I, Human

by John Nelson

  WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT

  I, HUMAN

  In John Nelson’s futuristic and aptly titled spy thriller, I, Human, he explores the boundaries of what it means to be human. Set at the end of the 21st century, when humanity has split into two groups, the techno elite with implanted neural brain processors that vastly increase intelligence, but which suppress emotion and intuition, and those called ‘Bornies,’ who have refused the artificial enhancement. Intelligence analyst Alan Reynard is sent on a mission to secretly infiltrate a Bornie spiritual community whose leader, Maria Fria, seems to be able to heal people and enhance emotion in ways beyond what the brain processors can do. But those who have sent him have not revealed the real purpose of his mission and Reynard and an outcast former operative, Emma, will find themselves on a dangerous exploration into the truth of self, consciousness and who we are and can be. An intriguing and superb futuristic spy thriller.

  Andrew Kaplan, author of the Scorpion and Homeland spy novels.

  In the late 1970s, I gathered together with a group of doctors to found Physicians for Social Responsibility and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War to prevent what we called the final epidemic of the human race. If we do not annihilate ourselves in an atomic war, John Nelson, in I, Human, imaginatively gives another apocalyptic scenario about the dark sides of pharmacogenomics and neural implants. He tackles a ticklish question. What exactly is a human being, and is there an invisible line inside that splits the human biocomputer into part man and part machine? And how will governments of the future manipulate it?

  Henry David Abraham, M.D., author, and cofounder of PSR and IPPNW, recipient of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize

  First published by Cosmic Egg Books, 2016

  Cosmic Egg Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

  office1@jhpbooks.net

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

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  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: John Nelson 2015

  ISBN: 978 1 78535 330 7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953282

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of John Nelson as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY, UK

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  For Susanne,

  Who could’ve taught me something about living and loving,

  if I would have only listened.

  I’m listening now, sweet sister.

  By John Nelson

  Starborn

  Transformations

  Matrix of the Gods

  The Magic Mirror

  Author’s Note

  My three full-length novels: Transformations (1988, 1997), Matrix of the Gods (1994), and I, Human (2016), chart the course of main characters who are “eating their shadows,” as Carl Jung would say, or the dark sides of themselves, individually and collectively. The collective aspect of this process was superbly elucidated by Maria-Louise von Franz in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales. Thus, their journeys start out dark and haunting, but I ask the reader to bear with this exploration for there are insights and rewards to be gleaned as they transcend their limitations.

  “The central problem of an intelligent species is the problem of sanity.”

  – Freeman Dyson, physicist and author

  Acknowledgments

  Six years ago, I was asked by a visitor to Hawaii if I could arrange a meeting with a kahuna for them. The only one I knew of was the daughter of a woman I had met in Charlottesville, VA a few years earlier. I contacted Laurie Grant, now known as Maa Uri, and while this facilitation didn’t come about, I took her to dinner for the inconvenience of it all.

  I was not prepared for this woman’s presence and the impact of her energy. This started a journey for me into energy medicine, and the results of that exploration infused my thinking and inspired the writing of this novel. Thanks, Uri. You’ve been a blessing to me and many others.

  I would like to thank my agent, Susan Crawford, who loved my earlier novel, Transformations, and took on the somewhat thankless task of trying to get I, Human published. In the meantime she kept me afloat by sending me fledging novelists in need of editorial assistance. Susan, without your help, I could never have sustained the effort to write this novel.

  And finally I would like to thank John Hunt and his wonderful staff. Speculative fiction is a hard genre to accommodate in today’s publishing market. I can only hope that this book will beat the odds and find its audience and justify their support of this effort.

  Chapter One

  1.

  I don’t know when I first crossed the boundary between human and what 20th-century Neo-Luddites would call transhuman, but I do remember, while in college, running over a cat in my new cruiser and wondering if I got any blood on my fender, with only mild concern about the animal whose life I had so abruptly ended. This was revealing, given my childhood affection for my Siamese cat, Slink, even given the usual callousness of youth. Of course those feelings—my school psychologist said I was feeling oriented—arose before puberty, after which my first neural processor was implanted. They do repress feelings but the trade off in computational functioning is amazing. Later, when we were preparing to move to a techno-housing complex that didn’t accept animals, my mother fed Slink rat poison and had animal control dispose of the remains. I was upset, even cried about it, but soon recovered—there were so many enticing distractions for a teenage boy with heightened technical proficiency in the new complex.

  Today’s scientists would gauge the transhuman threshold by the number of terabits per second my neural processor can process, as compared to the average borny brain—that’s what we call unenhanced Homo sapiens: a borny, given that they mostly accept the limitations they were born with. However, my employment test for K Industries, the private sector think tank for all levels of law enforcement, was telling. There was the standard IQ test—I scored more than 200—but the result for emotional empathy was high or at least for them. But, I was accepted and placed on the fast-track for surveillance work, where empathy could prove useful when dealing with the “borny problem,” since it’s one of their chief characteristics.

