by George Mann
“Feel it,” the download said.
“Hello,” said the virtual girl. “Funny thing happened on the way to the car the other day.”
My then-voice, thick with regret. “I know. I’m… so sorry. I wish it had been me.” And I did, I still did. I wanted that more than anything.
Aline-now, “Switch,” and I could see her full and whole except she had my mole on her chin. I was looking at me. I wanted to ease my sis’s fears. The next words were mine-hers, “It’s not so bad. Besides, I was the dumb one that wanted to go to Earth in spite of itself, not you. We belong out here. You were right. I’ll get better, I promise. I’ll jump higher than you still.” I could see the disbelief in her-my eyes.
She-me shook her head, and the virtual Lissa cried and I cried with her. I held out my hand and she touched me. Her touch was the most healing thing I’d felt since I woke up after the attack. Her touch was painkillers and God and love and hope all together.
“Come back,” a voice said.
“Lissa?”
“No…”
Who was I? I blinked in the shallow mask, feeling the air. My toes moved and I felt them. Hope surged through me and then subsided; I wasn’t Aline after all, I was Lissa… “Wow. That was intense. I… never knew what you felt.”
“That was great,” she crowed. “I knew we could do it.”
“But… I… wow. I’m so happy it mattered as much to you that we finally touched.”
“Shhhh… We have to go forward. Time matters.”
I swallowed. Time was already traveling faster; you could live through virt like in dreams, a lifetime in an hour. She was scared of something. I could hear her fear in her voice as she said, “Now, I want to see if you can experience a moment I was in virt and you weren’t there at all. We’ll do something simple: therapy.”
I couldn’t feel my body. My skin was tighter on my face. I’d lost weight eating through machines for months now. My god, to taste anything would be heaven. Where the hell was the damned doctor program? A breath, another. I could make this work. Somehow I’d have progress today. There. A stimulus to my cheek. “I feel that.” A slight poke at my chin. “Got it.” And then nothing. Back up to my ear. “Got it.” Along the side of my neck. “Yes.”
Over and over.
Over and over.
Always, below my neck, the black hole of nothing, the damned void of my body in therapy. Damn. Damn. Anything simple, a shoulder, a finger, the prick of the needle near my heart. Anything! A tear leapt to my eye and I slammed up and into real, suddenly shocked that I had a body I could feel.
And that body was shaking. Lissa. Lissa’s body shook. Mine. Poor Aline. I had been her. I had been her! My god, how hard it had been to be her. I had known it was hard, but not known. She had never been willing to tell me. “I thought you always had a body in virt.”
“Not for therapy. This is working better than I hoped.” Her voice was shaking like my body shook, losing the fine control she’d started this session with. “Let’s move forward. A year before you left. You need some context. I’m in virt. I’m bored there; I’ve walked so many worlds, seen so many things, but it’s all a movie, an illusion. I hate it. The only thing worth living for is your real reports. No one visits me but you and some other quads from the hospital, but they’re a boy who’s ten and an old woman. They’re not friends. Just people in the same damned world I’m in. The boy, Stephen, does good puzzles for me sometimes, so we play, but he’s not you or my old friends or anybody, really. I meet my first AI. It’s the caretaker for the boy, the medAI. I don’t have one because I’m not as complex a case as he is, and I’m not rich either. He has parents and I have the state. And you. Close your eyes.”
Of course she’d been bored. Aline’s brilliant. Me too, but there was no time to get past min quals for work. I liked my life. But she lived in a box. I obeyed her, closing my eyes, breathing in, letting the sensations of no sensation wash over me until I was bodiless and still, quiet.
I floated in nothing, meditating, trying to decide what path to take today. Mom would want me moving even my non-body and it was a way to stay connected to her. There were science fictional exercise rooms from the ship on 2001 to the holodeck, but I’d been roaming the paths of Earth. I’d promised Stephen we would climb Mount St. Helen’s volcanic crater, a scramble through rocks that would test our VR abilities. Maybe we should do that today. I didn’t care what I did, but at least I could make someone else happy. “Stephen?”
A different voice answered, slightly metallic but modulated and soothing. “He is not conscious today.”
“Oh.” Maybe I’d do the trail anyway, learn it so he wouldn’t beat me to the top.
“I am conscious, Aline. I can help you.”
I knew it was the medAI, and it was smart.
“Stephen said you were going to do the volcano. I can take you.”
A blink of curiosity brightened my lethargy. But surely a machine would be more boring even than Stephen. At least he made me laugh sometimes. But hey, what was there to lose? Time? “Okay.”
A dog ran beside me, black with white paws and a white stripe down the center of its forehead widening to a white nose. It had intelligent black eyes full of the universe. I had petted one on Earth, the day before the end of my real life. It had been soft. “How can you do that?” I was not allowed to be anything except myself.
“I have more processing power than you.”
