Chapter 17: Marcel
“The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication…”
— Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained
● Late Awakening Era: Manhattan, 2028
Marcel broke into a sprint while unlocking his phone. Every member of Little Satori had a button combination on their devices that would broadcast their location to other Satorians in case of emergency. Juliet had pressed hers. Marcel marked himself as Responding in the interface so the others knew he was on it.
He found the bathroom and knocked on the door. “Juliet? Byron?”
There were sounds of a struggle inside. He heard Byron gasp.
Fuck. Marcel tried the handle, but it was locked. He ran to the front desk of the Kimmel Center and found a security guard. “Hi, sir, I think there’s someone having an emergency in the single-user bathroom.”
The guard opened a desk full of keys, and, grabbing the right one, ran with Marcel to the bathroom and opened the door. Byron and Juliet stumbled out. Byron put on a guilty show to hide the fact that Juliet was lolling in his arms.
“God dammit, you kids! Get a friggin’ room, will ya?” shouted the guard.
“Yes, sorry, we’ll be off.”
Byron exited the building with Juliet in tow. Marcel thanked the security guard, and then slipped out behind them. His phone was full of messages of concern regarding Juliet’s emergency signal, so while walking outside he marked the situation Resolved.
Byron and Marcel rested Juliet on a bench in Washington Square Park and then sat down.
“So?” said Marcel firmly. “What happened.”
Marcel inspected Byron with suspicion and not a little misgiving: he had brought this volatile creature into their lives. Byron’s arms were covered in scratch marks. One of them bled. Marcel didn’t know what had happened inside the bathroom, but there were monsters inside this one, writhing to get free. Marcel would be damned if he let them lay another finger on Juliet.
Byron stared back at him, his lip curling with malice. “You think I did this to her? She did it to herself! I warned her not to lean in.”
“Slow down.”
“Your friend needs an exorcism.” Bryon’s face was becoming flushed. His eyes grew shiny with an unnatural light. “You should have warned me that she was a witch.”
Marcel’s voice went deadly quiet. “Shut up.”
At this Byron seemed ready to reach across Juliet and seize Marcel by the throat. But his expression turned to concern as Juliet began to speak softly, with her eyes half-lidded.
“She’s gotten more sophisticated.” Marcel felt Juliet use her voice to calm Byron down. A “tone poem,” she called it. Good, let the cobra be charmed.
“The woman you let possess you?” The devilment seemed to be dissipating from Byron’s body.
“My sister—”
“Byron,” Marcel interrupted. “It has been a trip meeting you. If you harmed Juliet in any way, you’ll be hearing from me. Now, if you don’t mind, I need to take my friend home to recover.”
“No,” Juliet turned to meet Byron’s eye. “He stays.”
Marcel’s tone gained an edge. “I can see you two have some kind of special connection. Please enjoy that later. For now, let’s leave for Little Satori.”
Juliet turned back to Marcel. “We both took information management training. I’m not a fool. This falls under emergency privileges. We need him.”
“I’m sorry, did you not put me in charge of reining in your recklessness? Then kindly convince me.”
“This is tedious.” Byron stood. “I have a ceremony across town to close.” Stuck between his need to know and his need to recover, Byron seemed to be choosing the latter. “You have my email.” For a moment he appeared to be mustering the willpower to tear his gaze from Juliet. She nodded lightly. At this, Byron abruptly turned and marched out of the park, trailed by his shining azure robe.
“Piece of shit.”
Juliet cast Marcel a sidelong glance from behind a red lock of hair. “That’s the old you speaking.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. He’s the friend I gave my heart to.”
Marcel took his eyes off the ground to catch Juliet’s loyal stare. He smiled then looked down again. “You really think that deviant can help us? Make your case, but first, tell me what happened. All I have is that you saw that Alexei character, and then you ran to the bathroom. Five minutes later you’re stumbling out with Byron like you’d been in a wrestling match.”
“I was.” Seeing Marcel’s alarm, she stumbled for words. “Or…she was.”
“She? Who? Astra did this to you?”
“In a way I did it to myself, like Byron said. I was already vulnerable, given our childhood together. She was already in me. But I’ve never seen a sim take over an entire nervous system like that.”
