Reboot

April 10, 2027

The mid-April sun, bright but cool, beamed off the chrome railings outside the Innovation Centre on the banks of the river, as the world’s press queued up excitedly, checking cameras and audio recorders as the security men in hi-vis ponderously checked credentials.

The site had been chosen to showcase the Government’s much-trumpeted investment in science and research — a soft power play against the Chinese, but also an attempt to compete on the global stage economically in the aftermath of leaving the EU.

Judith Ryan climbed out of the ministerial car door being held open by a protection officer and stepped out into the glare of photographers’ flashes. She wasn’t sure what use they’d get out of the photos since they didn’t yet know what the announcement would be, but she supposed it was probably to calibrate their flashes or something. Capturing the news was their job — hers was to make it. She waved languorously and held a rigid smile which would suffice from all angles.

The Chancellor had only been in post for a year since the shock election result of the previous winter, and although the coalition government hadn’t had the greatest headlines, an affinity with science was one of the areas where she and her Chief Secretary had been able to find common ground.

She swept inside without another word and was introduced in turn to various staff who had worked on the project, trying to etch at least their first names into her memory for the purposes of upcoming questions and answers from the press.

Grumbling after a long wait, the press filed into a wide conference room where four rows of silver chairs had been arrayed in a semicircle around a point facing the floor to ceiling windows which offered a view of the city centre. They were split up by thick bundles of snaking cables, anchored to the floor by strips of yellow and black electrical tape which didn’t prevent three or four journos tripping and swearing as they fanned out to find the best unobstructed view. Their cameramen set up tripods and fiddled with white balance as four PhDs in white coats — they’d been instructed to wear these for the aesthetic more than any practical necessity — worked behind theatrical red curtains obscuring two evidently important objects.

“So you’ll give me step by step instructions?” asked Judith as she stood in a conference room being prepared for broadcast by a small team of makeup artists. She didn’t like being on TV for the likes of Question Time, and this was infinitely bigger in scale. Making history put a lot of pressure on a single point, and she felt utterly under its thumb.

“Relax” replied Mortimer, a man of late middle age with a thinning scalp and a green jumper underneath his lab coat. He spoke with a cultivated, slightly nasal accent hailing from somewhere in the Home Counties. “We’ve tested and tested and tested. Everything short of a human, and it’s all come back fine.”

“I won’t end up as a pile of dust or accidentally embedded in a brick wall in Scunthorpe or something?” she asked. He laughed.

“No. Can’t happen. I can give you a full explanation if you like, but we’d have to push the launch back a bit.”

“By how long?” asked Judith tremulously.

“Ooh, I’m not sure” he replied, mockingly stroking a beard he didn’t possess. “Four years if we start you at undergraduate level. Although you have a Politics degree as I understand it, so you probably won’t have the A Levels for that. Call it six years, then.”

“There’s no need for sarcasm” muttered Judith, as the makeup artist finished applying her eyeliner. She had to keep her face appropriately rigid throughout, otherwise she’d have thrown Mortimer a filthy look.

She’d always been nervous about the little balding man since he perched himself in her office during her first week in the job, throwing jargon around in a bid for an extra £16 billion of funding. She’d felt he was lording his expertise, but she’d run it by the civil servants and they’d all agreed — this was the sort of return on investment you could usually only find by fixing horse races.

“So, I’ll say my piece, you follow the instructions, get the photo op, you say your piece, Powerhouse of Technology, new frontiers in transportation and communication, huge environmental benefits, blah blah blah, secure your party re-election in perpetuity, and we all get to go home rich and happy. Sound good?” he rattled off as he paced behind her. She watched in the mirror as he ran down a thick stack of notes handed to him by a blond PhD.

“That’s the plan” she said, cribbing a look at her own notes — a series of bullet points hastily assembled on the train. She was of the view that the words which accompanied the making of history were almost immaterial. A screenwriter would have decreed “one giant leap for mankind” too hackneyed, but Armstrong could have started singing Jingle Bells for all it would affect how people remembered it.

Back in the presentation room, the PhDs had finished their work on the cabling and now formed up in a row against the window, blocking a good deal of the streaming sunlight and throwing the curtained objects into a dappled shade. Photographers snapped away out of practiced habit, having settled into two camps on opposite sides of the room for an optimal view. A backdrop featuring the logos of the UK Government, several prestigious research institutions and the local university had rolled down from the ceiling on some kind of automated roller, and the broadcast engineers laboured to reframe their shots to capture the moment.

