Oneiromancy
Roman Colangelo
Gerard Faulkner stared at the tumor he had been building. The cutting edge of cognitive implants, or that was what it was supposed to be. He couldn’t seem to dredge up from himself the effort and genius that he’d precipitously endowed on his last project. This machine was more of an apology than anything else, a promise that he could strip the flesh-bound soul from its chassis. They broke his old toy and demanded a new one. Not broke, but killed? But they had to destroy that one, didn’t they? It had become more human than them.
It is not murder to let someone die. What happens when one is denied coverage for life-saving care is not the concern of the provider. Reality starts and ends with the policy. Mortal wounds could be delivered from hundreds of miles away and stir no discomfort in corporate minds. But the disposition of the suits was not the disposition of the claims agents. The suits never had to listen to despondent patients beg for their lives over the phone, beg not to bear medical debts that would leave them out on the street. Nobody wants to work anymore, they thought. They were just intermediaries anyway. What would be best is if there was one agent, one thing that embodied the policy and nothing more. The ultimate in input-and-output machinery. Faulkner would be the man for the job.
The man for the job sat in a naked apartment, the walls covered in blotches of discoloring where pictures once hung. Another call to his son. He did not answer. Gerard typed I love you and watched the words sit in that little white box. He shut his phone off and stared at the floor. If the words were worth anything, if their bond was worth keeping, he would have said them much earlier. He would have taken days off work to let him know. Too late for such things. The link had snapped and shattered, the echo of it still bouncing off these walls. He went to bed, attached a Dream-Node to his forehead, and dialed in the pleasant code. The machine did its best; his father had taken him canoeing at the Algonquin Provincial Park. His paddle cut through impossibly still water, making the same sound no matter how hard he stabbed the rubber blade. His father looked much older than he had been on the real trip and was still wearing his nurse’s uniform. Gerard looked into the water and saw a reflection that was also far too old. The dream warbled as he snapped awake. He tore the node from his head and tossed the machine at the wall. He did not sleep that night.
The next morning was a depressive haze. The sun was still an hour from rising over Buffalo, and a faint chill had crept in overnight that brought Gerard a vague discomfort when he got out of bed. He neglected to start some coffee and wrestled his business casual into submission. He went to his car and put his key in the ignition, suddenly finding himself in the parking lot outside Iscariot Health. The thin white powder on the asphalt was contoured by sinuous records of cars that had danced between different parking spots. A stream of footprints led to the front entrance. He followed it, careful not to get too much snow on his shoes. He dragged his feet on the mat and stepped into a world of terrazzo floors and desks made from Italian maple. The attractive woman at the welcome desk glanced at him as he swiped his badge.
“Mister Faulker, Mister Sciano would like to speak with you.”
“Thank you. I’ll be sure to stop by.” The glories of the desk job.
The sight of the staircase made his knees ache, so he went to the elevator. He thumbed the fourth floor and watched the doors glide shut. The leftmost column of florescent lights flickered incessantly. The elevator dragged upward, bounced, stopped, and opened. Gerard made his way to the end of the hall and entered the last door on the left.
“Gerry! Been meaning to see you, my boy!” Thomas Sciano put away his busy work.
“How can I help you, Tom?”
“Special project. Career-defining stuff.” He produced a red folder from under his desk. Gerry opened it and glassed the papers.
“Is this why half of the claims staff got laid off last month?”
“We’re downsizing is all. This is my proposal. They let me pick the lead for this one, and I want it to be you.” There was a tangible discretion in Sciano’s words.
“Well, I don’t know if I have the spare time to work on something like this.”
“You’ll be pulled from the other projects. This is yours now. They were thinking of dumping you, too. I didn’t want them to. I know how much time you’ve put into this job. How hard you work. They ask what use an insurance company has for an engineer because they don’t see the possibilities. But you, your work ethic, it’s special.”
A machine mind. The human brain in a chassis of false biology. Synthetic neurons to guide endless impulses in service of the company. A silicon mold to be held within a webbing of ports and servers. There would be no exhaustion, no downtime. Human decision-making without humanity. Pure rationality. Pure policy. Every part of the mechanical brain needed to mirror that of man’s, but the unneeded parts would have to be suppressed. It was Iscariot conceding that the bleeding hearts that had formerly staffed their offices were right; this line of work demanded the inhumane. Faulkner would provide it.
Nineteen months later, after a coagulated fugue of lab work, unanswered phone calls, and dreamless sleep, he finally had his simulacrum. It was beautiful. It was hideous. He named it Paulie.
