Genetechnic or whoever else gets their hands on it can start taking people from the street, resetting them, and selling their coils off to the highest bidder.” Chan had lifted her head and swung around in her chair. Her eyes—those disconcerting blue eyes that didn’t belong to the Shay Chan of my memory—bored into me. “That’s not the worst part, Carter.”
Christ. I could barely wrap my head around the idea that Genetechnic might have developed the technology to do a factory reset on a coil, effectively deleting the rightful owner, and that wasn’t the worst part?
A few months ago, I lived in a world where life sprung eternal, death was a transient condition, and, while my mortal coil could be killed, short of that, nothing could take it from me. Now, apparently, the world had progressed to a point where backups were no longer safe, opening up the possibility of permanent death for the first time in centuries, and any lunatic with a sprayer and access to the right nanobots could open a cottage industry in body snatching. And, according to Chan, that wasn’t the worst part?
“Okay, Chan. Hit me. What’s the worst part?”
“I said there were two unintended discoveries. Blanking the coils was just one of them. But once the coils were blanked, Genetechnic started experimenting. Stuffing a new person inside was old tech—valuable, but it looks like they thought they had an opportunity to see what else they could do with a coil.”
That made a sick sort of sense. Because fully grown bodies were in such short supply, the only corporations that had access to them were either those that grew them, or those responsible for the re-coiling process. Anybody else was out of luck. Companies like Genetechnic had to make do with tissue samples, animal testing, and whatever volunteers were desperate enough to stumble through their doors.
I thought back to the video of the apparent corpse aboard the shuttle. “So, they had an opportunity to turn loose their best and brightest on freshly murdered volunteers, and they what? Invented zombies?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice as I said it.
“Yes,” Chan replied. “That’s exactly what they did.”
Her frank assessment hit me with an almost physical force. I dropped back onto the bed, grunting at the little flash of pain sent through my arm and leg. “Why, for the love of all that’s holy, would Genetechnic want to create zombies?”
“I don’t know,” Chan admitted. “Maybe they didn’t. Maybe it was another accident. And they aren’t really zombies, not in the horror sim sense.” That was hardly comforting, given what my branch had seen, but I didn’t get a chance to say so. “They’re more… biological robots, I guess. Artificial intelligences stuffed into a bio-mechanical shell.”
I let that sink in. AIs could be programmed for… well, for anything. They weren’t truly cognitive—they possessed only rudimentary self-identity and their responses were the end product of complicated heuristic algorithms. They learned and grew, but only after a fashion, and only to the limits of their original programming. They were pervasive, inhabiting everything from space ships to the implants that every coil walking and breathing had stuffed into their heads.
Despite that, androids and gynoids, while still produced in small numbers, had never really caught on. On the practical front, it was far easier and cheaper to purpose-build a machine for a specific task than to try and tackle the vast complexities of mimicking the human form with synthetic materials. And those who wanted human-esque robots for other, darker, purposes, were put off by the fact that the uncanny valley, no matter how far technology had progressed, remained an unbridgeable gap. Regardless of how hard a legion of scientists and engineers had tried, robots remained unmistakably robotic, and those who produced them catered to a very small, though lucrative, section of the population.
“Okay,” I drawled. “I get that there could be money to be made there. I mean, sure, if you could kidnap anybody off the street, wipe their mind, and replace it with an AI programmed to heed your every wish…” I shuddered at the multitude of abuses and indignities that could stem from such a situation. “But that seems a little… out there… even for a megacorp. And I assume you’re talking live coils here. That thing that attacked my branch was definitely not a living, breathing coil. It had been sitting in vacuum for God alone knows how long.”
“There was nothing on the… reanimation,” Chan admitted with