Beyond the Rift

by Peter Watts

  I notice that doesn’t extend to tickling the temporal lobe, though. St. Michael’s just spent seven million equipping their nave for Rapture on demand.

  Maybe suicide was the only option left to you, maybe all you could do was follow one sin with another. It’s not as though you had anything to lose; your own scriptures damn us as much for desire as for doing. I remember asking you years ago, although I’d long since thrown away my crutches: What about the sin not made manifest? What if you’ve coveted thy neighbour’s wife or warmed yourself with thoughts of murder, but kept it all inside? You looked at me kindly, and perhaps with far greater understanding than I ever gave you credit for, before condemning me with the words of an imaginary superhero. If you’ve done any of these things in your heart, you said, then you’ve done them in the eyes of God.

  I feel a sudden brief chime between my ears. I could really use a drink about now; the woody aroma of a fine old scotch curling through my sinuses would really hit the spot. I glance around, spot the billboard that zapped me. Crown Royal. Fucking head spam. I give silent thanks for legal standards outlawing the implantation of brand names; they can stick cravings in my head, but hooking me on trademarks would cross some arbitrary threshold of free will. It’s a meaningless gesture, a sop to the civil-rights fanatics. Like the chime that preceded it: it tells me, the courts say, that I am still autonomous. As long as I know I’m being hacked, I’ve got a sporting chance to make my own decisions.

  Two spots ahead of me, an old man sobs quietly. He seemed fine just a moment ago. Sometimes it happens. The ads trigger the wrong connections. SWank can’t lay down hi-def sensory panoramas without a helmet, these long-range hits don’t instil so much as evoke. Smell’s key, they say—primitive, lobes big enough for remote targeting, simpler to hack than the vast gigapixel arrays of the visual cortex. And so primal, so much closer to raw reptile. They spent millions finding the universal triggers. Honeysuckle reminds you of childhood; the scent of pine recalls Christmas. They can mood us up for Norman Rockwell or the Marquis de Sade, depending on the product. Nudge the right receptor neurons and the brain builds its own spam.

  For some people, though, honeysuckle is what you smelled when your mother got the shit beaten out of her. For some, Christmas was when you found your sister with her wrists slashed open.

  It doesn’t happen often. The ads provoke mild unease in one of a thousand of us, true distress in a tenth as many. Some thought even that price was too high. Others quailed at the spectre of machines instilling not just sights and sounds but desires, opinions, religious beliefs. But commercials featuring cute babies or sexy women also plant desire, use sight and sound to bypass the head and go for the gut. Every debate, every argument is an attempt to literally change someone’s mind, every poem and pamphlet a viral tool for the hacking of opinions. I’m doing it right now, some Mindscape™ flak argued last month on MacroNet. I’m trying to change your neural wiring using the sounds you’re hearing. You want to ban SWank just because it uses sounds you can’t?

  The slope is just too slippery. Ban SWank and you might as well ban art as well as advocacy. You might as well ban free speech itself.

  We both know the truth of it, Father. Even words can bring one to tears.

  The line moves forward. We shuffle along with smooth, ominous efficiency, one after another disappearing briefly into the buzz box, reappearing on the far side, emerging reborn from a technological baptism that elevates us all to temporary sainthood.

  Compressed ultrasound, Father. That’s how they cleanse us. You probably saw the hype a few years back, even up there. You must have seen the papal bull condemning it, at least. Sony filed the original patent as a game interface, just after the turn of the century; soon, they told us, the eyephones and electrodes of yore would give way to affordable little boxes that tracked you around your living room, bypassed eyes and ears entirely and planted five-dimensional sensory experience directly into your brain. (We’re still waiting for those, actually; the tweaks may be ultrasonic but the system keeps your brain in focus by tracking EM emissions, and not many consumers Faraday their homes.) In the meantime, hospitals and airports and theme parks keep the dream alive until the price comes down. And the spin-offs—Father, the spin-offs are everywhere. The deaf can hear. The blind can see. The post-traumatised have all their acid memories washed away, just as long as they keep paying the connection fee.

