A tone sounded through the trees, rich, melodic, but obviously not to be ignored. Both aliens moved quickly up the slope.
The human pair stood looking after them until long after they were gone from sight. Finally Sara, shivering in the gathering dark, turned toward home, touching Jason’s arm as she passed. Jason crouched down and waited for Shep to come to him, petted him, and gave him a treat from his pocket. Then he removed his belt to leash the dog and followed Sara down the path.
At the cabin he dropped the scythe beside the wall and took Sara’s hand as they continued in silence down the darkening path.
“You think we ought to tell someone?” she asked at last.
He looked at her, puzzled. “Like who?”
“I don’t know. A scientist maybe. Someone who knows about aliens from other stars.”
He gave a doubtful one-shoulder shrug.
Sara persisted. “Or the sheriff?”
He laughed. “That fool? We’d have . . .” He stopped and turned to face her, the laugh turned to concern. “We’d have a bloodbath up here, Sara.”
They walked on in silence. Then Sara squeezed his hand.
“What was it that changed your mind?”
“You mean me and my trusty scythe?” He shook his head. “Not sure I know. They didn’t attack, for one thing. And they just seemed so . . . decent.”
It was full dark when they reached the barn. Jason stopped there as usual, gazing upward.
“Which one do you suppose they came from?” he asked suddenly.
“Which what?” She had thought he was studying the old oak, its bare branches silvered in the light of a quarter moon. But he was looking beyond it.
“Which one of all those stars?”
She leaned on his shoulder, looking up. The sky felt different, with all those eyes up there, looking back. “Sure would be hard to say.”
His arms closed around her, his bristly cheek easy against her face.
“Just think, Sara. People out there, among the stars.”
“People?”
“Yeah. You know. People. Who can think.”
She smiled in the darkness. “Oh.”
He shivered a little. “Must be millions of ’em too. Up our hillside or . . . it doesn’t matter where. They sure are out there, aren’t they?”
“I’ve always thought they might be,” she said. “But I never thought of them coming here.”
Jason followed Sara and Shep through the gate, closed it, and leaned on the weathered post, his worn face thoughtful in the moonlight.
“Sara, you and I—not all our kind are like us, are they?”
“No.”
“So, all those folks out there, you suppose they’re all as good as these?”
Sara opened her mouth but could not answer.
With thanks to Robert Frost, whose poem by the same title told of a different meeting with strangeness on a mountainside in New England.
Copyright © 2011 Paula S. Jordan
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SHORT STORIES
Blessed Are the Bleak
Edward M. Lerner
The meek did not inherit the Earth.
Neither did the just, the charitable, the brave, nor even—as I might have expected, considering—the smartest.
I admit I am none of those things. It wouldn’t have mattered. Anyone who cares to eat, to have shelter against the elements, cannot survive on the scant resources sufficient unto a Virt.
And that is why, knees knocking and heart pounding, I come to stand on the brink of an abyss.
Preparing to jump.
This isn’t the life I signed up for.
I got computers. I lived computers. My house and appliances more or less ran themselves. My car drove itself, navigated itself, parked itself. I spent my commute on the net, and my workday—then surfed, IMed, and tweeted yet more once I got back home. I owned an eighty-eight-inch holovision, often found my options wanting, and did a fair amount of virtual-reality gaming.
I should have seen this coming.
Not that many years ago, I was just another tiny cog in a really huge machine. Sure, the world was changing, faster and faster every year. I’d have admitted that. But some things were constant. Death. Taxes. More and more money expended in the futile effort to put off death. Healthcare was a quarter of the economy and still rising. What position could be more secure than something implementing cost controls in the healthcare industry? None, surely.
Except the situation I fell into: a civil-service slot when healthcare got nationalized. At Universal Care. The big UC.
Just don’t get caught by management pronouncing that “yuck.”
I brace myself against the gusts that threaten to send me, unprepared, over the cliff. Whipped by the frigid wind, my cape flutters behind me.
It’s not truly cold, I know. Somehow it feels cold. The chill breath of mortality.
Seabirds circle overhead, piping mournfully. The air has a salt tang and a bit of fishy smell through the nose plugs of my headset. The gear wouldn’t be of much use if the pickups blocked sensation. Anything I fail to see or hear or smell or feel, the Virts won’t . . .
Is sense the right word? Thankfully, I don’t know. Trying not to think about it, I’m unavoidably aware of a zillion tiny prickles from the microelectrodes of my snug-fitting helmet’s neural interface. My scalp is suddenly crawling. . . .
Does that show up on the recording? Maybe, like my fear, it’s part of the experience.
Far below, the ocean roars. The surf crashes. Craning my neck, I peer down. My goggles superimpose an irregular outline over the crashing waves. The thin, red line marks the supposedly safe landing zone: between boulders and where the water is deep enough—barring an untimely trough—that I might not pound myself like a tent stake into the sea-bottom muck.
Another day, another dollar.
