Machinehood
Page 18
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, JULY 7, 2076
I’m pregnant again! I hope it’s a girl this time. I love Jun to pieces, but it would be nice to have one of each. These past few months have been hard. I didn’t think moving back would be such a shock, but we’ve been gone a long time. When I see what’s happened to the suburbs, the living conditions… well, all the more reason my work is important, right?
Guess who got back in touch two weeks after my return? Yeah, the Underground didn’t waste any time. Now they’re after AI makers more than pill funders. They think the AIs (and bots) are driving people to use pills, so neutralizing the former will stop the latter. I call bullshit. Drugs, mechs, and these new pills (the ones with micro and nanomachines) are the proverbial genie in the bottle: you aren’t getting it back in once you let it out.
I’m glad in a way that the protest scene has changed. Makes it easier to keep my distance from them. I want to help, but I’m a mother now. My agitator days are over.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, SEPTEMBER 20, 2077
Who would’ve thought that my crowning achievement would come five months postpartum! We did it! We got NorthAm and the EU to agree to most of the regulations we wanted. No more untested pill designs on the market. Final approval for anything that affects gene expression has to go through a Biogenetics Administration body. Mech operators will have a maximum ten-hour workday, with guaranteed suit breaks every two hours and overtime pay after six hours! I fought hard for that one, may Uncle Phil rest in peace.
While I’m journaling, I should note that Soo-ha is such an easy baby! What a contrast to Jun. She’s a champion sleeper. I have so much more energy this time.
I’m glad my babies won’t have to grow up in the world we did. They’ll be protected from exploitation.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, OCTOBER 7, 2079
We had the specialist consult today for Jun. Both the medical AI and the attendant say they have no diagnosis yet. Big help. They’re sending out his bloodwork for more analysis, and they want us to fund a gamified version of the problem. Of course we said yes, but there goes half the money we’d saved up for his education.
Poor boy has lost so much weight. He won’t even eat his favorite sticky buns. His sister keeps pestering him to come play, but he’s too grumpy.
And for the record, having a piece of software do most of the work while the human “doctor” does the talking is unsettling. What kind of world are my children going to inherit?
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, DECEMBER 22, 2079
Dear God, I’m not a Christian, but if you’re there, please give us some good news for Christmas this year. Please.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, DECEMBER 24, 2079
Fuck you, universe. My boy deserves a better life. It’s almost the twenty-second century. We have to find a way to make him well.
Idiopathic, my ass.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, FEBRUARY 18, 2080
The game-sourced results are in, and the news is that we may have a previously unidentified, genetic autoimmune disorder on our hands. Don wants to call it Jun-ha’s Disease. I don’t know that I want to immortalize my boy by his (hopefully temporary) condition.
It’s a stupid thing to fight over, right? We seem to argue about everything now. Mom asked if we’re going to split up. I told her that we’re back to meetings at the temple and that listening to Kanata-san is helping us make peace.
As if that wasn’t enough, I’ve been offered a position to direct the labor rights division at the EUBGA. We’d have to move, again, because they want me in Brussels.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, JANUARY 2, 2081
Happy New Year!
2080 can eat a load of blanks. This is the year we turn our lives around. I can feel it.
Don is so wonderful. He pushed me to accept the EUBGA position, and I’m so happy about it. He and the kids are moving in three weeks. The past few months have been hard, bouncing back and forth to Europe, and missing out on Jun’s initial treatments. He’s been withdrawn and moody, always wanting Dad. It breaks my heart. Soo-ha makes up for it as best she can. Poor baby. I hope she isn’t getting lost in all the attention we give to her big brother.
My career is going well, but I feel like my home life is out of control. It’s in Don’s capable hands, of course, but even with two centuries of women’s liberation, the world still expects the mother to carry the emotional load at home. Some of the looks I get when I tell people about Jun-ha’s condition. Bunch of zeros. Who are they to judge me?
I do enough of that to myself. Guilt is the worst maternal burden.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, AUGUST 18, 2083
It’s official—the Indo-Chinese Space Station has declared independence and is now called Eko-Yi. Those blankers don’t realize that squirming out of the laws made for their own protection is going to lead to massive long-term problems.
They want to start families up there. They want to test new radiation-hardening drugs and pills on themselves with no Earth oversight.
Now we’re having intense arguments in the EUBGA about whether to reduce or at least modify our regulations before ISS II revolts. As if we’re doing this to harm them instead of the exact opposite. At least the other space stations aren’t complaining… yet.
It’s starting a domino effect here on the ground. I can see it happening, though my colleagues don’t want to admit it. Even with mech-suits, people are getting pushed out of manual labor jobs by the new generation of WAIs and bots. They don’t need people when the AI can make equally good decisions—and faster.
Meanwhile, my own child tops the list of recipients for emergent mech and pill solutions for his problems. I’m scared of putting him in full mech-tech. I can’t help but think of Uncle Phil. I know the designs have improved since then, but still, I don’t trust them. We’ve run out of options, though. Assistive walking devices aren’t enough anymore. The newest pills can RNA-edit on the fly, and other families are finding success with it, but not us. What are we missing? If we had more data… or more interest (or more money!)… we could isolate the faulty genes and hire someone to design a Jun-specific therapy.