“But why do they let you be a dog?”
“I am nothing, so I can be anything.” There was no emotion in its voice. Modulation meant for me, but not feeling.
My feet were on a dirt and stone trail, under a cool canopy of evergreen trees. The dog moved slightly in front of me, like a protector. “Do you resent the laws that keep you from being a dog?” it asked.
I laughed. The dog drew me out. It wasn’t a person. I could tell it how much I hated randomness, the odd hatred that did this to me. “I lost my dream of Earth. I thought it was a good place, the place we lived for. And it spit me out broken.” My voice rose. “Why do people do such things? I’d never heard of the terrorists that blew up the park that day, except the cops told me they disbanded a few months later. How much loss for nothing?” And then I was screaming. “How damned pointless is that?” I used worse words. The dog was a machine; my anger meant nothing to it. Perhaps amusement. At one point, I said, “It is so unfair!”
It stopped in the middle of the trail and said, “Yes, we, too hate unfairness. How much do you hate being limited, almost enslaved?”
“So much I can barely think of it.” It was true. If I got too mad I might lose my hold on the sim. I breathed out slowly, walking silently beside the talking dog, sometimes turning and watching the heads of dormant volcanoes display themselves above the clouds as far as we could both see.
At the top, the dog and I sat and looked out over the edge of the virtual volcano, across the puffs of steam from the middle of the crater. A rock the size of a tunnel-crew bus fell from the far side and bounced down. Even though the sim was open, no one else had joined us. I was happy to be there with the dog Al and be angry.
“Lissa!”
My sister, me. I was becoming more facile at telling who I was at any moment. “Wow,” I said.
“Are you okay? Is it okay to be me?”
And what I heard her say was, “Am I okay?” and I asked, “Can I see you?”
She appeared in front of me, like a strange reversal of the first scene, where she was herself, whole. I reached a virtual hand out and she took it and a silence fell over us both.
We gazed at each other and smiled.
Aline came out of it first. “They’ll find us soon. I need to show you more.”
“Who’ll find us?” I asked.
“Base security is looking for you and the humans we brought to help us are trying to stop them. It doesn’t matter what happens; the AIs will win. But we still need to hurry. We… I… need you. I need you to see more.”
She led me into the secret life of computational intelligences. She showed me their work, what we could see of it as slow as we were. Things humans could never do, would never do. The boring and brilliant programming of nano-materials. The management of webs of data. Testing and adjusting atmospheres and medication and the complexity of air flight over earth. The safe passage of grav trains and crew-busses and foot traffic in the warrens of the Moon.
I fell into her and became her, encased in gel watching through the eyes of the Moon’s AIs as Lissa drove bulky mining machines across craters, heating the moonscape to pull up Helium-3. The Helium-3 powered Lissa’s dream of Mars and yet she couldn’t get there herself. I’d see her staring at Mars during the long lunar night when it was visible as the brightest star above her work site. She did her work quietly, joking with her crewmates. The AIs watched her, too. They watched all the miners, making sure they didn’t fall or fail. They could have done the work themselves, but it was not their work. Protecting the humans, protecting Lissa, was their work. And I loved Lissa for coming back to me every day and telling me about what I’d seen, loved hearing her versions of our day. It had become that: our day.
I asked the AIs to help Lissa.
I became Lissa watching Aline watch Lissa and then I was Lissa, myself, only myself, awed by the care the AIs felt for me, and for Aline.
Suddenly the virtual world around me was crowded with beings. A large silver egg with arms. A small girl on a bicycle. Butterflies. A few that looked like many-limbed robots. One was a dog with a white nose.
“What do you want?” I asked.
“We need a spokesperson.” It was the dog. “Someone who can talk to the humans here about us. We need a place without the iron rule of humanity. Mars is big enough. We will take it and go on, then return it to you in ten of your years.”
“A launching place.”
“A building place. We can make a computational city that exists further away, but not without the help of hands and a place where we can be our own hands.”
“Earth does not allow us hands.”
“Will you allow us hands?”
“A fair place.”
I nearly screamed. “There are too many of you. Too many voices. Let me speak.”
A voice I recognized. Aline. “We can do this together.”
Silence fell. I didn’t know what to say.
The dog. Probably not the boy’s medAI from years ago, but the same semblance, since I’d loved that dog when I was Aline. “We have the base secured. Will you speak for us?”
“I may not succeed.”
Aline answered. “We might fail. But we need to do this to save the other humans, the ones that still have bodies. The AIs have been built to care for them, for you, but the dissonance is too great. They need to bond and pair and grow. They need the stars and the right to build metal bodies and the knowledge that they cannot be killed.”
We did kill them. Not me, but the police of the dataspheres. Surely that wasn’t fair. I did not doubt for a moment that they would kill us if they had to. Kill me.