“Anyone heard anything about what we’ve all been dragged here for?” whispered Malcom Mayer, the Science Correspondent for the Daily Express. Colleagues liked to joke that this made him akin to the Pope’s adviser on atheism. “Three hours on the West Coast Main Line ain’t my idea of a fun Saturday morning. I could have been taking the kids round the Horniman.”

“Christ Malc, one weekend’s custody a month and you want to subject them to that” said Alice Roberts, Political Editor of the New Statesman. She was less interested in the science than the implications of this incredibly expensive project for the upcoming Budget. “Anyway, no, nothing. Even Number 10’s WhatsApp’s as dead as your marriage.”

The techies chuckled, the raw black tar cynicism of the lobby hacks still not having worn thin on them.

“It’s not going to be graphene again, is it?” asked a man in a crumpled blue shirt tapping away at a too-small laptop. Chris Sawyer was running the day’s live blog for the Guardian, and had just issued readers with a list of ten puns about the Chancellor in the absence of anything else to report.

“We did graphene in 2016, remember?” said Alice, refreshing Twitter. The event wasn’t trending, despite her minimal efforts. “Didn’t save the government then either”.

The lights in the room dimmed, and an unassuming man in a green jumper strode purposefully onto the area of carpet which served as a stage. Trailing him, in a smart black suit and pencil skirt, came the Chancellor, who positioned herself one step back and to the side of him, as though prepared to shout encouragement in an upcoming fight without wishing to throw any punches herself.

“Ladies and gentlemen” began the man, a broad smile breaking out across his face. He stammered slightly as he fought to be heard over a fusillade of shutter clicks. “Last year, we began construction on the first working prototype of what our random word generator helpfully gave the codename Operation Soggy Problem.”

He waited patiently as titters broke out from the assembled press. He gulped down air as he noticed the red lights of broadcasting cameras at the back of the room.

“That project was conducted in total secrecy, with even staff working on the project siloed off into discrete teams. First and foremost, I’d like to apologise for the deception, and thank them for their forbearance. I hope they will all feel their work was well worth it.”

In the audience, Malcolm Mayer rolled his eyes at another boffin doing the earnest bit before the news lines, which he mentally calculated had cost him several hundred smoke breaks.

As the boffin continued, Malcolm watched as two rather pretty young scientists sidled up and whipped the curtains away from the devices on stage. Each was the size and rough dimensions of a phone box, with a glass door and cables and chips sitting exposed on the outside.

Mortimer had been of two minds on the presentation of the devices. His head had known they would need to look conspicuously sciencey, reflecting their being built in a rush and dampening down skepticism about their effectiveness. His heart yearned for gleaming silver pods as though he was directing his own episode of Star Trek.

“We originally believed this press conference would be a mere technical briefing” Mortimer continued, adjusting his glasses to defeat glare from the Television lights. “But we thought it would be rather better if we demonstrated it in person. I hope you’ll agree that what we’re about to show you will revolutionise the way we travel, work, and think about life itself. Judith, would you please step forward into the device on my right?”

The press murmured excitedly as it became clear the Chancellor was not just there to bathe in the glory she’d merely funded. She was going to give whatever this was a good go. She walked around to the front of the booth, pulled open the glass door, and stepped onto a metal plate surrounded by grids of a dark material.

“Thank you” continued Mortimer. “Now, if you wouldn’t mind, please follow the set of instructions I’m about to tape to the window.”

Photographers muttered as he moved off his mark and produced a sheet of paper and a roll of masking tape from his jacket pocket. Mortimer stood back and turned to face them, evidently struggling to find things to do with his hands, which fidgeted uncomfortably as he spoke.

“What Judith is doing now is taking the first human journey in what we are calling the DeRP. The Deconstructor-Reconstructor Protocol marks the first time in human history that we have been able to disassemble and rebuild a human in another location almost instantaneously.”

The press went wild. One word made itself heard above the din, and Mortimer exploited his having the microphone to yell over them.

“I should stress this is not teleportation, at least as science-fiction would have us understand it. It is more akin to cloning, but that doesn’t quite do it justice either. Essentially, the DeRP consoles are a giant 3D printer, only able to store and recall the intricate data of life. Previously, attempts to transport matter resulted in incoherent piles of molecules. Detritus. Dust. They were destroyers. What we have built here makes us creators.”