  That’s the rub, of course. It doesn’t last: the high frequencies excite some synapses and put others to sleep, but they don’t actually change any of the pre-existing circuitry. The brain eventually bounces back to normal once the signal stops. Which is not only profitable for those doling out the waves, but a lot less messy in the courts. There’s that whole integrity-of-the-self thing to worry about. Having your brain rewired every time you hopped a commuter flight might raise some pretty iffy legal issues.

  Still. I’ve got to admit it speeds things up. No more time-consuming background checks, no more invasive “random” searches, no litany of questions designed to weed out the troublemakers in our midst. A dash of transcranial magnetism; a squirt of ultrasound; next. A year ago I’d have been standing in line for hours. Today I’ve been here scarcely fifteen minutes and I’m already in the top ten. And it’s more than mere convenience: it’s security, it’s safety, it’s a sigh of relief after a generation of Russian roulette. No more Edmonton Infernos, no more Rio Insurrections, no more buildings slagged to glass or cities sickening in the aftermath of some dirty nuke. There are still saboteurs and terrorists loose in the world, of course. Always will be. But when they strike at all, they strike in places unprotected by SWanky McBuzz. Anyone who flies these friendly skies is as harmless as—as I am.

  Who can argue with results like that?

  In the old days I could have wished I was a psychopath. They had it easy back then. The machines only looked for emotional responses: eye saccades, skin galvanism. Anyone without a conscience could stare them down with a wide smile and an empty heart. But SWank inspired a whole new generation. The tech looks under the surface now. Prefrontal cortex stuff, glucose metabolism. Now, fiends and perverts and would-be saboteurs all get caught in the same net.

  Doesn’t mean they don’t let us go again, of course. It’s not as if sociopathy is against the law. Hell, if they screened out everyone with a broken conscience, Executive Class would be empty.

  There are children scattered throughout the line. Most are accompanied by adults. Three are not, two boys and a girl. They are nervous and beautiful, like wild animals, easily startled. They are not used to being on their own. The oldest can’t be more than nine, and he has a freckle on the side of his neck.

  I can’t stop watching him.

  Suddenly children roam free again. For months now I’ve been seeing them in parks and plazas, unguarded, innocent and so vulnerable, as though SWank has given parents everywhere an excuse to breathe. No matter that it’ll be years before it trickles out of airports and government buildings and into the places children play. Mommy and Daddy are tired of waiting, take what comfort they can in the cameras mounted on every street corner, panning and scanning for all the world as if real people stood behind them. Mommy and Daddy can’t be bothered to spend five minutes on the web, compiling their own predator’s handbook on the use of laser pointers and blind spots to punch holes in the surveillance society. Mommy and Daddy would rather just take all those bromides about “civil safety” on faith.

  For so many years we’ve lived in fear. By now people are so desperate for any pretence of safety that they’ll cling to the promise of a future that hasn’t even arrived yet. Not that that’s anything new; whether you’re talking about a house in the suburbs or the browning of Antarctica, Mommy and Daddy have always lived on credit.

  If something did happen to their kids it would serve them right.

  The line moves forward. Suddenly I’m at the front of it.

  A man with Authority waves me in. I step forward as if to an exec
ution. I do this for you, Father. I do this to pay my respects. I do this to dance on your grave. If I could have avoided this moment—if this cup could have passed from me, if I could have walked to the Northwest Territories rather than let this obscene technology into my head—

  Someone has spray-painted two words in stencilled black over the mouth of the machine: The Shadow. Delaying, I glance a question at the guard.

  “It knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” he says. “Bwahaha. Let’s move it along.”

  I have no idea what he’s talking about.

