by Stanley Bing
“Give in to it, son,” said a voice very, very far away from him. “Let it in.”
Gene screamed then, because the pain both physical and spiritual was so great. There are screams where you still exist while screaming, and there are those in which you turn into nothing but the scream. Gene was all scream.
In the short, square structure across the town from Building Eight, Livia’s head exploded with an urgent incoming message. She had been pacing back and forth in the apartment, waiting for word of Gene, and becoming increasingly frantic when there was none. Bronwyn had told her that all moving pieces were converging around him. She didn’t want to tell Liv what that convergence might mean. She barely knew herself.
Liv was scared. How did things get so serious so fast? She and Bronwyn had met during the long weekends at the Peaceable Kingdom up north, listening to Master Tim talk about the new society they would have to build out of the ashes of this one. She was aware that Bronny had spoken to Bob about this vision of the future, too, but that he considered her a crackpot and treated her with the polite disdain that men still maintained when dealing with women—especially younger women who expressed political ideas. Still, Bronwyn was in a position of strength here. Bob liked her a lot; that they could see. And along with the condescension, the mansplaining, and manterrupting she had to endure about stuff she already knew, they also were aware that, as evolved as they all had become, men still thought primarily with their little heads instead of their big ones.
The good news was that Bob was coming along. It might take a bit longer than she might have liked, but Bob was, after all, a genius, and, as Tim had explained, his command of all available and developing tech was key to the plan. Tim’s plan: the one that would make the planet habitable again for people who didn’t want antennas sticking out of their heads.
So Bronwyn got with Bob’s program, even though a lot of what she had to do made her sick. She had been tasked with the job of getting Gene’s brain up and working so it could serve its function later. That had taken some doing. The first iterations of the printed body had been impressive. It worked! They had a person! But after a little while, each had been unsuitable in one way or another. One couldn’t stop talking. Another proved to be unacceptably horny and had to be dismantled almost immediately. Versions three and four had physical problems and died horribly within weeks of their creation. Gene was version five. He was pretty much perfect physically, but mentally, his consciousness kept reasserting itself and getting in the way. A certain amount of this mindfulness was, according to Bob, a necessary part of the process, but too much of it would stymie what he had in mind. They had to get the balance of mental activity and emptiness just right.
As part of her job to jump-start this version, Bronwyn decided to introduce Gene to some friends of hers in a variety of benign social situations. One of these taught school to both biological children and, upon occasion, synths in need of training. This was Livia. The two had met during weekends at the Kingdom, so Bronwyn knew she was good people. Unfortunately, during this process, Liv had taken a genuine liking to Bob’s creation. Gene was nice, with a straight-forward manner born of sheer cluelessness and a very healthy appreciation for the simple things in life, including food and sex. Each time they rebooted him, however, he forgot all about his prior short-term experience base, and they had to get to know each other again. Maybe that was part of the attraction. Plus, each newly programmed Gene seemed to like Liv as much as the prior one had. So they kept getting into each other over and over again.
Bob didn’t know about that part. There were some things he didn’t need to know, as far as Bronwyn was concerned. He was busy with the execution of his own mysterious master plan anyway, the details of which he felt no compulsion to mention to her. She was also very aware that, although he was a pretty good guy in a lot of ways, Bob lacked a certain moral compass. She would have to keep an eye on Gene. And as good people do, she lied to herself; told herself that the big day for which they were preparing Gene would never really come. But now that day was here. She would have to play her role. The least she could do, however, was call Liv. She waited for an opportunity.
As the hours marched by on little cat’s feet, Livia’s anxiety grew to the point where she thought it might be helpful to pop a splooge, just to stay frosty. Right after that, she dispensed a small glass of white wine from the entertainment wall unit’s liquid print feature. Then she stretched out in the anthropomorphic bed and promptly fell into a comatose state that was not unpleasant. So when her head nearly blew off her body, beeping and flashing with an incoming message, she was completely disoriented.