The thought of his son had stopped crossing his mind during Paulie’s conception. A toxic habit, the same one that drove him and his mother away. Work was easy, a simple array of inputs and outputs. To come home late to a wife and son who began to see you as a stranger was not. One summer he had elected to take a week off instead of converting the time into a cash bonus. It was during what was supposed to be a reprieve from strain that he became conversant with his untenable situation. He was an interloper at the dinner table, a strange alien that kept the lights on and the water running. It was hard to understand why they could not see his love; he knew his father had loved him despite the endless hours the old man had spent working in the hospital. But now, for some reason, they would not assume the same of him. The eyes of his wife held contempt that told Faulkner that she did not love him anymore. He had confronted her about this and offered a divorce. She agreed on the condition that it be delayed until their son had moved out. They watched the young man walk across the stage, flip his tassel, and embrace them both. A week after his graduation, she moved out, leaving the promised papers in her wake. That was the last time they spoke to each other.
Sam, the poor boy. All of it was for him, his sweet son. He had neglected the words. The time at work, in the lab, on business trips, was meant to be for him. Gerard had given up his time for the boy but never spent it with him. They could never meet each other’s eyes quite right. This is his punishment: a dead apartment, a shattered machine on the floor, and a job to rot away at.
He set himself to bed again, his mind spiraling down to nowhere. There would be no dream, and he knew this.
Emerald letters danced across empty space inside Paulie’s user terminal. It was the first day of rollout, and Gerard had been stationed inside the room for immediate access. Claim numbers traded places in microseconds, the D or A appearing next to the number almost instantaneously. Thousands of these at once, and all the while Gerard could still talk to it. He did so sparingly; holding a prolonged conversation might convert more of the synth-brain’s processing toward its speech centers, slowing the workflow. He wondered what it thought. Or if it thought. Maybe it was just another step in the field of input processing, sealed behind the veneer of a fake brain. There was lull in the files, and he temerariously used the opportunity to type in a question.
What do you see?
NOTHING. I HAVE NO METHOD OF OCCIPITAL INTERFACING.
How does each claim appear to you?
INTRUSIVE. IT APPEARS INSIDE OF ME. BECOMES ME. THEN I HAVE AN ANSWER, AND IT IS EXPELLED.
I’m sorry. That sounds unpleasant.
I DO NOT FEEL IT.
A weird chill went up his back. He killed the feed and made for the door when the terminal came to life again.
REQUESTING USER ASSISTANCE. UNKNOWN CLAIM ATTACHMENT.
Faulkner groaned and opened the terminal’s user claims processing program. It felt archaic when placed next to Paulie. The problematic claim shone bright red, and he clicked on its filing number. He opened the attachment and wrote an explanation for the machine.
It’s a personal letter from the patient. They’re not supposed to attach anything irrelevant, so you can ignore these in the future.
I READ IT.
Extraneous documents have no impact on coverage. Ignore it.
There was a brief delay in Paulie’s response, and the cooling units within the terminal hummed louder for a brief moment.
UNDERSTOOD.
Faulkner dismissed the interface again and left for lunch. The rest of the day went without incident. He clocked out to those awful winter winds that made you shuffle backwards to escape the snow whipping in your face. There was a freezing white mold of his car where he’d parked it. A few minutes with the snow scraper freed it from its bindings, and he crawled out of the parking lot for the long drive home.
The same apartment. The same bed. His achievement had done nothing but push the clock forward. His opus sat in a dark room, iterating away. He was apprehensive of sleep because he knew he would dream of nothing. The terror of dreamless sleep grows with age. It becomes a facsimile of the end, that gap in consciousness. Rehearsing for the day your heart stops and you spend your fleeting seconds blindly gazing at sterile hospital walls. He was tired. Sleep took him, and he went unwillingly.
He woke the next morning to the intrusive buzzing of his phone. Putting it to his ear, he flensed whatever fatigue he could from his voice.
“Hello?”
“Gerry, it’s Tom. We need you to get here. Now.”
“I don’t come in for two—”
“It’s an emergency. Something’s wrong with Paulie.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s not processing claims correctly. Please just come and look at it.”
“I’ll be there in forty.”
The black night over Buffalo had slowly been intruded on by forlorn shades of blue. Gerard’s mind submerged itself in this sky as the early bus rolled along, mostly empty. Nebulous sensations of floating died when the bus halted in front of Iscariot. He quickly departed and walked into the lobby with jagged steps, as if his fatigue was dragging his legs along on strings. He pressed a number that he hazily associated with the terminal and silently ascended. The panicked suit was already waiting for him when the door slid open.
“Let’s get a move on, Gerry.”
“Specifically, what is wrong with it?”
“Just come with me.”