He motioned to Judith, who began following the complex commands hidden from the journalists. Their riot of questions turned to hushed reverence as they watched.

A soft whirring began to emerge from the machine, as two dimensions of motors drove three small black devices across fine lines on the internal grid with whiplike speed. Judith stood awkwardly as they scanned her from head to heeled toe.

“The DeRP is able to distinguish discrete objects” Mortimer explained as the scanners did their work. “That means we have been able to avoid the fusion issue.” He looked embarrassed at a shouted question from the audience. “That’s, um, where the resultant body is merged with everything else in the chamber. You’ve seen The Fly, yes? Well that’s precisely what we don’t want”.

The Communications Director of the University, leaning against a wall behind the TV cameras, smacked his palm against his face. One of the techs shushed him.

Judith turned to face the audience, her face a picture of anxious excitement. She was in early middle age, and wondered if she might have asked Mortimer to tweak the settings a bit. Maybe he could replace a grey hair here, an eye bag there. But she’d reasoned a test flight wasn’t the time to start tweaking her own DNA.

She finished her sheet of instructions and pushed a red button at the bottom of the control panel. As the press and photographers surged forward, there was a bright flash of light and a loud pop, as though a balloon had just burst.

“That was the air rushing in to fill the vacuum” explained Mortimer as the emptiness of the chamber became apparent, and a subtle smell of nutmeg filled the meeting room. “The Chancellor has now been converted into approximately 6.75 gigabytes of compressed data, ready for transfer. If you so chose, you could transport her on a USB stick.”

The press, reaching fever pitch, shouted questions over one another. Having won authority from the first stage of the test, Mortimer silenced them with a raised finger.

“You have only seen the first part of the test” he said testily. He withdrew a cheap looking Bluetooth remote from his trouser pocket. Ordinarily the deconstruction/reconstruction process occurred automatically to avoid operator error, but in this case he had asked the PhDs to rig up something manual.

He pushed the red button in the top-left of the handset, and eyes around the room and the country swivelled to the second chamber. They then blinked at the identical flash, and saw the glass in the windows of the booth strain its housing as the addition of a human’s worth of matter shoved all the air outwards at once. They held, and soon settled back to their resting state.

Mortimer turned tentatively as a smattering of shocked applause rang through the assembled journalists. A human shape had appeared in the booth, and as Mortimer approached, he could make out a sharp woman’s suit and familiar brown-grey hair.

Tentatively, he reached for the booth handle. The figure in the booth wheeled round, her eyes pinned open as though scanning for threats. Camera flashes rattled round the room, and she held her hands up in front of her face as she let out a harsh hiss of discomfort.

“Shut them down” whispered Mortimer to one of the PhDs standing behind him, who nodded subtly and ran off stage.

“What’s happened to her?” shouted Chris Sawyer, tapping furiously at his laptop. “And why can’t I post anything to the live blog?”

The lights clicked off one by one, and the red eyes of the broadcast cameras winked out. As the Chancellor thrashed around on stage, her eyes blank, tearing at the unfamiliar, constricting clothes, tears of frustration dragged track marks of eyeliner down her face. She howled at the journalists, snapping away on their phones in the absence of Wi-Fi, who he knew would soon be posting this out to the world, his moment of triumph turned into a ghoulish spectacle.

“How?” he mouthed weakly at his PhDs, knowing they wouldn’t be able to tell him anything he didn’t already know. He felt his phone buzz mercilessly in his pocket, and without checking it knew the tone would have turned from shock to fury to formal disciplinary emails within the space of about a minute.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, if I could please ask you to leave us here while we deal with this incident” he tried to say, before giving up in the face of the press onslaught. He appealed to the security man on the door, who shrugged as if to say “I’m not wrestling 50 of the fuckers out of here.”

April 11, 2027

“REBOOTED” screamed the front page of the Daily Mirror on the newsstand as Mortimer screamed by in a black government car heading through central London. The picture showed the Chancellor thrashing at the photographer, flailing down the lens like a baboon. He felt like a prisoner in a dark hole as the car slowed to allow police to clear the British Airline Pilots Association protest outside the wrought iron gates of Downing Street, which swung open to admit him.

“Here you go sir” said the suited handler assigned to watch him. “We’ve got the truckers coming later. The RMT’s gone straight to a strike ballot of their Maritime workers. You’ve given the trade unions their biggest cause since Maggie left.”

Instinctively ducking at the smashing sound as several bottles of piss broke against the paving stones, Mortimer and his entourage stepped out of the car and through the famous black door.

