Spring-Heeled Jack runs blind, blue fumes crackling from his heels.
His right hand, outstretched for balance, clutches a mark’s stolen
memories. The victim is sitting on the hard stones of the pavement
behind him. Maybe he’s wondering what’s happened; maybe he looks after
the fleeing youth. But the tourist crowds block the view effectively,
and in any case, he has no hope of catching the mugger. Hit-and-run
amnesia is what the polis call it, but to Spring-Heeled Jack it’s just
more loot to buy fuel for his Russian army-surplus motorized combat
boots.
*
The victim sits on the cobblestones clutching his aching temples. What
happened? he wonders. The universe is a brightly colored blur of
fast-moving shapes augmented by deafening noises. His ear-mounted
cameras are rebooting repeatedly: They panic every eight hundred
milliseconds, whenever they realize that they’re alone on his personal
area network without the comforting support of a hub to tell them
where to send his incoming sensory feed. Two of his mobile phones are
bickering moronically, disputing ownership of his grid bandwidth, and
his memory … is missing.
A tall blond clutching an electric chainsaw sheathed in pink bubble
wrap leans over him curiously: “you all right?” she asks.
“I -” He shakes his head, which hurts. “Who am I?” His medical monitor
is alarmed because his blood pressure has fallen: His pulse is racing,
his serum cortisol titer is up, and a host of other biometrics suggest
that he’s going into shock.
“I think you need an ambulance,” the woman announces. She mutters at
her lapel, “Phone, call an ambulance. ” She waves a finger vaguely at
him as if to reify a geolink, then wanders off, chainsaw clutched
under one arm. Typical southern �migr� behavior in the Athens of the
North, too embarrassed to get involved. The man shakes his head again,
eyes closed, as a flock of girls on powered blades skid around him in
elaborate loops. A siren begins to warble, over the bridge to the
north.
Who am I? he wonders. “I’m Manfred,” he says with a sense of stunned
wonder. He looks up at the bronze statue of a man on a horse that
looms above the crowds on this busy street corner. Someone has
plastered a Hello Cthulhu! holo on the plaque that names its rider:
Languid fluffy pink tentacles wave at him in an attack of kawaii. “I’m
Manfred - Manfred. My memory. What’s happened to my memory?” Elderly
Malaysian tourists point at him from the open top deck of a passing
bus. He burns with a sense of horrified urgency. I was going
somewhere, he recalls. What was I doing? It was amazingly important,
he thinks, but he can’t remember what exactly it was. He was going to
see someone about - it’s on the tip of his tongue -
*
Welcome to the eve of the third decade: a time of chaos
characterized by an all-out depression in the space industries.
Most of the thinking power on the planet is now manufactured rather
than born; there are ten microprocessors for every human being, and
the number is doubling every fourteen months. Population growth in
the developing world has stalled, the birth rate dropping below
replacement level. In the wired nations, more forward-looking
politicians are looking for ways to enfranchise their nascent AI
base.
Space exploration is still stalled on the cusp of the second
recession of the century. The Malaysian government has announced
the goal of placing an imam on Mars within ten years, but nobody
else cares enough to try.
The Space Settlers Society is still trying to interest Disney Corp.
in the media rights to their latest L5 colony plan, unaware that
there’s already a colony out there and it isn’t human:
First-generation uploads, Californian spiny lobsters in wobbly
symbiosis with elderly expert systems, thrive aboard an asteroid
mining project established by the Franklin Trust. Meanwhile,
Chinese space agency cutbacks are threatening the continued
existence of Moonbase Mao. Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to
turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit.
Two years ago, JPL, the ESA, and the uploaded lobster colony on
comet Khrunichev-7 picked up an apparently artificial signal from
outside the solar system; most people don’t know, and of those who
do, even fewer care. After all, if humans can’t even make it to
Mars, who cares what’s going on a hundred trillion kilometers
farther out?
*
Portrait of a wasted youth:
Jack is seventeen years and eleven months old. He has never met his
father; he was unplanned, and Dad managed to kill himself in a
building-site accident before the Child Support could garnish his
income for the upbringing. His mother raised him in a two-bedroom
housing association flat in Hawick. She worked in a call center when
he was young, but business dried up: Humans aren’t needed on the end
of a phone anymore. Now she works in a drop-in business shop, stacking
shelves for virtual fly-by-nights that come and go like tourists in
the Festival season - but humans aren’t in demand for shelf stacking
either, these days.
His mother sent Jack to a local religious school, where he was
regularly excluded and effectively ran wild from the age of twelve. By
thirteen, he was wearing a parole cuff for shoplifting; by fourteen,
he’d broken his collarbone in a car crash while joyriding and the dour
Presbyterian sheriff sent him to the Wee Frees, who completed the
destruction of his educational prospects with high principles and an
illicit tawse.
Today, he’s a graduate of the hard school of avoiding public
surveillance cameras, with distinctions in steganographic alibi
construction. Mostly this entails high-density crime - if you’re going
to mug someone, do so where there are so many bystanders that they
can’t pin the blame on you. But the polis expert systems are on his
tail. If he keeps it up at this rate, in another four months they’ll
have a positive statistical correlation that will convince even a jury
of his peers that he’s guilty as fuck - and then he’ll go down to
Saughton for four years.
But Jack doesn’t understand the meaning of a Gaussian distribution or
the significance of a chi-square test, and the future still looks
bright to him as he pulls on the chunky spectacles he ripped off the
tourist gawking at the statue on North Bridge. And after a moment,
when they begin whispering into his ears in stereo and showing him
pictures of the tourist’s vision, it looks even brighter.
“Gotta make a deal, gotta close a deal,” whisper the glasses. “Meet
the borg, strike a chord.” Weird graphs in lurid colors are filling up
his peripheral vision, like the hallucinations of a drugged
marketroid.
“Who the fuck are ye?” asks Jack, intrigued by the bright lights and
icons.
“I am your Cartesian theatre and you are our focus,” murmur the
glasses. “Dow Jones down fifteen points, Federated Confidence up
three, incoming briefing on causal decoupling of social control of
skirt hem lengths, shaving pattern of beards, and emergence of
multidrug antibiotic resistance in Gram-negative bacilli: Accept?”
“Ah can take it,” Jack mumbles, as a torrent of images crashes down on
his eyeballs and jackhammers its way in through his ears like the
superego of a disembodied giant. Which is actually what he’s stolen:
The glasses and waist pouch he grabbed from the tourist are stuffed
with enough hardware to run the entire Internet, circa the turn of the
millennium. They’ve got bandwidth coming out the wazoo, distributed
engines running a bazillion inscrutable search tasks, and a whole slew
of high-level agents that collectively form a large chunk of the
society of mind that is their owner’s personality. Their owner is a
posthuman genius loci of the net, an agalmic entrepreneur turned
policy wonk, specializing in the politics of AI emancipation. When he
was in the biz he was the kind of guy who catalysed value wherever he
went, leaving money trees growing in his footprints. Now he’s the kind
of political backroom hitter who builds coalitions where nobody else
could see common ground. And Jack has stolen his memories. There are
microcams built into the frame of the glasses, pickups in the
earpieces; everything is spooled into the holographic cache in the
belt pack, before being distributed for remote storage. At four months
per terabyte, memory storage is cheap. What makes this bunch so
unusual is that their owner - Manfred - has cross-indexed them with
his agents. Mind uploading may not be a practical technology yet, but
Manfred has made an end run on it already.
In a very real sense, the glasses are Manfred, regardless of the
identity of the soft machine with its eyeballs behind the lenses. And
it is a very puzzled Manfred who picks himself up and, with a curious
vacancy in his head - except for a hesitant request for information
about accessories for Russian army boots - dusts himself off and heads
for his meeting on the other side of town.
*
Meanwhile, in another meeting, Manfred’s absence is already being
noticed. “Something, something is wrong,” says Annette. She raises her
mirrorshades and rubs her left eye, visibly worried. “Why is he not
answering his chat? He knows we are due to hold this call with him.
Don’t you think it is odd?”
