The Escapement Mechanism, Part 20
Utsab was wearing the escapement mechanism.
“I had to envision it connected to the switch,” Wemly reiterated.
Utsab waved away her advice. “Already there. I can see the default model file on the device, and the new file on the server, but when I try to access it, it’s only a few megabytes in size. Are you sure you transferred the model?”
“Yes, it’s why I ended up on the floor. It’s like I was the wire.”
“Well, hardly any of it’s here. Just a file name without any data to do anything with. Whatever you did, you didn’t transfer shit.” Seeing the look on Wemly’s face, he added, “Find it yourself then.”
Wemly checked the file size on the server for what must have been the tenth time. It was indeed small, just a few megabytes. She clicked around, confirming with both Ada and Utsab that they could all see the same thing. They could, but it wasn’t anything useful.
“It didn’t work for me, so why don’t you give the transfer a try,” suggested Wemly.
“What is that?” said Ada, looking for the first time with any scrutiny at the black rock attached to Utsab’s neck. “A heart-rate monitor?”
Wemly felt the colour rising in her cheeks, like she had downed a glass of wine too fast, but before she could give anything away, Utsab answered.
“Not exactly,” he said. “It measures heart rate, yes, but that isn’t the novelty---we are hoping for on-device prediction of potential medical events, but we’re having some issues with connectivity.” But what are you going to do about it? his expression said, like Wemly’s mother finally uncovering supper for an absent father with a saccharine smile that made Wemly feel like not eating.
“That’s a prototype?” Ada asked, eyeing the stone that could have passed for jewelry, were it not for the slow pulse of red light in its centre.
“Yes,” Wemly and Utsab said at the same time.
“Okay,” said Ada, and her uncritical acceptance irritated Wemly. It must have driven Warner nuts.
“Seems pretty simple,” said Utsab. “But be ready just in case...” he gestured vaguely at the floor and Wemly hovered her hand above his neck.
“Here goes noth...” Utsab said before his hands locked tight on the arms of the chair. Wemly had never seen an electrocution, but felt now that she knew what witnessing one would be like, looking at the crooked smile stretched across Utsab’s face and the eyes rolled back in his head.
She didn’t wait for him to ask, as he didn’t seem capable of speech---she just ripped the escapement mechanism off his neck. A low, monotone hum began emanating from Utsab and he rocked in the chair.
“Hey, Utsab.” Wemly punched him on the arm. He continued to rock.
“Hey!” Louder. A harder punch. The rhythmic rocking continued.
Wemly gave Ada a pleading look, but she stood frozen, having no experience deciding her own course of action in unfamiliar situations and finally dropping her pen to break eye contact.
Wemly would have splashed water on Utsab’s face but food and drink were prohibited in the room. The room was barren of anything that could help, but she briefly considered breaking the keyboard over his back to knock him out of his stupor; instead, she slapped his cheeks like she was warming up a volleyball between her hands until he screamed out, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck!” and flung her arms away.
“Oh thank God,” said Wemly. Ada blew out a long breath.
“I, did. I mean, did your thing work?” Utsab asked. Hopelessly optimistic, but seemingly unaware of what he was even asking. He reminded Wemly of a toddler asking her mother where the sun went when it went down.
“Do you know where you are?” asked Wemly.
“Yeah. I’m here.”
“And where’s here.”
“Fuck off with your questions. The computer lab.”
“Whose?”
“Seriously?”
Wemly gave a hard stare in response.
“Fine. Fuck. In Frances' computer lab. You tried the transfer and it didn’t work. I’m seeing if I can find the rest of the file somewhere on the server. But ... what?”
“You don’t remember?”
A hard stare returned to her.
“You tried the transfer just now. It was like you were fried to the fucking chair.”
“Fuck off,” but there was no conviction behind it. “I did?” He swiveled to face the monitor and brought up the directory listing. A new file with a new hash, and a slightly larger file size.
“Shiiiiit,” he said, letting it die out with the momentum of his chair as he spun to face Wemly. “We’re fucking Johnny Mnemonic.”
Wemly had conceived of it more like a human wire that couldn’t handle the voltage of the file transfer, but nodded agreement. “It’s the brain, not the mechanism.
She wondered at the capacity of a human brain. She had read somewhere that it was 100 TB, but that seemed too small given what the supercomputer worked with every day. Wemly only cared about the free space she could access without overwriting existing data. A chill overcame her. Maybe there was no free space, and the brain was constantly operating at full capacity. It made sense---why would we evolve to waste our most precious resource? It was probably more like dynamically allocating new memories and experiences at the expense of old. The nostalgic past only the highlights her brain opted not to discard.
If that were true, they’d need a sacrificial Sherpa between worlds. The model on the device was 2.1GB, which was unfathomably big for Trudy Gorland’s time. Given the agony of transferring the paltry amounts they had managed so far, she was done being the wire.