Shiny New Robot Body

A work in progress, or otherwise, a stalled out work that I want to finish eventually. Retro Sci Fi criminals steal a celebrity's consciousness in software/hardware format.

1

So in the end we managed to steal the consciousness of Josten Petrick, the famous old author and actor from back in the early 2200s. It surely was a strange sensation, carrying it around with me. I stuck it in my back pocket at first, but before long I moved it to my jacket pocket: I was afraid of pickpockets. Since he had been disconnected from his sensors and ambulant equipment, he wasn't directly aware of what was happening during that time, but he must have figured out that something was up when me and Steph came in to start the process off. We hadn't bothered to steal the Home's uniform from an orderly or anything; we just went in in our work clothes. Petrick's study is so comfortable looking, I wasn't even nervous once we got in there and started pulling wires and such. 

It's funny being dead, really, it must be. You go, at least in his case, from middle aged vigor to weary listlessness, and then to a strange dual state of groggy half-consciousness mixed with another freshness of alertness that doesn't go with any sensory information. That's how the backup goes. I've talked to Petrick since then, plenty of times, and found out all about how it goes, at least in his experience. And man, I've gotta tell you, that guy sure can tell a story, even now. I'll tack on the transcript after I'm done here so you can get a load of it. It's pretty wild. 

So after that dual period, like I was saying, the groggy period ends--that's brain death, of course--and the backup unit is switched on--the tech was hard to work out, from what I've read about it, but the most difficult part was the thought-to-voice element. It's still in the process of being refined, but to me it's pretty darn impressive. I mean, I grew up watching Petrick in some of his great roles and listened to his audio books and stuff, and he still sounds about the same--not just the voice, it's more than a simple sampler, of course. It's the inflection and tones of his voice. All that used to be done with the brain controlling the entire vocal mechanism, same as it used to be with me, in those early days, but without the vocal mechanism, how do you create the sounds so it feels like the living person did? It was a long time in coming, from a primitive monotone that, though still admittedly a wondrous development, was basically the same as text to speech--well, yeah, it was text to speech, following of course the crucial technique of converting thought to text. We don't need the middle man any more, of course, but that's how things go, I guess. If the nerves are still doing all right, as Petrick's were, all the impulses can still go off and give the signals to the synth, everything having an analogue to the human speech mechanism. I hear they're even working on getting Tyrone Bliss's consciousness to sing again. Bliss himself has figured out how to compose again, and he's working himself on playing the piano. I don't think we're ready, as a society, for a workable air guitar, but you have to admire his pluck, if you'll pardon the pun.

Anyhow, for speech, which is still pretty involved, they can use whatever is still around of the pertinent nerves to control volume and intonation--basic pitch, though as Bliss has found it takes some extra fine tuning to get it really convincing. Petrick used to be good at various character voices--I mean, what would our society be, really, without him as the voice of Tarkin Pufty?--so with Petrick, who is of course still earning royalties--man, that was a major foofaraw in the early 2300s, that stuff about new rules for copyright!--he anyway still has the dough to get the best technicians and creative people to help him find his voice again. Most folks just sit back satisfied with a sampling of their original voices as processed and controlled by the synth and their nerve impulses, but with a real artist like Petrick you really want him to have his entire range of abilities, naturally. From what I've learned, it started the same way but with some specialty sub-processes of the synth whenever he wanted to go into a special character voice, starting of course with Tarkin, who has been too hard to replicate by any living voice actor, it never quite sounded right till we got Petrick back on the character, and of course now there are all the new features and shorts again, a new Pufty heyday. Then the specialists added a few more "classic" voices from his career, his Polonius and his narration voice from the Farbitten series he had written in the sixties. 

But still Petrick was unsatisfied, as any artist would be who could only use three or seven or whatever different colors when they were used to full control of how to mix thousands of options. It goes without saying that he wanted to be able to come up with just the right voice for the moment. It was expensive and it was innovative, and there were some money-wasting failures that were a bit embarrassing, but overall he and his people made a lot of progress. Since all the things I'm going to tell you about reached their conclusion, as you'll hear pretty soon, he eventually got back with his specialists and has continued to refine the technology. I'm sure his is the best sounding and most nuanced voice synth in the world by now. And if he wasn't rich enough already, he'll certainly be rolling in it, so to speak, when he goes commercial with this high tech synth. Ironic as it is, I might partake of it myself next time around, if I can hang onto my nerves.

