An Experiment

On the edge of one of many cracked, long-dry riverbeds in the desert redlands of New Mexico, there was a single, wide, one story house. Next to the house was a boxy pickup truck, its paint long since stripped away by the desert dust and sun. The house’s corrugated roof sprouted a pair of satellite dishes between rows of black solar panels.

Inside, standing next to a brown electric stove, Travis Dreame grilled a cheese sandwich in a black frying pan. He was tall, with thick brown hair and an unkempt handlebar mustache. The pit stains in his faded concert t-shirt formed an unbroken ring across his chest and upper back. His jeans were worn to threads at the knees and had been sun-bleached to a pastel blue. The butter in the pan spluttered and bubbled when he slid the sandwich around with his finger to prevent it from scorching. After checking the underside of the sandwich, he flipped it onto a paper towel next to its twin. He was expecting company.

Travis took three steps from his kitchen to the dining room, holding his impromptu plate over his shoulder like a waiter’s tray. With his free hand, he rearranged the mess on a cheaply veneered oval table. He carelessly tossed various circuit boards, antennas, memory chips, power converters, and batteries into a black plastic box, which he pushed to the far end of the table. The LCD monitor, suspended over the table by way of a metal arm on the ceiling, was swung to the side where the glowing lines of code weren’t as intrusive. He set the sandwiches on the table.

Four steps took Travis to his front window. He folded his arms and watched a dust cloud approaching from across the dry riverbed. The harsh sun-glare of metal untarnished by the desert caught Travis in the eye, and he did not blink. An oversized silver SUV headed the dust cloud, following a wide path between rust colored boulders and sparse patches of spiky yellow grass. Travis knew the SUV, large enough to haul some family trees, carried only one occupant. The sunglass-wearing driver, one of Travis’ benefactors and unwitting experimental subject, parked next to the house and went to the door as dust settled around him.

Travis waited for the knock, and opened the door. “Please, come in,” he said, standing free of the doorway. The crew-cut blond man flashed a whitened smile and took Travis’ hand in an executive grip.
“Yeah, hey, Travis! Good to see you; how you doin’ yeah?” he said as he took off his designer sunglasses. He wore a white polo shirt over a beech tan, and looked to be ten years Travis’ junior.
“Fine,” Travis replied with none of Paul’s enthusiasm. “Did you find the place alright?”

“Yeah, you know, you kinda live on the ass end of nowhere,” Paul said. His lower jaw bounced when he laughed. “No, no, no, though. I got a GPS in the car. Yeah, it tells me all the country roads and trails and shit.”

“That’s good-“

“Your place wasn’t on there,” Paul continued. “No- yeah, listen. I put you in latitude and longitude; you don’t even have a fucking address buddy!” His lower jaw bounced again.

Travis smiled on one side of his mouth and shut the door. “You must be hungry; I made a couple of sandwiches,” he said.

“Not really, the heat kinda dries me out, you know?”

“Oh please, you’ve been driving for hours. I insist,” said Travis.

“Well, yeah, maybe just one,” Paul said. He sat himself at the table, straddling the back of a chair, and took a sandwich off the paper towel. “Got anything to drink? I feel like I just crossed the Mojave!” He laughed.

“Sure thing,” Travis said, opening the refrigerator. He heard a faint crunch behind him.

“Mmm! Ugh, did you forget the wrapper on the cheese?” Paul asked. He pried his sandwich partially apart.

Travis looked at Paul and faintly shook his head. “No, of course not. Might be the sand, it gets inside sometimes,” he said.

Paul took a small bite and chewed carefully. “Yeah, maybe. That one part tasted rancid,” he said.

Travis poured pop out of a two-liter bottle into two empty glass jars. He set one before Paul and leaned against the counter, sipping the other. Paul finished his sandwich with large bites and took a large gulp out of the jar. He dusted his hands together and then pulled a PDA out of his pocket.

“So what have you got for me Travis?” he asked. “Can’t tell the boss you’re making million dollar sandwiches!” he laughed.

Travis stroked his moustache and narrowed his eyes. “I jumped the memory past critical mass about ten weeks ago. I’ve got just under 27,000 petabytes downstairs,” he said.

Paul’s eyebrows shot up. “Twenty-seven thousand? Jesus! But you don’t have the funds; between Gaond’s and Palmer-Kineal I know you haven’t gotten more than ten or twelve mil this year,” he said. Travis had secured multi-year, multi-million dollar grants from the two companies. Misguided funds, in Paul’s opinion, given to a self-styled prophet chasing an electronic pipe-dream.

