Glitch by Alex Irvine (Asimov’s SF, March-April 2021) opens with Kyle waking up in a medical facility and realising that he has been “recompiled” (uploaded) into a new body (he notes a missing tattoo, unpierced ears). His partner Shari tells him that he was killed in a terrorist bomb blast and that there has been a glitch in his persona upload (there are unconvincing explanations about why they have had to delete his backup and so cannot repeat the process). Then, when Kyle later remembers the attack from the bomber’s perspective, he realises that part of the terrorist’s persona has also been uploaded into his new body:
An image drifted through his head, smeary and fleeting. A toddler on the bricks of Monument Square, spilling out of a baby backpack. Eyes closed, mouth open, dust in pale streaks on his skin and in the black springs of his hair. An adult’s arm still twisted through one strap of the backpack. Blood dark on the bricks.
One more maggot won’t grow up to be a roach.
Kyle twitched and his eyes snapped into focus. God, what kind of a person—
The thought had come from inside his mind.
He leaned his elbows on the porch railing and rested his face in his hands. Imagine dying, he thought, and that’s one of your last thoughts . . . and now it’s one of my memories. Because he did remember it, and to his shame a part of him had felt a visceral satisfaction. That was the other person.
Brian. That was his name. Another neural pathway knitting itself into the gooey matrix that made Kyle Brooks who he was, and who he would be. Brian.
“You’re a fucking asshole racist, Brian,” Kyle said into his hands. “Sooner you’re gone, overwritten, forgotten, whatever . . . sooner the better. I hope nobody recompiles you.” p. 19
This idea of being trapped inside your own head with a racist terrorist is quite a promising one (in a chilling way) and, for the first part of the story, it is reasonably well handled—we get further racist outbursts from Brian, and memories of bomb-making with his wife Marie, etc. (that said, his character is never really developed much beyond a sanitised version of a stereotypical white supremacist villain1). Then the Feds turn up to question Kyle, suspecting that he has some or all of Brian’s persona in him; they tell him that if they find out that is the case, they will (by some legal hand-wavium) arrest him.
Kyle then goes to see Abdi, a Somali business contact and hacker, who agrees to track down the source of the hack that corrupted Kyle’s persona backup (Kyle figures that if he can find out more about the bomber he can make a deal with the Feds). Then a ticking clock is introduced when Kyle learns that the Feds have an arrest warrant for him, and the tempo speeds up further when Kyle sees a second bomb in one of Brian’s memories.
The rest of the story sees Kyle and three of Abdi’s cog swapping friends (body-swappers) run around (directed by Abdi’s magical hacker skills) looking for the bomb and, in one sequence, Kyle cogswaps with a transgender woman and goes to a club looking for a contact of Brian’s. There are further convenient memory reveals from Brian which move the plot forward when Abdi’s computer isn’t doing so.
The action draws to a conclusion when (spoiler) Kyle finds the bomb and the real Brian at a house Abdi has located from his computer searches. Brian beats up Kyle and injures him, but Kyle is rescued by Chantel from the house fire Brian starts afterwards. Then Kyle, Chantel and another cogswapper have to chase Brian to a fairground where Kyle finds the bomb under a school bus. Then Brian finds Kyle, and Kyle has to deal with Brian, the bomb and (of course!) his own inherent racism:
Over the loudspeaker, Kyle heard a voice instructing fairgoers to please exit to the parking lots in a calm and orderly fashion. He unzipped the backpack, exposing the explosive charge. Through the fog of agony, the Brian in his head tried to stop him, but Kyle was in charge now. You’re just an ugly part of me that already existed, he thought. And because I died, you got a name. Once I accepted that, I understood how weak you are.
you’re not so different, I fit right in
Kyle’s heel gouged a furrow in the ground as Brian dragged him all the way out.
As he emerged into the light again, he remembered Marie’s hands. He remembered exactly what they had done. Anyone pulls the red wires, boom.
He heard both Brians at once. No no no don’t—
He pulled the red wires. p. 48
Kyle awakens in a new body, and sees Shari and Abdi (who has edited out Brian from the new persona backup that he has conveniently been running for Kyle since earlier in the story). Kyle has no recollection of anything that has happened since the original bombing.
This story starts with a neat idea but it is one that is sloppily executed (how did Brian’s persona get mixed up with Kyle’s; why are there such stupid laws surrounding the backup technology and responsibility for criminal acts, etc.). Much worse is the second part of the story, which devolves into a sub-Hollywood cyberpunk thriller with good guys and bad guys. I lost interest halfway through.2
* (Mediocre). 21,600 words. Story link.
1. Stephen King does a much better job of putting his readers in the heads of genuinely unpleasant characters, and you can’t help but think that if he wrote this story that Brian would have been portrayed in a considerably more realistic way. In particular, the absence of the n-word in a story that is about a racist terrorist shows the extent to which the author or editor or publishers (or all of them) are self-censoring. Now, I can understand that any one, or maybe all, of the above may not want to use language like that in their work or magazine (and I’m not particularly keen on having to read it). But, if that is the case, I’d suggest that you may want to avoid using racist characters like this as convenient stereotypical villains, because all you are doing is presenting a filtered and unrealistic version of such people.
2. I think Jim Harris may have lost interest before I did: he wrote a long blog post listing all the suspension-of-disbelief problems he had with the story. I note that he mentions that Irvine is a comic book writer: I should have picked up on that from the mindless action in the second half, if not from the poor conceptualisation in the first.