj. "Yes, but it was the new hearing, not your voice."

"The structure of your old brain was completely replicated in the gel. You know that. And to the best of my ability, the potential across every single synapse was recorded. But at the quantum level--"

"I know," said Tim. "You could only approximate." The differences unnerved him. What bothered him the most, he realized, was himself. In what ways had he changed? How could he possibly know? I'm no longer who I was, Tim thought. But that's what I wanted, right? I'm Tim, not--