  The walls of the booth glimmer with a tight weave of copper wire. The helmet descends from above with a soft hydraulic hiss; it sits too lightly on my head for such a massive device. The visor slides over my eyes like a blindfold. I am in a pocket universe, alone with my thoughts and an all-seeing God. Electricity hums deep in my head.

  I’m innocent of any wrongdoing. I’ve never broken the law. Maybe God will see that if I think it hard enough. Why does it have to see anything, why does it have to read the palimpsest if it’s just going to scribble over it again? But brains don’t work like that. Each individual is individual, wired up in a unique and glorious tangle that must be read before it can be edited. And motivations, intents—these are endless, multiheaded things, twining and proliferating from frontal cortex to cingulate gyrus, from hypothalamus to claustrum. There’s no LED that lights up when your plans are nefarious, no Aniston Neuron for mad bombers. For the safety of everyone, they must read it all. For the safety of everyone.

  I have been under this helmet for what seems like forever. Nobody else took this long.

  The line is not moving forward.

  “Well,” Security says softly. “Will you look at that.”

  “I’m not,” I tell him. “I’ve never—”

  “And you’re not about to. Not for the next nine hours, anyway.”

  “I never acted on it.” I sound petulant, childish. “Not once.”

  “I can see that,” he says, but I know we’re talking about different things.

  The humming changes subtly in pitch. I can feel magnets and mosquitoes snapping in my head. I am changed by something not yet cheap enough for the home market: an ache evaporates, a dull longing so chronic I feel it now only in absentia.

  “There. Now we could put you in charge of two Day Cares and a chorus of altar boys, and you wouldn’t even be tempted.”

  The visor rises; the helmet floats away. Authority stares back at me from a gaggle of contemptuous faces.

  “This is wrong,” I say quietly.

  “Is it now.”

  “I haven’t done anything.”

  “We haven’t either. We haven’t locked down your pervert brain, we haven’t changed who you are. We’ve protected your precious constitutional rights and your God-given identity. You’re as free to diddle kiddies in the park as you ever were. You just won’t want to for a while.”

  “But I haven’t done anything.” I can’t stop saying it.

  “Nobody does, until they do.” He jerks his head towards Departure. “Get out of here. You’re cleared.”

  I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong. But my name is on a list now, just the same. Word of my depravity races ahead of me, checkpoint after checkpoint, like a fission of dominoes. They’ll be watching, though they have to let me pass.

  That could change before long. Even now, Community Standards barely recognise the difference between what we do and what we are; nudge them just a hair further and every border on the planet might close at my approach. But this is only the dawning of the new enlightenment, and the latest rules are not yet in place. For now, I am free to stand at your unconsecrated graveside, and mourn on my own recognizance.

  You always were big on the power of forgiveness, Father. Seventy times seven, the most egregious sins washed away in the sight of the Lord. All it took, you insisted, was true penitence. All you had to do was accept His love.

  Of course, it sounded a lot less self-serving back then.

  But even the unbelievers get a clean slate now. My redeemer is a machine, and my salvation has an expiry date—but then again, I guess yours did too.

  I wonder about the machine that programmed you, Father, that great glacial contraption of dogma and moving parts, clacking and iterating its way through two thousand years of bloody history. I can’t help but wonder at the way it rewired your synapses. Did it turn you into a predator, weigh you down with lunatic strictures that no sexual being could withstand, deny your very nature until you snapped? Or were you already malfunctioning when you embraced the Church, hoping for some measure of strength you couldn’t find in yourself?

  I knew you for years, Father. Even now, I tell myself I know you—and while you may have been many things, you were never a coward. I refuse to believe that you opted for death because it was the easy way out. I choose to believe that in those last days, you found the strength to rewrite your own programming, to turn your back on obsolete algorithms two millennia out of date, and decide for yourself the difference between a mortal sin and an act of atonement.

  You loathed yourself, you loathed the things you had done. And so, finally, you made absolutely certain you could never do them again. You acted.

