by Stanley Bing
Here they were now, all in one room, the biggest bugs in a neural ant farm teeming with virtual life forms. They buzzed and twitched among themselves as they waited for Jerry to get the meeting started. Lunch had been provided, and a few were picking at their quinoa sandwiches and cold, dead salmonetta. But Arthur knew that their real appetite was for something else: fresh blood. They could smell it. And it made them hungry. They were so fucking tired of being old, they would do anything to upgrade from that despicable status. That was his leverage. He cracked his knuckles in anticipation, as he would soon crack them, he thought, like a nestful of quail eggs.
It was time. Each shriveled, dappled, shrunken, sagging representative of the pillars of the universe was rustling in his or her place. None wanted to be caught staring at the guest of honor, but it was hard not to do so. He was all they thought that they could possibly be if everything went according to plan. They were, however, aware that they were in a position unique for them. They had no leverage. Arthur had something that they wanted. They would have killed him to acquire it, but that was clearly not a strategy that played out effectively. They needed him and what he now possessed. The secret of eternal consciousness. A solution to the problem of death.
“Okay. Let’s come to order,” said Jerry, his tiny, gleaming monkey head bobbing on his slender, little body. The dozen or so shriveled homunculi snapped to attention. On cue, a number of younger types more laden with business effluvia filed in. Each had a folding chair, which he or she set up near the sideboard and along the corners of the room. They looked neither left nor right and appeared ready for action.
“I’ll begin this meeting by noting its historic character,” said Jerry from the head of the boardroom table. He had said nothing at all to Arthur yet, but now he inclined his head in the direction of their honored visitor. “You all know Arthur, or are aware of his singular achievements. I’m not sure, however, whether he knows you all, so I will briefly introduce you. Some are, of course, founders and members of the board. Others on the periphery here, in the cheap seats, are senior staff who will bring us up to speed on certain key areas of development we believe Artie here should know about before we discuss the central matter on the agenda today. The only rule I will rigorously enforce at this gathering may be difficult for some of you to obey, and that is no sleeping, and certainly no drooling. Don’t want to short out your hardware.”
There was a phlegmy cough around the table that passed for something resembling a laugh. Obviously pleased with the reaction to this witticism, Jerry continued. “So in no particular order other than how you have seated yourselves around the table: To my right—Artie, I believe you know Arjun, who presides over the operations in Redmond. Arjun ate China a few years back. Next to him, I believe you will recognize Clarissa leaning in. She runs the bones of what used to be Verizon, which ingested Yahoo! for reasons best known to itself, then went on to consolidate all telecommunications not long ago. Next to her, of course, we have Larry . . . Larry, goddamn it! I said no sleeping!”
“I wasn’t!” cried the painfully thin entity, mostly a head, that Jerry had just addressed. “I was thinking!”
“Not allowed!” yelled Jerry, which produced another expulsion of air around the table. “Larry controls more than ninety percent of search, plus a fair chunk of the self-driving car market, which still has fewer fatalities than the more than forty-eight million deaths that were attributed to vehicles formerly controlled by their owners, right, Larry?”
“Of course, one death is too many,” said the animated cadaver that Jerry had designated as Larry, at which statement, for some reason unfathomable to Arthur, the entire room once again exploded into mirthful wheezing and clucking.
“Buzz? You with us?” Jerry had addressed a twitching figure in a hoodie seated at the other end of the table. “Buzz is impatient because this meeting requires his absence from social media for an hour or two.”
“I don’t want people to start speculating about my fucking death, Jerry,” came a whispering voice from the other end of the table.
“Okay, Buzzy. Artie, you’ll want to get with Buzz to talk about the implications of worldwide data harvesting.”
“Dude,” said Arthur.
“My man,” the hood replied.
“That brings us to Elaine.”
“Hey there, Artie,” said the tiny, twinkly figure a few seats down from Arthur.
“Elaine.” Arthur searched for the face he once knew inside the shell of age that now encased it.
“Artie and I once went to Burning Man together,” Elaine explained to the table while devouring Arthur with a gaze that held many emotions. “Before it was acquired by the corporation that stripped it of all meaning.”
Jerry smiled. “Now, Boots,” he said. “The thousands of In-N-Out Burning Man franchises around the world bring in not only billions of dollars of new revenue but offer an amazing amount of critical data on our many low-end global citizens who would otherwise fall off the grid.”
“I know, JC,” said Elaine. “Just sometimes I can’t help but remember shit.” And Arthur saw now, quite clearly, a lovely, lithe, completely nude young woman dancing in the light of a gigantic fire, drunk on wine, sex, and psilocybin so very long ago.
“Wrapping things up,” said Jerry. “To your left are two of our most distinguished members. First, of course, Nigel, who controls news and information. Everywhere.”
“Hey there, Artie,” croaked Nigel in a thick accent of some sort. His was the most amazingly attenuated life form at the table. “I’m sure we’re all looking forward to getting the fuck on with things.”
“Hi there, Nige,” said Arthur respectfully. “You look terrific.”
