Icicle: A Tensor Matrix

Chapter One

Chapter One

THE MATRIX—THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE 22nd CENTURY

Braxton Thorpe stirred, incipient awareness sharpening a fuzzy focus. He didn’t try to open his eyes or move his body. Instead, he grasped at a dream that seemed to slip away before he could capture it. He consciously relaxed and tried again, but the dream hovered just beyond his grasp. He seemed to be floating, surrounded by a viscous presence that encased his entire body. He sensed it, but his hands and fingers refused to follow his orders…he could not touch it—but it was there…it was there. Thorpe withdrew into himself, tiring from his exertions. He set his mind to neutral, trying not to think of anything at all and drifted into a troubled sleep.

Later, Thorpe stirred again, how much later he did not know. He reached out to capture a shred of a dream—a bed, lost minutes, white smock…and then he slipped back into his troubled sleep.

Much later, Thorpe opened his left eye, but he couldn’t because it was already open…but it wasn’t…and sleep captured his mind again.

It really was time to wake up. Thorpe knew it and pushed hard to rise above the viscous presence that still seemed to encase him. Push…push… push… But it clung to him; he couldn’t shake it as sleep claimed him again.

Later, very much later, Thorpe reached out and grasped something beyond his cocoon. Hold, he told himself, hold! He felt his hands still encased, and yet he held on to whatever he had grasped, refusing to let go. Slowly, very slowly Thorpe sensed the viscosity surrounding him dissipate, fade away, transform into a nebulosity that clung to him like a shroud, then a wispy vapor, then nothing at all.

LOS ANGELES—PHOENIX REVIVE LABS

Daphne O’Bryan tossed her copper-red mane, firmly placing hands on hips. “How’s that again?” she said to Dale Ryan, her lab partner and fellow researcher. He grinned at her, his face crinkling, steel-blue eyes twinkling behind smallish oval glasses. It was her first day on the job, and she still was getting used to the whole idea.

“Like I said,” Dale answered, “we transferred the Icicle into the matrix a few hours before you got here.” Dale looked across at Daphne. She stood just under 180 cm, so he had to look up at her green eyes. “We have no idea whether the Icicle is in there,” he pointed to an electronic unit that was one of several in a free-standing electronics rack, “or still in there,” he pointed to an insulated box connected to a cryogenic tank and resting on a lab bench next to the rack, “or anywhere at all, for that matter.”

“You wouldn’t pull the leg of a new associate?” Daphne walked over to the rack as she tossed the question at him, her long legs encased in not-quite-skin-tight black trousers that made her appear even taller.

“Hell no! Especially not to one with red hair who’s big enough to kick my ass.” Dale joined her at the rack with a grin.

Daphne decided she liked this little guy with his broad sense of humor. “Explain the readouts,” she said.

“It’s not integrated with the GlobalNet, but it does have a local Link connection,” he said, “and we got an absolute two-way firewall protecting him from outside interference and keeping him contained in this matrix.” He activated his Link so that a holographic image floated in the air—an image of nothing, of emptiness. “That’s all we’re going to see,” he said, “until the Icicle starts being responsive, whatever that means.”

“What about the firewall?” Daphne asked.

“I have a private tunnel. Let’s set one up for you.” Dale manipulated his Link and sent a coded sequence directly into Daphne’s Link. “That should do it,” he told her. “Try it out.” He extinguished his holoimage to avoid any confusion.

Daphne brought up the image, the same one she had seen a few moments earlier from Dale’s Link. As they watched, the emptiness flickered.

“Did you see that, Dale?”

“What?”

“There it is again—a momentary flicker. Does it mean anything?” Daphne felt a bit of excitement tingle her fingertips.

“I don’t know,” Dale answered. “We’ve never really done this before, you know.”

“There it is again!”

“Yeah, I see it,” Dale said, his voice carrying a ting of excitement.

“What is this thing programmed to display?” Daphne asked.

“If the Icicle is really in there…”

“Doesn’t he have a name?” Daphne wanted to know, her green eyes flashing.

“Yeah, I guess so…Braxton Thorpe,” Dale said. “Braxton Thorpe.”

“So…if Thorpe is really in there…,” Daphne prompted.

“Okay, so if that’s really Thorpe, the unit is programmed to project a likeness of what he looked like when he was alive. It’s AI, so as it gains experience, it will begin to reflect how Thorpe sees himself at any moment—his emotions, his feelings…we really don’t know ’cause he’s the first one.”

“There!” Daphne said, full of excitement. “Did you see it? Did you?” The nothingness had coalesced briefly into a shape that disappeared too quickly for Daphne to identify it.

“Dr. Fredricks,” Dale said over the voice channel of his Link. “You need to get in here right now!”

“On my way.” A door opened at the other end of the lab, and Dr. Jackson Fredricks, Phoenix Revive Director, strode into the room, unbuttoned white smock floating behind him. “What is it?” he asked as he reached them, looking up at Daphne and then down at Dale.

