The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  But I had no way of casting off the gloom and feeling what I wanted to feel. My only freedom came down to a choice between hunting for reasons to justify my sadness—deluding myself that it was my own, perfectly natural response to some contrived litany of misfortunes—or disowning it as something alien, imposed from without, trapping me inside an emotional shell as useless and unresponsive as a paralyzed body.

  My father never accused me of weakness and ingratitude; he just silently withdrew from my life. My mother kept trying to get through to me, to comfort or provoke me, but it reached the point where I could barely squeeze her hand in reply. I wasn’t literally paralyzed or blind, speechless or feeble-minded. But all the brightly lit worlds I’d once inhabited—physical and virtual, real and imaginary, intellectual and emotional—had become invisible, and impenetrable. Buried in fog. Buried in shit. Buried in ashes.

  By the time I was admitted to a neurological ward, the dead regions of my brain were clearly visible on an MRI scan. But it was unlikely that anything could have halted the process even if it had been diagnosed sooner.

  And it was certain that no one had the power to reach into my skull and restore the machinery of happiness.

  TWO

  The alarm woke me at ten, but it took me another three hours to summon up the energy to move. I threw off the sheet and sat on the side of the bed, muttering half, hearted obscenities, trying to get past the inescapable conclusion that I shouldn’t have bothered. Whatever pinnacles of achievement I scaled today (managing not only to go shopping, but to buy something other than a frozen meal) and whatever monumental good fortune befell me (the insurance company depositing my allowance before the rent was due) I’d wake up tomorrow feeling exactly the same.

  Nothing helps, nothing changes. Four words said it all. But I’d accepted that long ago; there was nothing left to be disappointed about. And I had no reason to sit here lamenting the bleeding obvious for the thousandth time.

  Right?

  Fuck it. Just keep moving.

  I swallowed my “morning” medication, the six capsules I’d put out on the bedside table the night before, then went into the bathroom and urinated a bright yellow stream consisting mainly of the last dose’s metabolites. No antidepressant in the world could send me to Prozac Heaven, but this shit kept my dopamine and serotonin levels high enough to rescue me from total catatonia—from liquid food, bedpans and sponge baths.

  I splashed water on my face, trying to think of an excuse to leave the flat when the freezer was still half full. Staying in all day, unwashed and unshaven, did make me feel worse: slimy and lethargic, like some pale parasitic leech. But it could still take a week or more for the pressure of disgust to grow strong enough to move me.

  I stared into the mirror. Lack of appetite more than made up for lack of exercise—I was as immune to carbohydrate comfort as I was to runner’s high—and I could count my ribs beneath the loose skin of my chest. I was thirty years old, and I looked like a wasted old man. I pressed my forehead against the cool glass, obeying some vestigial instinct which suggested that there might be a scrap of pleasure to be extracted from the sensation. There wasn’t.

  In the kitchen, I saw the light on the phone: there was a message waiting. I walked back into the bathroom and sat on the floor, trying to convince myself that it didn’t have to be bad news. No one had to be dead. And my parents couldn’t break up twice.

  I approached the phone and waved the display on. There was a thumbnail image of a severe-looking middle-aged woman, no one I recognized. The sender’s name was Dr. Z. Durrani, Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Cape Town. The subject line read: “New Techniques in Prosthetic Reconstructive Neuroplasty.” That made a change; most people skimmed the reports on my clinical condition so carelessly that they assumed I was mildly retarded. I felt a refreshing absence of disgust, the closest I could come to respect, for Dr. Durrani. But no amount of diligence on her part could save the cure itself from being a mirage.

  Health Palace’s no-fault settlement provided me with a living allowance equal to the minimum wage, plus reimbursement of approved medical costs; I had no astronomical lump sum to spend as I saw fit. However, any treatment likely to render me financially self-sufficient could be paid for in full, at the discretion of the insurance company. The value of such a cure to Global Assurance—the total remaining cost of supporting me until death—was constantly falling, but then so was medical research funding, worldwide. Word of my case had got around.

