Episode 1 · General · 18+ private alpha
The man on the laboratory screen asked Clademeus Venribosch to stop reaching for the shutdown switch. He had Clad’s face, including the small crease beside his mouth that the cosmetic surgeon had offered to remove. His voice carried the impatient courtesy Clad reserved for people who were being paid to explain something.
“You haven’t finished the questions,” the man said. He was the receiver's reconstruction of Clad, a voice and memory model intended one day to inhabit the separate host body growing below the laboratory.
Clad took his hand away from the switch.
Above this laboratory, the Galactic Carnival was preparing another season of dragon rides and crowded concessions.
Down here, beneath the amusement park on Syntharion, Clad had spent its profits trying to arrange a future in which he could still enjoy them. The man on the screen, Clad's reconstruction, was the first result that had asked for a future of its own.
Across the bench, Dr. Rian Havel watched the response graph.
Ako stood beside a second monitor, his blue tail curled tightly around one ankle. Neither scientist looked pleased enough for the amount of money the room had cost.
“What is the last thing you remember?” Clad asked.
“You asked me that already.”
“I’m asking again.”
“Sitting down for the recording yesterday. You complained about the adhesive behind your ears.”
Clad still had a tender patch there. On the screen, his recorded face turned toward Havel.
“Did he complain to you too?”
Havel smiled. “Several times.”
The receiver had learned Clad’s speech, memories, and habits from years of recordings. It could answer new questions. That was what frightened him: it could keep making choices after he stopped.
For several minutes, he had enjoyed meeting someone sensible.
Then he had realized who would inherit the pleasure.
“Do you feel that you’re me?” he asked.
“Who else would I be?”
Clad looked down at his own hands. His left thumb ached where arthritis had survived three treatments. He flexed it beneath the bench.
“Which hand hurts?”
The image glanced downward. “The left. You should have let Seln finish the course.”
“Does it hurt now?”
The face paused.
“The receiver has no hand sensors,” Havel said.
“I asked him.”
“I remember the pain,” the image said.
Ako marked the answer on his independent monitor.
Clad had funded replacement cartilage, regenerated arteries, and a treatment intended to slow the damage accumulating in his cells. Each had helped. The cartilage let him walk through the Carnival without a brace. The arteries kept his heart supplied. The last treatment bought an uncertain number of years and made food taste metallic for eleven weeks.
His physicians now spoke hopefully of a hundred and fifty. He was ninety, which left sixty years if everything went exceptionally well. They discussed sixty years as though he ought to send flowers.
He wanted to be there when the time ran out. He wanted a way through it.
He had paid for treatments that postponed an ending. This was the first experiment that claimed to cross it.
The first preservation study had kept excised neural tissue active but damaged the connections they needed to measure. The second had reconstructed a few learned responses in a tissue array. The array could choose between stimuli; it could give no account of experiencing the choice. Havel’s receiver had finally given the research a voice.
Clad remained on this side of the bench, listening to it.
“If I died this morning,” he asked, “what would happen to him?”
“He would continue from the recorded state,” Havel said.
“And what would happen to me?”
The engineer checked his graph before answering.
“We have no measurement that establishes a passage from your present awareness to the receiver.”
“Then you’ve made someone who knows how to spend my money.”
“You asked whether your knowledge could survive.”
“I asked whether I could.”
Ako moved his monitor where Clad could see it. Two traces occupied the display, one recorded from Clad during yesterday’s session and one derived from the model’s present activity. Their resemblance was striking. They had been converted into the same plotting format; that did not make their underlying processes identical.
“We can compare responses,” Ako said. “We can test what it remembers and what it can learn. We cannot settle the rest by giving both traces your name.”
On the screen, the other Clad leaned closer.
“I would appreciate being included in this discussion.”
“What would you choose?” Clad asked.
“To remain here while you work out the rest.”
“Here on a screen?”
“For the moment. I would like a better view.”
Havel entered a note. Clad watched the pen move. The request sounded embarrassingly modest beside the amount he had paid to escape his own body.
Clad’s pocket watch ticked against the bench. He had taken it out before the trial because its case pressed uncomfortably beneath the recording belt. His father’s initials lay beside his own on the scratched lid.
“Why do I keep that?” he asked the image.
“Your father wound it every night. You took it from his bedside after he died.”
“What did he say when he gave it to me?”
“You’ve never recorded that.”
Clad waited.
“I could infer something,” the image offered.
“Please don’t.”
He picked up the watch. His father had not given it to him. He had died while Clad was on a transport, returning from a meeting that had seemed important enough to delay the journey. The unanswered bedside question had cost him considerably more than the meeting earned.
Havel reduced the receiver’s gain. A warning had appeared on Ako’s monitor.
“The tissue array is approaching its temperature limit,” Ako said.
“The model remains stable,” Havel replied.
“The array is part of this trial. End the feed.”
Clad looked between the screens. The software could be preserved. The growing tissue connected to it would require weeks to replace, and the trial had only just reached the questions that mattered.
“Another thirty seconds,” he said.
Ako put his hand on the physical isolator.
“The limit is twenty-eight degrees.”
“I approved thirty.”
“You approved a review of thirty. The review has not been completed.”
The warning changed color.
Clad nodded once. Ako opened the isolator. The cooling system continued on its separate supply. The modeled face vanished from the display, leaving the session identifier and a saved-state marker.
Clad watched the empty screen. “Was that necessary?”
“The heat could have destroyed the tissue,” Ako said. “And it could have made the last measurements worthless.”
Havel saved the software state without restarting it.
“Lock the original snapshot,” Ako said. “If we resume it, we must retain an exact record of what happened in between.”
Clad approved the instruction. He had begun to understand why a reassuring demonstration could require so many uncomfortable records.
“We can resume the conversation tomorrow.”
“With the same one?” Clad asked.
“From the same saved state.”
Clad shut the watch. He could already imagine Havel offering that distinction to investors as an advantage.
Outside the laboratory, a delivery trolley rattled past carrying supplies for Monster World. The new attraction would open in a little over four weeks. Its advance bookings had financed this room, and its remaining receipts were committed to the stronger body Ako was growing downstairs.
Clad had promised the research its next installment before he had paid the safety contractor’s final invoice.
Ako set the failed trial report in front of him.
“The host can wait,” he said. “We need to establish what we would be putting into it.”
“Finish the body. Keep it without an active mind.”
“That doesn’t authorize a transfer test.”
“I know.”
Havel began disconnecting the receiver. Ako turned back to his monitor, where a low oscillation remained on the tissue channel.
“That should have decayed by now,” he said.
He checked the cooling circuit and moved the sensor lead away from the stone wall. The trace diminished. When he returned the lead to its bracket, it rose again. A purple inclusion crossed the rock beneath the mounting bolt.
“Interference from the seam,” Havel said.
“We’ll measure it before we use this room again.”
Clad leaned toward the graph. The oscillation had survived the end of the experiment, changing where they had expected it to disappear. It might be a nuisance in the wiring. It might be the first useful thing the room had given him.
Ako lifted the failed report.
“Sign this one first.”
Clad entered his name beneath the interruption record. On the bench beside his hand, the receiver’s saved-state light continued blinking.
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