Stuff I'm NOT Doing 3: Living Will

Continuing my series in things I once thought of doing, but probably never will...

 

Living Will

Origin/Description

Richard Camden is dying – trapped in an experiment of some sort, electrocuted by what he realizes must be a deliberate betrayal. He refuses to die… but he has no escape.

Lieutenant Kevin Sutherland is the detective in charge of investigating the near-death of Richard Camden, and surveys the bizarre scene – Camden hooked into a strange helmet-like rig that is connected to a bank of computers and experimental machinery. Camden was apparently working on designing a method for direct mental control of computers, short-cutting typing or voice control or any other clumsy, secondary method of directing the activities of machines. It looks like an accident of some sort – Camden had been working alone, excluding others from his own research – but Sutherland has a gut feeling that this is a murder – or rather, an attempted murder at the moment, as Camden isn't quite dead, just in a coma.

Interviewing Marilyn Dellarocca and Charles Dexter Wardell, Camden's partners, builds on that unease. Both of them weren't quite sure what kind of innovations Camden had made but they were both confident that despite his secrecy, Richard knew what he was doing and wouldn't have made any major errors. Besides, the helmet rig shouldn't have been able to carry lethal surges of electricity. 

An examination shows that the current cutoff devices had been tampered with. It was attempted murder, beyond any doubt. 

Camden awakens – in a void of pure white, that only slowly resolves when he focuses on his own body. It seems to respond to his will, but in a way that still shows him nothing to tell him where he is, what has happened to him. He tries to wake up, assuming he is asleep or unconscious, but nothing happens. Finally he focuses the entirety of his will on the fact that there must be something there, he must be somewhere if he is aware and conscious, and that he must be able to therefore see it… and there is a blaze of light.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Sutherland, Marilyn Dellarocca, and Charles Wardell are gathered in the room with the unconscious Camden. An examination of Camden has shown essentially no brain activity and damage that indicates that even if he did somehow regain consciousness he would not be even close to the man he was. Empowered to make the decision by Camden's living will, Dellarocca and Wardell agree that Camden would not want to live in these conditions. The life support is pulled, and Camden's heart beats only three more times. Camden is dead… and his death is murder.

Sutherland continues his investigation, determining the set of suspects who might have had the knowledge and skills to perform the murder. The last lines displayed on the computer's screen showed that somehow Camden's invention had worked, introducing a new, clear motive: to steal what might be the greatest innovation in information transfer EVER. So beyond possible personal motives… there was now a very large new motive. If, that is, someone could also have stolen the data and designs, which the power surge would have destroyed. With this in mind, Sutherland orders a detailed search of the building complex for any indication that copies of Camden's work have been made.

Meanwhile, Camden suddenly finds himself overwhelmed by light, sound, vibration, taste, and takes minutes to find a way to control it. When he finally has, he discovers he is in some kind of strange latticework of misty gray spheres in peculiar geometric alignment. Light streams past him in this latticework in pulses. He tries viewing this from close and far, gaining control over perspective and motion, until the truth dawns on him. 

He's seeing the chips he designed. He's inside his own invention.

Sutherland's search uncovers a set of optical discs which, upon examination by those most familiar with Camden's work, appear to hold the details of the design of the unique chips and the key programming elements of the experimental system. The fact that they were found hidden behind the paneling of Marilyn Dellarocca's office is sufficient cause to have her arrested; she protests her innocence, and Sutherland himself feels this may be too pat, but the warrant for her arrest is already served.

Meanwhile, Camden learns something about how to control his presence inside the machine. Eventually he realizes that since he obviously doesn't exist as a physical object, yet his actions all seem to be physical, that it's his visualization and perception that drive the way he interacts with the systems – and replicates in his vision the control helmet for the system.

Sutherland continues the investigation, knowing there are at least three other people with a motive for killing Camden and thus framing Marilyn Dellarocca. He finds that Camden's experimental machine is wired to be almost impossible to turn off, for a number of reasons. He wants to test the existing discs to see if they have the complete program for Camden's invention, but as they attempt to install the program, the machine shows a strange resistance to input, refusing to accept the reprogramming. Susan Burdeaux, the company's AI specialist, manages to load her best anti-viral applications, and after a short time these appear to have successfully cleaned the system.

Camden recognizes the faint external probings, and then finds himself literally fighting for his life against programs that are to him as dangerous as assassins would have been to his physical body. Even with his vast control over the machine, it is a very close thing before he manages to neutralize the programs and then emulate the "System Clean" message …

That was pretty much as far as I had gotten in the book. The overall remaining plotline would have revolved first around the investigation and trial of Marilyn Dellarocca and then the discovery that Camden still existed – as a disembodied intellect within a machine. The courtroom would then be faced by another several issues, not the least of which being whether Machine-Camden was a person, and whether he should be considered the SAME person as the Richard Camden whose murder is the purpose of the trial!

Insofar as the actual murderer, I kept waffling back and forth between it being Charles Wardell or Susan Burdeaux, with Mark Thomas, who'd been having an affair with Marilyn which she'd broken off the week previously, as a minor distraction. 

Why I'm Not Doing It (And What I'll Steal From It)

Part of the problem with this story is that a lot of the concept doesn't work as it was written. Not only is any computer tech in it ludicrously outdated, it's also somewhat close to TRON (though TRON differed significantly in that it had a self-aware computer from the start). I'm not sure the story as a whole is even reasonably salvageable.

Pieces of the story might be. Lieutenant Sutherland was actually one of the prototypes for Jason Wood (I'd had the ideas that became the Jason Wood stories well before I started Living Will, but I started writing Living Will before I really got working on Jason's adventures). Re-reading this one, I was both wincing because of some of the clumsy writing, but also surprised by some aspects; I'd remembered the protagonists as younger, but I'd actually given them reasonable ages and, at least in some parts of the story, they sounded like they were those ages – considerably older than I was when I was writing it.

The question of whether a machine intelligence is truly a person, of course, I haven't let go of, and it's one of the major if mostly background problems in Grand Central Arena. And a particular character's name and inspiration does get re-used to an extent, in Princess Holy Aura of all places...

Still, I don't see too much salvageable from this one in large chunks, though maybe I could do a vaguely related story one day.