  Most of the treatments I’d been offered so far had involved novel pharmaceuticals. Drugs had freed me from institutional care, but expecting them to turn me into a happy little wage-earner was like hoping for an ointment that made amputated limbs grow back. From Global Assurance’s perspective, though, shelling out for anything more sophisticated meant gambling with a much greater sum—a prospect that no doubt sent my case manager scrambling for his actuarial database. There was no point indulging in rash expenditure decisions when there was still a good chance that I’d suicide in my forties. Cheap fixes were always worth a try, even if they were long shots, but any proposal radical enough to stand a real chance of working was guaranteed to fail the risk/cost analysis.

  I knelt by the screen with my head in my hands. I could erase the message unseen, sparing myself the frustration of knowing exactly what I’d be missing out on … but then, not knowing would be just as bad. I tapped the PLAY button and looked away; meeting the gaze of even a recorded face gave me a feeling of intense shame. I understood why: the neural circuitry needed to register positive non-verbal messages was long gone, but the pathways that warned of responses like rejection and hostility had not merely remained intact, they’d grown skewed and hypersensitive enough to fill the void with a strong negative signal, whatever the reality.

  I listened as carefully as I could while Dr. Durrani explained her work with stroke patients. Tissue-cultured neural grafts were the current standard treatment, but she’d been injecting an elaborately tailored polymer foam into the damaged region instead. The foam released growth factors that attracted axons and dendrites from surrounding neurons, and the polymer itself was designed to function as a network of electrochemical switches. Via microprocessors scattered throughout the foam, the initially amorphous network was programmed first to reproduce generically the actions of the lost neurons, then fine-tuned for compatibility with the individual recipient.

  Dr. Durrani listed her triumphs: sight restored, speech restored, movement, continence, musical ability. My own deficit—measured in neurons lost, or synapses, or raw cubic centimeters—lay beyond the range of all the chasms she’d bridged to date. But that only made it more of a challenge.

  I waited almost stoically for the one small catch, in six or seven figures. The voice from the screen said, “If you can meet your own travel expenses and the cost of a three-week hospital stay, my research grant will cover the treatment itself.”

  I replayed these words a dozen times, trying to find a less favorable interpretation—one task I was usually good at. When I failed, I steeled myself and e-mailed Durrani’s assistant in Cape Town, asking for clarification.

  There was no misunderstanding. For the cost of a year’s supply of the drugs that barely kept me conscious, I was being offered a chance to be whole again for the rest of my life.

  Organizing a trip to South Africa was completely beyond me, but once global Assurance recognized the opportunity it was facing, machinery on two continents swung into action on my behalf. All I had to do was fight down the urge to call everything off. The thought of being hospitalized, of being powerless again, was disturbing enough, but contemplating the potential of the neural prosthesis itself was like staring down the calendar at a secular Judgment Day. On 7th March 2023, either I’d be admitted into an infinitely larger, infinitely richer, infinitely better world … or I’d prove to be damaged beyond repair. And in a way, even the final death of hope was a far less terrifying prospect than the alternative; i
t was so much closer to where I was already, so much easier to imagine. The only vision of happiness I could summon up was myself as a child, running joyfully, dissolving into sunlight—which was all very sweet and evocative, but a little short on practical details. If I’d wanted to be a sunbeam, I could have cut my wrists anytime. I wanted a job, I wanted a family, I wanted ordinary love and modest ambitions—because I knew these were the things I’d been denied. But I could no more imagine what it would be like, finally, to attain them, than I could picture daily life in twenty-six-dimensional space.