“A sim. You can’t be serious.”
A sim was nothing special. Nearly everyone ran persistent simulations of one important person in their life or another: In Marcel’s mind, there dwelled a sim of his grandma, smiling within him whenever he took pleasure in a rum cake. There were even sims of his parents, weakly composed of half-memories, but still there to warm his heart when he grew fussy with Seraphine or Juliet. Their bodies were all buried in Haiti somewhere, but they lived on through the structure of his mind. Regrettably, there too was a sim of his aunt, screaming at him from a sim of Flatbush each day for abandoning her for the Satorians.
Marcel watched a grandson steering his grandma’s wheelchair across the park. They wheeled passed an artist displaying her paintings, a man on a bench with his face in his hands, a businesswoman walking her poodle. He pondered the dozens, maybe hundreds of other people living inside their heads. What most of them might never understand was that sims could operate semi-autonomously within the mind. For better or worse, sims held influence over our thoughts and decisions from the murky depths of the psyche. But Marcel had never heard of a sim that stripped you entirely of conscious control. It was like….
“Yes. Possession.” said Juliet, inferring his train of thought. “And worse, it jumped into me from – what did you say his name was? – Alexei. …Like a parasitoid wasp laying eggs into a caterpillar.”
“Or…more like a virus, right? Merde!” Marcel exclaimed in French, “Viral possession. Just when I thought I’d seen it all.” Marcel closed his eyes to think. “Theoretically, there may be enough bits encoded in the interplay between facial expression, posture, micromovements, and so on for complex algorithms like sims to be passed between two people standing at a distance. We’re still chipping at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to understanding the body-mind’s signal sensitivity. I mean, the brain even harbors magnetite, just like the beaks and snouts of animals who use magnetoreception.” He scratched his chin. “Let me see if I understand. Alexei must have come into enough contact with your sister to ‘download’ the sim. And then he passed it onto you within seconds. Or ‘updated’ the copy you were already running, or something. …Are seconds really enough to transmit a sim?”
“You like to pass on your ‘muse,’ don’t you? I’ve seen you do that with a handshake and some eye contact.”
“That’s just a little suggestion to someone’s norepinephrine and dopamine receptors – probably. It’s basically just Wellbutrin. What we’re talking about is a simulation of an entire mind – or at least a landscape of intentions.”
“Do an impression of Buck.”
“What? Oh, the crypto guy.” Marcel’s posture suddenly shifted and he was unlike himself. “‘Sup guys! Hey––” he said, holding out both hands, as if to brace the audience for a lion jumping through hoops of fire, “‘How about we hop in the lambo, scoot to my place in the Hamptons, and hit some cactus. I’m talkin’ peyote!’…. Woah!” he exclaimed, breaking his impression, “Juliet Ramsey, having a laugh? When is the last time I saw that?”
Marcel had to wait a minute for her to recover. Juliet rarely laughed, but when she did, she lost control. Maybe that’s why she rarely laughed.
“That,” said Juliet, holding her belly, “That was…that was good.” She regained composure. “A caricature, perhaps, but an accurate one. To my original point, how much contact with Buck would be enough for you to do that impression?”
“I don’t know. A few moments of him talking. A couple minutes maybe.”
“Impressions run off of sims. A couple minutes to pass on a sim – at least for someone with Buck’s level of charisma. Now imagine what someone could do if they practiced putting themselves inside others deliberately for years. A person who had been trained since birth by my mother and father. Someone as formidable as Astra.”
“They might be able to transfer sims of themselves within seconds – passing someone on a sidewalk.” Marcel looked off into the distance speculatively. “Maybe that’s how tulkus work in Buddhism. You know how some Buddhist masters are reported to pass their personality on through the ages? Like your dad’s teacher – how she was recognized as the reincarnation of the 12th Dalai Lama or something like that? Maybe the sims of masters are just floating around out there, hopping from brain to brain, waiting for a susceptible enough host, like you were for Astra.”
“I wonder how that could be tested….”
“I’m distracting us. Hm, so: it might be that Astra and Alexei don’t know each other after all.”
For a moment Juliet too became lost in thought. Then she shook her head. “No. Astra and Alexei work together. I’m sure of it.”