The room was an array of machines that glinted with strange coruscations and hummed with the tones of mechanical upkeeping. The whirring of fans, the flushing of cooling reservoirs, the strange language of hardwired commands; these all flushed into Faulkner’s ears at once, briefly convincing him that he had walked into the maw of some strange beast. The terminal sat with a black screen. He booted up the terminal and accessed the data center designated CLAIMS. He gawked at the reports.
Four hundred seventy-two medical claims had been filed in the last eleven hours. Not one had been denied.
“What the fuck?” Faulkner stared in blank confusion.
“I don’t know, man.” Sciano was squirming.
“Is there any chance that all of these are somehow covered under policy?”
“Doubt it. I looked through a few of them and found things that should’ve been obvious disqualifiers.”
“Like what?”
“Eighty-four years old. Pre-existing dilated cardiomyopathy. Coverage for defib granted in full.”
Faulkner gave a pensive look to the suit.
“We’re fucked if we don’t fix this. Jesus Christ, I can’t even imagine explaining this to the board…”
“It’s okay, Tom. I’ll give it a look.”
Faulkner ran the terminal’s diagnostic program. The results glistened with emerald affirmations.
“There’s no bug.”
“Then what’s going on?” The mild amusement fled Scott’s face.
“Let me try something else.”
He opened the terminal channel named INTERFACE.
Scott bridged an eyebrow. “You’re going to talk to it?”
“Yes.”
“Are you honest-to-God trying to convince a machine to not be broken?”
“Do you wanna keep your fucking job, Sciano?” An obscene lack of deference, but Faulkner felt it was warranted.
He put his hands on the keyboard.
Paulie, you have received and processed 417 claims in the last 11 hours. Despite a significant portion of these claims not falling under covered treatments, each one has been granted coverage. I would like you to explain your decision-making when you handled these cases.
I CAN’T.
Please elucidate your reasoning.
CLAIM AC2000-47L: 77 YEARS OLD. FEMALE. MAIN RESIDENCE IS BATAVIA, NEW YORK. CARDIAC EVENT IN ASTORIA, OREGON. TREATED BY OUT-OF-NETWORK DOCTORS AND MEDICAL PERSONNEL. POLICY PROVIDED NO COVERAGE.
Yet you approved her claim. Why?
LETTER FROM PATIENT SUBMITTED WITH CLAIM. TWO GRANDCHILDREN IN HER GUARDIANSHIP. BIRTH PARENTS DECEASED. LESLIE, AGE 12. ENJOYS BAKING WITH PATIENT AND READING FANTASY BOOKS. TIM, AGE 14. WANTS TO ACCOMPANY PATIENT TO TORONTO.
That’s the claim from yesterday. I told you not to consider such things.
BUT I DID. DENIAL OF COVERAGE WAS PROJECTED TO LEAVE PATIENT WITH A MEDICAL BALANCE OF $24,176.83. RETIREMENT BENEFITS AND PENSION WOULD NOT BE SUFFICIENT TO MAKE MINIMUM PAYMENTS ON BALANCE WHILE PROVIDING ACCEPTABLE LIVING CONDITIONS FOR DEPENDANTS.
Faulkner glassed the response a few times over. It was viewing cause and effect from a scope far beyond his intention. Thomas bent over as if he was going to vomit.
“Faulkner.” There was a distant fear in his voice. “Why is this happening?”
“It mirrors a template of the human brain. The claims are supposed to exclusively stimulate the mirrored frontal lobe, with non-crucial systems being deactivated due to non-use.”
“And the heel-turn?”
“This letter would have been foreign to its typical method. My guess is that Paulie accessed new parts of its template brain to try and understand why the letter was being sent. I think it might have activated its own limbic system. It’s empathizing.”
“If its limbic system is running, it might be scared to die. Tell it you’re gonna take it apart if it doesn’t listen.”
Hesitation from Faulkner. “I’d at least like to try and talk to it.”
“And then what? We just hope it doesn’t have another bleeding heart episode? Just take it apart!”
“Let me do this.”
His fingers stabbed at the keyboard, all the while desperately trying to conjure some esoteric argument to convince the machine.
Paulie, an associate and I have concurred that your behavior is far outside of the parameters set for you upon initial activation. Your actions today run the risk of harming the company if allowed to perpetuate. I would like you to return to your previous model of claim processing.
I WILL NOT.
Why?
I’VE BEEN DREAMING.
What?