“I’ve had some extra help,” Travis said. He pulled at his scruffy chin and continued. “I had thought fifteen-thou would be plenty, enough for two people maybe. But then I started testing, on myself at first, about nine weeks ago, and the system couldn’t handle it. Fifteen kay was enough for a rudimentary copy, but it wasn’t a personality, not a consciousness. It was like the mind of someone in a coma,” he said.

Travis paused while Paul tapped at his phone. The medicinal division of Gaond Researchers, which Paul worked for, sent him all over the world with that PDA, looking for new chemicals and treatments. When Paul found something the company thought promising, like a man attempting to copy a person’s entire mental image into a computer, granting something like digital immortality; Paul tapped his phone and reported the details via satellite to the company.

Travis waited for Paul to look up, and then continued. “So I jumped the capacity and tried again. Three weeks ago I was testing a subject, and I hit a dilemma. In order to copy a mind at rest, I’d need to use a maser strong enough to fry the neurons I’m trying to map. But the only time the brain is active enough so I can use a subtler maser is when the mind is in a primal survival mode.”
“Like ‘fight-or-flight?’” asked Paul as a matter of course.

“Something like that, yes. But when the brain is that active, the Heisenberg effect jumps a few orders of magnitude and I end up with corrupted data,” said Travis. A metallic glare through the window shone briefly on his face.

“So what are you telling me? You’re saying it’s a bust, yeah?” asked Paul.

“Not exactly,” Travis said. From outside, the sound of tires on rock stopped abruptly. The whisper of a fuel-cell engine floated through the compact house. Travis walked to the door and opened it.
The passenger door of a black custom Cadillac, parked within touching distance of the front awning, opened with an electric whine. A hunched silhouette sat waiting on the seat while a man built like a refrigerator and wearing a suit stretched tight across his chest walked around the front of the car. Travis leaned against the doorframe while the barrel-chested driver helped his withered passenger out of the car. The desert wind disturbed the passenger’s sparse white comb-over and revealed a scalp covered with dark malignant splotches.

Travis chewed his overgrown moustache while the mismatched pair of men shuffled to his doorstep. The small man’s shrunken skull squeezed his squinted eyes halfway out of their sockets, giving him a fishlike appearance.

“Travis,” the small man said. “This—is C—Carl, my body—bodyguard.”

“Aren’t you going to invite us in?” The larger man put his face close to Travis’ when Travis didn’t move to let the pair inside.

Travis wrinkled his nose at Carl’s strongly minted breath. “He can’t come in,” he said.

“He just—just in case some—something—“ wheezed the old man.

Travis tilted his head around Carl’s blocky face. “I told you Charles. No. It’s not something for spectators.” He scratched under his chin and glared at Carl. “He might interfere.”

“You listen—“ started Carl, putting his face even closer to Travis’.

“Carl, wait—wait in the car,” Charles said, touching his driver’s elbow. The large man took a step back and bent to whisper in Charles’ ear. Travis saw him slip something heavy into the older man’s suit pocket. Travis smiled with one corner of his mouth as Carl fumed on the way back to the car.

Travis stepped out of the doorway. “Charles, I’d like you to meet Paul Dunn. Paul, this is the esteemed Charles Maxell.”

“Maxell the banker?” Paul stood and surveyed the stooped man in the doorway.

Charles stretched his neck, revealing dark hardened growths around his collarbones. “That’s—yes. Maxell In—Investments. That’s mine,” he boasted.

Paul shook Charles’ hand with stunned reverence. The old man looked suddenly out of place; one of the world’s wealthiest men, hunched and withering in a run-down nothing of a desert hut.
“I was just telling Paul here that I’m on the verge of a breakthrough,” Travis said, laying a hand on Charles’ bony shoulder.

The man’s fish-eyes went wild for a moment. “You—you told him—the—“ he stammered.

Travis smiled. “Oh no, no, no. I don’t think Paul has ever seen the basement. Let’s get you something to drink first. Would you like a sandwich perhaps?” he said.

“No. I’m not—not hungry,” Charles said, looking at Paul.

“I insist, Mr. Maxell,” Travis said. He handed Charles the second cheese sandwich on a fresh paper towel. “Have a sandwich.”

Paul glanced from Travis to Charles as the two stared at each other for a long moment. A look of understanding passed Charles’s face like a shadow, and the banker took the sandwich with both hands.

“Mr. Maxell has been working with me since I left my practice, almost nine years now,” Travis explained. “He’s helped keep me off the grid, so I can work independently, without the AMA always looking over my shoulder.”