  I didn’t sleep at all before the dawn flight out of Sydney. I was escorted to the airport by a psychiatric nurse, but spared the indignity of a minder sitting beside me all the way to Cape Town. I spent my waking moments on the flight fighting paranoia, resisting the temptation to invent reasons for all the sadness and anxiety coursing through my skull. No one on the plane was staring at me disdainfully. The Durrani technique was not going to turn out to be a hoax. I succeeded in crushing these “explanatory” delusions … but as ever, it remained beyond my power to alter my feelings, or even to draw a clear line between my purely pathological unhappiness and the perfectly reasonable anxiety that anyone would feel on the verge of radical brain surgery.

  Wouldn’t it be bliss, not to have to fight to tell the difference all the time? Forget happiness; even a future full of abject misery would be a triumph, so long as I knew that it was always for a reason.

  Luke De Vries, one of Durrani’s postdoctoral students, met me at the airport. He looked about twenty-five and radiated the kind of self-assurance I had to struggle not to misread as contempt. I felt trapped and helpless immediately; he’d arranged everything, it was like stepping on to a conveyor belt. But I knew that if I’d been left to do anything for myself the whole process would have ground to a halt.

  It was after midnight when we reached the hospital in the suburbs of Cape Town. Crossing the car park, the insect sounds were wrong, the air smelt indefinably alien, the constellations looked like clever forgeries. I sagged to my knees as we approached the entrance.

  “Hey!” De Vries stopped and helped me up. I was shaking with fear, and then shame too, at the spectacle I was making of myself.

  “This violates my Avoidance Therapy.”

  “Avoidance Therapy?”

  “Avoid hospitals at all costs.”

  De Vries laughed, though if he wasn’t merely humoring me I had no way of telling. Recognizing the fact that you’d elicited genuine laughter was a pleasure, so those pathways were all dead.

  He said, “We had to carry the last subject in on a stretcher. She left about as steady on her feet as you are.”

  “That bad?”

  “Her artificial hip was playing up. Not our fault.”

  We walked up the steps and into the brightly lit foyer.

  The next morning—Monday, 6th March, the day before the operation—I met most of the surgical team who’d perform the first, purely mechanical, part of the procedure: scraping clean the useless cavities left behind by dead neurons, prising open with tiny balloons any voids that had been squeezed shut, and then pumping the - whole oddly shaped totality full of Durrani’s foam. Apart from the existing hole in my skull from the shunt eighteen years before, they’d probably have to drill two more.

  A nurse shaved my head and glued five reference markers to the exposed skin, then I spent the afternoon being scanned. The final, three-dimensional image of all the dead space in my brain looked like a spelunker’s map, a sequence of linked caves complete with rockfalls and collapsed tunnels.

  Durrani herself came to see me that evening. “While you’re still under anaesthetic,” she explained, “the foam will harden, and the first connections will be made with the surrounding tissue. Then the microprocessors will instruct the polymer to form the network we’ve chosen to serve as a starting point.”

  I had to force myself to speak; every question I asked—however politely phrased, however lucid and relevant—felt as painful and degrading as if I was standing before her naked asking her to wipe shit out of my hair. “How did you find a network to use? Did you scan a volunteer?” Was I going to start my new life as a clone of Luke De Vries—inheriting his tastes, his ambitions, his emotions?

  “No, no. There’s an international database of healthy neural structures—twenty thousand cadavers who died without brain injury. More detailed than tomography; they froze the brains in liquid nitrogen, sliced them up with a diamond-tipped microtome, then stained and electron-micrographed the slices.”

  My mind balked at the number of exabytes she was casually invoking; I’d lost touch with computing completely. “So you’ll use some kind of composite from the database? You’ll give me a selection of typical structures, taken from different people?”

  Durrani seemed about to let that pass as near enough, but she was clearly a stickler for detail, and she hadn’t insulted my intelligence yet. “Not quite. It will be more like a multiple exposure than a composite. We’ve used about four thousand records from the database—all the males in their twenties or thirties—and wherever someone has neuron A wired to neuron B, and someone else has neuron A wired to neuron C … you’ll have connections to both B and C. So you’ll start out with a network that in theory could be pared down to any one of the 4,000 individual versions used to construct it—but in fact, you’ll pare it down to your own unique version instead.”