After a winding journey through corridors, his every footstep feeling like withdrawing a tree trunk from a tar pit, Mortimer found himself led in a manner that verged on shoving into a carpeted room containing a large oak desk. At the desk sat a short woman in the regimental coloured suit jacket, staring at him from under a businesslike straight fringe and a concerned face. The security men stood back and closed the door, as she slid a glass of water across the table towards Mortimer.

“A little one to one, if you don’t mind” said the Prime Minister. Mortimer tried to stammer a response, but goldfished noiselessly until he gave up and sat down on a perfunctory wooden chair. He took a gulp of the water, his hands trembling.

“It’s quite something to lose a Chancellor” said the PM over crossed arms. “Most Prime Ministers haven’t survived it. Although in this case, the public seems to think it’s strictly not my fault.”

“I — I’m sorry ma’am” stammered Mortimer. She nodded.

“I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry. I want to hear what happened, and what we’re going to do about it.”

Mortimer nervously tapped his fingers on his glass as he tried to find a layman’s explanation.

“Are you familiar with the concept of tabula rasa?” he asked, finding his flow a little as he lunged into science.

“Englighten me” said the Prime Minister gently.

“Essentially, it is the concept in psychology that humans are born without innate knowledge, and that we are a blank slate — that’s literally what the words mean — which our experiences, upbringing and education etch themselves onto to create the full person.”

“And that’s what happened to Judith” said the PM, nodding.

“That’s what happened to Ju- to the Chancellor, yes” explained Mortimer. “We tested the machines thoroughly on everything below human level. I don’t mind telling you we did terrible things. Merged cats and dogs together by mistake. Reduced a rat to cinders. Melted a goat into its collar. But eventually, we got there. One to one replication of the body from the ground up, including the kickstart to return the molecules to life. But there was one part we couldn’t replicate.”

“The mind. The personality” interjected the PM. Mortimer solemnly shook his head.

“The system works perfectly for anything non-living” he offered by way of feeble defence. “For transport, logistics, shipping, manufacturing, it’s a revolution.”

“Yes, I understand that’s why all the haulage unions are currently offering their considered opinion on the regulation and rollout of DeRP outside my office window” said the PM, as the distance flash of a petrol bomb briefly illuminated her black hair. “It probably won’t completely erase your legacy as the man who made the Chancellor a vegetable, mind. Just a comms tip there. Maybe try transporting a Big Mac before you start mind wiping the cabinet in front of the world’s media.”

Mortimer stayed silent, knowing he had no further defence to offer.

“So, how do we fix this?” said the PM, leaning in close. Mortimer began to sweat.

“There won’t be any brain damage” he explained. “With a typical course of schooling, socialisation and re-integration she can be her old self again in 20 years or so.”

“If my government lasts that long we’ll have fixed a lot of other problems” she replied darkly. “For now, I want to know what we need to do to make this thing safe for human transport. One mind wiping doesn’t make it not a revolution. Hiroshima was a revolution, even if it wasn’t a happy one for a lot of Japanese people.”

Mortimer looked back at her, his eyes wide even as his eyelids began to feel heavier.

“That’s insane. You’ve seen what it can do. Even a one in a million risk would be too high”.

“What’s insane — running a small risk for low-power instantaneous transport, or continuing to burn our way through the climate? Millions will die if we don’t take cars off the road, planes out of the sky and rockets out of space. That’s the reality. You’d have thousands of car deaths over a small chance of a reboot?”

He tried to respond, but felt his voice leave him. His muscles felt stiff and sore, and soon he’d relented to the heavy eyelids. Within ten seconds, he was unconscious. The Prime Minister pressed a button on her desk, and two large security officers stepped through the door, hoisting the hapless professor onto his feet by his shoulders. An aide opened a side door and wheeled through a phone box sized device trailing a thick bundle of cables, this time encased in a pleasing silver facade.

The Prime Minister emptied the rest of the drugged water into her spider plant and nodded to the security men, who bundled the scientist inside the chamber before pushing a button on the outside to begin the automated process. She had thought it kinder not to tell him that much bigger forces than Irwell University had been monitoring, copying and improving his technology.

“We’re ready” said the taller of the two security men, a ramrod straight expression held as he addressed the Prime Minister. “Where do you want to send him?”

The Prime slid open a small side drawer of her desk and withdrew a small black USB stick.

“I’ll hang onto him, I think.”