Well, yes, getting back to that, I was well in control of my nerves when we got started that evening. It was all going fine. We were well trained, well prepared with our supplies and such, and we were alert and well practiced. What I wouldn't give to get that state of mind back, brother, I tell you, I was better than any fine tuned machine at that moment in my life, I really believe that. I'll never get it back, it'll never feel the same as it did that even if my reflexes are perfected and my grip is unslippable via technology and the best wiring anywhere. It will never feel like that night again. I didn't feel like a criminal; I felt like a mix between a super hero and a brain surgeon. I ... do you remember that old character called the Shadow, who could 'cloud men's minds'? I felt like I had these super powers and just could NOT be stopped, do you hear me? I was SO READY.

You whippersnappers here probably need a bit of refreshing on what it was like back then, where we were at that particular point in the tech with a rich, famous deadlebrity like Petrick. 

Very well, be refreshed: there were several options, or classes of options, at that time. First, which was not our patient's choice, was to move the second brain into a mechanical body of some sort. Some were very human-like, some were like old science fiction robots, and some were quite unlike a human shape, meant for other purposes. Some criminals even stole brains and put them into factory machines, basically using them as slaves and never letting them rest. Those were used and used until they wore out; then they simply got out their extra backup and reinstalled them and, without the memories of what hell they'd gone through, the process would start again. Anyway, Petrick didn't go that route. 

He went with the hologram routine, which by then could create a 3D image of Petrick (or any of his old characters) that could ambulate around his room, essentially a stage. The image was mostly just an image, but it was built around a simple material skeleton, so that the image could interact with the objects and people in the room. It worked pretty well for his purposes. He had fun with it, and so did his visitors and audiences when he started performing again. 

Also, he had the itch to get writing his novels again. He tried to use his old techniques, but writing with pen and paper never felt right or worked right in that clumsy manner (he did not need the projectors when he had no audience). He tried out the Autory method of mind typing, and got fairly fluent with it, but he didn't like the ham-handedness of its editing functions. Finally he decided to just work with what he had and hit upon a new method that, strange to me as it sounds, worked for him--he even said it was the best way to write that he had ever tried. I still can't totally picture how it works because three fourths of it is going on in his head, or what serves the function of his head, and so I can't observe it or report on how it works. Good enough for his purposes, though, and that's all I need for now.

Well, that one glorious night I felt like I was really in control. Good for me, for after that I felt like I had lost all control for nearly a year, and I tried to hang on to that memory. Anyhow, though the tech was really advanced for its time, the connections were in fact pretty simple, and I had no trouble getting up close to the control center seeing as Petrick already trusted me, basically, though he was disconcerted by my unusual appearance at night like that. I went first for the things that he could use to alert people to the fact that he was being taken away: his voice first, his motor control next, and then...then I started to feel guilty. I was supposed to wait for his vision control, and I knew the boss would give me hell for it, but I didn't want Petrick to watch me doing all that to him. I knew he would take it personally and feel betrayed. I yanked those leads out and then the other senses, too. Then he was sort of locked inside his head. It's not a good feeling, friends and neighbors. It's scary as hell. Don't do that to people--take it from me, a mug who's done it himself, and who's gone through it in my turn. Nasty damn stuff. Not nice.

Petrick blamed me, as of course he would. So did I, for that matter. I felt like such a damned skunk. Kind of took the edge off the evening. Felt like I had gone out deeper than I thought I was, and couldn't swim. I panicked. For Petrick's part, he had never experienced out and out death before, and what it was for him was, he thought he had died. He thought I had pulled the plug on him and killed him outright. Now we're all right, of course, I managed to make it up to him and he sure got back at me before we got there, but at that point I felt like I had killed him, too. I hadn't, though, not really. His brain was still running, but without any senses and any motor control, it was like he existed only as a set of thoughts, sort of like a spirit or a soul, if you believe in those things any more--I never thought I did until a few years later, and now, I'm just not sure, I'm not at all ready to state unequivocally that it's all bunkum, anyway. But Petrick was alive and thinking, and in what we might equate to a coma, or to being in a sensory deprivation tank, maybe, from what I read in the old novels. As he told it to me, that last time, if he'd still been in his meat body, he'd like to have died of fright, and I can't blame him, not anymore. The thing that told him something different was up, was of course that the fright kept on going, longer than it reasonably should have. It wasn't like he was in any pain, but it just shouldn't have kept going like that. Not based on what he'd heard of what death or near death was supposed to be like. It was supposed to either end with a short, sharp shock, if you will, or with him approaching a light in the sky, or with him waking up in an ER somewhere in Nebraska, and none of the above happened to him. He had no sense of time passing during that experience, either. I did, though, I was constantly pricking up my ears, expecting every moment to hear a police sirene or to be nabbed from behind or cracked behind the skull or, in nightmares, to be sliced up by Petrick himself, coming to me from the dream world he was then inhabiting. And I ended up having the horrible conviction that Petrick really had died, that we would be unable to get his consciousness up and running again, and that all we had worked for would be all for butt nothing. 