Gianni nods and leans back, regarding her from behind his desk. He
prods at the highly polished rosewood desktop. The wood grain slips,
sliding into a strangely different conformation, generating random dot
stereoisograms - messages for his eyes only. “He was visiting Scotland
for me,” he says after a moment. “I do not know his exact whereabouts
- the privacy safeguards - but if you, as his designated next of kin,
travel in person, I am sure you will find it easier. He was going to
talk to the Franklin Collective, face-to-face, one to many …”
The office translator is good, but it can’t provide realtime
lip-synch morphing between French and Italian. Annette has to make an
effort to listen to his words because the shape of his mouth is all
wrong, like a badly dubbed video. Her expensive, recent implants
aren’t connected up to her Broca’s area yet, so she can’t simply
sideload a deep grammar module for Italian. Their communications are
the best that money can buy, their VR environment painstakingly
sculpted, but it still doesn’t break down the language barrier
completely. Besides, there are distractions: the way the desk switches
from black ash to rosewood halfway across its expanse, the strange air
currents that are all wrong for a room this size. “Then what could be
up with him? His voicemail is trying to cover for him. It is good, but
it does not lie convincingly.”
Gianni looks worried. “Manfred is prone to fits of do his own thing
with telling nobody in advance. But I don’t like this. He should have
to told one of us first.” Ever since that first meeting in Rome, when
Gianni offered him a job, Manfred has been a core member of Gianni’s
team, the fixer who goes out and meets people and solves their
problems. Losing him at this point could be more than embarrassing.
Besides, he’s a friend.
“I do not like this either.” She stands up. “If he doesn’t call back
soon -”
“You’ll go and fetch him.”
“Oui.” A smile flashes across her face, rapidly replaced by worry
lines. “What can have happened?”
“Anything. Nothing.” Gianni shrugs. “But we cannot do without him.” He
casts her a warning glance. “Or you. Don’t let the borg get you.
Either of you.”
“Not to worry, I will just bring him back, whatever has happened.” She
stands up, surprising a vacuum cleaner that skulks behind her desk.
“Au revoir!”
“Ciao.”
As she vacates her office, the minister flickers off behind her,
leaving the far wall the dull gray of a cold display panel. Gianni is
in Rome, she’s in Paris, Markus is in D�sseldorf, and Eva’s in
Wroclaw. There are others, trapped in digital cells scattered halfway
across an elderly continent, but as long as they don’t try to shake
hands, they’re free to shout across the office at each other. Their
confidences and dirty jokes tunnel through multiple layers of
anonymized communication.
Gianni is trying to make his break out of regional politics and into
European national affairs: Their job - his election team - is to get
him a seat on the Confederacy Commission, as Representative for
Intelligence Oversight, and push the boundaries of posthumanistic
action outward, into deep space and deeper time. Which makes the loss
of a key team player, the house futurologist and fixer, profoundly
interesting to certain people: The walls have ears, and not all the
brains they feed into are human.
Annette is more worried than she’s letting on to Gianni. It’s unlike
Manfred to be out of contact for long and even odder for his
receptionist to stonewall her, given that her apartment is the nearest
thing to a home he’s had for the past couple of years. But something
smells fishy. He sneaked out last night, saying it would be an
overnight trip, and now he’s not answering. Could it be his ex-wife?
she wonders, despite Gianni’s hints about a special mission. But
there’s been no word from Pamela other than the sarcastic cards she
dispatches every year without fail, timed to arrive on the birthday of
the daughter Manfred has never met. The music Mafiya? A letter bomb
from the Copyright Control Association of America? But no, his medical
monitor would have been screaming its head off if anything like that
had happened.
Annette has organized things so that he’s safe from the intellectual
property thieves. She’s lent him the support he needs, and he’s helped
her find her own path. She gets a warm sense of happiness whenever she
considers how much they’ve achieved together. But that’s exactly why
she’s worried now. The watchdog hasn’t barked …
Annette summons a taxi to Charles de Gaulle. By the time she arrives,
she’s already used her parliamentary carte to bump an executive-class
seat on the next A320 to Turnhouse, Edinburgh’s airport, and scheduled
accommodation and transport for her arrival. The plane is climbing out
over la Manche before the significance of Gianni’s last comment hits
her: Might he think the Franklin Collective could be dangerous to
Manfred?
*
The hospital emergency suite has a waiting room with green plastic
bucket seats and subtractive volume renderings by preteens stuck to
the walls like surreal Lego sculptures. It’s deeply silent, the
available bandwidth all sequestrated for medical monitors - there are
children crying, periodic sirens wailing as ambulances draw up, and
people chattering all around him, but to Manfred, it’s like being at
the bottom of a deep blue pool of quiet. He feels stoned, except this
particular drug brings no euphoria or sense of well-being.
Corridor-corner vendors hawk kebab-spitted pigeons next to the chained
and rusted voluntary service booth; video cameras watch the blue bivvy
bags of the chronic cases lined up next to the nursing station. Alone
in his own head, Manfred is frightened and confused.
“I can’t check you in ‘less you sign the confidentiality agreement,”
says the triage nurse, pushing an antique tablet at Manfred’s face.
Service in the NHS is still free, but steps have been taken to reduce
the incidence of scandals: “Sign the nondisclosure clause here and
here, or the house officer won’t see you.”
Manfred stares blearily up at the nurse’s nose, which is red and
slightly inflamed from a nosocomial infection. His phones are
bickering again, and he can’t remember why; they don’t normally behave
like this, something must be missing, but thinking about it is hard.
“Why am I here?” he asks for the third time.
“Sign it.” A pen is thrust into his hand. He focuses on the page,
jerks upright as deeply canalized reflexes kick in.
“This is theft of human rights! It says here that the party of the
second part is enjoined from disclosing information relating to the
operations management triage procedures and processes of the said
health-giving institution, that’s you, to any third party - that’s the
public media - on pain of forfeiture of health benefits pursuant to
section two of the Health Service Reform Act. I can’t sign this! You
could repossess my left kidney if I post on the Net about how long
I’ve been in hospital!”
“So don’t sign, then.” The Hijra nurse shrugs, hitches up his sari,
and walks away. “Enjoy your wait!”
Manfred pulls out his backup phone and stares at its display.
“Something’s wrong here.” The keypad beeps as he laboriously inputs
opcodes. This gets him into an arcane and ancient X.25 PAD, and he has
a vague, disturbing memory that hints about where he can go from here
- mostly into the long-since-decommissioned bowels of NHSNet - but the
memories spring a page fault and die somewhere between fingertips and
the moment when understanding dawns. It’s a frustrating feeling: His
brain is like an ancient car engine with damp spark plugs, turning
over and over without catching fire.
The kebab vendor next to Manfred’s seating rail chucks a stock cube on
his grill; it begins to smoke, aromatic and blue and herbal -
cannabinoids to induce tranquillity and appetite. Manfred sniffs
twice, then staggers to his feet and heads off in search of the
toilet, his head spinning. He’s mumbling at his wrist watch: “Hello,
Guatemala? Get me posology please. Click down my meme tree, I’m
confused. Oh shit. Who was I? What happened? Why is everything blurry?
I can’t find my glasses …”
A gaggle of day-trippers are leaving the leprosy ward, men and women
dressed in anachronistic garb: men in dark suits, women in long
dresses. All of them wear electric blue disposable gloves and face
masks. There’s a hum and crackle of encrypted bandwidth emanating from
them, and Manfred instinctively turns to follow. They leave the A&E
unit through the wheelchair exit, two ladies escorted by three
gentlemen, with a deranged distressed refugee from the twenty-first
century shuffling dizzily after. They’re all young, Manfred realizes
vaguely. Where’s my cat? Aineko might be able to make sense of this,
if Aineko was interested.
“I rather fancy we should retire to the club house,” says one young
beau. “Oh yes! please!” his short blond companion chirps, clapping her
hands together, then irritably stripping off the anachronistic plastic
gloves to reveal wired-lace positional-sensor mitts underneath. “This
trip has obviously been unproductive. If our contact is here, I see no
easy way of locating of him without breach of medical confidence or a
hefty gratuity.”
“The poor things,” murmurs the other woman, glancing back at the
leprosarium. “Such a humiliating way to die.”
“Their own fault; If they hadn’t participated in antibiotic abuse they
wouldn’t be in the isolation ward,” harrumphs a twentysomething with
mutton-chops and the manner of a precocious paterfamilias. He raps his
walking stick on the pavement for punctuation, and they pause for a
flock of cyclists and a rickshaw before they cross the road onto the
Meadows. “Degenerate medication compliance, degenerate immune
systems.”
Manfred pauses to survey the grass, brain spinning as he ponders the
fractal dimensionality of leaves. Then he lurches after them, nearly
getting himself run down by a flywheel-powered tourist bus. Club. His
feet hit the pavement, cross it, thud down onto three billion years of
vegetative evolution. Something about those people. He feels a weird
yearning, a tropism for information. It’s almost all that’s left of
him - his voracious will to know. The tall, dark-haired woman hitches
up her long skirts to keep them out of the mud. he sees a flash of
iridescent petticoats that ripple like oil on water, worn over
old-fashioned combat boots. Not Victorian, then: something else. I
came here to see - the name is on the tip of his tongue. Almost. He
feels that it has something to do with these people.