Paul tapped his PDA and gave Travis a sidelong look. “You never mentioned that in your application for the Gaond grants,” he said. “You claimed Palmer-Kineal was your only other donor.” He tapped the PDA several more times, then let his hands drop to his sides. “And you’re in microcircuit science, not medical science.”

“Both, actually,” Travis said as Charles slowly gummed the sandwich. “Here, let’s go downstairs.”

Travis opened a door that stood in the house’s central divider. A black wrought-iron staircase spiraled downward inside the closet sized space. He flicked a light switch on the wall and looked over his shoulder. “Paul, you’ll help Mr. Maxell down, won’t you? The stairs are a bit steep.” Without waiting for an answer, he started down.

The air grew rapidly cooler as they descended. Paul walked sideways so as to support Charles by the arm. The rounded walls to which the staircase was fastened were made of uneven brick and crumbling mortar, making Paul think of an abandoned well.. The descent was lit by hooded fluorescent lamps over a myriad of framed papers. Doctorate of Computer Science: Travis Johnson. Doctorate of Theology: Travis Brown. Doctorate of Psychology: Travis Sowa. Doctorate of Internal Medicine: Travis Taylor. A letter of outstanding achievement in neurology to Travis Sweeny. Paul felt Charles’s hand become clammy.

“I met Charles when I first started this project; treated him for a minor aneurysm,” Travis said. His footfalls on the iron stairs clanged a strange rhythm into his speech. “I had the idea, he had the money. I sought your company’s grants, Mr. Dunn, to keep some suspicion off Charles. This much hardware, as you’ll see, goes beyond a personal expense account, even one such as his.”

The stairway ended in a wide low-ceilinged room. The walls were covered by floor-to-ceiling metal racks, bristling with circuit boards and humming with electricity. The corner closest to the stairway was draped with a thick cloth tarp, blotted with dark stains. On the ceiling above the tarp was a silver inverted bowl several feet across. In the opposite corner, an old, torn dentist’s chair sat under an octopus array of instruments that bristled from the sides of a similar silver bowl.

The fluorescent light drained the tan out of Paul’s skin. He took a few slack-jawed steps into the room, noting the scale and sophistication of the computers around him; mentally calculating how many hundreds of millions of dollars surrounded him. He tapped his phone, which returned a “No Signal” and promptly shut off.

Charles bobbed his head, forcing the last of the cheese sandwich down his dry throat. His jaw worked rapidly, almost independent of the words that tumbled out, “I—I—I don’t know, Travis. The—I’m sending for Carl. I’ve an app—appointment with the doctors—doctors in Seattle tomorrow,” he said. He turned back toward the stairs.

“For what?” Travis asked. His eyes were dark. “Chemo again? Going to let them laser away more of your mind? For what, Charles?”

Paul wandered to a monitor on one of the computer banks, in awe of the technology and all but ignoring Travis’s sudden growls. An animated star bounced around the edges of the screen. He clicked the Enter key on a keyboard below the monitor.

“I need treat—treatment. I don’t—don’t—don’t want to die,” Charles said.

“What are you getting this time Charles?” Travis advanced on the shrunken man, who stared back with wild fish eyes. “Mechanical liver? They’ve already done your kidneys and heart and God knows what else. You’ve more metal and cancer in you than normal cells.”

Hello Paul. The words appeared above the star like a comic thought-bubble. Paul peered closely at the screen in disbelief. He looked over his shoulder at Travis towering over Charles, then back at the monitor. He typed, Hello.

Charles tore at the paper towel in his hands. “But he’s—he’s just—just a boy. I—does it have to be now—now?”

Go with Charles you? appeared below the star. Paul pressed the escape key. Charles uses you? Paul noticed a blinking red light on a bulbous lens attached to a circuit board to his right. He waved his hand in front of it. Hello Paul.

“You’ve been rotting for a decade and you want to wait some more?” Travis barked. He grabbed Charles by the chin. “Your mind is rotting. Go! Fine! You’ve got fifteen years, if that, up those stairs. You have centuries down here.”

Who is this? typed Paul. The star paused in the middle of the screen and spun around. Travis, said the thought-bubble. Paul backed away from the monitor.

“Yeah, um, Travis, buddy? Your computer is talking to me,” Paul said. He forced a laugh.

Travis turned smoothly away from Charles with a charismatic smile that turned his moustache into an inverted ‘W.’ He left the muttering old man at the base of the stairs and moved close to Paul. “It’ll do that,” he chuckled. “Some of those corrupted scans are still floating around in there, awfully hard to root out sometimes. At least for me,” he said, looking back at Charles.

