Chapter #14Machineries of Change by: Seuzz   Part of you wants to fold Professor Hyde-White in half and shove him up his own asshole. But part of you also finds this talk very bracing. Is that your problem: estrogen and hormones and the psychology of a goth-girl who nevertheless sometimes feels mushy at the sight of a pink bunny rabbit?
"Okay, you've got my attention," you tell him. "What's this job?"
"You'll do it?"
"Yes." Just saying this word makes you feel stronger. You still feel shaky, but it's now like a vibration running through steel, not Jell-O.
"Then go home, sleep, and meet me in my office tomorrow," he says. Brusquely, he returns his papers to an attaché case, and leaves without a backward glance.
* * * * *
You're still a little unsteady the next morning—it did not do you good to spend the night inside a flat that became detestable to you over the last forty-eight hours—but otherwise fairly centered. The professor is still wearing his "patrician" air when he meets you, and there is nothing warm or genial in his manner. Without making any introductions, he leads you into one of the "clean rooms" where Project Vulcan performs its most cutting-edge research.
You work for Diana, not Vulcan, but your long association with the professor means you are no stranger to Vulcan's headquarters. You are also the head of Diana's infiltration teams, and so Vulcan regularly consults with you: They show you new gadgets and devices, to see if you can make use of them; they ask for critiques of the devices you use, and how they could be improved. But you've never seen anything like the device sitting in the middle of this clean room.
To the eye it doesn't look very complicated: a hospital bed that's attached to a large and heavy-looking steel cabinet. That cabinet has something like a control panel on its side, and from its top sprouts a robotic arm tipped with a crystalline drill-bit. It looks like the sort of thing you'd find on a UFO: an alien body probe.
Hyde-White ignores it, though, and gestures you into a chair as he also sits. "You remember Cuthbert, of course," he says.
"Of course." Fuckbert, as the Diana team still calls it when they have to recall it with a shudder. A nasty hillbilly village back in the U.S., a few hundred miles from your hometown, as it happens; a place crawling with distant relatives of yours, as it further happens. It was one of your first jobs for Diana, in your second year with them: you'd spent weeks hidden inside it, scouting out its secrets and booby-traps, and sowing some well-timed confusion within its defenders when Fane's private army stormed it in a massive smash-and-grab raid.
"Well, we are finally earning dividends on the assets we acquired there," he says.
"'Finally'? What have you been doing all this time?"
"Please, Mr. Prescott. Do not denigrate our researchers. The material we pulled out of Cuthbert is of a complicated and obscure nature, one ill-understood even by its former owners."
"They knew enough to operate that vacuum cleaner in the church basement." You shudder; it was one of the first decisions you made after the raid, telling Hyde-White in no uncertain terms that you and your teammates would not be wearing "skin suits" of victims, and that Lillis and Plante needed to concentrate on refining the "tattoo" technology.
"Quite. But there was a great deal more we acquired. After painstaking experimentation over the last seven years, we have finally unlocked and perfected a technology beyond what the denizens of that benighted township could have dreamed."
Your eyes go to that machine, and it suddenly looks very loathsome. Is it a high-tech version of that ghastly steam-punk thing that was in the church?
"It is a technology," Hyde-White is saying as you continue to stare at the thing, "with many applications for many parts of Dark Stars, and beyond. However, it is a technology that would be most immediately useful for Diana."
"We're not wearing anybody else's skin," you tell him flatly.
He arches an amused eyebrow. "And what, pray tell, is your team doing now with those tattoos? What do you do with the masks?"
"I don't know how those things work, but it's not like pulling up someone's skin around your—"
"Yes, you don't know the theory behind the technology. I rather wish you did," he adds peevishly. "I suppose I shall have to give you a brief lecture."
You groan inwardly.
"The only thing you really need to know, Mr. Prescott, is that a human being is composed of three substances, which we have dubbed P1, P2 and P3."
Well, that's helpful, you think to yourself.
