“Wow. Wow wow wow wow. I’ve never actually seen one of these before! This is so cool!”
Wint was sprawled on the impromptu surgical bed, usually functioning as a dining table. They had covered the surface with bin liners. The blood made Rob queasy. He looked out of Lukas’s kitchen window to the ugly courtyard of The Barbican. The brutalist concrete estate was what people of the past thought what the future would look like. Rob knew the name of the architectural style derived from the building material, béton brut, or raw concrete, but the name was apt in the more obvious meaning, too. In the cold London evening, the jagged edges of the tower sawed the sky in half, and the grass of the usually green enclosure was dirty and shorn: the scene was brutal.
“We’ve only started to play with these”, Lukas said. “Whoever put this in is pretty cutting edge.” The lanky, dirt road blonde Estonian beamed at the discovery.
“Can we get it out?” Ada asked.
“Yeah… sure. But do you want to?”
“Why would we not want to?”
“Well, if we take it offline, it’ll be hard to find where it’s transmitting to. Can you see these wires?”, Lukas pointed his X-ACTO knife’s tip at the blue fibers. “One of these is for power. I’m not sure how exactly how it works, but it’s being powered by his body. If you take it out, I’m not sure how to power it back on.”
“He’s going to wake up soon”, Ada said. “Normally the stun only lasts for four to six hours, and it’s been… nearly seven.”
“Ok, let me try to get a reading off of it.” He grabbed a small metallic implement. “Can you wipe it a bit?”
Ada daubed off some of the blood. The bleeding had nearly stopped, but a few drops were still exuding from the scalpel wound and pooling around the tiny metal plate in Wint’s head.
Lukas’s implement looked like like a pen. Out of the other end protruded a wire that was attached to a laptop computer. Lukas touched the chrome plate with the pen, and looked at his screen. He raised the pen’s tip and touched it again.
“Hmm… odd”, Lukas said. “I’m not getting a reading. I think the electrical current of the taser might have fried it.”
“Does that mean it’s no longer transmitting?”
Lukas put down the pen and spread his arms. “Like I said, I’ve never seen one of these before. But if I can’t get a reading, I’m guessing neither can whoever is listening in on the other side.”
“Listening? It’s a microphone? They’ve heard everything we’ve said?” Rob said.
“Oh, well, gosh, no… not exactly. It’s a bit more refined than that. It’s a bit hard to explain… wait here.”
They waited while Lukas disappeared to the other room.
“What the christ?” Rob coughed up. “I thought it was a GPS thing…”
“I know… I’m as lost as you are”, Ada said. “Are you feeling ok?”
Rob nodded. He was feeling all right, considering that in the last twelve hours he had nearly drowned, his friends had likely been shot, and now he was in a narrow kitchen, barely enough room for the two of them, witnessing a field surgery at close proximity.
Lukas returned holding a white headset. “Which one of you wants to try?”
Rob looked at Ada. Ada shrugged and put out her hand.
“Let me”, Lukas said. “Grab a chair.” He rounded the table and stood behind Ada who had taken a seat, a mid-century original design piece by the looks of it. He placed he headset on her head and adjusted the headband with a twisty knob in the back. Instead of covering her ears, the round receivers squeezed around her temples. Placing his laptop on Wint’s unconscious body he plugged in the jack of the headset into the USB port and clicked an icon to start up a program on the screen. “MemBrain DevTools”, said the splash screen.
After a few seconds, the program window opened on the screen. Lukas hit the red, round “record” button.
As stream of black began to run on the white screen. It was text. Rob leaned in to look at it closer. The words were English, but they moved across the screen so quickly he couldn’t make any sense of them.
“What the hell is this?”, Rob demanded.
“This”, said Lukas, beaming proudly at him, “is Ada’s MemBrain.”
“What!?”, Ada asked. The text began to run even faster. Lukas hit the pause button, and the text stopped. He scrolled up, looking for something.
“Here”, Lukas said and pointed at a fragment of garbled text.
Rob peered at the screen. It was… random garbage?
“See, over here. You can see this word repeat. “brain… brain… brain.”
“Oh no”, Ada said.
“Yeah… you get it”, Lukas said.
“I don’t”, Rob said gruffly.
