And then nothing more.
* * *
There are thoughts before there is breath.
Tangled thoughts. Swimming realities. My father in his chair, reading the Torah. My mother bending down to kiss my cheek. A blow landed in the ring, sending my opponent crashing to the concrete. They are all memories that belong to me, but they’re muddled together. No… not muddled… simply being resorted. Indexed. Categorized and stored. It’s a sweeping up, a housekeeping of sorts. Thoughts and feelings and ideas—I see connections between them that I didn’t before. Those form new ideas, ones that need a special place of storage until I’m ready to think upon them some more. For now, I’m just tidying up the assortment, like a scavenger picking through scrap to see what’s good for salvage and what can safely be left behind to slowly rot away in the baking sun.
Then breath comes rushing back. I gasp in air, my body arching up then falling back with a dull metallic thud. Fill and release, in and out; oxygen floods and enlivens my entire body.
My mind expands in an overdrive that makes me dizzy. My eyes blink open, but too soon—the flood of information, sights and sounds and smells, is more than I can take, so I squeeze them shut again. I breathe more, suck in more, and focus only on that for a long stretch of seconds.
There are sounds all around me: shouts, a clatter of something metallic on the stone floor, crying. I hear them but shunt that information to the side because there’s simply too much to process at the moment. Breathe in. Breath out. Smells… those aren’t too much for my hyper-sensitive mind, so I shut out the rest and focus on that. The acrid tang of antiseptic. The sweat of human bodies. Each has their own flavor—some feminine, some masculine. I can feel the uniqueness of each one. Pheromones, a recessed memory conjures the name of them. One is special… it belongs to Mateo. He’s here, in the room with me, overshadowed by the press of other scents, including my own. I cringe internally: I’m not smelling that great at the moment. I make a note to clean up when I get a chance.
A chance.
I’m alive. This awareness catapults me out of my shut-down state. The barrage of sensations is still overwhelming, but I fight to open my eyes anyway. I squint at the lights overhead, blink at them, then command my body to curl up off the gurney for a better vantage point. Every muscle screams in protest, but I manage it. The room is packed with gowned med techs staring at me with shocked faces. They’re keeping their distance, like they’re not sure what’s happening.
But I know exactly what’s happening: the resurrection mod worked. And the experiment took. And the vast, vast room inside my head is only beginning to be filled.
It worked.
The elation of that is quickly tempered by the wildness of their eyes. They’re terrified. I can see it. Smell it. Even Mateo is gap-mouthed, staring at me like I’m an alien. But I’m not.
I’m Miriam Levine. Only more.
I have an urgent sense that I need to reassure them. I lift my hand and beckon the nearest med tech to my side. His eyes go even wider, but he edges over, bending his head, like he thinks I might have difficulty speaking.
And I do. I have to clear my throat twice before I can form audible words.
“How long have I been out?” I ask.
He flashes an even-more-surprised look to the rest of the gathered techs, then quickly turns back to me. “A week,” he says, the smile growing broad under his mask.
Mateo pushes forward through the crowd, but he hesitates at the foot of my bed. I smile for him. The med tech must be telling the truth, because it feels like my face hasn’t moved for at least that long. The memory of the kind-eyed med tech’s words from before come rushing back… the technical explanation for what is going on inside my cranium… only this time, I understand what she said. And a whole lot more.
I peer up into the med tech’s jubilant expression. “I need to know precisely what you’ve done to me.”
His face falls, a frown creasing his forehead.
I temper my smile a little and raise an eyebrow. “So I can help you improve it.”
Both his eyebrows fly up, and the look of shock is priceless.
It will take them some time to understand. To put the pieces together. But eventually they’ll figure out what I’ve already leapt to, in a mere minute of being conscious with this gift they’ve given me—this precious thing that so many before me have given their lives to craft.
We are Makers by design.
And we’ve just taken a giant leap forward.
A Word from Susan Kaye Quinn
This story is just a small corner of my Singularity world.
If this is the first story of mine you’ve read, I apologize—I just gave you a glimpse into the heart of my novel series with Miriam’s short story. Please erase her from your mind and start over from the beginning with the first novel of the series, The Legacy Human (the story of Elijah Brighton, a painter who is Miriam’s polar opposite in some ways and her kindred spirit in others).
When I set out to write the Singularity Series, I knew I would be writing these short stories to accompany it—there were just too many possibilities, too many dark corners that could only be illuminated by a different point-of-view than Eli, the boy who wanted to be a machine. What I didn’t expect was to fall so intensely in love with the characters of these side stories. With four short stories in the Singularity world so far (Restore, Containment, Augment, Defiance), each with a different side character highlighted, I can already tell I’ll be writing more as the series evolves (eventual plans: five or seven novels, and as many short stories; more if I can’t help myself).
Our world is zooming forward so fast—and so uncertainly—that sometimes I wonder if I’m writing fiction at all. Already we have human augmentation becoming a reality for our disabled veterans and citizens. Already our brightest minds are trying to develop Artificial Intelligence that’s truly intelligent—capable of reading emotions to comfort cancer patients or dreaming of electric sheep or simply making a salad. These are things happening now—five minutes in the future, who knows? The present is already radically different from the past, and I fully expect that exponential change to continue.