Maybe you’ve seen me online. In more than one virtual world, I was the Caped Avenger: fast with a sword, faster with a healing spell. With one tool or the other, I succored the weak and protected the blameless. I undertook noble quests. I meted out justice. In hindsight, I was using VR to balance a cosmic scale.
Because with each passing day my job, more than anything else, involved implementing new ways to say “no.”
And as I sought, in vain, for relief, some of the newest players got good. Damned good. Impossibly good. Turns out they were more virtual than me. Uploads, they called themselves: ascended to a better place. Upchucks, one of my gamer friends called them: Some things got lost in the translation.
But one thing I have to admit about Virts—they were masters of the games. You could say they had been reborn to them.
I should have seen this coming.
Don’t blame me for the waiting lines for care. Or for disallowing treatments as medically unnecessary, or experimental, or off-label, or “too risky” given the age of the patient. Or for . . . whatever policy stymied you. I only maintained the software that made it easy to do those things. And when “queue management” failed to reconcile an aging population with a shrinking work force, it was suggested to me that a bit of electronic misfiling might help. Most people would wait for a while before following up. Or forget. Or give up. Or die.
You can blame me for being an enabler.
And so later and later into the evenings the Caped Avenger did his best to do virtual good. At least enough good so that afterward I might sleep.
Only the Virts, more of them playing by the day, made doing good harder and harder. Virts were mean. I didn’t understand their problem. Would they have been happier checked out altogether?
I should have seen this coming.
The more people become Virts, the faster the economy deflates. Implodes. Few people actually make anything anymore. Mostly they shuffle information in and among computers.
I’m damned good at that.
But hardly as fast as someone already in the
computer. And when your room-and-board budget only has to cover a bit of silicon and a trickle of electricity, you can underbid anyone who is still flesh and blood.
And the little work that still requires hands? Every new Virt means a bit less need for farmers, or construction workers, or—you name the trade. More than enough people who know those tasks compete for ever fewer jobs. Dilettantes need never apply.
Which leaves . . . ?
I turn my head, trying to psych out the motion of the waves, the probable undertow, the hazards of flotsam and jetsam and sharks. The red outline marking my target shifts as I move my head, but as for any other dangers my headset gives no clues.
You Virts will have your fun.
I was without a clue when Reggie hobbled into my office that day and plunked his e-reader on my desk. It wasn’t only the hesitant gait: he looked prematurely old. He had some rare disorder, one of the orphan diseases, a condition he didn’t discuss. Maybe if I had understood that his prognosis was all downhill. Or that the only possible treatment was personalized gene therapy, very expensive, for which the UC waiting line was out the wazoo. Maybe.
But he was just . . . Reggie.
“Hi, Malcolm,” Reggie said.
“Morning,” I replied. “What’s up?”
“Good choice of words,” Reggie said. “Uploads fix everything.”
The odd statement brought to mind film cameras. They still existed, not that it was easy to find the film. The people who used them—the people who inexplicably thought their antiques were the norm, to be fussily distinguished from digital cameras—were our most expensive clients. Fixing was the magical, near-medieval process of rendering permanent an image from film. Chiseling the image, if not quite into stone, in silver halide.
Synapses are strange and wondrous things. I didn’t get uploading them.
“Have a seat,” I told Reggie. “I’ll bite. What, exactly, do uploads fix?”
“Budgets,” he said. He swiveled a guest chair and settled, legs casually astraddle, elbows folded across the thinly upholstered back. Smug as hell about something. “Fixes UC’s budget forever.”
Reggie was a political junkie, an amateur policy wonk, who refused to get that not everyone was. But Reggie was also our office’s lead sys admin. If you’ve never programmed for a living, that title won’t mean much to you. Think of him as the office manager, the boss’s secretary, or that guy in Accounting who has to sign off on your expense reports. Someone on whose bad side it’s most unpleasant to be.
“Fixes how?” I asked.
He tapped something on his e-reader, and a headline popped up: AG Amicus Curiae in Radowitz.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I understood one word of that headline. The preposition.
“Friend of the court. The attorney general is testifying today at the Supreme Court.”
Okay, that left only one word to explain. “Radowitz?”
“Bazillionaire hedge-fund manager. Got himself a terminal case of H5N1. Put his money into a trust before he went. The son is the trust’s beneficiary, and he’s suing to take control. Technically, the case is Radowitz v. Radowitz Trust.”
H5N1: dog flu. An unpleasant way to go, but all too common and surely not Reggie’s point. I wondered how much money had to be at issue before an estate dispute percolated up to the Supreme Court.
“Uh-huh,” I said again.
Reggie laughed. “Radowitz, Sr. became a Virt.”
The fog began to lift. “So Senior, uploaded, still controls the trust.”
Reggie nodded. “Make the trust pay out, and the attorney managing the trust for Senior loses a very cushy job.”
A four-wheeled dolly, one wheel clattering, wobbled past my open door. More office furniture for the ever-growing empire that was Universal Care.
“And uploading fixes something,” I said dubiously. For Junior or Senior? I had no idea.