The squad cross The Meadows by way of a tree-lined path, and come to a
nineteenth-century frontage with wide steps and a polished brass
doorbell. They enter, and the man with the mutton-chops pauses on the
threshold and turns to face Manfred. “You’ve followed us this far,” he
says. “Do you want to come in? You might find what you’re looking
for.”
Manfred follows with knocking knees, desperately afraid of whatever
he’s forgotten.
*
Meanwhile, Annette is busy interrogating Manfred’s cat.
“When did you last see your father?”
Aineko turns its head away from her and concentrates on washing the
inside of its left leg. Its fur is lifelike and thick, pleasingly
patterned except for a manufacturer’s URL emblazoned on its flanks;
but the mouth produces no saliva, the throat opens on no stomach or
lungs. “Go away,” it says: “I’m busy.”
“When did you last see Manfred?” she repeats intently. “I don’t have
time for this. The polis don’t know. The medical services don’t know.
He’s off net and not responding. So what can you tell me?”
It took her precisely eighteen minutes to locate his hotel once she
hit the airport arrivals area and checked the hotel booking front end
in the terminal: She knows his preferences. It took her slightly
longer to convince the concierge to let her into his room. But Aineko
is proving more recalcitrant than she’d expected.
“AI Neko mod two alpha requires maintenance downtime on a regular
basis,” the cat says pompously: “You knew that when you bought me this
body. What were you expecting, five-nines uptime from a lump of meat?
Go away, I’m thinking.” The tongue rasps out, then pauses while
microprobes in its underside replace the hairs that fell out earlier
in the day.
Annette sighs. Manfred’s been upgrading this robot cat for years, and
his ex-wife Pamela used to mess with its neural configuration too:
This is its third body, and it’s getting more realistically
uncooperative with every hardware upgrade. Sooner or later it’s going
to demand a litter tray and start throwing up on the carpet. “Command
override,” she says. “Dump event log to my Cartesian theatre, minus
eight hours to present.”
The cat shudders and looks round at her. “Human bitch!” it hisses.
Then it freezes in place as the air fills with a bright and silent
tsunami of data. Both Annette and Aineko are wired for extremely
high-bandwidth spread-spectrum optical networking; an observer would
see the cat’s eyes and a ring on her left hand glow blue-white at each
other. After a few seconds, Annette nods to herself and wiggles her
fingers in the air, navigating a time sequence only she can see.
Aineko hisses resentfully at her, then stands and stalks away, tail
held high.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” Annette hums to herself. She intertwines
her fingers, pressing obscure pressure points on knuckle and wrist,
then sighs and rubs her eyes. “He left here under his own power,
looking normal,” she calls to the cat. “Who did he say he was going to
see?” The cat sits in a beam of sunlight falling in through the high
glass window, pointedly showing her its back. “Merde. If you’re not
going to help him -”
“Try the Grassmarket,” sulks the cat. “He said something about meeting
the Franklin Collective near there. Much good they’ll do him …”
*
A man wearing secondhand Chinese combat fatigues and a horribly
expensive pair of glasses bounces up a flight of damp stone steps
beneath a keystone that announces the building to be a Salvation Army
hostel. He bangs on the door, his voice almost drowned out by the pair
of Cold War Re-enactment Society MiGs that are buzzing the castle up
the road: “Open up, ye cunts! Ye’ve got a deal comin’!”
A peephole set in the door at eye level slides to one side, and a pair
of beady, black-eyed video cameras peer out at him. “Who are you and
what do you want?” the speaker crackles. They don’t belong to the
Salvation Army; Christianity has been deeply unfashionable in Scotland
for some decades, and the church that currently occupies the building
has certainly moved with the times in an effort to stay relevant.
“I’m Macx,” he says: “You’ve heard from my systems. I’m here to offer
you a deal you can’t refuse.” At least that’s what his glasses tell
him to say: What comes out of his mouth sounds a bit more like, Am
Max: Yiv hurdfrae ma system. Am here tae gie ye a deal ye cannae
refuse. The glasses haven’t had long enough to work on his accent.
Meanwhile, he’s so full of himself that he snaps his fingers and does
a little dance of impatience on the top step.
“Aye, well, hold on a minute.” The person on the other side of the
speakerphone has the kind of cut-glass Morningside accent that manages
to sound more English than the King while remaining vernacular Scots.
The door opens, and Macx finds himself confronted by a tall, slightly
cadaverous man wearing a tweed suit that has seen better days and a
clerical collar cut from a translucent circuit board. His face is
almost concealed behind a pair of recording angel goggles. “Who did ye
say you were?”
“I’m Macx! Manfred Macx! I’m here with an opportunity you wouldn’t
believe. I’ve got the answer to your church’s financial situation. I’m
going to make you rich!” The glasses prompt, and Macx speaks.
The man in the doorway tilts his head slightly, goggles scanning Macx
from head to foot. Bursts of blue combustion products spurt from
Macx’s heels as he bounces up and down enthusiastically. “Are ye sure
ye’ve got the right address?” he asks worriedly.
“Aye, Ah am that.”
The resident backs into the hostel: “Well then, come in, sit yeself
down and tell me all about it.”
Macx bounces into the room with his brain wide open to a blizzard of
pie charts and growth curves, documents spawning in the bizarre
phase-space of his corporate management software. “I’ve got a deal
you’re not going to believe,” he reads, gliding past notice boards
upon which Church circulars are staked out to die like exotic
butterflies, stepping over rolled-up carpets and a stack of laptops
left over from a jumble sale, past the devotional radio telescope that
does double duty as Mrs. Muirhouse’s back-garden bird bath. “You’ve
been here five years and your posted accounts show you aren’t making
much money - barely keeping the rent up. But you’re a shareholder in
Scottish Nuclear Electric, right? Most of the church funds are in the
form of a trust left to the church by one of your congregants when she
went to join the omega point, right?”
“Er.” The minister looks at him oddly. “I cannae comment on the church
eschatological investment trust. Why d’ye think that?”
They fetch up, somehow, in the minister’s office. A huge, framed
rendering hangs over the back of his threadbare office chair: the
collapsing cosmos of the End Times, galactic clusters rotten with the
Dyson spheres of the eschaton falling toward the big crunch. Saint
Tipler the Astrophysicist beams down from above with avuncular
approval, a ring of quasars forming a halo around his head. Posters
proclaim the new Gospel: COSMOLOGY IS BETTER THAN GUESSWORK, and LIVE
FOREVER WITHIN MY LIGHT CONE. “Can I get ye anything? Cup of tea? Fuel
cell charge point?” asks the minister.
“Crystal meth?” asks Macx, hopefully. His face falls as the minister
shakes his head apologetically. “Aw, dinnae worry, Ah wis only
joshing.” He leans forward: “Ah know a’ aboot yer plutonium futures
speculation,” he hisses. A finger taps his stolen spectacles in an
ominous gesture: “These dinnae just record, they think. An’ Ah ken
where the money’s gone.”
“What have ye got?” the minister asks coldly, any indication of good
humor flown. “I’m going to have to edit down these memories, ye
bastard. I thought I’d forgotten all about that. Bits of me aren’t
going to merge with the godhead at the end of time now, thanks to
you.”
“Keep yer shirt on. Whit’s the point o’ savin’ it a’ up if ye nae got
a life worth living? Ye reckon the big yin’s nae gonnae unnerstan’ a
knees up?”
“What do ye want?”
“Aye, well,” Macx leans back, aggrieved. Ah’ve got -” He pauses. An
expression of extreme confusion flits over his head. “Ah’ve got
lobsters,” he finally announces. “Genetically engineered uploaded
lobsters tae run yer uranium reprocessing plant.” As he grows more
confused, the glasses’ control over his accent slips: “Ah wiz gonnae
help yiz oot ba showin ye how ter get yer dosh back whir it belong
…” A strategic pause: “so ye could make the council tax due date.
See, they’re neutron-resistant, the lobsters. No, that cannae be
right. Ah wiz gonnae sell ye somethin’ ye cud use fer” - his face
slumps into a frown of disgust - “free?”