  “Hey, Alan. Whatta got there?” Sherry asked, passing through the living room from the kitchen, wearing a see-through robe over her pink nightie and clutching her morning pep shake. “Is that a newspaper?” It was Sunday morning and I was reading it on the sofa, since we had nothing else planned, or nothing outside the apartment complex. This was a modern high-rise on the upper West Side of Manhattan, with a good view of Central Park through a wall-size tinted window, with all of its now lovely artificial trees gleaming, and the thirty-foot dike surrounding the island peaking through the buildings.

  “Yeah. The Times Sunday edition. Checked it out of the library archives.”

  “Whatever for?” She shook her head, her short, red shag-cut hairdo shimmering as I readied my feeble explanation. “Don’t bother,” she added. “You’re so fucking retro sometimes I can’t believe it.” She went back to her bedroom and closed the door. I could hear her cranking up the stereo to drown out an autoerotic session with on
e of her virtual playmates. I checked once and found that most of the programs were with women. I guess I should have felt reassured; truth is, it really didn’t bother me. But, that’s another story.

  I checked out the newspaper and a few paper books, because it was safer to record this journal in a subprogram of my neural processor, without detection, if I had this split 3D focus at the same time. Performing multiple simultaneous processes is what we’re geared to do. But a non-computer interface, such as reading a book or writing on a pad, makes the monitoring of my mental activities via brain-wave scanners harder. I know that sounds paranoid, but welcome to the new post-techno world. Of course, according to the Techno Privacy Laws of 2050, no computer brain scans are allowed without permission. But K Industries, like other military contractors, often operates above the law, and I was fairly certain they monitored employees off the farm. Another precaution was that I downloaded my sessions and stored them on a remote device, wiping my processor clean each time. Of course, needless to say, I have to hide this kind of activity from my wife. We don’t exactly live in a 1984 Big Brother world, but spousal loyalty is only as good your marital contract due date—ours only has three years remaining on it.

  So, why would somebody like me, as part of the techno elite of the so-called New World Order—talk about a retro term—with all the privileges of my class, risk such a dangerous venture? It’s hard to explain in a purely rational way, but I can share an experience I had last year that seemed to propel me along this track. As part of my job in surveillance, I had to infiltrate one of the borny villages in the Midwest Sector and write a status report. I went in with a cover wife—Sherry doesn’t work for KI, given her contentious streak, not that she’d be interested. Emma was a new recruit who also had mediocre EE test scores. She did need conditioning in order to act as my wife and sleep with me, but we hit it off and it wasn’t a problem after the first week.

  The major challenge at first was acting as slow as the bornies—I should say, by our post-techno standards, since our average IQs are twice theirs—and putting up with all of the retro hassles like computers in which you could actually count the microseconds before a response, or we could. But, what really flustered me was the high-feeling expression of their society: I mean, people hugging and kissing each other in public, helping strangers rebuild their house or an old lady with her groceries and the Shakespeare plays in the park. The first time a casual woman acquaintance tried to hug me, I kept her at arms’ length. So the woman blew me a kiss. Now I differentiate feelings from emotions, since, according to my psychologist, feelings are a natural function of the psyche, whereas emotions have some kind of mental component. I’m used to emotional outbursts in my world on a daily basis, but not all of this touchy-feely stuff.

  Something else that really bothered me was their church service, with all the singing and praising the Lord. We had chosen a born-again revivalist church over the Buddhist one, where you were expected to mediate for an hour. I mean, close down all my neural nets and don’t think about anything for an hour. Impossible, I thought back then. Well, either way, this aspect of their society really confused me. The word God was never brought up in my family, and only as a primitive cultural fixation in my education. My public withholding of affection was suspect, and the only way Emma could open me up was with a marathon sexual session, which was almost as threatening, especially without stimulants. I couldn’t wait to leave the place. (I later heard that Emma had dropped out, and at the time no one in our group had heard from her, so I thought maybe she was on a deep-cover assignment.)

  But, it did provoke me into thinking that there was some lack in my life and in our society as a whole, and I began to wonder if we hadn’t lost some essential quality as a species in our rush toward technological progress. We’re not cyborgs; our neural processors are made from human brain cells—the idea of sentient robots has long been discarded, a sci-fi fantasy, as well as electronic mental devices—our transhuman advances a mere conditioning of living matter. But they do repress the feelings. So I felt compelled to pursue some kind of personal exploration and hopefully adjust my expectations. I was beginning to notice kinks in my behavior, and if I could detect them, other more discerning eyes could also spot them.