“Ha! What!” she yelled, leaping to her feet. Where was she? Oh. Right. Gene was gone. He had not come back. She activated her implant.
“Liv,” said Bronwyn’s voice from inside her head. “I don’t have a lot of time, so listen.”
“Bee, is that you?” Liv’s mind was clearing just a little bit, although not too much. Splooges weren’t quite as powerful as even the mildest Xee, but their effects didn’t just vaporize after a half-hour nap.
“I can’t talk long,” said Bronwyn. “And I have to keep my voice down. But I heard screaming about twenty minutes ago.”
“Oh no,” said Liv. She sat down on the edge of the bed because her legs would not support her. What were they doing to Gene? Could they be killing him? Harvesting his organs?
“There was nothing I could do, Liv,” whispered Bronwyn. The screaming had been pretty horrible at first. Bronwyn thought she was used to those kinds of noises when they had worked on animals, but it turned out that when they came from a human being, it was even worse. The shrieking didn’t last long, thank goodness. But it was terrible while it lasted.
“Oh, Bee,” said Liv. She felt sick to her stomach. “This is Gene we’re talking about.”
“I’ll call you later if I find out anything,” said Bronwyn, and with a short touch to the transmitter behind her ear, she was gone. Another piteous cry, fainter than the first but still pretty awful, had just erupted from the lab down the hall.
“This is not going so well,” said the voice just outside Gene’s head. He knew it was Bob, but he seemed to be blind and couldn’t see anything around him. “Resisting again, goddamn it! This is bad. I don’t want to have to reboot him!”
Then came a woman’s voice: soft, gentle. “Gene,” it said. “This is Sallie.” Her voice took his hand. “It’s going to be okay.”
“That’s better. He’s stabilizing. Thank God. I’d hate to go back to the print shop for another copy entirely. In many ways, this one works very well.”
“Shhh, Bob.” Sallie again, with a hard knife-edge underneath. “There is still a person in there somewhere, and that person is still listening to you. So if you have anything but the most positive thoughts, you should probably keep them to yourself for the time being.”
“I’m sorry,” said Bob. “It’s just the prospect of having to do this all over again. The DNA work. The cell development and chain linking. I don’t have to tell you how much the whole thing cost Arthur, do I?”
“You’re still talking, Bob.” The steel beneath the skin was just a bit harder now. But it didn’t matter. The thing that had been Gene was shrinking, melting down to a small, rotating nimbus of light in the center of his brain stem. And the other thing was moving inside him.
Bob finally lowered his voice, but a morsel of the remains of what was once the fabricated persona known to himself as Gene was still listening in there somewhere. If he existed at all in the future, he would remember it, and not with fondness. “Besides,” the doctor went on, “there’s also no way that Arthur can be uploaded again, I presume you know that. There’s no there there. He’s a turnip—I mean his physical self—and that decomposition has fed back into his mental functioning. We can use the backup if we need to again, I suppose, but you know that’s not as reliable as a fresh upload.”
Gene gave one last wrenching scream with all the might th
at existed in him. It came out as a tiny squeak, and then his mouth reset itself and said, “Bob, if you don’t shut the fuck up, I’m going to push the bone in your nose through the back of your head.”
“Artie?” Sallie said with a little tremble. “Is that you?”
“Hi, munchkin.” The voice was Gene’s but already a bit loaded with an extra helping of gravel. “Help me sit the fuck up.”
“Not yet.” Bob was behind the creature who was once Gene, both his hands on the back of its head. “Don’t move your head. The download probe is still seated in the input module and transferring the last little bit into your inferior frontal cortex right behind your left eye. It’s why you’re blind right now. I had to disable your optic nerve. If you lie very still, we’ll complete the transfer in about . . . six minutes.” Bob fiddled with some hardware behind the thing that was now Arthur: a young Arthur, as strong and impatient to get going as the original.
“Come on, come on,” said Arthur. “I got places to go and people to do.”