"The 'P' means 'Personal Characteristics', and there are three types. P1 is the person's body and brain. That is what your old masks and our new machines copy and put onto you and your teammates in Diana. It leaves you and them looking and acting exactly like those you mean to impersonate."
"Uh huh."
"Except the impersonations are never quite complete," the professor continues. "Because people also contain P2, the Personal Characteristics of the Second Type."
"What is there to a person except body and brain?" you ask.
"There is P2," he says in a tone like you're an impatient child. "You've met it before. You remember those two boys in your home town, before we recruited you? The two Stellae?"
"Right." A chill wraps about you: a chill of fear and hatred.
"You were not able to mimic them exactly, were you?"
"I did okay," you bridle.
"But you were not able to mimic their gifts," he says in a very arch tone. "That is because neither masks nor tattoos are able to replicate P2, and their gifts, their occult powers, are a function of their P2."
"I thought it was because they had special training."
"They do, but if it was only a matter of training, then you would have been able to replicate it, as you replicated some of their other skills. No, the training enhances unique talents that they have in virtue of their P2."
"Okay, assume I understand all this so far." You think you do: he's giving you a Baby's First Steps version of it.
"Then there is P3, which for lack of a better word is the consciousness, the sense of perspective that a person has." He points. "You are sitting there, and look at the world from where you are sitting. I am sitting here, and look at the world from where I am sitting. Your consciousness is located in one place, and mine is in another. That is the third kind of personal characteristic."
You understand it well enough—and the talk of Diana finding a use for some new technology—that you think you can guess where this is going. You chuck your chin at the device. "Are you saying you've figure out how to copy these P1, P2 and P3 things?"
"Copy? No, not in the sense you're talking about. We have learned to manipulate them, however."
He looks over your shoulder and gathers his thoughts for a minute before speaking again. You let him, and go back to staring darkly at the new contraption.
"Think of yourself as the operator of a piece of machinery, like a construction crane, or a bulldozer" the professor finally says. "The machine can do certain things, and it obeys your commands. In this analogy, you are P3, the consciousness sitting inside the machine, which is your body—your P1. The machine's abilities are its P2."
It's a bit hard juggling the numbers, but you think you've got it.
"When you use a mask, or activate a tattoo, that's like repainting the outside of the machine, or resurfacing it, to give it the appearance of a different machine. Like camouflaging the crane to look like a bulldozer. Er—" It's clear he doesn't like the way the analogy is now unfolding, and looks momentarily taken aback. But then he rallies. "The crane is still limited in what it can do, and you are still limited by what it can do, because you are still inside it."
"Must be one fantastic disguise if it can still work like a crane while looking exactly like a bulldozer," you dryly observe.
"Quite. But suppose instead of disguising the crane as a bulldozer, you opened a hatch, crawled out, and crawled into a real bulldozer?" His lips twitch.
You blink. "I move from a crane into a bulldozer? And those things are bodies? So you're basically talking about a body swap?" So why the silly analogies instead of just saying that?
"Exactly. You move into a new machine, and now you are controlling it, and are able to do what it does. And since you are hidden inside that machine, no one on the outside could say for sure that we had substituted one operator for another. Because," he hurriedly adds, "there was another operator, a rival, inside it, and we removed him so you could take over his—"
Your eye returns to the machine. "So that's what that thing does? It swaps one person's soul—"
"There's no such thing as a soul!"
"Don't get hung up on terminology, professor. I just want a basic picture. So you could swap my soul into another body instead of giving me a tattoo?"
"Exactly!"
"So what's the gain on what we can do now?"
He looks disappointed. "My dear boy. What if we were to execute this 'soul swap'—" He mouths the words distastefully. "—by putting you into the body of a Stellae?"
A chill touches you at the base of your neck, and like a stone dropped into a still pond sends small waves rippling all over your body, down even to the soles of your feet.
"Now, you wouldn't just look like a Stellae, and have his memories," Hyde-White says, and his voice turns very soft. "You could do what he can do. The perfect impersonation of one who is otherwise impossible to fully mimic." He smiles. "And what would you do then?" | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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