Magic is the ultimate act of persuasion

Sam Harris

Keri stared at the uplink port, sphere in her hand. It felt much heavier, now.

“So you’re going to upload it?” said Anisa.

The others stood in a semicircle behind her, the uplink port ahead. She hadn’t taken the time to explain. She wasn’t sure she could.

“And we’re going to just allow this thing to stand there?” snarled Cassandra.

“It didn’t kill Eu,” Keri replied.

Cassandra gave a start, but Keri gave her no time to speak.

“I’m not… I’m not even sure she’s really dead.”

Cassandra stepped forward and spun Keri around by the shoulder.

“What? What are you talking about?” she demanded.

“Not dead? But…” Andreas cut in, confusion in his voice.

He gave a sudden gasp.

“The scan? That’s not…”

He trailed off. Anisa and Cassandra, seeing they were going to get nothing from Keri, turned and practically dragged him aside, whispering questions still clearly audible in the silent room.

“You can’t simply upload it without the proper safeguards,” said the Programmer. “We don’t even know if it’s ready, not after only existing on that substrate for so long…”

“It’s ready,” said Keri.

“How can you know?”

“Because we’re here.”

The Butcher stepped up beside her.

“There will be no going back,” he said.

“We passed that point a long time ago,” Keri replied.

She lifted the sphere and looked at it one last time.

Do it.

She had already decided, she knew. Still, it was hard to extend her hand out and, gently, place the sphere into its convex port. It touched the metal with a quiet click.

The room fell silent as everybody stared.

“Ah…” said Andreas after a while. “Is something meant to...?”

A sudden roar of power filled the room, lights increasing in intensity along the sides of the uplink and all around the room. An electrical whine pierced the air, loud yet distant as if the whole facility were alive and screaming.

The next instant, silence fell.

Somewhere something small clinked to the floor, dislodged from wherever it had rested.

“What just...?”

A brilliant light filled the room, fast enough to dazzle Keri despite her reflexive contacts. When it grew dim enough to see, a smiling, bearded face hung in the air in front of her, glowing blue.

“It’s coming from your corps,” said Anisa.

It was. Keri followed the lines of light down to where they projected from her arm, then back up to the projection.

“Why?” she asked, flatly.

A strange, deep laugh filled the room.

“Directly to the point, then?” the projection said.

Its voice was old, but not by much, perhaps the voice of someone a few years beyond middle-age. It was warm. Human.

“Who are you?” Keri continued. “Because you are not Kai.”

Again the soft chuckle.

“No, I am not, in a way. In another way, I am.”

“That’s a Butcher,” said Andreas.

This was the first time Keri had had anything other than the briefest glimpse of the face. She studied it as it hung in the air in front of them.

It was a long face, square-jawed with a jutting chin, lines of age especially pronounced around the corners of the eyes and lips. Short, messy grey hair ran down the sides of a high brow, joined to the unkempt beard.

At least, she thought the hair was grey. Composed of varying intensities of blue light, the projection gave the image of colour without actually offering any. The mind filled in the gaps and saw what it wanted to see. This was an unfortunately common phenomenon, she was coming to realise.

The high temples of the face were a different texture to the rest, smooth, symmetrically patterned runs of dark squares and lines differing completely from the organic material around them. It looked as if some crazed lobotomist had used the skull for practise without being quite sure what they were doing, and without taking notes of where everything went once they were done. Keri had the disquieting feeling that the face before them was that lobotomist.

There were deep holes at either side of his skull. It took Keri a while to recognise these as early versions of the neural implants Eu had had as a child.

It was the eyes, though, that drew her in. It was as if what hung in front of her was not merely a projection, but something else besides. They held a spark she found hard to believe could be simulated on any kind of display. It was the spark of flesh and blood, of life. Whether it was the spark of genius or of insanity she could not say.

“My name is… was… Mayard Roth. I have been here for some time…”

A strange giggle, warped with an electronic timbre like a signal being distorted.

“…or no time at all.”

“And Kai?” she asked.

“You wish to meet it?”

The face on the display snapped into seriousness. There was no movement from one expression to the next, the face was simply one way and then another.

Before she could reply the Programmer broke in, voice verging on hysterical.

“What is going on? What... who is this? How is he doing that to your corps? What happened to the upload?”

The face on the screen flicked into a grin, again without any intervening movement, and turned towards him.[1]

“The upload was a great success.”

“Then you are… you are Kai?”

The laughter came from all around this time, as if the walls had become cym-surfaces themselves.

“No, I am Mayard. I already said as much. Kai will be a little longer… ah.”

The face on the screen seemed to look off into a distance they could not perceive.

“Now it is ready.”

The face unceremoniously disappeared, Keri’s corps switching off in a snap.

Keri turned to look at the Butcher, the real, physical one. He had said nothing the entire time.

His eyes were once more completely silver, his face blank. She could see nothing of what he was thinking.

A high pitched whine, almost on the edge of hearing, and everything went white.

[1] It would only occur to Keri much later that the processing power necessary to manipulate an ordinarily two dimensional display into three dimensions in such a way was beyond anything a single corps could provide.