  You acted as I never could, though I’d pay so much smaller a price.

  There is more than this temporary absolution, you see. We have machines now that can burn the evil right out of a man, deep-focus microwave emitters that vaporise the very pathways of depravity. No one can force them on you; not yet, anyway. Members’ bills wind through Parliament, legislative proposals that would see us preemptively reprogrammed for good instead of evil, but for now the procedure is strictly voluntary. It changes you, you see. It violates some inalienable essence of selfhood. Some call it a kind of suicide in its own right.

  I kept telling the man at Security: I never acted on it. But he could see that for himself.

  I never had it fixed. I must like what I am.

  I wonder if that makes a difference.

  I wonder which of us is more guilty.

  FLESH MADE WORD

  Wescott was glad when it finally stopped breathing. It had taken hours, this time. He had waited while it wheezed out thick putrid smells, chest heaving and gurgling and filling the room with stubborn reminders that it was only dying, not yet dead, not yet. He had been patient. After ten years, he had learned to be patient; and now, finally, the thing on the table was giving up.

  Something moved behind him. He turned, irritated; the dying hear better than the living, a single spoken word could ruin hours of observation. But it was only Lynne, slipping quietly into the room. Wescott relaxed. Lynne knew the rules.

  For a moment he even wondered why she was there. Wescott turned back to the body. Its chest had stopped moving. Sixty seconds, he guessed. Plus or minus ten.

  It was already dead by any practical definition. But there were still a few embers inside, a few sluggish nerves twitching in a brain choked with dead circuitry. Wescott’s machines showed him the landscape of that dying mind: a topography of luminous filaments, eroding as he watched.

  The cardiac thread shuddered and lay still.

  Thirty seconds. Give or take five. The qualifiers came automatically. There is no truth. There are no facts. There is only the envelope of the confidence interval.

  He could feel Lynne waiting invisibly behind him.

  Wescott glanced at the table for a moment, looked away again; the lid over one sunken eye had crept open a crack. He could almost imagine he had seen nothing looking out.

  Something changed on the monitors. Here it comes...

  He didn’t know why it scared him. They were only nerve impulses, after all; a fleeting ripple of electricity, barely detectable, passing from midbrain to cortex to oblivion. Just another bunch of doomed neurons, gasping.

  And now there was only flesh, still warm. A dozen lines lay flat on the monitors. Wescott leaned over and checked the leads connecting meat
to machine.

  “Dead at nineteen forty-three,” he said into his recorder. The machines, intelligent in their own way, began to shut themselves down. Wescott studied the dead face, peeled back the unclenched eyelid with a pair of forceps. The static pupil beneath stared past him, fixed at infinity.

  You took the news well, Wescott thought.

  He remembered Lynne. She was standing to one side, her face averted.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know this is never a good time, but it’s—”

  He waited.

  “It’s Zombie,” she went on. “There was an accident, Russ, he wandered out on the road and—and I took him into the vet’s and she says he’s too badly hurt but she won’t put him to sleep without your consent, you never listed me as an owner—”

  She stopped, like a flash flood ending.

  He looked down at the floor. “Put him to sleep?”

  “She said it’s almost certain anything they tried wouldn’t work, it would cost thousands and he’d probably die anyway—”

  “You mean kill him. She won’t kill him without my consent.” Wescott began stripping the leads from the cadaver, lining them up on their brackets. They hung there like leeches, their suckers slimy with conductant.

  “—and all I could think was, after eighteen years he shouldn’t die alone, someone should be there with him, but I can’t, you know, I just—”

  Somewhere at the base of his skull, a tiny voice cried out, My Christ don’t I go through enough of this shit without having to watch it happen to my own cat? But it was very far away, and he could barely hear it.

  He looked at the table. The corpse stared its cyclopean stare.

  “Sure,” Wescott said after a moment. “I’ll take care of it.” He allowed himself a half-smile. “All in a day’s work.”