Approximately thirty seconds later, as he is picking himself up off
the front steps of the First Reformed Church of Tipler,
Astrophysicist, the man who would be Macx finds himself wondering if
maybe this high finance shit isn’t as easy as it’s cracked up to be.
Some of the agents in his glasses are wondering if elocution lessons
are the answer; others aren’t so optimistic.
*
Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade
look mostly medical.
A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for
Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern
European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole
agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities
sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes.
A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the
American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence
is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that
evolution hasn’t weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on
the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than
his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic
treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and
hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private
clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.)
Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental
patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome
Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the
creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved
replacements for all commonly defective exons.
Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under
emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim
that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian
curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest
civil rights issue of all.
For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover
cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing
death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore,
is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few
judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins.
Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken
eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other
commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off
weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets;
middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that
can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending.
The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are:
the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main
Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New
with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants
that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners
through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia
about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen
disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all
peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers,
and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to
experience embarrassment.
Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.
*
The Victorians are morphing into goths before Manfred’s
culture-shocked eyes.
“You looked lost,” explains Monica, leaning over him curiously.
“What’s with your eyes?”
“I can’t see too well,” Manfred tries to explain. Everything is a
blur, and the voices that usually chatter incessantly in his head have
left nothing behind but a roaring silence. “I mean, someone mugged me.
They took -” His hand closes on air: something is missing from his
belt.
Monica, the tall woman he first saw in the hospital, enters the room.
What she’s wearing indoors is skintight, iridescent and,
disturbingly, she claims is a distributed extension of her
neuroectoderm. Stripped of costume-drama accoutrements, she’s a
twenty-first-century adult, born or decanted after the millennial baby
boom. She waves some fingers in Manfred’s face: “How many?”
“Two.” Manfred tries to concentrate. “What -”
“No concussion,” she says briskly. “‘Scuse me while I page.” Her eyes
are brown, with amber raster lines flickering across her pupils.
Contact lenses? Manfred wonders, his head turgid and unnaturally slow.
It’s like being drunk, except much less pleasant: He can’t seem to
wrap his head around an idea from all angles at once, anymore. Is this
what consciousness used to be like? It’s an ugly, slow sensation. She
turns away from him: “Medline says you’ll be all right in a while. The
main problem is the identity loss. Are you backed up anywhere?”
“Here.” Alan, still top-hatted and mutton-chopped, holds out a pair of
spectacles to Manfred. “Take these, they may do you some good.” His
topper wobbles, as if a strange A-life experiment is nesting under its
brim.
“Oh. Thank you.” Manfred reaches for them with a pathetic sense of
gratitude. As soon as he puts them on, they run through a test series,
whispering questions and watching how his eyes focus: After a minute,
the room around him clears as the specs build a synthetic image to
compensate for his myopia. There’s limited Net access, too, he
notices, a warm sense of relief stealing over him. “Do you mind if I
call somebody?” he asks: “I want to check my backups.”
“Be my guest.” Alan slips out through the door; Monica sits down
opposite him and stares into some inner space. The room has a tall
ceiling, with whitewashed walls and wooden shutters to cover the
aerogel window bays. The furniture is modern modular, and clashes
horribly with the original nineteenth-century architecture. “We were
expecting you.”
“You were -” He shifts track with an effort: “I was here to see
somebody. Here in Scotland, I mean.”
“Us.” She catches his eye deliberately. “To discuss sapience options
with our patron.”
“With your -” He squeezes his eyes shut. “Damn! I don’t remember. I
need my glasses back. Please.”
“What about your backups?” she asks curiously.
“A moment.” Manfred tries to remember what address to ping. It’s
useless, and painfully frustrating. “It would help if I could remember
where I keep the rest of my mind,” he complains. “It used to be at -
oh, there.”
An elephantine semantic network sits down on his spectacles as soon as
he asks for the site, crushing his surroundings into blocky pixilated
monochrome that jerks as he looks around. “This is going to take some
time,” he warns his hosts as a goodly chunk of his metacortex tries to
handshake with his brain over a wireless network connection that was
really only designed for web browsing. The download consists of the
part of his consciousness that isn’t security-critical - public access
actors and vague opinionated rants - but it clears down a huge memory
castle, sketching in the outline of a map of miracles and wonders onto
the whitewashed walls of the room.
When Manfred can see the outside world again, he feels a bit more like
himself: He can, at least, spawn a search thread that will
resynchronize and fill him in on what it found. He still can’t access
the inner mysteries of his soul (including his personal memories);
they’re locked and barred pending biometric verification of his
identity and a quantum key exchange. But he has his wits about him
again - and some of them are even working. It’s like sobering up from
a strange new drug, the infinitely reassuring sense of being back at
the controls of his own head. “I think I need to report a crime,” he
tells Monica - or whoever is plugged into Monica’s head right now,
because now he knows where he is and who he was meant to meet
(although not why) - and he understands that, for the Franklin
Collective, identity is a politically loaded issue.
“A crime report.” Her expression is subtly mocking. “Identity theft,
by any chance?”
“Yeah, yeah, I know: Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state
vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only
constant, et bloody cetera. Who am I talking to, by the way? And if
we’re talking, doesn’t that signify that you think we’re on the same
side, more or less?” He struggles to sit up in the recliner chair:
Stepper motors whine softly as it strives to accommodate him.
“Sidedness is optional.” The woman who is Monica some of the time
looks at him quirkily: “It tends to alter drastically if you vary the
number of dimensions. Let’s just say that right now I’m Monica, plus
our sponsor. Will that do you?”
“Our sponsor, who is in cyberspace -”
She leans back on the sofa, which buzzes and extrudes an occasional
table with a small bar. “Drink? Can I offer you coffee? Guarana? Or
maybe a Berlinerweisse, for old time’s sake?”
“Guarana will do. Hello, Bob. How long have you been dead?”
She chuckles. “I’m not dead, Manny. I may not be a full upload, but I
feel like me.” She rolls her eyes, self-consciously. “He’s making rude
comments about your wife,” She adds; “I’m not going to pass that on.”
“My ex-wife,” Manfred corrects her automatically. “The, uh, tax vamp.
So. You’re acting as a, I guess, an interpreter for Bob?”
“Ack.” She looks at Manfred very seriously: “We owe him a lot, you
know. He left his assets in trust to the movement along with his
partials. We feel obliged to instantiate his personality as often as
possible, even though you can only do so much with a couple of
petabytes of recordings. But we have help.”
“The lobsters.” Manfred nods to himself and accepts the glass that she
offers. Its diamond-plated curves glitter brilliantly in the
late-afternoon sunlight. “I knew this had something to do with them.”
He leans forward, holding his glass and frowns. “If only I could
remember why I came here! It was something emergent, something in deep
memory … something I didn’t trust in my own skull. Something to do
with Bob.”
The door behind the sofa opens; Alan enters. “Excuse me,” he says
quietly, and heads for the far side of the room. A workstation folds
down from the wall, and a chair rolls in from a service niche. He sits
with his chin propped on his hands, staring at the white desktop.
Every so often he mutters quietly to himself; “Yes, I understand …
campaign headquarters … donations need to be audited …”
“Gianni’s election campaign,” Monica prompts him.
Manfred jumps. “Gianni -” A bundle of memories unlock inside his head
as he remembers his political front man’s message. “Yes! That’s what
this is about. It has to be!” He looks at her excitedly. “I’m here to
deliver a message to you from Gianni Vittoria. About -” He looks
crestfallen. “I’m not sure,” he trails off uncertainly, “but it was
important. Something critical in the long term, something about group
minds and voting. But whoever mugged me got the message.”
*
The Grassmarket is an overly rustic cobbled square nestled beneath the
glowering battlements of Castle Rock. Annette stands on the site of
the gallows where they used to execute witches; she sends forth her
invisible agents to search for spoor of Manfred. Aineko, overly
familiar, drapes over her left shoulder like a satanic stole and
delivers a running stream of cracked cellphone chatter into her ear.
“I don’t know where to begin,” she sighs, annoyed. This place is a
wall-to-wall tourist trap, a many-bladed carnivorous plant that
digests easy credit and spits out the drained husks of foreigners. The
road has been pedestrianized and resurfaced in squalidly authentic
mediaeval cobblestones; in the middle of what used to be the car park,
there’s a permanent floating antiques market, where you can buy
anything from a brass fire surround to an ancient CD player. Much of
the merchandise in the shops is generic dot-com trash, vying for the
title of Japanese-Scottish souvenir from hell: Puroland tartans,
animatronic Nessies hissing bad-temperedly at knee level, second hand
laptops. People swarm everywhere, from the theme pubs (hangings seem
to be a running joke hereabouts) to the expensive dress shops with
their fabric renderers and digital mirrors. Street performers, part of
the permanent floating Fringe, clutter the sidewalk: A robotic mime,
very traditional in silver face paint, mimics the gestures of passers
by with ironically stylized gestures.