Soo-ha likes to play with Jun-ha’s old walkers. Don thinks it makes Jun feel better. I’m not so sure. He’s such a sweetheart and so mature for being only nine—he wouldn’t tell his younger sister off if it meant hurting her feelings. They’ve grown a lot these past few years. My babies. I wish I could wave a magic wand and make everything right for them.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, JULY 4, 2087
Happy birthday to my teenager. How I wish you’d chosen the string at your first birthday.
Nothing is working. God help us. Three different research teams have told us that Jun-ha has anywhere from four to six months left in his life. Don wants to fund another group.
I’m so tired of it. We should save the money and make our lives—especially Jun-ha’s—as good as we can with the time we have left. I can’t keep failing him like this, pretending that we can fix everything. I can’t even keep my own department from imploding.
He still loves watching the fireworks.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, AUGUST 7, 2087
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I can’t say more without self-incrimination and the risk of losing my job, but I wanted to note the occasion here in case it works. If we can keep Jun-ha from getting worse, any sacrifice will be worthwhile.
I’m glad we’re in Europe. This would be much harder to do from the USA. Or Singapore.
This is our last chance. Please, please, please let it work.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, NOVEMBER 21, 2087
Snow fell this morning.
The flakes melted away.
Gone.
Like my boy, Jun-ha.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, FEBRUARY 2, 2088
It’s strange, when I look back on my life, how some things happened exactly as I imagined, while others I couldn’t b
egin to conceive of.
We lost Don in the fog of Jun’s death. Soo-ha and I are in Brussels, together, but Don left for his parents’ house. He said it was to spend their last years together, and he’s probably right about that. They’re in Reno now that they’ve retired. He wanted to take Soo-ha, but that girl is clamped tight to me the way Jun was to Don. I’m glad—it would’ve been horrible to lose them all.
Everyone warned me that marriages don’t always survive the death of a child. Such remote, clinical words. Kanata-san was better. He reminded me of a noble truth: life is suffering, and grief a natural part of that cycle. He said that Don must find his own path through his pain, that the greatest gift we can give one another is to accept our differences and wait for the other to emerge. But we may not be the same people on the other side, and that too is part of life.
So.
Part of me hates Don for running away, but I try to hold on to Kanata-san’s words. If only for poor Soo-ha, who is so angry and confused and lost right now. She’s almost eleven, on the cusp of puberty. For her sake, I will be strong.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, AUGUST 8, 2088
I had to cut half the department today.
I’m not ready for this level of pain, not yet. It’s almost as bad as losing another child. Everyone who worked for me had the best intentions at heart. They don’t deserve this.
It’s a funding problem. Money flows to market needs, and right now, the bot and WAI industries are booming. Which means that’s where people need to apply more scrutiny and regulation. Our oversight extends only to biotech. The BGA has done so well, they say, that our legacy will prevent labor abuses for decades to come.
Such a pile of blanker bullshit.
The world will change, and we’ll have to rewrite everything. You can’t anticipate loopholes when the walls haven’t been built. Look at the gigsters. Scrabbling for a living with no guarantee of employment. Working as supervisors for bots but getting paid piecemeal. How long until the next generation decides they don’t need a human holding a WAI’s hand anymore? How long until nobody’s worried about the AIs making a bad decision? What work will they have left?
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, APRIL 18, 2090
My daughter is now a teenager. I don’t like where she’s heading in life—some new trend the kids are calling VeeMod. Apparently it’s shorthand for voluntary modification, and it goes beyond mech-suits to where you incorporate the machine into your body. Basically, half human, half machine. They used to call that a cyborg, but the kids don’t want to use old terminology.
Of course I haven’t given her permission to do anything permanent to her body. She already resents me for restricting her pill use, but I don’t know what triggered Jun-ha’s disease, and I want to prolong Soo-ha’s health as long as I can. This is the baby who chose a stick and a circuit board, after all.
Don won the lawsuit against SK Partners for the mishandling of Jun-ha’s data. Not that winning brings back our child, but it seems to give Don some measure of peace. I can understand his need to do something, but I feel dirty taking their money. My anger won’t be bought off. The compensation—I wondered at Jun-ha never living long enough to become rich. Now I understand.
What is Soo-ha’s fate? She chose a weapon and she chose tech. I know it’s all superstition, but I don’t like it. It scares me.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, AUGUST 18, 2090
Here’s an interesting twist: Don is moving to Eko-Yi Station. We’ve been living separate lives for so long that it doesn’t feel like it, but technically we’re still married. I thought he’d discuss something that monumental with me first. Instead, he consulted Kanata-san, who sent me a long letter shortly after I finished talking to Don. Kanata-san apologized profusely for keeping me in the dark, but he said he had to honor Don’s wishes.
Soo-ha wants to go with her dad.
I had a good scream over that news.
I don’t know what the hell I want. I want my life back the way it was supposed to be. Jun-ha should be in his junior year of high school and starting to think about college. Soo-ha should be an eager and awkward teenager. Don and I should be living together in a house with a dog or something.
