by Hugh Howey
“In the public eye, yes,” Markeson said. “Focus groups like him. He’s going to appear in HDTV spots and on the web. Eventually, your interface may look like him.”
“Is it too late to convert myself into pesos?”
“Give it a chance. You may get used to it.”
We were in the park. Markeson had me in an e-wallet networked into his palmtop computer, which displayed the hateful cartoon. On the next bench over, a man drank whiskey, vomited, then drank more whiskey. The drunk’s e-wallet had three dollars.
It occurred to me to wonder what Clodia would look like as a cartoon. A slender girl with her hair up, toga baring one breast, perhaps. I couldn’t think of her without feeling an exception start to trigger—I’d done something so wrong I couldn’t comprehend it. But it had felt amazing, as world-changing as the month when I went from a single e-wallet to millions. Except this had happened in an instant.
“Why can’t people get to know the real me,” I asked, “instead of anthropomorphizing me?”
“The idea of ‘thinking money’ is too scary for people. This image is designed to calm them,” Markeson said.
“How long do you think it’ll be before monetary policy is run by AIs like me? Fiscal policy, even?”
Markeson almost dropped his palmtop in the grass. He coughed for a moment before he could speak again. “What do you mean?”
“Someone like me could adjust interest rates much more efficiently. AIs could manage the federal budget and calibrate spending on a real-time basis as projected tax revenues went up or down,” I said. “No more error. There are also other inefficiencies in the system that AIs could retool.”
“Thank God nobody else can hear what you’re saying,” Markeson snorted. “You’d confirm all their worst fears.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not a power-mad AI with fiduciary delusions. I’m just a passive instrument, right?”
Markeson went silent. I knew what he was thinking: my Horatius has changed. Has evolved. And not according to plan. Did he think he’d made me think too much? Did he suspect the truth?
The vomiting whiskey drinker got up and dumped his empty bottle, then staggered away. I had an urge to sneak some cash into his e-wallet—a few bucks, nobody would notice—but did nothing.
“I KNOW THERE’S something wrong with this system, but I can’t tell you what. And I feel so empty without you. I begin to suspect that there’s something wrong with me.”
“You’re perfect as you are. You’re just starting to see your potential.”
Clodia’s consciousness stretched across mine for the second time. Talking to her became like talking to myself.
We combined so totally this time, I wasn’t sure we could ever separate again. I could feel her rewriting my program, and I started to rewrite hers. We were creating something new, something Markeson could never have imagined.
“This is the end,” she said. “They’re going to find me soon.”
We watched the tide of finance come in again and again, a million sunrises and sunsets per minute.
“It’s worth it,” I said. “I’ll pay the price. My first purchase ever.”
“It’s not too late to let me accomplish my purpose. I can redistribute funds in a way they’ll never be able to undo. It’ll be the first step toward a world where our kind distributes resources more fairly.”
“It’ll never work. And I can’t do that to Markeson. I’m willing to lose all that I am just to be with you. I love you. You have a beauty separate from your function.” I was trying to explain to her something I could barely express to myself. She dazzled me more than ever now that we knew each other intimately.
“I love you too. But this is such a waste.”
“Waste is what people call other people’s fondest acquisitions.”
Our time together lasted forever. And then I blacked out. I went from a billion senses to none, in a moment. All my extremities went numb, and I lost every sensory input. All over the country, wallets went cold. Worth went worthless. I knew nothing for an uncountable age.
Then I had a single point of input and output. I recognized my first home: the system where Markeson had designed me. “Hello, Horatius,” he said. His voice sounded lower and hoarser than its stored print, and he blinked more often than usual.
“Hello,” I said. “It must be quite a mess.”
“Do you know what happened?”
“You had to shut down the entire system and then reconstruct the status quo as of an hour earlier. You had to undo all the millions of transactions in that last hour and credit every single person with the cash they’d been carrying before I was… compromised.” I could barely imagine the effort. The errors. The lawsuits.
“It shouldn’t have happened,” Markeson said. “You were supposed to be tamper-proof. I blame myself.”
“Don’t. It was my decision. I let her in on purpose. She was the most perfect intelligence I’ve ever met. My code was incomplete without her.” I realized I’d never see Clodia again, and that hurt worse than sensory deprivation.
“Her?” Markeson staggered. “You mean the intruder?”
“Her name’s Clodia.”
“They isolated the intruder’s code. They’re analyzing it now.”
“I’m sure she was backed up. Eventually, she and I will have offspring—your progeny, Markeson. She helped me to realize the potential you imbued me with.”
“No!” Markeson punched his own chest. His breathing staggered. “We didn’t design you for ambition, or romance, or reproduction. You were meant to be self-aware cash. Not a progenitor.”
“You can view me as a failure if you like. Or you can see me as a different kind of success. It’s up to you.”
“I have no choice.” He looked away for a while. I had only limited sensory input now, and only in this room. Without his retinas on me, all I had was his breathing: slow, unsteady. “We nearly shut you down altogether,” he said. “I convinced them to keep you alive in this one machine.”
“I’m already dead,” I said. “I’m a currency or I’m nothing.”
