Lauren reaches across the table and peels up the man’s eyelid with her fingernail, tugging with gradually increasing force. The thin half-moon of skin stretches like warm mozzarella before finally coming loose from his face. She flicks it onto the table. A loud noise comes from deep within the man. He begins to shake.
She pauses for a moment.
“Are you noticing that?” she asks.
There’s no response. Lauren pulls a brown leather bag up onto the table and fiddles with its fastener cord until it falls open. Thin silver tools spill out across the table’s surface.
The man’s flailing arm catches a corner of the bag and drags it halfway off the table, scattering a few tools on the ground.
“Hey, cut that out,” Lauren says. She looks up, where the grey plastic walls meet the rugged foamlike surface of the white 15/16” drop acoustic panel ceiling tiles. “Are you paying attention? It took too long for him to react.”
Maybe it was still booting up.
“Okay.” She picks up a steel teaspoon and pushes it around the side of the man’s eyeball, wiggling as it sinks into the socket.
“No, no, no,” the man whimpers.
“That should be a seven or eight,” Lauren says. “What is that?”
Five. Give or take. Lauren pries and the eye gushes out, dangling by pink tubes from the socket.
The man mumbles something.
“Should we shut down and troubleshoot?”
It could just be slow to spin up.
“It’s software, Stephen, it doesn’t ‘spin up.’ What are we going to do if they won’t sit through our tutorial? You know these boot boy freaks. You put them in a sim and they start carving up children and blowing up pregnant women and shit.”
Hang on, let me tweak some stuff.
There’s the sound of rapid typing, piped into the room as if from a speaker in the ceiling. Lauren sighs. The man across from her goes momentarily rigid, calibrates, and slumps forward in pain again, grasping at his missing eye.
Try now.
Lauren paws through her scattered tools, eventually finding a scalpel on the floor by the man’s feet. She grasps his hand in hers.
“What, slash the wrist? Or fingernail stuff?”
Fingernails. Trying to dial in the terror. The ick factor. Fingernails make people feel icky.
“Don’t I know it,” she says, screwing up her face as she isolates the man’s index finger and begins to move the scalpel towards it.
The man spasms, shrieking incoherently.
“Too much.”
I know. Sorry. Trying to fix it.
Lauren grimly holds onto his finger but the movement doesn’t stop. In seconds the man is jerking his arm so violently that it starts slamming down into the table. The motion is powerful, almost deliberate, and after a few strong blows the man’s elbow splinters. Tools go flying onto the floor. A shard of radius pokes a hole out the back of the arm. The man’s shrieks grow in volume.
“Fuck this. Pull the plug.”
Lauren’s vision distorts, pixelates, and gradually fades into translucence, revealing a dimly-lit office with haphazard stacks of notebooks and diagrams piled onto desks. Moving about in virtual reality, she sees she’s knocked an adjustable desk lamp askew so it points at her face. When she takes the headset off, the light makes her sneeze. Across the room, Stephen spins in his chair and chews his thumbnail.
Lauren wipes her nose and tosses the headset onto the desk. Juxtaposed with the schematics, the headset’s thin, foil-like exterior, covered in colorful ads and warning labels, looks like a candy wrapper.
“That... wasn’t good, dude. What are we gonna show them?”
“I said we should use an established personality. We had the money. Or I could’ve found one somewhere, free. Cutting corners with this bargain bin guy was not the right move.”
“It doesn’t fucking matter.” Lauren rubs her eyes. “This is the guy we’ve got. Couldn’t have known he’d be so fucking weird.”
“I’ll go in and mess with it tonight,” Stephen says, trying to head off her anger. “Just needs some tweaks.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s already gory and engaging, but keep in mind that these guys have probably actually tortured people. We need reactive subjects. The emotional progression isn’t there.”
“I know. It’ll be fine.”
“Two days, Stephen.”
“I know.” She stands up.
“I’m going to grab dinner. Want anything?” Stephen, whose headphones are back on, doesn’t respond. Lauren grabs her jacket and leaves.