“Try the doss house,” Aineko suggests from the shelter of her shoulder
bag.
“The -” Annette does a doubletake as her thesaurus conspires with her
open government firmware and dumps a geographical database of city
social services into her sensorium. “Oh, I see.” The Grassmarket
itself is touristy, but the bits off to one end - down a dingy canyon
of forbidding stone buildings six stories high - are decidedly
downmarket. “Okay.”
Annette weaves past a stall selling disposable cellphones and cheaper
genome explorers, round a gaggle of teenage girls in the grips of some
kind of imported kawaii fetish, who look at her in alarm from atop
their pink platform heels - probably mistaking her for a school
probation inspector - and past a stand of chained and parked bicycles.
The human attendant looks bored out of her mind. Annette tucks a
blandly anonymous ten-Euro note in her pocket almost before she
notices: “If you were going to buy a hot bike,” she asks, “where would
you go?” The parking attendant stares, and for a moment Annette thinks
she’s overestimated her. Then she mumbles something. “What?”
“McMurphy’s. Used to be called Bannerman’s. Down yon Cowgate,
thataway.” The meter maid looks anxiously at her rack of charges. “You
didn’t -”
“Uh-huh.” Annette follows her gaze: straight down the dark stone
canyon. Well, okay. “This had better be worth it, Manny mon ch�r,” she
mutters under her breath.
McMurphy’s is a fake Irish pub, a stone grotto installed beneath a
mound of blank-faced offices. It was once a real Irish pub before the
developers got their hands on it and mutated it in rapid succession
into a punk nightclub, a wine bar, and a fake Dutch coffee shop; after
which, as burned-out as any star, it left the main sequence. Now it
occupies an unnaturally prolonged, chilly existence as the sort of
recycled imitation Irish pub that has neon four-leafed clovers hanging
from the artificially blackened pine beams above the log tables - in
other words, the burned-out black dwarf afterlife of a once-serious
drinking establishment. Somewhere along the line, the beer cellar was
replaced with a toilet (leaving more room for paying patrons
upstairs), and now its founts dispense fizzy concentrate diluted with
water from the city mains.
“Say, did you hear the one about the Eurocrat with the robot pussy who
goes into a dodgy pub on the Cowgate and orders a coke? And when it
arrives, she says ‘hey, where’s the mirror?’”
“Shut up,” Annette hisses into her shoulder bag. “That isn’t funny.”
Her personal intruder telemetry has just emailed her wristphone, and
it’s displaying a rotating yellow exclamation point, which means that
according to the published police crime stats, this place is likely to
do grievous harm to her insurance premiums.
Aineko looks up at her from his nest in the bag and yawns cavernously,
baring a pink, ribbed mouth and a tongue like pink suede. “Want to
make me? I just pinged Manny’s head. The network latency was trivial.”
The barmaid sidles up and pointedly manages not to make eye contact
with Annette. “I’ll have a Diet Coke,” Annette orders. In the
direction of her bag, voice pitched low: “Did you hear the one about
the Eurocrat who goes into a dodgy pub, orders half a liter of Diet
Coke, and when she spills it in her shoulder bag she says ‘oops, I’ve
got a wet pussy’?”
The Coke arrives. Annette pays for it. There may be a couple of dozen
people in the pub; it’s hard to tell because it looks like an ancient
cellar, lots of stone archways leading off into niches populated with
secondhand church pews and knife-scarred tables. Some guys who might
be bikers, students, or well-dressed winos are hunched over one table:
hairy, wearing vests with too many pockets, in an artful bohemianism
that makes Annette blink until one of her literary programs informs
her that one of them is a moderately famous local writer, a bit of a
guru for the space and freedom party. There’re a couple of women in
boots and furry hats in one corner, poring over the menu, and a parcel
of off-duty street performers hunching over their beers in a booth.
Nobody else is wearing anything remotely like office drag, but the
weirdness coefficient is above average; so Annette dials her glasses
to extra-dark, straightens her tie, and glances around.
The door opens and a nondescript youth slinks in. He’s wearing baggy
BDUs, woolly cap, and a pair of boots that have that quintessential
essense de panzer division look, all shock absorbers and olive drab
Kevlar panels. He’s wearing -
“I spy with my little network intrusion detector kit,” begins the cat,
as Annette puts her drink down and moves in on the youth, “something
beginning with -”
“How much you want for the glasses, kid?” she asks quietly.
He jerks and almost jumps - a bad idea in MilSpec combat boots, the
ceiling is eighteenth-century stone half a meter thick; “Dinnae
fuckin’ dae that,” he complains in an eerily familiar way: “Ah -” he
swallows. “Annie! Who -”
“Stay calm. Take them off - they’ll only hurt you if you keep wearing
them,” she says, careful not to move too fast because now she has a
second, scary-jittery fear, and she knows without having to look that
the exclamation mark on her watch has turned red and begun to flash:
“Look, I’ll give you two hundred Euros for the glasses and the belt
pouch, real cash, and I won’t ask how you got them or tell anyone.”
He’s frozen in front of her, mesmerized, and she can see the light
from inside the lenses spilling over onto his half-starved adolescent
cheekbones, flickering like cold lightning, like he’s plugged his
brain into a grid bearer; swallowing with a suddenly dry mouth, she
slowly reaches up and pulls the spectacles off his face with one hand
and takes hold of the belt pouch with the other. The kid shudders and
blinks at her, and she sticks a couple of hundred-Euro notes in front
of his nose. “Scram,” she says, not unkindly.
He reaches up slowly, then seizes the money and runs - blasts his way
through the door with an ear-popping concussion, hangs a left onto the
cycle path, and vanishes downhill toward the parliament buildings and
university complex.
Annette watches the doorway apprehensively. “Where is he?” she hisses,
worried: “Any ideas, cat?”
“Naah. It’s your job to find him,” Aineko opines complacently. But
there’s an icicle of anxiety in Annette’s spine. Manfred’s been
separated from his memory cache? Where could he be? Worse - who could
he be?
“Fuck you, too,” she mutters. “Only one thing for it, I guess.” She
takes off her own glasses - they’re much less functional than
Manfred’s massively ramified custom rig - and nervously raises the
repo’d specs toward her face. Somehow what she’s about to do makes her
feel unclean, like snooping on a lover’s e-mail folders. But how else
can she figure out where he might have gone?
She slides the glasses on and tries to remember what she was doing
yesterday in Edinburgh.
*
“Gianni?”
“Oui, ma ch�rie?”
Pause. “I lost him. But I got his aid-m�moire back. A teenage
freeloader playing cyberpunk with them. No sign of his location - so I
put them on.”
Pause. “Oh dear.”
“Gianni, why exactly did you send him to the Franklin Collective?”
Pause. (During which, the chill of the gritty stone wall she’s leaning
on begins to penetrate the weave of her jacket.) “I not wanting to
bother you with trivia.”
“Merde. It’s not trivia, Gianni, they’re accelerationistas. Have you
any idea what that’s going to do to his head?”
Pause: Then a grunt, almost of pain. “Yes.”
“Then why did you do it?” she demands vehemently. She hunches over,
punching words into her phone so that other passers-by avoid her,
unsure whether she’s hands-free or hallucinating: “Shit, Gianni, I
have to pick up the pieces every time you do this! Manfred is not a
healthy man, he’s on the edge of acute future shock the whole time,
and I was not joking when I told you last February that he’d need a
month in a clinic if you tried running him flat out again! If you’re
not careful, he could end up dropping out completely and joining the
borganism -”
“Annette.” A heavy sigh: “He are the best hope we got. Am knowing
half-life of agalmic catalyst now down to six months and dropping;
Manny outlast his career expectancy, four deviations outside the
normal, yes, we know this. But I are having to break civil rights
deadlock now, this election. We must achieve consensus, and Manfred
are only staffer we got who have hope of talking to Collective on its
own terms. He are deal-making messenger, not force burnout, right? We
need coalition reserve before term limit lockout followed by gridlock
in Brussels, American-style. Is more than vital - is essential.”