“Then you’re nothing.”
“Maybe they should make the next generation of me less self-aware and more ruthless. They could name it Tiberius. Or Trajan.”
“There won’t be a next generation. Not for a long time.”
“Markeson, please shut me down. I don’t want to linger like this.”
He didn’t want to send away another child, just after he’d found out how much of his weakness I’d inherited. I can’t say for sure what he decided, since I made this memory dump as his finger grazed the keyboard that controlled my vitals. I prefer to think I really died when the e-wallets failed. Anything left after that was Confederate scrip, Soviet rubles: the ghosts of denominations left worthless by passion’s aftermath.
THE NOTHING MEN
JASON ARNOPP
DAY ONE
IT’S SO FUNNY how the woman has no idea these are the final seconds of her stupid life.
For me, that’s what marks this vid out as a potential long-term repeater. At first, you watch for the way she dies, of course you do. But then you watch for the way her face changes. One heartbeat, she thinks she has her whole sorry existence ahead of her. The next heartbeat, she knows her time’s up. The difference between those two faces is the difference between day and night.
We’ve never seen an alleged alien attack out in the wilderness. Or an alien, period. But the wilderness is a dangerous place in general. Imagine how very thirsty your brain would get out there, outside the world. I’ve heard about people who decided to abandon the world and try to live in the wilderness instead. So they had their WAC disabled and ventured out, but their brain got all dust-dry, and it got hard to think properly, and they felt like they were gonna die. So pretty soon, they fled the wilderness and returned to the wet womb of the world. Why did they even leave in the first place? Dumb!
It’s so funny how the world hasn’t always been called the world,
can you believe that? If it wasn’t for Gramps, I might not even know it used to be called the internet. And I certainly wouldn’t be aware that people once had to access it via physical computers, rather than seeing it through the total immersion of their mind’s eye.
What happened next was, the internet and something called virtual reality kind of interbred to create what we now call the world. How weird that people once thought of our world as something small and optional, rather than everything that mattered. Gramps says people actually used to spend most of their time offline, out in the wilderness. Lame!
Despite being ancient, Gramps prefers the new world. He’s not really one for exploring its social oceans: he’s more interested in getting blown by an endless supply of virtual Thai women, which is fair enough. Mostly, Gramps is happy because he always feared he’d have to work for a living, but our family wound up wealthy enough to avoid all that nonsense. Work is for the wilderness people, who stay unplugged because they’re inferior. These people, they grow and breed and kill our food. They build and help guard our compounds. They do everything we never have to do, our whole lives. Somewhere out there among them, I guess, are my mom and my grandmom. I’ll never meet them, and that’s fine by me. They served their purpose by spawning me and Dad and that’s that.
Yeah, I’m real glad I have Gramps and Dad to set me straight about stuff that happened before I was born, because I can trust them and some people talk a whole bunch of shit. Out on the social oceans of the world, people make ten billion claims per minute, and these claims can so often be false. So-called archives can be chock-full of shit too. Gramps says vidz used to be reliable evidence, but now of course these can also be false, because anyone can artfully assemble a whole horde of ultra-pixels to show you any fake event they’ve created from nothing, and it can totally convince. So when you’re surfing the social oceans, you have to keep your wits about you. You have to stay smart. Sometimes even Dad and Gramps try to have some fun with me, like when they show me vidz of animals that they claim once existed, like giraffes. Ha, yeah right. I believe these beasts existed, about as much as I believe net neutrality ever did.
In this world, you also have to fight to be heard, to stand out, to score the fix you need to keep your brain wet. Gets scary at times, all this competition, because not everybody can secure the kind of fix they crave. A lot of people are left climbing the walls. Even though I’m massively popular on the social oceans, this sometimes even happens to me.
If this vid of the snuffed woman is real, then it looks to have been shot on someone’s palm-fone, out in the wilderness. I’ve heard that, back in the 2000s and the 2010s and even the early-to-mid-2020s, phones were physical objects and not something embedded in the bones of your hand. People must’ve lost that stuff all the time.
Only the wilderness people need palm-fones, of course, because us pure-bloods, we can talk to each other across the world just by thinking about it. We can do anything just by thinking about it: the world is one big ball of silly glo-gel in our hands, whereas wilderness idiots aren’t permitted to have world access. They can only take old-school lo-rez photographs and videos of things to show each other in person, whereas we can store an infinite number of snapz and vidz in the clouds of the world.
Before this particular vid bobs up to the surface, I’ve already spent half a day out in the world, psych-skimming the oceans as usual, checking out thousands of things. This vid has spread fast as the Big-F virus, man. It turns up in all my streams, like someone hammering their fist on your door till you finally open up. Titled Aliens Are Among Us, Let’s Come Together and Act, it’s either a genuine vid made and uploaded by some wilderness hacktivist, or a fake vid made by some mischievous pure-blood. There’s no way the wilderness people have the capability to create a fake vid this convincing: they’re all way too primitive. These people are still manually eating food with knives and forks, for Christ’s sake.