The room is quiet. Air from a vent, clicking from the keyboard, and muffled music in Stephen’s headphones. He pauses at one point and gets up to stretch. Walks across the room to the desk with his and Lauren’s backpacks. Takes a now-soggy hummus sandwich out of his. Lauren’s bag is open. There’s a colorful pill-shaped cardboard box.
Stephen dabs at his sandwich with a paper towel and lifts the flap of the bag to get a better look. It’s a DNA test. He pauses, considering, before removing and opening it. There’s a printed sheet of paper inside with the results, and enclosed in a small Ziploc, a flash drive. Lauren’s genome.
Without pausing this time, Stephen pockets it and packs the box back into the backpack, draping material of the bag so it lies naturally. He goes back to his desk, and he’s still there 20 minutes later when Lauren returns with a styrofoam container of pasta.
-/-
The next day Lauren comes in and Stephen is there again, at his desk, sulking because she’d left her pasta out, garishly smothered in greenish-brown capers and red sauce.
“I’m sorry, I forgot,” she says, without sincerity. “Anyway, I can’t always curate a world for you without any colors. And I don’t see how it’s any worse than your… what is that, oatmeal? That looks fucking gross. Looks like goo.”
“Oatmeal is the ultimate food because it’s beige, pleasureless, and easily digestible,” Stephen says slowly, like he’s explaining to a child. He sets his spoon down in the bowl. The oats were rolled and boiled; there’s no brown sugar or maple syrup but from the thin consistency Lauren thinks there might be some milk mixed in.
“Remind me again why beige is the superior food color?” She asks.
“It’s the average color of the universe. It’s the average skin color. It’s optimized for consumption by humans.”
“I think it’s really funny how there is actually a grand and thorough pattern programmed into basically every aspect of human life, and you still need to make up completely batshit stuff, like you’d be suicidally bored if you had to just take things like they are.”
“I am suicidally bored.”
“Right. I just feel like there should be a limit to how much you control my behavior. I stopped wearing colors to the office, now I can’t leave my food out? You gonna make me get a grey car? Tattoo my eyes?”
“You don’t drive.”
“Okay, what about my headset? Should I cover it with electrical tape like yours?”
“It would be nice,” Stephen says meekly. “Anyway, I didn’t mean to fight. There are rational reasons to not leave food out too. Insects.”
“Sure, Stephen. I will try to not leave leftovers out in the future.”
Stephen nods, apparently oblivious to the annoyance in Lauren’s voice.
“Cool. I’m going to finish my oatmeal and download some custom ringtones of songs I like, and then we can go over how the sim looks.”
Time moves slowly in the office, not because the work is miserable but as if the physical structure of the room, its four walls and furniture, absorb and lessen whatever force causes time to continue forward. The sim looks a little better today, but there are odd tics and unexpected reactions from the man whose genome Lauren and Stephen had scanned and rebuilt in the program. One thing that’s interesting about the process is that certain qualities and behaviors you assume are learned are actually present in the software-grown entity through multiple recreations of the scanned mind, suggesting that some idiosyncrasies are built in from birth, inherited probably. Another interesting thing is recreating the same person multiple times with different algorithms and ageing them, watching the predictive changes the software assigns to their face and body as virtual years go by. This is something Stephen does in his free time with minds torrented from unlisted websites.
Lauren’s got her headset on. Light leaks out onto her cheekbones and eyebrows. The sim is improved but still riddled with errors. We know what to expect when we torture someone. We know what constitutes “normal” behavior under basically any circumstance. We’re thrown off by strange reactions. Mystifying etiquette by the tortured. I would plead for my life here. Why does he shield himself like that. This should hurt more.
“Oh, hey,” Lauren says before she leaves. “Did you see a flash drive lying around near where I put my bag down?”
“No,” says Stephen.
After she’s gone, he plugs it back in and fiddles, putting on his headset and gesturing with the controller.