With a toss of her head, Daphne indicated the holodisplay. As Fredricks turned to look, the display flashed again, and this time stabilized into an image.

“The Icicle is coming around?” Fredricks asked.

“Braxton Thorpe,” Daphne said indignantly.

“Thorpe…yeah,” Fredricks said.

Daphne pointed. “That thing looks like a Klein bottle to me.”

“So it does,” Fredricks said.

“Look at that!” Dale said as the image began to squirm and flow. “The surface is flowing into itself as if the Klein bottle was constantly turning inside-out.”

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX

Thorpe tried to open his eyes, but he couldn’t lift his eyelids. He raised his hands to rub his eyes, at least he tried. His hands wouldn’t move, no matter how he strained, and his eyes remained closed. He turned his head. Something turned, but it wasn’t his head. Then the dream flashed into his memory, but it wasn’t a dream. He remembered! He was lying on a bed at the hospice dying…the lost eighteen minutes…the white-smocked doctor…and then nothing.

Memories started flooding into his consciousness, the girl with golden curls, his training as an engineer, his entrepreneurial life, his wealth, his perennial loneliness, his decision to preserve his head cryogenically. The memory stream quickly overwhelmed him. He buried his head in his arms—except he didn’t have a head, and he didn’t have arms, and this time, he knew it. Overwhelmed by renewed aloneness, he curled himself into a ball, but not an ordinary ball…something he remembered from his math studies, a Klein bottle—inside and outside the same thing—hard to understand then, but crystal-clear now—a three-dimensional Möbius surface.

Memories flooded into his mind—a golden-haired girl, a wildflower-filled meadow, a kiss, an engineering exam, a missed rendezvous, another exam, a business start-up, another missed date, a slap, a slammed door, a wild-beyond-his-imagining IPO, a complete shut-out, a deep-seated loss and enduring loneliness. He curled tighter and began to roll himself—inside, outside, upside, downside, in and out, up and down…grabbing a memory here, ejecting one there, climbing inside himself, only to find himself there already, and rolling back out, only to find himself there as well.

Exhausted by these activities, Thorpe reached out in all directions simultaneously, collapsed the moving surface, and slipped into a deep sleep.

LOS ANGELES—PHOENIX REVIVE LABS

The holographic rolling Klein bottle suddenly seemed to expand to fill the entire room. Then it collapsed into an oddly-shaped structure that looked like a solid cube that simultaneously seemed to be rotating on all three axes while passing through itself on all three axes.

“That,” Daphne said, “is a rotating tesseract—a hypercube. Our Icicle Braxton Thorpe is gaining control of his environs. I think he’ll let us know when he is ready to take the next step.” She stood thoughtfully for several seconds. “What happens,” she asked to no one in particular, “if we have a sudden catastrophic power loss, with power failure to Thorpe’s matrix?”

“That’s a good question,” Fredricks responded. “The matrix is designed to hold and retain its current pattern in the event of a complete power failure—like a solid-state memory. But I really have no idea how this would affect Thorpe’s self-awareness.”

“We’ve never done this before,” Dale chimed in. “I keep telling you that.” He grinned at Daphne.

“Don’t you think we should be generating a real-time backup, just in case?” Daphne asked. “If we lose everything, and then regenerate him from the frozen head, we’re back to ground-zero…right?”

“If there’s anything left in that case,” Dale said. “We’ve never tested that.”

“I’m not sure we know how,” Fredricks said, thoughtfully, “but I like the idea of a backup.” He turned back toward his office. “You two set that up.”

“How do you want to do this?” Daphne asked as she and Dale stood in front of the rack that contained Thorpe’s matrix.

“I think a simple mirroring program would work,” Dale said, stepping back.

Daphne agreed and told him so. “What do you have off the shelf?”

“I’ve got a matrix duplicator that parallels every matrix channel in real-time. Thorpe’s current matrix has an unused output socket that normally serves to double the matrix capacity. We should be able to plug in a second matrix slaved to the main matrix through the duplicator. The backup will lag the master by whatever the transit time is—maybe several femtoseconds.”

“Virtually nothing,” Daphne chimed in. “Let’s do it.”

LOS ANGELES—THE MATRIX

Thorpe roused slightly from his deep sleep, sensing undefined activity, a discomfort more than anything else. He sensed movement, a suggestion of movement, but by the time he had roused sufficiently to consider it, the sense of movement had ceased.

For a moment, Thorpe almost felt like there were two of him, but his self-awareness was too marginal to bring the feeling into focus. By the time he felt sufficiently aware to consider this, the feeling was gone. He settled back into his deep sleep.

Briefly, he sensed movement, as if he had been moved, but the feeling departed almost immediately. If he had been moved, he sensed no difference in his surroundings. Before he could give it further thought, deep sleep reclaimed his consciousness.