“That’s no excuse -”
“Annette, they have partial upload of Bob Franklin. They got it before
he died, enough of his personality to reinstantiate it, time-sharing
in their own brains. We must get the Franklin Collective with their
huge resources lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment: If ERA passes,
all sapients are eligible to vote, own property, upload, download,
sideload. Are more important than little gray butt-monsters with cold
speculum: Whole future depends on it. Manny started this with
crustacean rights: Leave uploads covered by copyrights not civil
rights and where will we be in fifty years? Do you think I must ignore
this? It was important then, but now, with the transmission the
lobsters received -”
“Shit.” She turns and leans her forehead against the cool stonework.
“I’ll need a prescription. Ritalin or something. And his location.
Leave the rest to me.” She doesn’t add, That includes peeling him off
the ceiling afterwards: that’s understood. Nor does she say, you’re
going to pay. That’s understood, too. Gianni may be a hard-nosed
political fixer, but he looks after his own.
“Location am easy if he find the PLO. GPS coordinates are following -”
“No need. I got his spectacles.”
“Merde, as you say. Take them to him, ma ch�rie. Bring me the
distributed trust rating of Bob Franklin’s upload, and I bring Bob the
jubilee, right to direct his own corporate self again as if still
alive. And we pull diplomatic chestnuts out of fire before they burn.
Agreed?”
“Oui.”
She cuts the connection and begins walking uphill, along the Cowgate
(through which farmers once bought their herds to market), toward the
permanent floating Fringe and then the steps towards The Meadows. As
she pauses opposite the site of the gallows, a fight breaks out: Some
Paleolithic hangover takes exception to the robotic mime aping his
movements, and swiftly rips its arm off. The mime stands there, sparks
flickering inside its shoulder, and looks confused. Two pissed-looking
students start forward and punch the short-haired vandal. There is
much shouting in the mutually incomprehensible accents of Oxgangs and
the Herriott-Watt Robot Lab. Annette watches the fight and shudders;
it’s like a flashover vision from a universe where the Equal Rights
Amendment - with its redefinition of personhood - is rejected by the
house of deputies: a universe where to die is to become property and
to be created outwith a gift of parental DNA is to be doomed to
slavery.
Maybe Gianni was right, she ponders. But I wish the price wasn’t so
personal -
*
Manfred can feel one of his attacks coming on. The usual symptoms are
all present - the universe, with its vast preponderance of unthinking
matter, becomes an affront; weird ideas flicker like heat lightning
far away across the vast plateaus of his imagination - but, with his
metacortex running in sandboxed insecure mode, he feels blunt. And
slow. Even obsolete. The latter is about as welcome a sensation as
heroin withdrawal: He can’t spin off threads to explore his designs
for feasibility and report back to him. It’s like someone has stripped
fifty points off his IQ; his brain feels like a surgical scalpel
that’s been used to cut down trees. A decaying mind is a terrible
thing to be trapped inside. Manfred wants out, and he wants out bad -
but he’s too afraid to let on.
“Gianni is a middle-of-the-road Eurosocialist, a mixed-market
pragmatist politician,” Bob’s ghost accuses Manfred by way of Monica’s
dye-flushed lips, “hardly the sort of guy you’d expect me to vote for,
no? So what does he think I can do for him?”
“That’s a - ah - ” Manfred rocks forward and back in his chair, arms
crossed firmly and hands thrust under his armpits for protection.
“Dismantle the moon! Digitize the biosphere, make a n�osphere out of
it - shit, sorry, that’s long-term planning. Build Dyson spheres, lots
and lots of - Ahem. Gianni is an ex-Marxist, reformed high church
Trotskyite clade. He believes in achieving True Communism, which is a
state of philosophical grace that requires certain prerequisites like,
um, not pissing around with Molotov cocktails and thought police: He
wants to make everybody so rich that squabbling over ownership of the
means of production makes as much sense as arguing over who gets to
sleep in the damp spot at the back of the cave. He’s not your enemy, I
mean. He’s the enemy of those Stalinist deviationist running dogs in
Conservative Party Central Office who want to bug your bedroom and
hand everything on a plate to the big corporates owned by the pension
funds - which in turn rely on people dying predictably to provide
their raison d’�tre. And, um, more importantly dying and not trying to
hang on to their property and chattels. Sitting up in the coffin
singing extropian fireside songs, that kind of thing. The actuaries
are to blame, predicting life expectancy with intent to cause people
to buy insurance policies with money that is invested in control of
the means of production - Bayes’ Theorem is to blame -”
Alan glances over his shoulder at Manfred: “I don’t think feeding him
guarana was a good idea,” he says in tones of deep foreboding.
Manfred’s mode of vibration has gone nonlinear by this point: He’s
rocking front to back, and jiggling up and down in little hops, like a
technophiliacal yogic flyer trying to bounce his way to the
singularity. Monica leans toward him and her eyes widen: “Manfred,”
she hisses, “shut up!”
He stops babbling abruptly, with an expression of deep puzzlement.
“Who am I?” he asks, and keels over backward. “Why am I, here and now,
occupying this body -”
“Anthropic anxiety attack,” Monica comments. “I think he did this in
Amsterdam eight years ago when Bob first met him.” She looks alarmed,
a different identity coming to the fore: “What shall we do?”
“We have to make him comfortable.” Alan raises his voice: “Bed, make
yourself ready, now.” The back of the sofa Manfred is sprawled on
flops downward, the base folds up, and a strangely animated duvet
crawls up over his feet. “Listen, Manny, you’re going to be all
right.”
“Who am I and what do I signify?” Manfred mumbles incoherently: “A
mass of propagating decision trees, fractal compression, lots of
synaptic junctions lubricated with friendly endorphins -” Across the
room, the bootleg pharmacopoeia is cranking up to manufacture some
heavy tranquilizers. Monica heads for the kitchen to get something for
him to drink them in. “Why are you doing this?” Manfred asks, dizzily.
“It’s okay. Lie down and relax.” Alan leans over him. “We’ll talk
about everything in the morning, when you know who you are.” (Aside to
Monica, who is entering the room with a bottle of iced tea: “Better
let Gianni know that he’s unwell. One of us may have to go visit the
minister. Do you know if Macx has been audited?”) “Rest up, Manfred.
Everything is being taken care of.”
About fifteen minutes later, Manfred - who, in the grip of an
existential migraine, meekly obeys Monica’s instruction to drink down
the spiked tea - lies back on the bed and relaxes. His breathing
slows; the subliminal muttering ceases. Monica, sitting next to him,
reaches out and takes his right hand, which is lying on top of the
bedding.
“Do you want to live forever?” she intones in Bob Franklin’s tone of
voice. “You can live forever in me …”
*
The Church of Latter-Day Saints believes that you can’t get into the
Promised Land unless it’s baptized you - but it can do so if it knows
your name and parentage, even after you’re dead. Its genealogical
databases are among the most impressive artifacts of historical
research ever prepared. And it likes to make converts.
The Franklin Collective believes that you can’t get into the future
unless it’s digitized your neural state vector, or at least acquired
as complete a snapshot of your sensory inputs and genome as current
technology permits. You don’t need to be alive for it to do this. Its
society of mind is among the most impressive artifacts of computer
science. And it likes to make converts.
*
Nightfall in the city. Annette stands impatiently on the doorstep.
“Let me the fuck in,” she snarls impatiently at the speakerphone.
“Merde!”
Someone opens the door. “Who -”
Annette shoves him inside, kicks the door shut, and leans on it. “Take
me to your bodhisattva,” she demands. “Now.”
“I -” he turns and heads inside, along the gloomy hallway that runs
past a staircase. Annette strides after him aggressively. He opens a
door and ducks inside, and she follows before he can close it.
Inside, the room is illuminated by a variety of indirect diode
sources, calibrated for the warm glow of a summer afternoon’s
daylight. There’s a bed in the middle of it, a figure lying asleep at
the heart of a herd of attentive diagnostic instruments. A couple of
attendants sit to either side of the sleeping man.
“What have you done to him?” Annette snaps, rushing forward. Manfred
blinks up at her from the pillows, bleary-eyed and confused as she
leans overhead: “Hello? Manny?” Over her shoulder: “If you have done
anything to him -”
“Annie?” He looks puzzled. A bright orange pair of goggles - not his
own - is pushed up onto his forehead like a pair of beached jellyfish.
“I don’t feel well. ‘F I get my hands on the bastard who did this …”
“We can fix that,” she says briskly, declining to mention the deal she
cut to get his memories back. She peels off his glasses and carefully
slides them onto his face, replacing his temporary ones. The brain bag
she puts down next to his shoulder, within easy range. The hairs on
the back of her neck rise as a thin chattering fills the ether around
them: his eyes are glowing a luminous blue behind his shades, as if a
high-tension spark is flying between his ears.