  Well, the company was impressed with my previous borny village report and wanted to send me on another recognizance mission, but I got a doctor’s pass due to my ongoing psychotherapy treatment. Of course they know that and were just testing my progress, or my assessment of it, since they’ve probably reviewed the sessions themselves, despite doctor/patient privileges and the laws upholding it. It was all too threatening, or I wasn’t sure what more exposure would bring—some kind of psychotic break I feared. But, I did need to address this issue and …

  “Alan, get the fuck in here.”

  I looked up from my newspaper and turned to find Sherry standing in her doorway, the nightie pulled down to her waist, her lovely breasts glistening with sweat.

  “My damn virtual broke down. Take a Bluie and get in here pronto … and fuck me.”

  She stepped back into her room, and I could hear her throw the device against the wall. I hurried in before another outburst was picked up by the monitors, and she got called up for more ECT—emotional conditioning training. That would’ve made my life a living hell again. Oh well, it was part of our contract, but I decided to modify that language if I renewed.

  2.

  Work was a real drag that week. I helped arrest somebody and that made me feel rather guilty. While the local cops and the sector police handle most crimes, from murder to financial scams and the FBI focuses on global problems like tech pirating and antigovernment activity, we are a privatized think tank for all levels of law enforcement, with outreach monitoring functions as well. That is, when the criminals are too creative or erratic, and they slip by computer watchdog surveillance and the kind of thinking employed by the public sector, they call us in. For instance, it just doesn’t compute for them that criminal activity could be anything but goal—or agenda—oriented. With all the genetic engineering to weed out “bad” or “antisocial” traits from the population base, and the behavioral drugs mandated for anybody with such leanings, they just can’t figure out “irrationals,” as my boss would call them, or they can only “see themselves and their own motivations.”

  The case we worked on that week, which had been referred to us by a government regulatory agency, was a pharmaceutical company, where somebody had tampered with the formula for one of their top mood-enhancement drugs. The effect was to give the user a kind of old-fashioned psychedelic trip, the opposite of its maintenance function. The company had figured it was plant spore contamination, but when that was ruled out and it became obvious that one of their scientists had tampered with the formula and completely covered their tracks, the government had gone looking for subversive agents with political agendas, since profit didn’t seem to be a motive. After thorough background checks, psych evaluations on all fifty of their scientists with access, they still had not found their suspect. So they sent us the video of their interviews and months of lab footage of the scientists at work, which we quickly scanned.

  To understand our methodology, we are definitely the creative types in the law enforcement area, not that any of us are artistically creative, just a little out there with our thinking. Our offices in mid-Manhattan are also unique with their large open work areas—no cubicle mentality for us—but with a fairly understated décor. However, our investigative sessions could be a little unnerving for outsiders, like government suits. On Monday we began examining the footage on the main vid screen with its 180° curvature. After thirty minutes I pointed out one of the white-coated scientists.

  Gene, the department head, a cuddly sort—or so the women say—in his early forties, freeze-framed his image as the man turned away from the camera.

  “He’s smirking. I mean, that’s a smirk, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “He’s smirking while he works, bette
r than whistling,” Beatrice added. She is an ex-political analyst, older and savvy, with a cutting wit.

  “Let’s isolate this guy, all the footage,” Gene insisted. So we used facial recognition to pull up all his coverage, about three hours of it over a six-week period, which we processed in minutes. He wasn’t smirking as if he had a condescending attitude, but had an odd or superior smile at times.

  “Let’s look at his blood work and physical exams.” The blood work was normal, but his eye examine showed slightly dilated pupils. “He’s high or something, but it’s not organic.”

  “Maybe, it’s interior, some kind of natural high or mystical state,” I offered. Everybody scrutinized me as if I were the suspect.

  “What have you been smoking, Alan?” Jeffrey asked. If there was a real outlaw druggy amongst us, it would’ve been Jeff.

  Gene gave this possibility serious consideration, while the others continued to mock me. “Alan’s right. The superior attitude, dilated pupils, no drug trail. It’s got to be interior.”

  Bart, the new guy, shook his head. “How do we go to the Feds with that? It’s flimsy as hell.” He was pudgy and smarmy and nobody liked him.

  “We do a full profile on him, from childhood if necessary. Bring in the scientists. Given this guy’s specialty and access and the drug tampering, they can figure out how he could have done it.”

  “Based on a guy with a smirk or suspicious smile?” Bart asked incredulously.

  By Wednesday the guys in sci-fi, as we call them, came back with an assessment as to how Dr. Leonard Quirk could have changed the formula without detection. But again, that wasn’t proof. They had scanned his neural processor, but he had been flushing it daily—definitely suspect behavior. Fortunately, or not, given your civil rights position, Quirk was brought in by the Feds for “drug” interrogation. They have truth serums today that make Sodium Pentothal look like aspirin, and together with brain-wave scanners, they got him to confess. When asked why, he said, “I wanted others to see God.”