Into the Looking Glass: Book Two of the Jack: Cyberpunk Series by J. Paul Roe

Author:J. Paul Roe [Roe, J. Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter nineteen

LEARNING TO FLY

The NetOps suite, an echoing room of polished com-crete and blinking network hardware, was always cold. It was a matter of keeping all the servers and drives from overheating and one reason why psychers wore those skin-tight NetOps suits.

I’d heard it was not uncommon for a psycher to lose track of time when linked to the DarkNet, and the suits not only kept them warm, but monitored their life signs, sending data back to the psycher about their heart rate, metabolism, and all that skitz.

Zoroaster was wearing his when I stepped into the suite, sans his trademark brown duster with a high collar. Six feet of lean muscle wrapped in stretchy, polymeric fabric. The bio-neural hardware grafted to the base of his skull was pretty sleek, like a high-tech extension of his upper spine covered in ports and little cooling fins.

“You look ready for…something,” I said, crossing the suite to lean on an empty NetOps chair. “Where’s the rest of the under-dwellers?”

Z looked up from the slate in his hand, giving me a quizzical eyebrow raise.

“Katarina, Pilky…” I explained.

He smirked. “Under-dwellers, I see. Clever!”

“I figured it sounded better than ‘the mole people’,” I said, shrugging.

“Well, considering the scope of our ambitions plans, they’re focusing on mission prep.” Z set down the slate, folding his arms. “You get to train with me.”

“A crash course in psyching? There’s no chance this could scramble my brains, right?”

Z smirked. “You’ve already had your brains cannibalized and lived to tell the tale.”

“The LookingGlass,” I sighed. “Yeah. You know, I’ve been meaning to ask you something about that.”

Z patted the chair, waving me into it with his other hand.

Climbing up, I asked, “If my entire brain and body were stored as data, couldn’t you just print, like, a hundred copies of me?”

Z adjusted the chair into an upright position and activated a monitor on the facing wall. “Funny you’d ask that, since it was among the first questions that occurred to me. The research you pulled from the Skypillar lab included copious project notes, many regarding the ethics of the LookingGlass system.”

“Wanna give me the short version?” I asked, exaggerating a pained smile.

“The Consortium recognized the potential dangers with the program, and TaoCom was forced to implement safeguards. After a traveler is printed and revived in the destination device, their data is deleted from both nodes, for starters.”

“That doesn’t seem like enough of a safeguard,” I said.

“I agree. There are few technological limitations on what LookingGlass could do. All of its limitations are artificially imposed through policy. I find that worrying.”

I raised an eyebrow. “So, someone could print copies of themselves?”

“I have seen no proof otherwise, if they can get around the policies. In theory, we’re halfway there. We have a functional origin scanner. If we had the printing technology, we could, say, fill this room with identical Katarinas.”

I shuddered, chuckling.

“The real value of LookingGlass is in the printer. The destination device is the golden goose, not the scanner, and TaoCom knows it. There were no schematics for the printing systems in their lab data.

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