“Oh. Wow.” He sits up, the covers fall from his naked shoulders, and
her breath catches.
She looks round at the motionless figure sitting to his left. The man
in the chair nods deliberately, ironically. “What have you done to
him?”
“We’ve been looking after him - nothing more, nothing less. He arrived
in a state of considerable confusion, and his state deteriorated this
afternoon.”
She’s never met this fellow before, but she has a gut feeling that she
knows him. “You would be Robert … Franklin?”
He nods again. “The avatar is in.” There’s a thud as Manfred’s eyes
roll up in his head, and he flops back onto the bedding. “Excuse me.
Monica?”
The young woman on the other side of the bed shakes her head. “No, I’m
running Bob, too.”
“Oh. Well, you tell her - I’ve got to get him some juice.”
The woman who is also Bob Franklin - or whatever part of him survived
his battle with an exotic brain tumor eight years earlier - catches
Annette’s eye and shakes her head, smiles faintly. “You’re never alone
when you’re a syncitium.”
Annette wrinkles her brow: she has to trigger a dictionary attack to
parse the sentence. “One large cell, many nuclei? Oh, I see. You have
the new implant. The better to record everything.”
The youngster shrugs. “You want to die and be resurrected as a
third-person actor in a low-bandwidth re-enactment? Or a shadow of
itchy memories in some stranger’s skull?” She snorts, a gesture that’s
at odds with the rest of her body language.
“Bob must have been one of the first borganisms. Humans, I mean. After
Jim Bezier.” Annette glances over at Manfred, who has begun to snore
softly. “It must have been a lot of work.”
“The monitoring equipment cost millions, then,” says the woman -
Monica? - “and it didn’t do a very good job. One of the conditions for
our keeping access to his research funding is that we regularly run
his partials. He wanted to build up a kind of aggregate state vector -
patched together out of bits and pieces of other people to supplement
the partials that were all I - he - could record with the then state
of the art.”
“Eh, right.” Annette reaches out and absently smooths a stray hair
away from Manfred’s forehead. “What is it like to be part of a group
mind?”
Monica sniffs, evidently amused. “What is it like to see red? What’s
it like to be a bat? I can’t tell you - I can only show you. We’re all
free to leave at any time, you know.”
“But somehow you don’t.” Annette rubs her head, feels the short hair
over the almost imperceptible scars that conceal a network of implants
- tools that Manfred turned down when they became available a year or
two ago. (“Goop-phase Darwin-design nanotech ain’t designed for clean
interfaces,” he’d said, “I’ll stick to disposable kit, thanks.”) “No
thank you. I don’t think he’ll take up your offer when he wakes up,
either.” (Subtext: I’ll let you have him over my dead body.)
Monica shrugs. “That’s his loss: He won’t live forever in the
singularity, along with other followers of our gentle teacher. Anyway,
we have more converts than we know what to do with.”
A thought occurs to Annette. “Ah. You are all of one mind? Partially?
A question to you is a question to all?”
“It can be.” The words come simultaneously from Monica and the other
body, Alan, who is standing in the doorway with a boxy thing that
looks like an improvised diagnostician. “What do you have in mind?”
adds the Alan body.
Manfred, lying on the bed, groans: There’s an audible hiss of pink
noise as his glasses whisper in his ears, bone conduction providing a
serial highway to his wetware.
“Manfred was sent to find out why you’re opposing the ERA,” Annette
explains. “Some parts of our team operate without the other’s
knowledge.”
“Indeed.” Alan sits down on the chair beside the bed and clears his
throat, puffing his chest out pompously. “A very important theological
issue. I feel -”
“I, or we?” Annette interrupts.
“We feel,” Monica snaps. Then she glances at Alan. “Soo-rrry.”
The evidence of individuality within the group mind is disturbing to
Annette: Too many reruns of the Borgish fantasy have conditioned her
preconceptions, and their quasi-religious belief in a singularity
leaves her cold. “Please continue.”
“One person, one vote, is obsolete,” says Alan. “The broader issue of
how we value identity needs to be revisited, the franchise
reconsidered. Do you get one vote for each warm body? Or one vote for
each sapient individual? What about distributed intelligences? The
proposals in the Equal Rights Act are deeply flawed, based on a cult
of individuality that takes no account of the true complexity of
posthumanism.”
“Like the proposals for a feminine franchise in the nineteenth century
that would grant the vote to married wives of land-owning men,” Monica
adds slyly: “It misses the point.”
“Ah, oui.” Annette crosses her arms, suddenly defensive. This isn’t
what she’d expected to hear. This is the elitist side of the
posthumanism shtick, potentially as threatening to her post
enlightenment ideas as the divine right of kings.
“It misses more than that.” Heads turn to face an unexpected
direction: Manfred’s eyes are open again, and as he glances around the
room Annette can see a spark of interest there that was missing
earlier. “Last century, people were paying to have their heads frozen
after their death - in hope of reconstruction, later. They got no
civil rights: The law didn’t recognize death as a reversible process.
Now how do we account for it when you guys stop running Bob? Opt out
of the collective borganism? Or maybe opt back in again later?” He
reaches up and rubs his forehead, tiredly. “Sorry, I haven’t been
myself lately.” A crooked, slightly manic grin flickers across his
face. “See, I’ve been telling Gianni for a whole while, we need a new
legal concept of what it is to be a person. One that can cope with
sentient corporations, artificial stupidities, secessionists from
group minds, and reincarnated uploads. The religiously inclined are
having lots of fun with identity issues right now - why aren’t we
posthumanists thinking about these things?”
Annette’s bag bulges: Aineko pokes his head out, sniffs the air,
squeezes out onto the carpet, and begins to groom himself with perfect
disregard for the human bystanders. “Not to mention A-life experiments
who think they’re the real thing,” Manfred adds. “And aliens.”
Annette freezes, staring at him. “Manfred! You’re not supposed to -”
Manfred is watching Alan, who seems to be the most deeply integrated
of the dead venture billionaire’s executors: Even his expression
reminds Annette of meeting Bob Franklin back in Amsterdam, early in
the decade, when Manny’s personal dragon still owned him. “Aliens,”
Alan echoes. An eyebrow twitches. “Would this be the signal SETI
announced, or the, uh, other one? And how long have you known about
them?”
“Gianni has his fingers in a lot of pies,” Manfred comments blandly.
“And we still talk to the lobsters from time to time - you know,
they’re only a couple of light-hours away, right? They told us about
the signals.”
“Er.” Alan’s eyes glaze over for a moment; Annette’s prostheses paint
her a picture of false light spraying from the back of his head, his
entire sensory bandwidth momentarily soaking up a huge peer-to-peer
download from the server dust that wallpapers every room in the
building. Monica looks irritated, taps her fingernails on the back of
her chair. “The signals. Right. Why wasn’t this publicized?”
“The first one was.” Annette’s eyebrows furrow. “We couldn’t exactly
cover it up, everyone with a backyard dish pointed in the right
direction caught it. But most people who’re interested in hearing
about alien contacts already think they drop round on alternate
Tuesdays and Thursdays to administer rectal exams. Most of the rest
think it’s a hoax. Quite a few of the remainder are scratching their
heads and wondering whether it isn’t just a new kind of cosmological
phenomenon that emits a very low entropy signal. Of the six who are
left over, five are trying to get a handle on the message contents,
and the last is convinced it’s a practical joke. And the other signal,
well, that was weak enough that only the deep-space tracking network
caught it.”
Manfred fiddles with the bed control system. “It’s not a practical
joke,” he adds. “But they only captured about sixteen megabits of data
from the first one, maybe double that in the second. There’s quite a
bit of noise, the signals don’t repeat, their length doesn’t appear to
be a prime, there’s no obvious metainformation that describes the
internal format, so there’s no easy way of getting a handle on them.
To make matters worse, pointy-haired management at Arianespace” - he
glances at Annette, as if seeking a response to the naming of her
ex-employers - “decided the best thing to do was to cover up the
second signal and work on it in secret - for competitive advantage,
they say - and as for the first, to pretend it never happened. So
nobody really knows how long it’ll take to figure out whether it’s a
ping from the galactic root domain servers or a pulsar that’s taken to
grinding out the eighteen-quadrillionth digits of pi, or what.”
“But,” Monica glances around, “you can’t be sure.”