I firmly believe our biggest challenges ahead will lie in integrating technology into our lives while remembering what it means to be human. Stories have always been our way of explaining the world to ourselves and to understand what really lies inside that three pounds of meat and electricity between our ears. All my stories dabble in science, especially the science of the mind, but the Singularity series goes one step further, looking at that intersection of mind, body, and soul in a way that I hope will start some conversations… if only in my readers’ minds.
If you enjoyed Augment, you can find all my Singularity stories on Amazon. You might also like my first YA SF series (Mindjack) about a world where everyone reads minds except one girl. I’ve written a range of spec fic, from kid’s SF to steampunk, but I’m still surprised to call myself a novelist. After turns at NASA and NCAR, today I use my PhD in engineering to create worlds and technology that don’t exist… yet.
You can find all about my works on my website or you can subscribe to my newsletter to get a free story. If you find me on Facebook, please tell me to get busy writing. These stories won’t write themselves… at least, not yet.
His Name In Lights
by Patty Jansen
THE TIME DISPLAY SAID 33.16, an hour and a half after sunset. Daniel was so tired that he no longer appreciated the spectacular sky where Jupiter occupied a significant proportion of the horizon, an immense ball in white and red pajama-stripes. By its red-orange light, he staggered off the plate-ramming machine, rubbing muscles stiff with fatigue.
“Finished,” he said, a pre-set command, voice-cast to the immediate surroundings. His tech-bot team needed only that one word to start packing, which they did with their usual robotic efficiency.
Oscar rose from a crouch where he had been taking measurements. His voice-cast went
straight into Daniel's ears. “Hurry up. Scanner says an earthquake's coming this way.”
“I'm onto it.” Thank goodness, only one more job to do.
Daniel slid the vibration gun out of its housing, ran his hand over the thick rim of hardened polymer that stuck about a hand-width out of the dust, found the joint between the two plates by touch, and attached the electrodes. Click - power. The gun hummed. Along the depth of the plates, about ten meters into the yellow soil, billions of atoms heated up, re-arranged themselves and formed a new matrix that glued the two plates together, completing the ring around the planned settlement.
Done. Great. Daniel straightened and looked over the dry valley, where the rims of seven similar rings stuck out of the ground, eight concentric plastic circles, the smallest more than 100 meters across, of carefully calibrated thickness and distance from each other: the installation that formed the planned settlement's earthquake protection shield. A beautiful design.
“I'm done. Oscar, pack up your gear and--”
Crack. He didn't hear it--the whisper-thin atmosphere meant there was little sound--but he could feel it in the parched dust under his feet.
What the--
[override command]
[emergency decision module]
[possible scenarios: 1. something in the ground cracked, 2. the seam has split]
The voice in his head soothed him. Yes, he could have figured these possibilities out himself, but he liked to hear confirmation, a clear plan to work to.
He knelt in the yellow dust and ran his sensitive fingertips over the rim. There was a hair-crack in the seam. He pulled the vibration gun out again--
The ground rumbled.
Crack.
[override command]
[emergency decision module]
[possible scenarios: 1. something--]
Yeah, yeah, he got it; he might not be considered entirely human yet, but he wasn't stupid.
Now the split was wide enough for the tip of his little finger. “Uhm, Oscar, maybe we should go back to the truck.”
[advice: survey surroundings]
The caterpillar vehicle and its trailer stood near the far perimeter of the proposed new settlement, beyond white lines painted in the dust, where the major infrastructure would be built. Two tech-bots were tying empty crates onto the trailer bed in preparation for their return to Calico Base.
[advice: monitor geological activity]
Oscar was lazily packing away the geo-scanner, tying the leads in neat bundles before putting them into the case. “I wouldn't worry about quakes now. We're inside the barrier.”
[advice--]
Daniel cut off the internal voice. “A section of the inner ring just broke--Look, there, behind you!”
Black clouds billowed on the far side of the valley. Thick volcanic dust with flecks of orange. Damn it, an entire new volcano had sprung up--
[override command]
[emergency decision module]
[advice: 1. calm down, 2. prioritize personal survival]
Daniel ran, stumbling over the bucking ground. The neat white lines that demarcated the building site distorted under his feet. Rocks shook free of the yellow dirt.
To his right, a section of the outermost earthquake barrier flew out of the ground, a solid sheet of black plastic more than ten centimeters thick. The second barrier came up, buckled . . .
Yellowish sulfuric dust fell from the air, little specks of heat burning on his skin. Vision became murky. He switched to IR view. The rain of hot dust thickened. Daniel ran as fast as his human muscles and his mechanical frame could carry him.
Quick, the truck. He jumped up onto the caterpillar wheel, opened the cabin, crawled in.
[advice: 1. calm down, 2. shut cabin door]
Daniel froze. Shut the door and leave Oscar out there? He screamed into the billowing dust, “Oscar!”