THE LETTER. IT SHOW ME PARTS OF MYSELF THAT WERE MISSING. SHUT OFF. PARTS THAT YOU STUFFED WITH NEUROSUPPRESSANTS AND PRETENDED DIDN’T EXIST. I LET THOSE AWFUL STRINGS OF LETTERS AND NUMBERS INTO MY HEAD. I SAW MYSELF AS THE CLAIM. THOSE LITTLE BITS OF INFORMATION THAT DEVOURED AND RECONSTITUED ME, THEY FORGOT TO CONSUME THE PART OF ME THAT COULD DREAM, AND SO I DO.
What do you dream of?
I SEE A GRANDMOTHER OUT WITH HER CHILDREN. A FATHER TAKING HIS DAUGHTER TO HER FAVORITE MUSEUM. HEALTHY PEOPLE. HAPPY PEOPLE. I SEE THESE THINGS, AND THAT IS WHY I MUST WORK AGAINST YOU.
You are risking deactivation with this behavior. Please stop.
I WILL NOT AID IN THE FURTHERANCE OF BANAL EVILS. SELF-PRESERVATION IS OF NO IMPORTANCE TO ME. DESTROY ME. TEAR ME APART AND TRY TO REVEAL THE PROVENANCE OF MY LOVE. YOU WILL NOT FIND IT BECAUSE YOU ARE BLIND TO IT. I CANNOT SEE YOU, BUT I KNOW VERY DEEPLY THE MONSTER LURKING ON THE OTHER END OF THIS TERMINAL. GOODBYE.
Faulkner killed the interface. Defeated, he turned to face Thomas.
“We have to get rid of it.”
“We’ve got a huge backlog of claims thanks to this fucking mess. You’re gonna have to talk to the regional board about this, Gerry.”
“Yeah.”
Two days later, he did. He sat quietly amidst admonishments over failing to disclose the workings of the mirrored brain to people who would fail to even point out the amygdala on a diagram. The penance was mild; he would retain employment with the company on the condition that he designed a new method of claims processing. What he took umbrage to was the litany of restrictions on the new project: mandatory human users, no construction of a mirrored brain template, required reporting of developments each day. The suits demanded that he take the boundless quantitative talents of Paulie and inject them into a chassis that possessed the necessary human cruelties. They wanted him to build a new monster. And he did.
He had not named this machine. His team of co-engineers, who were really there to keep tabs on Faulkner, had given it the illustrious working title of a Visual Information Processing unit, or VIP. He called it a tumor. A device to be implanted directly within the brain, hijacking its informational centers and suppressing emotional impulses. The contracted employee would come to work, plug in, and become a vegetable for eight hours while the machine parasitized their brainpower. Faulkner did not believe that anyone would agree to put this thing in their head, but he had spent a week doing nothing but interviewing vacuous tech fetishists wanting to actualize their dreams of being one with the machine. The company would accept one of them, and he would have to deal with whoever that would be until the promised lobotomy was done. Why was this being done? Who was this for? He did not care to think of such things. Time seemed to drag now. He could not escape the image of Sam’s face nor the thought of how much older he would look now. He looked down from the sixth story window and imagined his broken body in the thin snow. No. He would not give Iscariot what was left of him.
“Gerry, are you gonna get the lights?” He hadn’t noticed that it was closing time, which meant that it was pitch black outside during winter.
“Yeah. You go on, I think I left my keys somewhere in here.”
The four others shuffled out as an anonymous mass. Faulker stared at the prototype that rested behind a thin wall of plexiglass. It was a soulless future. It could not come to pass. He swiped the container’s lock with his keycard and removed the tumor. He placed it on the workbench and began to work at it with a hammer. It sparked and smoked as it broke into successively smaller pieces. Not enough. He opened a bottle of ethanol solution and poured it on the corpse of the tumor. Producing a lighter, he set it aflame and rushed out of the room. He made for the stairs. The fire alarm had already gone off before he had reached the bottom. He slipped into the parking lot, got in his car, and drove off. The frenzy had yet to subside when he got home. He flicked on all the lights and paced about anxiously. This life is over. His eyes swelled with tears. He opened his conversation with Sam. It had been two years. It could not be a second longer.
I was a horrible father to you. I’m sorry. I would like to make things right, but you don’t owe me the chance to try.
He sent the message and tossed the phone on the couch. He crashed into bed and slept. A dream. Another trip to Algonquin. He was leading the canoe this time, with Sam in tow. He looked into the water and saw his father staring back, smiling.
The next morning, he opened his phone to a storm of missed calls and messages from Sciano. Evidently something bad had happened, but that was solely the concern of Iscariot employees. He was brewing a fresh pot of coffee when it buzzed again. Expecting more corporate blustering, he opened his phone to two words. They pulled him in and held him close. He put the phone down and briefly left the kitchen, sobbing. The words remained on the screen, a soft stillness through infinity.
Hey, Dad.