“Heh heh heh!” This amused Nigel so profoundly he practically snorted out an adenoid.
“And finally, say hi to Jimmy,” said Jerry, “from the Lakeville Road gang.”
“Very funny, Jerry.”
“Okay, okay. Jim is our rep from Planet IOS who also, as you probably know, speaks for Japan Inc. and the remaining corporate survivors of the radioactive area that was once Korea.”
Jim’s body, other than its head, was fused with its transportation unit. But he had a pleasant and rather youthful face. “Arthur, I just want to say that the good that can be done for the human race with the tech you have apparently mastered is incalculable,” he said. “I think that’s as exciting as any other aspect of this thing.”
“Jim is very big on the pro-social benefits of what we do,” said Jerry.
“Yeah,” said Arthur genially. “I’m sure that’s why we’re all here.” To which everybody had not a word to add, because they didn’t know whether to laugh or not.
“And of course you know me. What started as a means of selling physical objects now encompasses all retail sales and distribution of pretty much everything there is. I don’t need to brief you on that. We kicked your ass in several acquisition wars back in the thirties, I think. Leaving you still with plenty of playground.”
“Yes,” said Arthur politely. “Worms turn.”
“They do indeed,” said Jerry magnanimously. “In the uncomfortable chairs are our executives . . .” He gestured to the gentlemen and ladies on the periphery, whose average age seemed to hover at a jejune, say, sixty-plus. “They’re what used to be called Generation Z.”
“Oh yes,” said Arthur. “I remember.” He allowed himself a little smile. Forty years later and their generation was still waiting for the slackers, the boomers, and even the millennials to vacate the big table. And here they were, still in the folding chairs.
“They’ll be giving brief reports on matters that should be of interest to you,” said Jerry.
“In a minute.” Arthur stood, his young, powerful body looming over the tiny, seated forms of the ancient executives. “Before we do, Jerry, I think we should recognize the reality of the situation.”
“And in what way should we do that, Artie?” Jerry looked interested but not flustered. Curio
us, that’s all.
“Get up, Jer,” Arthur said, friendly-like, as you would address a bridge partner who had taken the wrong position at the table. “I’m in the wrong seat.”
All the air immediately left the room. Arthur stood, hands behind his back, gazing down at the minuscule entity beneath him with kindly indulgence. After a while, he said, “Do it, Jer. I don’t think you want to piss me off.”
“No, Arthur.” Jerry stood. He was just about the same height standing as he was seated. “I’m afraid it is I who is in the wrong seat.” He waddled in a dignified fashion around Arthur and sidled his way into the seat that Arthur had occupied. Arthur helped him with the last little maneuver into the chair, which wasn’t easy for a man Jerry’s age. Then Arthur briskly, and without further ado—but without rushing, either—took his place at the head of the table.
“Wow,” he said. “Things look better from here.” The table might have died of merriment, so great was the guffaw at this massive jest.
16
Core Dump
“Okay,” Arthur said. “I wanna take about fifteen minutes to hear all the shit that’s fucked up around here. And don’t bullshit a bullshitter. I was laying it on people before some of you were born, and that’s really saying something.” He looked around the table expectantly.
“Okay, Artie,” said Jerry, very, very respectfully. “We were prepared with some brief material in anticipation of this meeting. We just weren’t sure if you’d be interested in the granular stuff.”
“Not too granular,” said Arthur. “Just granular enough.”
“We might as well start with the workforce issue,” said Jerry. “Allie?”
“Here, Jer,” said a young woman, practically a little baby, maybe only in her midfifties, who was standing near the smoked salmon display on the sideboard, sipping on a cup of coffee. She was tall and athletic, wearing a suit much like the one sported by the rest of her cadre except that where they had pinstriped pants, she had a pinstriped skirt that fell just above her knees. Her cranial implant was alabaster white and glowed behind her ear like an illuminated jewel. The only other gender-defining touches were a white silk scarf tied loosely around her throat and the pile of light-blond hair gathered at the top of her head. She was wearing large horn-rimmed glasses, which she pushed to the top of her head as she eagerly took center stage.
“Artie, this is Alessandra Morph, our head of Human and Artificial Resources. “She’s going to scare the shit out of you.”
“Better men than she have tried,” said Arthur, and some in the room may have wet themselves, such was the intensity of their mirth.
“That’s not much of an introduction, Jerry,” said Morph as she strode forward. She took a position behind the installed podium in the corner just past the end of the table, and waved her arm in the vague direction of the wall behind her, which immediately disintegrated, turning into a translucent screen. On it were the words “A Workforce in Crisis.” Under that chilling title, a smaller subhead: “The New Employee: Dedicated, Industrious, and Incapable of Independent Thought.”
“Well, that’s not good,” said Arthur.
“You have no idea.” She stood near the wall that was now a display and let the headline sink in. “The situation is this,” she began. “A significant number of the citizens in Athena have evolved.”
“Evolved?” Arthur was mystified. “You mean . . . spiritually? Socially?”