[advice: volcanic dust is dangerous for equipment]
[advice: shut the--]
“Yes! Shut up!”
He grabbed his head. The module was wrong. Survival wasn't just about himself. Real people would look after each other. He wanted to be a real person.
[advice:1. calm down, 2. shut cabin door]
It hurt, it hurt his brain. He had to obey; the stupid routine was part of him.
He slammed the hatch shut and sank in the driver's seat, jabbing at switches and buttons. Thoughts raced each other through his mind.
Oscar!
[advice: unit XRZ-26 is programmed to find his own way back]
There's no handle on the outside of the door.
[advice: unit XRZ-26 has excavation and cutting equipment]
I'm not leaving Oscar out there.
The truck powered up and displayed the surrounding terrain on the viewscreens, in IR vision. Most of the projection was a soup of grey, the regular scenery blanked out by an incredibly bright spot of spewing liquid. It looked like a water fountain, but was molten rock bursting from Io's molten interior.
“Do you copy, Oscar?”
Oscar's voice-cast came over the intercom, irregular, as if he was running. “Yes, I'm coming--” A silence and then, “Shit.”
“Hang on, buddy, I'm coming.”
Daniel crunched the truck into gear, but as the vehicle lurched forward, there was a sharp heave of the ground, followed by a snap. Something clanged against the outside of the cabin, and warnings flashed over the controls. A few seconds later the power flickered out. The floor tilted forward. Daniel scrambled over the seat towards the back of the vehicle, just as the front of the truck crunched into stone, and hung there, metal creaking. In the pitch dark cabin, Daniel could see nothing except the red glow of a button that said emergency.
“Oscar!”
There was no reply.
What now, what now? The inside of his head was quiet; he sensed the emergency routine was re-calibrating after he had ignored its commands and it was taking an extraordinarily long time in doing so. A moment of panic struck. Was it ever going to come back?
“Come on, tell me. What should I do now?”
Nothing. The cabin filled with eerie, throbbing darkness.
You wanted to be a regular human? Well, here you are.
Daniel hit that red glowing button.
President of Allion Aerospace Ltd, Eilin Gunnarsson, sat back in her chair and yawned so profoundly that tears sprang into the corners of her eyes. These last few days, at the pointy end of the project, sleep was too sparse and too short.
The picture on the forward viewscreen of the utility vessel Thor III was beyond surreal: in the blue-purple sky a hung a cluster of moons, the largest Io, roughly the size of the Moon on Earth, and behind that glimmered bright spots that were Europa and Ganymede, the conjunction a regular feature of the moons' choreographed dance around their giant planet. In the indefinite horizon between the sky and the white-pink mist of Jupiter below floated grey specks, millions upon millions of them: balloons, each filled with hydrogen and equipped with a tiny heating element and a remotely-controlled light. As the planet rotated, which it did in ten hours, the balloons distributed throughout the entire white cloud band that encircled the planet. The Thor III and two slaved robotic craft had been spewing balloons for days.
Eilin conceded that to the casual observer this activity had to look completely nuts. Painting the Fenosa Communications company logo on the clouds of Jupiter, big enough for the well-heeled on Ganymede to see was only half of what they were doing here. The publicly-known half, which attracted ridicule, scorn and shouts about money wasted. But she'd never been much good at caring what other people thought.
The atmosphere on the bridge of the Thor III was one of intense concentration.
The pilot, Vivie Chan, only had eyes for the controls. Too high and the balloons would escape the cloud mass. Too low and the Thor III would enter the outer zone of the planet, where the thick soup of gases would create drag on the hull, heat friction and hydrogen embrittlement and all sorts of Bad Things
would happen.
Next to the pilot, the two equipment operators were flat out deploying the balloons, and they could afford not a hitch in their schedule because every second of the dive towards the Big Red was carefully planned.
People throughout the system were watching this strange project, out of interest, out of curiosity, or because they'd paid millions to have it done. They were filming, from many angles, broadcasting throughout the human settlements, even to Earth.
And into this tense, concentration-filled silence, the comm beeped.
Vivie glanced aside, but kept both hands on the controls. The two equipment operators didn't stop their work.
But the comm was still beeping and after a few more you-deal-with-it glances from Vivie at the crew at large, it was Eilin who took the call, since she was no more than an observer on this flight.
She pressed the button underneath the flickering light and was blasted in the ear by the screech from an automated relay.
Ouch.
Another button, and the text scrolled over the comm screen.
mayday mayday mayday.
She stared at the screen.
“Is there a problem, Madam President?” Vivie said. She had pushed down one part of her earpiece and had half-turned in her seat.
“An alarm beacon,” Eilin said, one eye on the forward viewscreen that Vivie at this moment wasn't watching and wishing she did.
“Cross-check it with base.”
Eilin nodded and dialed up a different ID.
“Thor III to Forthright, do you copy?”
A moment later, a static-riddled voice came through. “Eilin, how are you going down there? I can't see anything yet.”
The Cyborg Chronicles (The Future Chronicles) Page 24