  That sounded better than being an emotional clone or a Frankenstein collage; I’d be a roughly hewn sculpture, with features yet to be refined. But—

  “Pare it down how? How will I go from being potentially anyone, to being … ?” What? My twelve-year-old self, resurrected? Or the thirty-year-old I should have been, conjured into existence as a remix of these four thousand dead strangers? I trailed off; I’d lost what little faith I’d had that I was talking sense.

  Durrani seemed to grow slightly uneasy, herself—whatever my judgment was worth on that. She said, “There should be parts of your brain, still intact, which bear some record of what’s been lost. Memories of formative experiences, memories of the things that used to give you pleasure, fragments of innate structures that survived the virus. The prosthesis will be driven automatically towards a state that’s compatible with everything else in your brain—it will find itself interacting with all these other systems, and the connections that work best in that context will be reinforced.” She thought for a moment. “Imagine a kind of artificial limb, imperfectly formed to start with, that adjusts itself as you use it: stretching when it fails to grasp what you reach for, shrinking when it bumps something unexpectedly … until it takes on precisely the size and shape of the phantom limb implied by your movements. Which itself is nothing but an image of the lost flesh and blood.”

  That was an appealing metaphor, though it was hard to believe that my faded memories contained enough information to reconstruct their phantom author in every detail—that the whole jigsaw of who I’d been, and might have become, could be filled in from a few hints along the edges and the jumbled-up pieces of four thousand other portraits of happiness. But the subject was making at least one of us uncomfortable, so I didn’t press the point.

  I managed to ask a final question. “What will it be like, before any of this happens? When I wake up from the anaesthetic and all the connections are still intact?”

  Durrani confessed, “That’s one thing I’ll have no way of knowing, until you tell me yourself.”

  Someone repeated my name, reassuringly but insistently. I woke a little more. My neck, my legs, my back were all aching, and my stomach was tense with nausea.

  But the bed was warm, and the sheets were soft. It was good just to be lying there.

  “It’s Wednesday afternoon. The operation went well.”

  I opened my eyes. Durrani and four of her students were gathered at the foot of the bed. I stared at her, astonished: the face I’d once thought of as “severe” and “forbidding” was … riveting, magnetic. I
could have watched her for hours. But then I glanced at Luke De Vries, who was standing beside her. He was just as extraordinary. I turned one by one to the other three students. Everyone was equally mesmerizing; I didn’t know where to look.

  “How are you feeling?”

  I was lost for words. These people’s faces were loaded with so much significance, so many sources of fascination, that I had no way of singling out any one factor: they all appeared wise, ecstatic, beautiful, reflective, attentive, compassionate, tranquil, vibrant … a white noise of qualities, all positive, but ultimately incoherent.

  But as I shifted my gaze compulsively from face to face, struggling to make sense of them, their meanings finally began to crystallize—like words coming into focus, though my sight had never been blurred.

  I asked Durrani, “Are you smiling?”

  “Slightly.” She hesitated. “There are standard tests, standard images for this, but … please, describe my expression. Tell me what I’m thinking.”

  I answered unselfconsciously, as if she’d asked me to read an eye chart. “You’re … curious? You’re listening carefully. You’re interested, and you’re … hoping that something good will happen. And you’re smiling because you think it will. Or because you can’t quite believe that it already has.”

  She nodded, smiling more decisively. “Good.”

  I didn’t add that I now found her stunningly, almost painfully, beautiful. But it was the same for everyone in the room, male and female: the haze of contradictory moods that I’d read into their faces had cleared, but it had left behind a heart-stopping radiance. I found this slightly alarming—it was too indiscriminate, too intense—though in a way it seemed almost as natural a response as the dazzling of a dark-adapted eye. And after eighteen years of seeing nothing but ugliness in every human face, I wasn’t ready to complain about the presence of five people who looked like angels.