Bob continued to fiddle. This whole thing had felt just too easy for him. Gene had gone under, and after that original, horrid scream, he had whined a little, uttered an occasional moan, but only once had he issued a mighty screech—the kind of howl a dog might make if it was being euthanized improperly. Bob felt bad. He had liked the entity that had emerged when the living (if artificial) being he had brewed from his own DNA had emerged over the course of a long month in the 3-D printing room. People had said that it couldn’t be done. But he had done it, from the inside out: first the spine and then the rest of the skeletal structure. That took about ten days. Then the musculature, sketched in lightly and then spun into shape ever so carefully, appearing as if by magic in the chamber. The blood was the hardest. It was fabricated from his own template and had to be infused a bit at a time, as if watering a plant that filled with life as the liquid flowed through its veins. The organs, one by one, followed. That was easy. They’d been printing livers, spleens, kidneys, and hearts since the late 2030s. Those were mostly shells, about as alive as the Visible Man plastic anatomy set that he had assembled as a kid. But the blood and the bile and the spit and all the other fluids infused the waiting objects with the stuff of life. The brain was last. Left brain. Right brain. Corpus callosum. The all-important Broca area. Each little portion fertile, alive in a way, but empty. A medium, nothing more, waiting for the cocktail of data, neural search capability, and long-term and short-term memory that made independent thought possible. But no persona, of course. No soul. Just waiting for the final implant: Arthur. If it could be said that a being like Arthur had a soul. And here it was on the table beneath his hands, this thing that he had created, and it was being filled up with something pretty terrible, and all the decent human in there was being expunged.
The thing that had been surprising was the unplanned emergence of something approaching—what would you call it, character?—in this empty body he had created as a receptacle for this mean old man, so greedy for life that he absolutely refused to accept the inevitable fate of every other person who had ever lived in the history of the planet. All of a sudden there had been this individual with a character of sorts. Gene. True, a sort of vapid person most of the time. What else could he be without memory or experience of his own to draw on? But with a spark: a feisty, resistant young man who kept on asserting himself no matter how many times Bob rebooted his center of consciousness in an effort to create a tabula rasa for Arthur to inhabit. This . . . human being, unlike any other. Made from his, Bob’s, mitochondrial soup, printed, and then infused with some of his knowledge base. He wondered if the boy was still in there somewhere. He looked down into the empty eyes that had once contained his creation but now stared sightlessly up at the ceiling.
“I think your six minutes are up,” said the gritty voice that was not yet quite 100 percent Arthur but wasn’t Gene anymore, either. “Come on, Bob. I want to try out any number of my working parts.”
“Okay,” said Bob, and in one fluid motion, he removed the infinitely thin probe, some four inches in length, that had entered Gene’s cerebrocortical implant and poured the entire upload of Arthur’s consciousness in all its parts into the vessel that had been created to house it.
“Ouch, man,” said Arthur. “Now, whatever you did to my optic nerve, I’d really appreciate it if you give it back now. This darkness is freaking me out.”
A few moments later, the door to the lab opened, and Bob emerged pushing a wheelchair that contained the shell that was once Arthur. Its mouth hung loose, wide open like that of a skull with blown hinges. Its head tilted at an odd angle, askew from its torso. But its eyes were open, the orbs within its sockets moving slowly to various points of light or motion in the space around it.
Behind Bob, the door to the lab stood open. Gene was standing there, near the operating table, in properly starched white boxers and an open white dress shirt. He was attempting to put gold cuff links into the cuffs and whistling softly. As he wrestled with the job, he glanced up, saw Bronwyn, looked her up and down appraisingly, and gave her a smarmy smile. Then he went to the lab door, winked at her, and closed it.
Bob handed over the wheelchair and its terrifying occupant. “Room six,” he said, scrutinizing Bronwyn to see if she was going to offer any editorial opinion. “Make him comfortable. We’ll see about his permanent disposition tomorrow. It’s funny. I never considered this aspect of the procedure.”
