medical offices on the third floor. The checkup was routine; the scanners found nothing which would prevent Casper from taking the imprinting as scheduled.
He had mixed feelings about that. It was nice to know he was healthy, and his brain activity normal, but he almost wished that they had found a neural anomaly or something that would keep him from accepting an imprint.
Of course, if he had had such a problem, he would have lost his job-but it wouldn't have been for cause, and he might have qualified for a disability income, or even have been able to swing a discrimination-against-the- handicapped suit. He'd heard the Party sometimes used those to keep companies in line.
No, he told himself as he pulled his shirt back on, that was daydreaming. Nobody won discrimination suits against a member of the Consortium, and Data Tracers was a member in good standing. They had access to the best lawyers in the world-and of course, to people like himself, who would find ways to re-route any responsibility.
And it didn't matter; his brain was perfectly healthy. Dr. Jalali said so. She had told him that he could take the imprint without any trouble at all.
He sighed, and headed back to his cubicle.
When Cecelia Grand called to say she had to work late at the law office, he snatched at the chance to cancel their date-he was too worried about the imprinting to deal with Cecelia and her whims. Instead he spent the evening home alone, drinking cheap beer and playing old, faded CDs until he finally fell into bed around midnight.
That was Tuesday.
Wednesday morning he awoke at the usual time without meaning to; since his appointment was at ten he had intended to sleep late. Instead he took his time over breakfast, and left his apartment an hour later than usual.
He reached NeuroTalents in plenty of time despite his dawdling, and walked slowly through the Institute's lobby, admiring the fountains and the greenery that grew toward the high glass ceiling. Studying the scenery put the inevitable off for another minute or two.
NeuroTalents’ receptionist was a handsome young man; the way he was dressed made Casper feel shabby.
Which was reasonable, really-Casper was shabby. He knew it, but he didn't like to admit it.
“May I help you?” the receptionist asked.
“I hope so,” Casper said uneasily. “I'm scheduled for an imprinting at ten. The name is Casper Beech, 3036- 94-7318.”
The young man sucked on his teeth as he checked his screen. “Ah, yes,” he said, “I have it here. We've received your records and the report from Dr. Jalali.” He swung a screen around and handed Casper a stylus. “If you would just sign this waiver of liability, we'll take care of you immediately.”
Casper read over the form; it was a standard corporate waiver, with NeuroTalents and his employer agreeing to cover any medical expenses that were incurred in exchange for his forfeiting his right to sue.
He grimaced. He was already uncomfortable about the procedure, and this waiver was not encouraging in the least. Every day at work he saw reports on what could happen to people who signed these.
It wasn't as though he had any real choice, though. He signed the form and tapped ENTER.
The receptionist checked the signature against a display on his primary screen, then nodded. “Very good, Mr. Beech,” he said. “If you would take that elevator there up to the fourth floor, a technician will see you.”
He was even more nervous than he had realized; when he first tried to give his floor the elevator answered, “We're sorry, sir, but your order was not understood.”
“Four, please,” Casper repeated, trying unsuccessfully to distract himself by wondering, as he had for years, why so many machines were programmed to speak of themselves in the plural.
When he reached the fourth floor a green-smocked technician with a clipboard awaited him. “Please follow me,” the technician said brusquely before striding down the corridor. She didn't look back, and for a moment Casper thought wildly of making a run for it.
But where would he go? Meekly, he followed her.
His guide brought Casper to the open door of a small room and pointed inside. “Put your clothes in there,” she said. “I'll be back in five minutes.”
The technician left. Casper was relieved to find a paper jumpsuit and slippers on a shelf; he began to change, and pulled on the second slipper just as the technician returned.
“This way, sir,” she said.
He was strapped into a large, complicated chair in a smaller room a few doors down; then the technician attached electrodes and placed a headpiece on his head.
“There's nothing to worry about,” the technician said, clearly reciting a set speech. “The monitors are just to keep tabs on your bodily functions. Once we start the procedure, a sleep inducer will put you under for the duration. When you wake up, it'll be over.” She smiled mechanically.
Casper smiled back shakily, and closed his eyes. The technician flipped the switch to start the sleep inducer, and Casper quickly slipped under.
The technician checked him over swiftly and efficiently; then she waved the go-ahead signal to the monitor camera and slipped out of the room. In the central control room another technician saw the signal, hit a button, and turned away.
The procedure was fully automated, with technicians present only to troubleshoot when something did not go according to schedule. Under most circumstances, unless an alarm went off or the machines told them something was wrong, their attention was directed elsewhere. After all, watching someone sleep is impossibly dull, even if the subject's brain is doing various interesting things.
Casper's chosen skill file consisted of a few gigabytes of data on a microptical disk, tagged and ready to be fed into his brain; first, however, the scanners had to examine Casper's neural pathways and brainwave patterns. The file would be imposed on these pathways, but the machines had to be sure that the file was not so radically opposed to the recipient's mental structure that some harm could occur. Dr. Jalali's preliminary survey had shown that Casper's brain could accept imprinting, but not that he could accept any particular program; since the individual programs were all proprietary information owned by NeuroTalents or their independent vendors, not to be distributed freely to other companies’ doctors even within the Consortium, the doctor had not had the information to verify that Casper could handle this specific skill-set.
The central computer began matching program details against neural pathways, checking for conflicts.
While the mapping was taking place, however, a badly-worn sector of old disk storage finally gave out, dropping approximately sixty bytes from the system's primary command programming, from a total of some two and a half million lines of code.
When the time came to check the scan against the waiting skill file, an uninitialized variable came up garbage-the code that should have set it was missing. The error-handling software, never tested in this particular situation, attempted unsuccessfully to compensate.
The waiting skill file was ignored. The mapping continued, into secondary and then tertiary areas of detail, levels that were totally unnecessary for an ordinary skill imprint. A set of restricted-access files, quite separate from the scheduled one, was accessed and readied.
A technician looked up casually from his magazine at the monitoring panel, then stopped and looked again. He had thought the subject in Suite B was in for a regular skill imprint, but his instruments showed that he was in the middle of optimization programming.
He didn't remember anyone scheduling any optimizations. Weren't there supposed to be extra precautions for optimizations? A skill imprint just added a few new patterns to the subject's brain, plugging in a little new information and some artificial habits, but an optimization more or less rebooted the entire brain, streamlining the entire personality and redirecting it toward a predetermined goal, adding whatever information and habits might be useful for that purpose.
Optimizations went deep, messing with parts of the brain not entirely understood, and were thought to be risky. NeuroTalents hadn't done any in months, and at last report didn't expect to do any-so why was this man getting one?
The technician looked for warning flags, but found none. The system appeared to be running smoothly.