“Genetically,” said Morph. There was a brief silence as people chewed, swallowed, and then digested this gristly nugget. “That in itself is not the issue,” Morph continued. “It happens. The circumstances of life change, and people change with it. This, however, appears to be progressing in a way that is unexpected over such a short time frame. And it has implications for the company in both upside and downside.”
A sequence of tedious graphics now accompanied the presentation to give people something to look at, with headlines and bulleted subordinate points.
“There are several factors that contribute to this weird development,” she said. “First, there is almost no functional limit to the age people can attain. People simply . . . cure unto a very advanced state. More people die in household accidents than die of old age.” There was a general murmur around the table. This was their ultimate fear: to break an artificial limb in a fall down the stairs or electrocute one’s head in the shower.
“Next, population density is extreme. There are simply too many people for comfort. You may have noticed it is difficult to walk down the street in the developed areas, and in the older cities, the situation is even more acute. Everywhere you look are masses of people attempting to get somewhere. It’s a real issue. There is no escape from the crowd. It moves as a group if you look at it from a distance: huge clots of individuals all connected to one another, moving like fattened sheep in large herds. This leads to an exacerbation of the problem of deindividualization that we now see taking place in our employees, our consumers, and our neighbors.”
“Five minutes, Allie,” Jerry said quietly. “Don’t demand too much of our attention spans. We’re executives. This whole meeting should be concluded in twenty minutes, and we have a lot more ground to cover.”
“Don’t rush the lady,” said Arthur. “She’s getting somewhere.”
Still, Morph picked up the tempo. “Plus, the mandating of self-driving vehicles has also added to the passivity and general lack of acuity in the workforce. As you know, it has been shown that even now, fifty years down its developmental road, so to speak, the AI necessary to support this tech is reliable only up to fifteen miles per hour if fatalities are deemed unacceptable. So with the delegalizing of independent driving, as a people we are conveyed everywhere in very slow-moving vehicles in whose conduct we have no part. This once again leaves people free to consult their internal electronics and otherwise divorce themselves from any so-called real experience. It is possible, at this point, for people to wake up, get to work, get home, and go to sleep without having one analog experience. With the huge advances in dildonics, even sexual experience is at this point either enhanced by or replaced entirely by digital alternatives that are, for the most part, equal to or superior to the real thing, particularly if you’ve been married for a while.”
Polite chuckle. A laugh in the dark. It was clear where this was headed to most in the room, if not to Arthur, for whom this information was new.
“Our drone data tell us that, in general, people have slowed down to match the pace of the vehicles in which they travel,” she continued.
“Drones,” said Arthur with obvious disgust.
“The data they give us are invaluable,” said Morph, very polite but unyielding on the matter. She proceeded briskly to the next bullet, which read simply: “Enhanced individuals hold the edge.”
“Then we have the people who have dedicated themselves entirely to turning themselves into Human 2.0. They have it all. They run faster. They jump higher. Their blood and brain and connective tissue is swimming in smart drugs. And they never get tired. Nobody human can compete with them. Until they explode.”
“They explode?”
“That’s not really a problem, Arthur,” said Morph. “They are extremely fungible. The problem is that they represent yet another demotivator for people who are already prone to inertia, indolence, and virtual existence, driving what we believe is a fundamental alteration to the core mitochondrial DNA of a vast segment of the population.
“Next to last . . .” Here Morph highlighted the next bullet, which read, “Extreme age builds megafamily units of dubious provenance.”
“Due to the extreme longevity of the affluent populace,” Morph explained, “one may have many partners over a lifetime. When you live to be a hundred and beyond with no end in sight, partners peel off and die on you, and must be replaced. Extended intergenerational families from such multiple unions take up massive amounts of space and sometimes create creatures of . . . uncertain legitimacy.”
“
And we care about that why?” asked Arthur.
“Well, sir,” Morph replied gingerly. “We have progeny that shows odd characteristics.”
“Yikes.”
“Yup.” Morph transitioned to the final graphic, which read, “A New Human Species? Positives and Negatives.”
“Not really,” said Arthur.
“I’m afraid so. We’re trying to think about what to call them. But they aren’t strictly Homo sapiens. And they come from here.”
There appeared on the screen a rotating image of a humanoid entity. It was neither male nor female and was distinguished by its very small head, which tapered toward a virtually bald point with a tuft of hair at the top.
“The brain,” said Morph, looking at the picture, “is capable of almost telekinetic communications skills, but magnetic imaging shows that the part of the cortex responsible for undirected thinking is shrinking. We believe that within twenty years, we’ll be running low on people capable of leadership. Which makes the people in this room all the more crucial as we face some of the operating issues that lie ahead.”
“Thank you, Allie,” said Jerry Cee. “I’m sure Arthur very much appreciates you improving his already overpowering leverage.”
“Thank you for the opportunity,” said Morph humbly. The board gave a small golf clap as she walked to her former position at the rear of the room. The only sound for a few moments was the plop plop plop of coffee being dispensed into a waiting cup here and there. During that time, Arthur came to the important conclusions that Morph was a shrewd businessperson with a fabulous ass.