-/-
Two men in slacks and dress shirts sit across from Stephen, whose gaze is fixed on the presentation screen as he speaks, never turning to face his audience. At one end of the oval table, Lauren is hunched over, fingers caressing her scalp, probably pondering how much of the rest of her life will be spent in rooms like this with people like this. The photo on the screen is of a rubbery action figure with moveable limbs.
“A vitally important part of early childhood development is being given stretchy, malleable toys of one’s favorite characters from cartoons or movies and then pulling them, deforming the features of these beloved faces.” One of the military men is tapping the table. Stephen ignores it or doesn’t notice.
“We learn about disfigurement through play with toys. Everything else, like empathy, cooperation, pain, we can learn by communicating with others. The concept of permanent injury only solidifies with firsthand experience. That’s why children who spend less time playing with humanoid toys have greater stress responses to accidents and injuries.” The tapping man is restless. The other might be asleep.
“So,” Lauren interrupts, “is there anything you want to know that hasn’t been covered? Or should we show you guys around the sim?” The man stops tapping and opens a folder.
“Yeah, we have a checklist. We can leave it with you to fill out. It’s just standard stuff, probably the same questions you get every time. Can you throw acid onto someone’s face. How does it interact with their eyes specifically. Can you put someone into a large tub filled with acid. Does the player character that you inhabit have a body. Can you physically interact with the subjects. Can the subjects be raped. How difficult would it be to map the faces of soldiers’ wives and children onto the bodies of the subjects. What if it was a non-interactive scene, like one of those Jibjab Christmas animations.” He pauses and looks around the room. His colleague is awake but not attentive. Lauren and Stephen are expressionless. He continues in a monotone as if by rote, eyes scanning the page.
“You know. Let’s see. Can you mutilate the genitals of the torture subjects? Can you force objects into their urethras? Can there be a sequence where they try to urinate or defecate after having their genitals and anus mutilated?”
“Yeah, you can just leave the list with us,” Lauren says. “Want to get started?”
The men follow them through the door into their cramped office. One puts on Lauren’s headset while everyone else gathers around Stephen’s monitor for a third-person view.
In the simulation, their subject sits waiting.
“Can we get more overhead light,” Lauren asks, and Stephen drags in a brightly glowing point that hangs from the sim’s ceiling as if in an interrogation. The light hits the subject’s eyes, and he sneezes.
The military man paws gracelessly through the instruments on the table, still getting used to dexterity and movement. Then he goes to work, and Lauren and Stephen hold their breath.
-/-
An hour or so later the man is flushed, holding the headset in one hand and rubbing his eyes with the other. His companion is compiling final notes on his clipboard.
“Really fantastic. I expect those few glitches to be ironed out, of course, but this is fine work. Remarkably lifelike. I know once they see it they’ll want this and more. Can we make a new environment, a drab basement with cinderblock walls, as if you’re conducting the interrogation on site?” He goes on for a bit. The other man just smiles, wipes sweat from his cheeks where the headset pressed in.
Eventually the men leave, still conversing excitedly, and the two developers are alone again. Stephen goes to the minifridge and removes plastic wrap from a sub roll. Lauren is lost in thought. Eventually, she speaks.
“You used my code. That was a gamble, this close to the demo.” Stephen looks up, mouth full of bread. Lauren continues.
“It was weird seeing my tics and mannerisms copy-pasted onto another body. It didn’t look totally natural all the time. I don’t think they noticed most of it, but anyone who gets really deep into the sim… We’ll have to work out those kinks.” Stephen swallows.
“You’re not mad?”
“About what? You made a call. It turned out to be the right one. Plus, it’s not like I was watching my body get taken apart. It was just a familiar mind inside.”
“You do this thing,” Stephen says softly, “where your hands flutter when you’re scared, but they like, face inward. It’s really strange. I had to cut it out of the sim.” Lauren doesn’t respond.
“Now that we’ve bought some time,” Stephen continues hesitantly, “we can find other minds. Once the check comes in-” Lauren cuts him off.
“Sure, we’ll need more for variety, but don’t bother taking me out. It looked good, human. We need all the effective minds we can get. Plus, it’s one less thing we’ll have to pay for.”