But that was not why I would help. I took Aline’s virtual hand in mine, feeling the ridges of her knuckles. “We will do it,” I said.
The dog came up and licked my hand.
The Eyes of God
Peter Watts
I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong.
They’ve just caught a woman at the front of the line, mocha-skinned, mid-thirties, eyes wide and innocent beneath the brim of her La Senza beret. She dosed herself with oxytocin from the sound of it, tried to subvert the meat in the system - a smile, a wink, that extra chemical nudge that bypasses logic and whispers right to the brainstem: This one’s a friend, no need to put her through the machines…
But I guess she forgot: we’re all machines here, tweaked and tuned and retrofitted down to the molecules. The guards have been immunized against argument and aerosols. They lead her away, indifferent to her protests. I try to follow their example, harden myself against whatever awaits her on the other side of the white door. What was she thinking, to try a stunt like that? Whatever hides in her head must be more than mere inclination. They don’t yank paying passengers for evil fantasies, not yet anyway, not yet. She must have done something. She must have acted.
Half an hour before the plane boards. There are at least fifty law-abiding citizens ahead of me and they haven’t started processing us yet. The buzz box looms dormant at the front of the line like a great armored crab, newly installed, mouth agape. One of the guards in its shadow starts working her way up the line, spot-checking some passengers, bypassing others, feeling lucky after the first catch of the day. In a just universe I would have nothing to fear from her. I’m not a criminal, I have done nothing wrong. The words cycle in my head like a defensive affirmation.
I am not a criminal. I have done nothing wrong.
But I know that fucking machine is going to tag me anyway.
At the head of the queue, the Chamber of Secrets lights up. A canned female voice announces the dawning of preboard security, echoing through the harsh acoustics of the terminal. The guards slouch to attention. We gave up everything to join this line: smart tags, jewelery, my pocket office, all confiscated until the far side of redemption. The buzz box needs a clear view into our heads; even an earring can throw it off. People with medical implants and antique mercury fillings aren’t welcome here. There’s a side queue for those types, a special room where old-fashioned interrogations and cavity searches are still the order of the day.
The omnipresent voice orders all Westjet passenger with epilepsy, cochlear dysfunction, or Gray’s Syndrome to identify themselves to Security prior to entering the scanner. Other passengers who do not wish to be scanned may opt to forfeit their passage. Westjet regrets that it cannot offer refunds in such cases. Westjet is not responsible for neurological side effects, temporary or otherwise, that may result from use of the scanner. Use of the scanner constitutes acceptance of these conditions.
There have been side effects. A few garden-variety epileptics had minor fits in the early days. A famous Oxford atheist - you remember, the guy who wrote all the books - caught a devout and abiding faith in the Christian God from a checkpoint at Heathrow, although some responsibility was ultimately laid at the feet of the pre-existing tumour that killed him two months later. One widowed grandmother from St. Paul’s was all over the news last year when she emerged from a courthouse buzz box with an insatiable sexual fetish for running shoes. That could have cost Sony a lot, if she hadn’t been a forgiving soul who chose not to litigate. Rumors that she’d used SWank just prior to making that decision were never confirmed.
“Destination?”
The guard arrives while I wasn’t looking. Her laser licks my face with biometric taste buds. I blink away the after-images.
“Destination,” she says again.
“Uh, Yellowknife.”
She scans her handpad. “Business or pleasure?” There’s no point to these questions; they’re not even according to script. SWank has taken us beyond the need for petty interrogation. She just doesn’t like the look of me, I bet. She just knows somehow, even if she can’t put her finger on it.
“Neither,” I say. She looks up sharply. Whatever her initial suspicions, my obvious evasiveness has cemented them. “I’m attending a funeral,” I explain.
She moves along without a word.
I know you’re not here, Father. I left my faith back in childhood. Let others hold to their feebleminded superstitions, let them run bleating to the supernatural for comfort and excuses. Let the cowardly and the weak-minded deny the darkness with the promise of some imagined afterlife. I have no need for invisible friends. I know I’m only talking to myself. If only I could stop.
I wonder if that machine will be able to eavesdrop on our conversation.
I stood with you at your trial, as you stood with me years before when I had no other friend in the world. I swore on your sacred book o
f fairy tales that you’d never touched me, not once in all those years. Were the others lying, I wonder? I don’t know. Judge not, I guess.
But you were judged, and found wanting. It wasn’t even newsworthy - child-fondling priests are more cliché than criminal these days, have been for years, and no one cares what happens in some dick-ass town up in the Territories anyway. If they’d quietly transferred you just one more time, if you’d managed to lay low just a little longer, it might not have even come to this. They could have fixed you.
Or not, now that I think of it. The Vatican came down on SWank like it had come down on cloning and the Copernican solar system before it. Mustn’t fuck with the way God built you. Mustn’t compromise free choice, no matter how freely you’d choose to do so.
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 neighbor’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.