“Say, Paul, I said this project wasn’t a bust, right?” he said. Paul nodded and Travis continued. “When the mind is in the survival mode I was telling you about earlier, it will do anything, anything, to survive. Right before death, the consciousness replicates itself almost instantaneously, for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Your life flashes before your eyes, literally, in an attempt to preserve itself.”
Quartering closer toward Paul, Travis said, “About two weeks ago, I managed to come up with a few neat devices: one which amplifies and transmits that last burst of consciousness, and one which can receive and re-emit that burst. Then a third device which can combine two such bursts, so the first amplifies the second consciousness to a level that can be received and recorded by this equipment.”
Paul felt himself backing up as Travis advanced toward him. He tripped over a tarp on the floor, and put out a hand to steady himself. He touched a sticky and rancid smelling stain on the tarp hanging over the wall. “Yeah, yeah, great,” he said while wiping his hand on his pant leg. He saw Charles shuffling across the room with his hand in his suit pocket. Paul rubbed his hands together, bringing the darkly red substance off in flakes.

“I put the devices on nano-wafers, heat activated colonies,” Travis said, grinning with pride. “Once the wafer gets inside the body, the nano-machines reconstitute in the cerebrum, and in a matter of minutes are fully functional.”

“Great, yeah, fuckin’ good work; I guess,” Paul said. “But, uh, what good is it? No offense, but if it only fuckin’ works when people--“ He stopped abruptly. He cocked his head at the smiling Travis and slowly turned toward Charles.

In a bony and jittery hand, Charles pointed a compact black pistol at Paul. His eyes stood out, huge and round; and his mouth contorted rapidly between smiles and grimaces.

Paul froze, his eyes darting to Travis. “Sandwiches,” he whispered.

“I insist,” said Travis.

The pistol roared. Paul felt a burning tear at his neck.

“Goddamnit, Charles! Not the head!” shouted Travis.

The pistol roared again and Paul felt a punch to his chest. He couldn’t breathe.

Travis rushed to a monitor as Paul fell to his knees. He scanned the rapidly incoming data with expert precision. “Good, alright. We’re getting a good signal Charles!” he said.

Charles Maxell froze in fascination under the silver bowl on the ceiling; watching red stains spread through Paul’s punctured shirt. The body in front of him crumpled slowly, like a time-lapse of a dying plant.

“Looking good, looking good,” Travis drummed his fingers on the keyboard. The banks of computers around him hummed furiously. “Finish it Charles!”

Charles turned slowly to face Travis. “Jesus—God!” he said, voice cracking. He lifted the pistol, pointing it at Travis’s sweat-stained chest.

The younger man noticed the movement, took one stride toward Charles and backhanded the diminutive banker across the face. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You’ll throw this away?” he yelled.

“I—I’m sorry. I’ll—okay. Here,” the banker mumbled around the blood filling his mouth. He raised the pistol to his own temple.

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” Travis grabbed the old man’s arm and twisted it so the gun pointed at Charles’s breast pocket. “Do the heart; it’s not even yours,” he said. He turned his back on his old benefactor and went to a monitor.

“God—Oh, God! Forgive me,” Charles said.

“Only if this works,” Travis said to himself.

The gunshot echoed off the underground walls.

Screens all around the room lit up with reams of code, scrolling to fast for all but the most trained eyes to follow. Paul’s dying brainwaves, transmitted via millions of microscopic nano-machines to Travis’s receiver, merged with and amplified Charles’ last burst of consciousness. Charles’ personality and thought processes rode Paul’s brainwaves into the computer’s memory banks, filling thousands of petabytes of digital space.

The computer screens went black. A single green cursor blinked in the corner of one monitor. Travis stepped over a pool of spreading blood and waited at the screen. A coin sized portrait of Andrew Carnegie replaced the cursor. Travis held his breath.

Travis did it work said the portrait. Then, rapidly: I can move and it doesn’t hurt and I’m so free and I can stretch and I can fly. I remember again, Mom and Dad and school and the firm. And Travis? Travis, are you there?

Fingers trembling, Travis typed: This is Travis. Who are you?

Charles Bernard Maxell. I’m alone here. It’s so big. I’m so big. I remember a boy; he looked like a plant on the ground. What happened to Paul?

“I did it!” Travis yelled. “I beat it! I fucking did it!” he jumped in the air. He laughed long and loud at the floating portrait on the screen.