* * *
As I shiver in the wind and cold spray—and a bit, too, from the rush of oppressive memories—two quick clicks sound in my headset earphones. “We’re not paying to watch you stand.”
Virts, among their many deficiencies, have no patience. But maybe if my brain had been disassembled synapse by synapse for readout, I’d be testy too.
What the hell does it matter? However long I take to work up my nerve, the delay, like those two clicks, like the nag, will be edited out. I say, “I’m waiting for the gusts to let up a bit.”
Life would be much simpler if I wasn’t naturally healthy.
If Radowitz, Sr. was still alive, his bazillions remained his. The money would stay in his trust, and Junior would wait forever for the wealth over which he salivated. And the Feds would not get their cut.
I quoted my mom, quoting some senator from her youth. “A billion here, and a billion there, and soon you’re talking real money. No wonder the AG is there. Estate tax.”
Reggie smiled crookedly. “What’s a billion compared to healthcare? Peanuts. We’re talking precedent here. Watch and learn.”
He had CNN streaming in a window on his e-reader, and shushed my meandering speculations when the AG appeared on the steps of the Supreme Court to give her statement. She said, “Is a person less a person for wearing glasses? Having a hip replaced? How about one of our fine young men and women in uniform, sent home without a limb to be fitted for a prosthetic? The measure of a man or woman is not what fraction of their body is ‘natural.’”
Lawyers will argue anything, I thought.
I tried again. “Why are we—”
“Just watch,” Reggie said.
We watched. I fidgeted with a stapler as I tried to parse Reggie’s interests. (Don’t ask why I had a stapler, but no desk could be without one.) If the Supremes ruled that a Virt was alive . . .
“Are you saying uploading will become . . . a medical procedure?”
Reggie nodded. “Readout costs nothing compared to bypass surgery, or hip replacements, or . . . choose your poison.”
Poison: That’s what, at Yuck, we called chemo. And radiation. And a nice, personalized retrovirus cocktail. That last one was on Reggie’s mind, and I had no idea.
I knew no Virts personally, but the VR games had become overrun with them. Shadows of former people. Mean shadows.
Bored shadows?
“Okay,” I said, “readout is cheap. So what? Who would choose uploading over, say, a hip replacement? You upload when you have to.”
“Choose?” Reggie smirked. “Yuck doesn’t let people choose their course of treatment. You accept the recommended treatment, or you’re on your own. And the frosting on the cake: After uploading, a Virt never incurs another medical cost.”
“Why are you so into this?” I finally thought to ask.
“Did I not mention? The government siding with Senior wasn’t the AG’s idea; it was at the UC’s recommendation. Nor was it the brainstorm of some Yuck High Muckety-Muck, either.
“Not to be modest”—Reggie buffed the nails of one hand on his shirt—“I suggested it.”
Maybe Virts are alive. So the Supremes have ruled, and so they gave us our first real shove down the Teflon slope.
Suppose the Supremes are right. Then Normals and Virts are at war! And for a mess of retroviruses—rather than upload himself—Reggie sold out his own kind.
Seniors voted more than any other demographic. That led to untouchable entitlements and almost to national bankruptcy—until Radowitz v. Radowitz Trust. Now Virts vote, too, and they can’t imagine the government spending too much on VR. Their “homes” are many-times fault-tolerant and widely distributed.
And still a bargain compared to medical care.
As Universal Care morphed into Universal Computing, I agonized. The Virts were taking over—everything. Nothing short of Armageddon could physically stop the process.
Could I destroy enough copies to make a difference? No. Could I plant a sufficiently effective virus or a worm? I looked and looked and never found a way.
Could I do anything
? The conundrum kept me sleepless every night, got me moving every morning— Until the day I found out I had missed my chance.
Yuck had laid me off. Henceforth, for a pittance, a Virt would be doing my job.
* * *
The wind died. Trying to ignore the omen, I leap.
Seventy feet. The math is simple: a hair over two seconds.
The waves rise up to swat me. Math be damned, they take their time. Long enough for my life to flash before my eyes. Long enough to think:
—The meek have not inherited the Earth. The mean did.
—Given my deeds as a cog within Yuck, I am little better than they.
—Maybe no better.
—That my cape is a stupid affectation.
—How ironic it is that Reggie, after the Faustian bargain by which he got proper treatment for his illness, was flattened by a wayward bus. Smashed, even, beyond uploading.
—As, quite possibly, I am about to be flattened.
And finally, as the surface rushes toward me, to think: This is my life henceforth. One spectacular act of daring—of choreographed insanity—after another, until my luck runs out. Every merely reckless and painful entertainment has been recorded already. I’ve looked.
And so, here I am.
Waves lunge at me. Massive, jagged rocks stare hungrily at me through the spray. The air buffets me and the red outline of my target drifts.
This is my life. Unless . . .
I had never found a way to plant a suitable virus. But what about a meme?
I twist and stretch my body to alter my wind resistance. To swerve outside the boundary. Thinking dark—honest—thoughts about what we all, Virts and Normals alike, have become.
There is an instant of excruciating pain—
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