So what I did was to reconnect his voice. Not his hearing; just the voice, and just the basic unit anyone can get at the fix it shop. We had had to leave the advanced stuff in the room. Too complex and anyway too heavy and ornate to cart around without taking on an excessively suspicious appearance to passersby. 

It scared the hell out of me. He had no nerves to make himself aware that the voice was working again, it was too basic a setup for that. He made no sounds at all for all that first night after I plugged the damn thing in. I kept unplugging it and whacking it against the side of the truck to see if I could get it working, but I guess it was working fine, he just wasn't speaking. He was thinking, but that won't make the voice unit go off unless he is intending to be heard, just like with living bodies. After a few days, though, and after hearing him voice random ideas in a stale, flat-liney voice, I realized that he couldn't tell any more if he was talking or just thinking, without any feedback of any kind. It must have all seemed the same to him. It weirded me out. I wished we had sprung for the midrange voice synth, at least. It didn't sound anything like his basic voice, or any human voice that was made by a natural person--except for the timing, that was a bit weird in itself. It would sound like Rosie the Robot, but with the cadences of speech that Petrick himself had made famous. It sounded like a tactless parody of Petrick by a not very clever joker who didn't have the talent to do something at all original. But yeah, that was how Petrick sounded at that moment. It didn't last like that, though, there was that. That was just for the first week, before we got back to the boss. Thank goodness, things were a little less rancid after that, at least as Petrick was concerned, though for me I just kept falling deeper and deeper into the hole of guilt. The only thing that was good for was to--after reaching the bottom--give me the resolution to make it up to Petrick, one day...and I started to brainstorm and search for a plan how I would do it. 

2

Petrick really did not like how his voice sounded out of that cheapo voice synth unit. Really honestly hated how he sounded. You could call it a turn off; anyway, he turned himself off in a way by refusing to speak after the boss tried to force him to tell him what he needed to know. An artist like him? Nah, he couldn't take sounding like that. It was worse, to him, than having laryngitis that wouldn't go away. Especially after all his work at getting his synth voice to sound so good. I didn't blame him. 

We brought the equipment back to HQ after a week. Evidently we had somehow done our work pretty well, and eluded detection. I don't know how that even worked. We weren't nearly careful enough. Maybe I was Cranstoning myself into the room and fogging up the cameras and other sensors. But we had followed the news and the police radio lines and kept a lookout and all that rot, and there was nobody around searching for us and no word that they had any idea it was us. Indeed, they seemed not to have a clue to work with. It felt like a trap, but we couldn't stay holed up in that haystack forever. The time came to move and we moved. 

When we moved Petrick in to the HQ building, he still had nothing hooked up but his voice and he still seemed to think he was a disembodied spirit, which in effect was more or less the case. He seemed to be coming to grips with his new plane of existence, which was being created, lacking any sensory input, purely by his imagination. It was neat, really. I can give you the printout for that as well. Maybe I'll even ask him for permission to publish, or give it back for him to publish. It may be that he wouldn't even recognize it as his own stuff if he heard it now. It was so far removed from everything else, so disconnected from any of his living experience before and after. And after all, nobody else can access whatever his imagination was supplying to his mind's eye and ear and such. Who's to say that it's nothing but baseless fantasy, really? If there's an afterlife, I want to see how it compares to the Petrick edition of hellven.