“Well, you can’t plan for everything, Bob,” said Bronwyn, and if Bob noticed the tartness of her tone, he didn’t let on. She took control of the chair and disappeared down the hallway to the place where Arthur’s former body was to be stored until it failed to function entirely. That might be in days, or months, or years, even, thought Bob, but you most certainly couldn’t do anything to influence that process or hurry it along. That would be wrong.
He then repaired to the executive offices, where Sallie was waiting. In silence, he went to his desk and extracted a small plastic box, which he handed her without fanfare. Inside were four blue sticks carefully nestled in individual nanofoam slots.
“Guard these carefully,” he said.
“And they are?”
“Memory nodes of almost infinite capacity. They contain all the data necessary to reconstitute your husband, Arthur—if, you know, that becomes necessary.”
“Might it? I thought the procedure was a success.”
“As far as we know,” said Bob, but his mind had already moved on to the next subject. “Who knows?” he added as he turned to reenter the lab. “Maybe you’ll want more than one copy of the mean old son of a bitch.”
– TWO –
10
Feelin’ Groovy
They left the building, Sallie with her original body, Arthur with his new one pumping Gene’s brand-new blood and bile and rheum and sweat and tears and cerebrospinal fluid, except it was no longer Gene’s—it belonged to the ancient entity that by all rights should have died thirty years ago and been considered lucky to have lasted that long. The muscles and ligaments seemed to work fine, too.
Arthur sneezed. It felt great. Yesterday that sneeze would have blown his head off his shoulders. Fucking A, he thought. No matter what bullshit he’d gone through, all the years of transplants and cyborg grafts and vitamin suppositories and hemitropic infusions and mitochondrial transubstantiations and cranial enhancements and upgrades and whatever new thing was supposed to elongate his time on the planet, it was nothing like this. He looked at Sallie and felt a pleasurable wave of endorphins—real ones now, not the synthetic variety he’d been shooting for a couple of decades. Time to go home, he thought, and try this motherfucker out.
Their vehicle was waiting in parking mode, hovering about six inches above the polished surface of the plaza. All around them, people surged here and there, intent on whatever task awaited them in one of the virtually identical buildings that made up the campus. No one paid anyone any attention as they went, so utterly focused wer
e they on the electronic images and messages that were buzzing about inside their heads. The local weather had been turned off for the afternoon. Nobody missed it.
The hovercraft was an Uber piloted by no one but the cyborg brain that resided somewhere in its chassis. Inside was a passenger compartment that more closely resembled a small, comfortable conference room, with a love seat, a couple of chairs, and a central table with controls for environment and entertainment. “Home?” inquired the vehicle.
“Go fuck yourself,” said Arthur.
“Artie, that behavior was kind of cute when you were a grumpy geezer,” said Sallie, “but now that you’re a handsome young stud, you might want to ameliorate your tone. People may like you a little better.”
They climbed in, Sallie first. It was very posh, she thought, and had that new-car smell. Before he followed, Arthur stood tall at the doorway of the conveyance, taking in the entire scene. It was the first time he had been out and about in the new world beyond his gates, and without the pain that had made his life a misery. It was magnificent.
Looking about him with new eyes, literally, he noticed an object of some sort floating in the air a short distance from him behind some shrubbery, clearly trying to look inconspicuous. This wasn’t difficult, because it had been designed to be ignored. Arthur knew that, because it was, in fact, he who had designed it, or at least called for its design. Perhaps this gave him an unfair advantage, he thought. He turned to face it and motioned it to come closer. It tilted in the breeze as if to ask, “Who, me?”
“Yeah you. Get over here.” It was a simple floating yellow globular security device, the kind they call a “tennis ball.” It had been lurking and appeared nonplussed at having been spotted. It now approached, raised itself slowly several feet into the air, and then simply remained suspended there with a certain saucy arrogance. It was said these entities had a vocabulary of perhaps a dozen words and the capacity to learn another five or six more, which they could emit from a small embedded speaker.