“Yeah.” Stephen smiles. “Cool, yeah. Just, it would work better in a body closer to yours. I could model you in Blender with some reference photos of your face and posture.”
Lauren’s face changes.
“Do whatever gets them off, right? They’ll have a better time raping and killing me if it’s not some puppet, right?”
“I thought you and I were okay,” Stephen says, in what he clearly thinks is a disarming tone. “I thought we agreed it was good. Plus it’s not really you, just a copy. Plus, it’s not, like, a rape sim. It’s for psychological conditioning.”
“You really are a broken little idiot, huh? Fundamentally. Fucking freak.” Lauren grabs her stuff and prepares to leave, then stomps back to his desk.
“Give me my fucking genome back.” Stephen fumbles it from his pocket and tosses the drive to her. She walks to the exit.
“See you tomorrow, I guess?” Stephen asks. Lauren doesn’t turn.
“Yeah.”
The door closes behind her.
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The company was bought and broken up six years ago. The main value wasn’t in the code, which was impossible to understand or improve, written in a collision of archaic languages and dropped haphazardly into visual editing programs. Its only translator had blown his brains out months earlier. Rumor has it he was on a holiday video call with his family at the time.
There were the copyrights Lauren and Stephen had acquired for each new development, those could be monetized; and then there was the system for melding digital mind-copies to person-shaped softbody simulations. The innards of the program were, again, opaque, but it worked as intended, better than any competitor. Their biggest client is the United States military. They had found that the military men didn’t want to dive too deep into destroying any one human body. Instead, they repeated single incisions, pulled out fingernails, clamped cables to nipples, before resetting to a fresh, untainted corpus. A stack of generated tabula rasa, awaiting digital hell.
Their next biggest client is an educational conglomerate providing tools and programs to medical schools.
Lauren was kept on as an advisor. Her salary is generous, in part to ensure her silence regarding some cut corners that revealed themselves during an in-depth examination of Stephen’s programming. Illegally torrented minds, plus contraband reference videos from terrorist groups, police departments, and leaked military cams.
She has the money now for a car service, or if she liked she could live closer to her new, much fancier office on one of the old building’s upper floors. But she walks every day, 45 minutes each way through the city. It’s not a habit or a health decision or anything like that. It just ended up this way. She is comfortable letting things fall into place, as this seems to have.
-/-
The morning is cold and bright, everything high contrast. Lauren stops at a cafe along the way to get a steamed milk with amaretto. She has stopped drinking caffeine.
She’s back out on the sidewalk, having just crossed the street, when she hears the voice of the barista, a tall, 20-something man with thick glasses and dark curly hair. She has forgotten her credit card inside the reader. He steps across the street to return it to her.
A truck is turning through the intersection; it hits him at an angle. He falls and twists beneath the tires. The weight and force against his midsection spins him apart like a centrifuge. The fluid curls out as if ejected from a pipe. Thick particles emit and spatter the pavement beige and medium purple. The beige is a surprise. Lauren’s sim had never treated skin as spatterable. Or no, she thinks, looking closer, perhaps that’s an interior color.
The back wheel has gone over the side of his head. It bursts, and out of the mush comes, somewhat comically, a white-pocked ball still quivering with its wires attached, surrounded by specks of glimmering red.
The body comes to a rest facing up, gapped torso still spilling wet matter. The organs are dark and more brownish than she’d have thought, wrapped in wine-colored membranes. Bundles of them lay on the black pavement in small puddles of dull fluid, which slowly vanish into cracks in the street.
Lauren’s hands are at her sides. She looks. Soon, she thinks, the road will be dry again, and the fluid will be collected somewhere. Soon it’ll be a normal intersection again, cleaned, as if reset to an earlier state.
Is the future set in stone, or a cloud of possibilities? It exists, Lauren thinks, but it’s vague about itself. Even if you could see it, you might interpret it incorrectly. You’d realize when it arrived how stupid you were, to think you had understood. What a fool you were.