I had given Petrick a sort of rude awakening of sorts before when I disconnected him, and now I was about to give him a new one that would bring his newfound sense of reality crashing down. I hated myself for that, even more than I had before, but orders were orders. An old soldier boy like me knew about that sort of thing; I had reason to. The boss--still, after all these years, I can't really bring myself to use his name, so I'm going to call him Mr Claudius--gave me all the order he needed to, a simple hand gesture, and I was compelled to make the change. I left the voice hooked up, which I thought was a bad idea and I still do, and powered up the hearing units to the second brain. Then I plugged in the connector, and for the first time in more than a week Petrick could very suddenly hear. 

The difference was obvious at once. We were all quiet, and there was nothing especially noisy in the room, but to a brain that had been cut off from all sound, there was a huge difference, comparable to someone who had been stuck underground for a long period being suddenly assaulted by the glare of a nightlight. Plenty overwhelming for the situation, you know? It was horrible to me, the sound of the deathly monotone of the mechanized voice screaming in deathly fear. Not needing to pause for breath, poor Petrick screamed for a good long while, gibbering sometimes in the same unvarying D flat about death and life and monsters and assault and frying in hell. Even Mr Claudius felt it best to let Petrick acclimatize for a while before speaking to him, which seemed an excellent notion to me. 

The unexpected restoration of his sense of hearing forced Petrick to reassess his situation, once he overcame his initial panic. Soon enough, he gathered enough from the neutral sounds around him to realize he was in a room with some people and machinery, and therefore was in the real world. He was about to start stabbing the curtains when Mr Claudius broke the silence. 

Claudius had never met Petrick before, so since the last person he saw before shutdown was me, Petrick started out by assuming that I was there and that his "ears" were fooling him. I felt petrified, as if I were in his dark bedroom and he was calling out for me and striking out blindly to catch me, a thief in the night. Thankfully I was not supposed to say anything at that point, and all I could do was fear and, like Petrick, listen. 

The worst thing about that first conversation was that Mr Claudius did nothing to disillusion Petrick. He didn't absolutely claim to be me, but he let the matter rest and let the actor assume that his guess was right. I guess it could have been worse, but probably Claudius acted that way because he knew he still needed me for a while more at least, as I was no good to him dead and I was a positive danger to everything if I got away. He didn't need me to be furious at him for lying to Petrick like that, so he let the matter lie where it landed, in my court--only thing was, I couldn't do anything about it but listen. 

I think there's something fundamentally rotten in the mind of the habitually criminal minds of the world. These brains can be brilliant, can be full of knowledge, can be wily and clever and cunning and all the hell other things, but miss the most elementary basic things simply because they seem so obvious that they seem to be beneath their notice. That was the way it was with Claudius..and, I have to admit, with me and Pete. We had it down pat how to carry out the kidnapping, if it counted as that, and we knew how to avoid detection and how to be anonymous and where to hide and when to move and we even had a plan--that was subject to later revision, and it was flexible enough to provide for that--for how to deal with Petrick as an intelligent person who was driven by danger into a corner. But Claudius never gave a rational thought to how the ransom would work.

The thing was, Petrick was a smart cookie. He always had been. He had a good enough sense of his own self worth, like most celebrities, but he was always in command of his own faculties, as it should have been obvious to us by the simple fact that he had had a backup made of those faculties in advance before he started to lose them in his human body. He was in good shape. He had money and did his homework and knew whom to hire to make the switch work right, in that early time when it was still relatively unknown and daring. He never depended on anyone to keep him going. He was ready when things started going south in a physical way, and he had never missed a beat, really. He was a real sharpie. 

Claudius was a cad, brilliant in some ways, but he simply just assumed that he could bag a huge ransom just by kidnapping Petrick, who through me and my acquaintance with him was an accessible candidate for stealing. He never thought about who would be willing to pay him to get Petrick back. And it wasn't like Petrick had ever had someone taking care of him, a custodian or children or anyone responsible for his safety. He had hired people who were loyal to his paycheck, but with no personal, emotional bond to him. These people, professionals of their kind, were not going to go and pay just to get their own paychecks back; it was simply not worth that much. They didn't have that much. Petrick had been their best account, but they had others and would make do. The writer had no kids keeping him alive, or ex wives. He depended on himself, his smarts and his earnings. The ones who loved Petrick best, after all, were the members of the general public, and those who depended most on him were the cartoon people, and they also could make do without him if they had to.

Author's Note

Work in progress! I like the narration.