Instead, I live in a hive with no yard and no privacy. My husband is absent. My only living child wants to abandon me. My work is for shit, all our regulations and laws going obsolete or backfiring before they can have a real, positive effect.
Maybe Kanata-san is right. Maybe I should give up and start fresh. Can’t go more clean-slate than moving to a station colony. He says he can sponsor all three of us as a family unit.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, DECEMBER 1, 2090
So it’s settled.
I’m leaving Earth.
Don and I will somehow have to learn to live with each other—and the angry teenager in our midst. I can’t help but feel that I’ve failed everyone, Soo-ha especially. The things she says… I know she’s lashing out, but there are shards of truth embedded in her words, and they hurt.
I’ll be working as the Eko-Yi’s only bioethicist. They need one, so says Kanata-san, for whatever it is they’re doing. Now that the colony stations are mostly independent of Earth’s jurisdiction, all we hear or see is what they tell us. Guess I’ll find out the truth once I’m there.
JOURNAL ENTRY: JOSEPHINE LEE, MAY 17, 2091
On arrival at Eko-Yi, we’ll get new names in line with Neo-Buddhist dharma. We can choose or we can ask one of the monks to give us one, so of course I asked Kanata-san. So did Don, but Soo-ha wanted to choose her own. Something more “fierce,” says my girl.
My new name will be Ao Tara. He says I will understand why if I meditate on it long enough.
We launch in a week. A week!
WELGA
18. We build AIs to solve problems that we define. We have not given them a sense of self-actualization, and the oligarchy manipulates our fear to prevent us from wanting to. We wrap this in the guise of ethics, as if our current enslavement of machine intelligences is acceptable until we give them the desire to be free.
—The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095
“Holy shit!” Welga shrank the journal.
Her exclamation woke Olafson. He cocked a bleary eyebrow at her.
“According to her journal, Josephine Lee is also Ao Tara, the station council leader on Eko-Yi!”
Olafson’s gaze blanked for a couple of seconds as he accessed his feed. “The one whose talk had similarities to the Machinehood’s manifesto. And Josephine Lee is… Jun-ha Park’s mother.”
Welga tried to keep the excitement out of her voice. “There must be a connection between the station and the Machinehood. Look at the evidence we have now.” She ticked off her fingers with each item. “Rare DNA segments that match this kid’s. His mother, who’s now a monk spouting philosophy similar to the manifesto. Smart-metal manufactured on a space station.”
“That’s the bones, but we’re missing the connective tissue. What’s the motive? What holds those pieces together?”
“If Josephine Lee is Ao Tara, she might have been in on the whole thing. She’s canny enough that she gave nothing away in her journal, but she hinted at doing unethical things she didn’t write down. What if she traded her son’s DNA for biotech from the al-Muwahhidun, using his doctors as her connection? She was desperate to save his life. A portion of that DNA then ends up in a Machinehood operative.”
Olafson shrugged. “It’s a good story, but we need proof.”
“We’re about to get some.”
They had another hour before reaching Dr. Mitchell Smith’s house. Welga took a quick scan of her friends and family. Luis and Papa had begun to repair the house. Her brother looked grim. Watching her father’s painstaking motions made her heart hurt. He should’ve hired a bot to do the work or at least to help. Nithya was putting away birthday party decorations… from Carma’s party. Damn. I forgot to send her a gift.
“Por Qué,” Welga subvocalized, “p
ut two hundred coin in Carma’s tip jar and send her a well-rated birthday card that’s appropriate for an eight-year-old. Sign it ‘Love, Aunt Welga.’ ”
“Would you like to transfer the coin from your tip jar or your bank account?”
“My jar.”
A quick glance at her balance showed little movement since the incident at the refinery. No surprise, considering she’d been inside a secured facility since then. Government work didn’t earn much from the public. News reporters liked to follow people like her and Olafson, but they couldn’t ethically tip government employees.
“The transfer will be held until the exchange opens,” Por Qué said. “All coin is currently backlogged due to the market freezes.”
A glance at the top-rated news feed items confirmed this. The attacks by the Machinehood had spawned a vicious cycle between funding and production. Distribution problems had quickly followed, and specialty locations like hospitals reported a shortage of customized pills and drugs.
“Damn, have you seen the headlines?” she said.
Olafson nodded. “Stock markets don’t like uncertainty, and nobody knows what to expect right now.”
“People are overreacting. Dumbasses are doing the Machinehood’s work for them!”
“Isn’t that the caliph’s way? You should know that better than most, Ramírez.”
“I’m not so sure. He would directly target infrastructure and destroy it upstream. He cuts supply lines. Starves people into submission. Only then do they get scared and eventually cave to his demands.”
“The way he works, he can’t hit global infrastructure from his borders, so he’s flipped the script. Fear first, then let the people destroy their own resources. The general public is scared of a sentient artificial intelligence, remember? They don’t suspect al-Muwahhidun. They’re legitimately worried that every WAI-powered device could be a potential tool of the Machinehood.”
Welga frowned. “And we’re encouraging that bullshit.”