Ada reached out to the laptop and toggled the pause button. Text began streaming and flashing on the screen. She squeezed her eyes shut and pressed her fingers on the headset’s receivers.
Even with the rapid movement, Rob and Lukas could see the screen fill with one word, over and over:
cake cake cake cake cake
cake cake cake cake cake
cake cake cake cake cake cake cake
cake cake cake cake cake
cake cake cake cake cake
“Cake?”, Rob said.
“Hah!”, Ada opened her eyes. “It can read my mind!”
“That’s right! How frigging cool is that!”
“Cool?” Rob said. “You’re nuts. That’s terrifying!”
“Well, that too”, Lukas smiled. “But mostly cool. We’ve been able to do this in laboratory conditions for a long time, but what’s really changing the game is how portable these things are getting. The one inside your friend’s head… that’s the latest Chinese model. It’s completely naturally powered by the body, so it can run indefinitely. The rumour is they’ve installed these into the heads of every Party committee member to make sure their thoughts are… patriotic.” He said the last word in an exaggerated Russian accent.
“So you think it’s the Chinese?”
“On the other end? Hmm… well, it’s possible, but not guaranteed.” Doing the Russian accent must have stuck. The “r” in “guaranteed” rippled harshly. “Ten years ago, maybe, but these days everything is on the market, for the right price.”
“How much would one of these chips cost?”, Rob asked.
“These tiny ones? Ten grand. Twenty maybe. And they’re single use too, once they’ve been installed, you can’t take it out without destroying either the device, or the… subject.”
“Let me try another one!”, Ada said. She closed her eyes. What appeared on the screen this time was not English. Instead, it was cryptic symbols highlighted in red:
man SGkgbmVyZCE man
man TmljZSB0byBtZWV0IQ
man man man
RW5qb3lpbmcgdGhlIGJvb2s
man
“What does it say now?”, Ada asked?
“Are you thinking about your passwrd?”, Rob said.
“No! I’m thinking about you, Rob!”
“Ah!”, Lukas exclaimed. “Our brains don’t really work that way. When you think of a person, you’re not really thinking about their name, or the letters R, O and B. Instead, you are referencing a location in your memory. That’s how the MemBrane works, except that for certain known concepts, like cake, the system knows how to translate it into human-readable language. If we had more time and a bigger sample size, we could map these memory locations and eventually associate them with Rob in your mind.”
Ada eased the receivers of the headset off of her temples. “Wanna try?”, she offered to Rob.
“Nope”, he said. “Nope nope nope. This is way too creepy.”
Lukas chuckled and put away the receivers. “So, what do you want me to do with this guy?”, he patted Wint’s knee.
“Is there anything you can tell us about who’s been reading his mind?”
“If I could turn it on… I can try to take out the processing unit and see if I can reboot it.”
“Does this mean more blood?”, Rob asked.
“No, it’s just the top plate. It’ll just snap off. Once it’s out, we can’t put it back, though.
Ada nodded. Lukas exposed another step of the X-ACTO knife’s blade and, holding Wint’s head steady with one hand, snipped the fibers protruding from the metal plate. Using the tip of his knife, he lifted the plate off and dropped it onto a napkin Ada was holding up for him. “Ok, nurse, dress him up, and I’ll analyse this”, Lukas said, disappearing into the back room.
Ada daubed Wint’s forehead and taped a gauze patch to his wound. Looking at Wint’s unconscious face, she said: “I wonder what you were thinking about… and how much do they know.”
“Well, he doesn’t know that we are here, so that means neither do they”, said Rob.
“That’s true. It’s just… he knows a lot. About me. About what we’ve done. And what we’re working on.”
“But he doesn’t know about Struct?”
“He knows the word, but that doesn’t mean anything. Besides, if this works the same way as the one I tried, the name doesn’t even transmit.”
Lukas cleared his throat. Rob and Ada looked up. The Estonian had returned to the room quietly. He looked ghostly pale.
“Ada… you know, we have been friends for a very long time?”
“…’
Lukas lowered his gaze to the floor, unable to bring himself to face Ada. “You have to understand. You have to believe me, Ada. I didn’t know.”
Ada looked at him with a puzzled expression on her face.
Luke scratched his arm, lifting the sleeve of his shirt, exposing a tattoo on the inside of his forearm. Rob looked at the tattoo. It said: (loop (print (eval (read)))).