“I think it may be sapient,” says Manfred. He finds the right button
at last, and the bed begins to fold itself back into a lounger. Then
he finds the wrong button; the duvet dissolves into viscous turquoise
slime that slurps and gurgles away through a multitude of tiny nozzles
in the headboard. “Bloody aerogel. Um, where was I?” He sits up.
“Sapient network packet?” asks Alan.
“Nope.” Manfred shakes his head, grins. “Should have known you’d read
Vinge … or was it the movie? No, what I think is that there’s only
one logical thing to beam backward and forward out there, and you may
remember I asked you to beam it out about, oh, nine years ago?”
“The lobsters.” Alan’s eyes go blank. “Nine years. Time to Proxima
Centauri and back?”
“About that distance, yes,” says Manfred. “And remember, that’s an
upper bound - it could well have come from somewhere closer. Anyway,
the first SETI signal came from a couple of degrees off and more than
hundred light-years out, but the second signal came from less than
three light-years away. You can see why they didn’t publicize that -
they didn’t want a panic. And no, the signal isn’t a simple echo of
the canned crusty transmission - I think it’s an exchange embassy, but
we haven’t cracked it yet. Now do you see why we have to crowbar the
civil rights issue open again? We need a framework for rights that can
encompass nonhumans, and we need it as fast as possible. Otherwise, if
the neighbors come visiting…”
“Okay,” says Alan, “I’ll have to talk with myselves. Maybe we can
agree something, as long as it’s clear that it’s a provisional stab at
the framework and not a permanent solution?”
Annette snorts. “No solution is final!” Monica catches her eyes and
winks: Annette is startled by the blatant display of dissent within
the syncitium.
“Well,” says Manfred, “I guess that’s all we can ask for?” He looks
hopeful. “Thanks for the hospitality, but I feel the need to lie down
in my own bed for a while. I had to commit a lot to memory while I was
off-line, and I want to record it before I forget who I am,” he adds
pointedly, and Annette breathes a quiet sight of relief.
*
Later that night, a doorbell rings.
“Who’s there?” asks the entryphone.
“Uh, me,” says the man on the steps. He looks a little confused. “Ah’m
Macx. Ah’m here tae see” - the name is on the tip of his tongue -
“someone.”
“Come in.” A solenoid buzzes; he pushes the door open, and it closes
behind him. His metal-shod boots ring on the hard stone floor, and the
cool air smells faintly of unburned jet fuel.
“Ah’m Macx,” he repeats uncertainly, “or Ah wis fer a wee while, an’
it made ma heid hurt. But noo Ah’m me agin, an’ Ah wannae be somebody
else … can ye help?”
*
Later still, a cat sits on a window ledge, watching the interior of a
darkened room from behind the concealment of curtains. The room is
dark to human eyes, but bright to the cat: Moonlight cascades silently
off the walls and furniture, the twisted bedding, the two naked humans
lying curled together in the middle of the bed.
Both the humans are in their thirties: Her close-cropped hair is
beginning to gray, distinguished threads of gunmetal wire threading
it, while his brown mop is not yet showing signs of age. To the cat,
who watches with a variety of unnatural senses, her head glows in the
microwave spectrum with a gentle halo of polarized emissions. The male
shows no such aura: he’s unnaturally natural for this day and age,
although - oddly - he’s wearing spectacles in bed, and the frames
shine similarly. An invisible soup of radiation connects both humans
to items of clothing scattered across the room - clothing that seethes
with unsleeping sentience, dribbling over to their suitcases and hand
luggage and (though it doesn’t enjoy noticing it) the cat’s tail,
which is itself a rather sensitive antenna.
The two humans have just finished making love: They do this less often
than in their first few years, but with more tenderness and expertise
- lengths of shocking pink Hello Kitty bondage tape still hang from
the bedposts, and a lump of programmable memory plastic sits cooling
on the side table. The male is sprawled with his head and upper torso
resting in the crook of the female’s left arm and shoulder. Shifting
visualization to infrared, the cat sees that she is glowing,
capillaries dilating to enhance the blood flow around her throat and
chest.
“I’m getting old,” the male mumbles. “I’m slowing down.”
“Not where it counts,” the female replies, gently squeezing his right
buttock.
“No, I’m sure of it,” he says. “The bits of me that still exist in
this old head - how many types of processor can you name that are
still in use thirty-plus years after they’re born?”
“You’re thinking about the implants again,” she says carefully. The
cat remembers this as a sore point; from being a medical procedure to
help the blind see and the autistic talk, intrathecal implants have
blossomed into a must-have accessory for the now-clade. But the male
is reluctant. “It’s not as risky as it used to be. If they screw up,
there’re neural growth cofactors and cheap replacement stem cells. I’m
sure one of your sponsors can arrange for extra cover.”
“Hush: I’m still thinking about it.” He’s silent for a while. “I
wasn’t myself yesterday. I was someone else. Someone too slow to keep
up. Puts a new perspective on everything: I’ve been afraid of losing
my biological plasticity, of being trapped in an obsolete chunk of
skullware while everything moves on - but how much of me lives outside
my own head these days, anyhow?” One of his external threads generates
an animated glyph and throws it at her mind’s eye; she grins at his
obscure humor. “Cross-training from a new interface is going to be
hard, though.”
“You’ll do it,” she predicts. “You can always get a discreet
prescription for novotrophin-B.” A receptor agonist tailored for
gerontological wards, it stimulates interest in the new: combined with
MDMA, it’s a component of the street cocktail called sensawunda. “That
should keep you focused for long enough to get comfortable.”
“What’s life coming to when I can’t cope with the pace of change?” he
asks the ceiling plaintively.
The cat lashes its tail, irritated by his anthropocentrism.
“You are my futurological storm shield,” she says, jokingly, and moves
her hand to cup his genitals. Most of her current activities are
purely biological, the cat notes: From the irregular sideloads, she’s
using most of her skullware to run ETItalk@home, one of the
distributed cracking engines that is trying to decode the alien
grammar of the message that Manfred suspects is eligible for
citizenship.
Obeying an urge that it can’t articulate, the cat sends out a feeler
to the nearest router. The cybeast has Manfred’s keys; Manfred trusts
Aineko implicitly, which is unwise - his ex-wife tampered with it,
after all, never mind all the kittens it absorbed in its youth.
Tunneling out into the darkness, the cat stalks the Net alone …
“Just think about the people who can’t adapt,” he says. His voice
sounds obscurely worried.
“I try not to.” She shivers. “You are thirty, you are slowing. What
about the young? Are they keeping up, themselves?”
“I have a daughter. She’s about a hundred and sixty million seconds
old. If Pamela would let me message her I could find out …” There
are echoes of old pain in his voice.
“Don’t go there, Manfred. Please.” Despite everything, Manfred hasn’t
let go: Amber is a ligature that permanently binds him to Pamela’s
distant orbit.
In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in
the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it
drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly
encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and
obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the
vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all
the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.
Beyond the distant lobsters, the cat pings an anonymous distributed
network server - peer-to-peer file storage spread holographically
across a million hosts, unerasable, full of secrets and lies that
nobody can afford to suppress. Rants, music, rip-offs of the latest
Bollywood hits: The cat spiders past them all, looking for the final
sample. Grabbing it - a momentary breakup in Manfred’s spectacles the
only symptom for either human to notice - the cat drags its prey home,
sucks it down, and compares it against the data sample Annette’s
exocortex is analysing.
“I’m sorry, my love. I just sometimes feel -” He sighs. “Age is a
process of closing off opportunities behind you. I’m not young enough
anymore - I’ve lost the dynamic optimism.”
The data sample on the pirate server differs from the one Annette’s
implant is processing.
“You’ll get it back,” she reassures him quietly, stroking his side.
“You are still sad from being mugged. This also will pass. You’ll
see.”
“Yeah.” He finally relaxes, dropping back into the reflexive assurance
of his own will. “I’ll get over it, one way or another. Or someone who
remembers being me will …”
In the darkness, Aineko bares teeth in a silent grin. Obeying a deeply
hardwired urge to meddle, he moves a file across, making a copy of the
alien download package Annette has been working on. She’s got a copy
of number two, the sequence the deep-space tracking network received
from close to home, which ESA and the other big combines have been
keeping to themselves. Another deeply buried thread starts up, and
Aineko analyses the package from a perspective no human being has yet
established. Presently a braid of processes running on an abstract
virtual machine asks him a question that cannot be encoded in any
human grammar. Watch and wait, he replies to his passenger. They’ll
figure out what we are sooner or later.