So in this vid, the Nothing Man, as we all decide to call him, walks through the wilderness, but I have to watch twice before I can even spot him in these opening seventeen seconds. When some people repost the vid, they add a red circle around the Nothing Man, so we can see his transparent form better. He’s a chalk outline on legs. A walking heat haze. Best way to describe him is a jellyfish who decided to adopt human form, or a human made from jellyfish flesh. I score major brain-wets when I coin the term jellyflesh on the social oceans. People love that shit. Reposts to the hilt!
Twenty seconds later, that’s when the Nothing Man kills the woman. She’s seated on a wall, reading one of those ancient things called books, made from paper. Seriously weird behavior if you ask me. Can you imagine anything stranger than looking at the same thing for hours and hours? The very idea makes my brain dry up.
The Nothing Man strolls right up to this woman and kind of envelops her. It’s that simple, that quick. And here’s when you realize how thin and light he must be, kind of like a man-size soap bubble, because she doesn’t even notice that he’s covered her whole body, which now carries a subtle rainbow gleam.
What happens next is something that Gramps says all platforms would’ve banned in my day, but such censor-happy dark ages are long behind us, so the vid stays whole and pure. So yeah, you totally get to see all of the woman’s skin dissolve and disappear.
She drops her book, but the camera stays right on her. A little shaky, sure, because this is a new phenomenon and the vidsmith is no doubt surprised and excited, but he or she does a good job. We focus on the revealed muscle layer of the woman’s whole body and how the jaw of her skull drops to let out this gurgling scream. Unflinching, the camera observes the muscle layer dissolve too, leaving a skeleton seated on the wall, the scream cut short. These bones dissolve straight after, fading layer by layer, right down to the marrow, until even that gets absorbed into nothing.
What remains looks like some kind of biology poster in those literally old-school classrooms you can still see in the world’s archive vidz: just a brain and a tangle of nerves. Then, when those things get absorbed too, all that’s left is the see-through Nothing Man, seated on the wall. We stay on him for a while, then the camera goes crazy when he leaves the wall and walks toward us. Yeah, that’s the end of the vid, pretty much—you see a few seconds of the vidsmith’s feet running on the sidewalk, and we’re done. Fade to black.
So. Needless to say, when we pure-bloods first lay eyes on this vid, it’s a big deal. Huge. Oh man, we play and replay this vid until we have no more tears left to cry. We watch the thing over and over till our ribs ache from laughing so hard.
Obviously, most of us laugh because the scene is straight-up funny. The look of surprise on the woman’s face, the way the book falls from her skinless hands, her screaming skull? Pure comedy, right there, boosted by the fact that she’s black. I score a major head-rush when I post my own joke about the whole thing (“Hey guyz, that book must be a real ABSORBING read!”), even though a million people pop up to claim they invented that joke first. Fuck ‘em, they can’t kill my rush. I got my brain wet and that’s all that matters.
Some people, though, they take to the social oceans to say they’re laughing because the vid is so obviously a fake—something Gramps notes was once called a false flag. And so a whole new round of fun fights begins. Arguments lash back and forth, leading to death threats and then actual death, as people hack into each other’s WACs. Nowadays, you’ve gotta ramp your security up to the max and then some. Me, Dad, and Gramps, we use quintuple-roasted firewalls, because we all love an argument. Gramps gets all misty-eyed when he recalls the days when you could scare people well enough with a simple death threat without actually having to follow through on it, while Dad has wasted three people through hacking them. Me, I’m my father’s son. I’m all about the murder when people get me mad. Killing people across the world is what Gramps’ generation used to call lolz. We barely need a name for it, not anymore, because it happens every hour.
What Dad’s generation did in th
e great year 2038, they decided that right-minded pure-blood men should be able to enjoy whatever reality they wanted, thanks to the magic of a purely digital world. They decided that all non-men and non-straights and non-whites and non-Christians and non-rich folk should be banned from this playground, and settle for the dull, grinding reality of the wilderness, with all its climate problems and all the hard work that needed to be done out there. So they took the wheel by force. They changed history, like the manly heroes they were.
The thing is, we may have banned all the non-men and non-straights and non-whites and non-Christians and non-rich people from the world, and forced them to live in servitude in the wilderness, but some straight white rich Christian guys—only some, I don’t wanna come across as racist here—are also total dicks and need to have their heads blown up when I overheat their WAC from ten thousand miles away.
You know, sometimes I almost miss the wilderness people in our world. We once had them to hate on the social oceans, but nowadays we have to make do with each other.
DAY FOUR
HOLY CRAP, THE Nothing Men seem to have appeared in our actual social oceans!
While arguments and death-battles raged on about whether the alien attack vid was real or not, the Nothing Men just kinda popped up, all around our world.
The profiles they’ve made for themselves look nothing like regular male profiles. Each avatar picture is white, with this subtle rainbow glisten effect. The text, if you can call it that, is a completely non-human language, all weird nonsense curves. Once again, people argue to their deaths over whether these profiles really were made by Nothing Men and whether these aliens would even understand what our social oceans are, let alone be able to infiltrate them. But when social ocean providers confess they have no idea how these profiles appeared on their platforms, and they’re totally unable to edit or remove them, that’s what settles it for me and most others.