The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Durrani asked, “Are you hungry?”

  I had to think about that. “Yes.”

  One of the students fetched a prepared meal, much the same as the lunch I’d eaten on Monday: salad, a bread roll, cheese. I picked up the roll and took a bite. The texture was perfectly familiar, the flavor unchanged. Two days before, I’d chewed and swallowed the same thing with the usual mild disgust that all food induced in me.

  Hot tears rolled down my cheeks. I wasn’t in ecstasy; the experience was as strange and painful as drinking from a fountain with lips so parched that the skin had turned to salt and dried blood.

  As painful, and as compelling. When I’d emptied the plate, I asked for another. Eating was good, eating was right, eating was necessary. After the third plate, Durrani said firmly, “That’s enough.” I was shaking with the need for more, she was still supernaturally beautiful, but I screamed at her, outraged.

  She took my arms, held me still. “This is going to be hard for you. There’ll be surges like this, swings in all directions, until the network settles down. You have to try to stay calm, try to stay reflective. The prosthesis makes more things possible than you’re used to … but you’re still in control.”

  I gritted my teeth and looked away. At her touch I’d suffered an immediate, agonizing erection.

  I said, “That’s right. I’m in control.”

  In the days that followed, my experiences with the prosthesis became much less raw, much less violent. I could almost picture the sharpest, most ill-fitting edges of the network being—metaphorically—worn smooth by use. To eat, to sleep, to be with people remained intensely pleasurable, but it was more like an impossibly rosy-hued dream of childhood than the result of someone poking my brain with a high voltage wire.

  Of course, the prosthesis wasn’t sending signals into my brain in order to make my brain feel pleasure. The prosthesis itself was the part of me that was feeling all the pleasure—however seamlessly that process was integrated with everything else: perception, language, cognition … the rest of me. Dwelling on this was unsettling at first, but on reflection no more so than the thought experiment of staining blue all the corresponding organic regions in a healthy brain, and declaring, “They feel all the pleasure, not you!”

  I was put through a battery of psychological tests—most of which I’d sat through many times before, as part of my annual insurance assessments—as Durrani’s team attempted to quantify their success. Maybe a stroke patient’s fine control of a formerly paralyzed hand was easier to measure objectively, but I must have leapt from bottom to top of every numerical scale for positive affect. And far from being a source of irritation, these tests gave me my first opportunity to use the prosthesis in new arenas—to be happy in ways I could barely remember experiencing before. As well as being required to interpret mundanely rendered scenes of domestic situations—what has just happened between this child, this woman, and this man; who is feeling good and who is feeling bad?—I was shown breathtaking images of great works of art, from complex allegorical and narrative paintings to elegant minimalist essays in geometry. As well as listening to snatches of everyday speech, and even unadorned cries of joy and pain, I was played samples of music and song from every tradition, every epoch, every style.

  That was when I finally realized that something was wrong.

  Jacob Tsela was playing the audio files and noting my responses. He’d been deadpan for most of the session, carefully avoiding any risk of corrupting the data by betraying his own opinions. But after he’d played a heavenly fragment of European classical music, and I’d rated it twenty out of twenty, I caught a flicker of dismay on his face.

  “What? You didn’t like it?”

  Tsela smiled opaquely. “It doesn’t matter what I like. That’s not what we’re measuring.”

  “I’ve rated it already, you can’t influence my score.” I regarded him imploringly; I was desperate for communication of any kind. “I’ve been dead to the world for eighteen years. I don’t even know who the composer was.”

  He hesitated. “J. S. Bach. And I agree with you: it’s sublime.” He reached for the touchscreen and continued the experiment.

  So what had he been dismayed about? I knew the answer immediately; I’d been an idiot not to notice before, but I’d been too absorbed in the music itself.

  I hadn’t scored any piece lower than eighteen. And it had been the same with the visual arts. From my four thousand virtual donors I’d inherited, not the lowest common denominator, but the widest possible taste—and in ten days, I still hadn’t imposed any constraints, any preferences, of my own.

  All art was sublime to me, and all music. Every kind of food was delicious. Everyone I laid eyes on was a vision of perfection.

  Maybe I was just soaking up pleasure wherever I could get it, after my long drought, but it was only a matter of time before I grew sated, and became as discriminating, as focused, as particular, as everyone else.

  “Should I still be like this? Omnivorous?” I blurted out the question, starting with a tone of mild curiosity, ending with an edge of panic.

  Tsela halted the sample he’d been playing—a chant that might have been Albanian, Moroccan, or Mongolian for all I knew, but which made hair rise on the back of my neck, and sent my spirits soaring. Just like everything else had.

  He was silent for a while, weighing up competing obligations. Then he sighed and said, “You’d better talk to Durrani.”

  Durrani showed me a bar graph on the wallscreen in her office: the number of artificial synapses that had changed state within the prosthesis—new connections formed, existing ones broken, weakened or strengthened—for each of the past ten days. The embedded microprocessors kept track of such things, and an antenna waved over my skull each morning collected the data.

  Day one had been dramatic, as the prosthesis adapted to its environment; the four thousand contributing networks might all have been perfectly stable in their owners’ skulls, but the Everyman version I’d been given had never been wired up to anyone’s brain before.

  Day two had seen about half as much activity, day three about a tenth.

  From day four on, though, there’d been nothing but background noise. My episodic memories, however pleasurable, were apparently being stored elsewhere—since I certainly wasn’t suffering from amnesia—but after the initial burst of activity, the circuitry for defining what pleasure was had undergone no change, no refinement at all.

  “If any trends emerge in the next few days, we should be able to amplify them, push them forward—like toppling an unstable building, once it’s showing signs of falling in a certain direction.” Durrani didn’t sound hopeful. Too much time had passed already, and the network wasn’t even teetering.

  I said, “What about genetic factors? Can’t you read my genome, and narrow things down from that?”

  She shook her head. “At least two thousand genes play a role in neural development. It’s not like matching a blood group or a tissue type; everyone in the database would have more or less the same small proportion of those genes in common with you. Of course, some people must have been closer to you in temperament than others—but we have no way of identifying them genetically.”

  “I see.”

  Durrani said carefully, “We could shut the prosthesis down completely, if that’s what you want. There’d be no need for surgery—we’d just turn it off, and you’d be back where you started.”

  I stared at her luminous face. How could I go back? Whatever the tests and the bar graphs said … how could this be faiLure? However much useless beauty I was drowning in, I wasn’t as screwed-up as I’d been with a head full of Leu-enkephalin. I was still capable of fear, anxiety, sorrow; the tests had revealed universal shadows, common to all the donors. Hating Bach or Chuck Berry, Chagall or Paul Klee was beyond me, but I’d reacted as sanely as anyone to images of disease, starvation, death.

  And I was not oblivious to my own fate, the way I’d been oblivious to the cance
r.

  But what was my fate, if I kept using the prosthesis? Universal happiness, universal shadows … half the human race dictating my emotions? In all the years I’d spent in darkness, if I’d held fast to anything, hadn’t it been the possibility that I carried a kind of seed within me: a version of myself that might grow into a living person again, given the chance? And hadn’t that hope now proved false? I’d been offered the stuff of which selves were made—and though I’d tested it all, and admired it all, I’d claimed none of it as my own. All the joy I’d felt in the last ten days had been meaningless. I was just a dead husk, blowing around in other people’s sunlight.

  I said, “I think you should do that. Switch it off.”

  Durrani held up her hand. “Wait. If you’re willing, there is one other thing we could try. I’ve been discussing it with our ethics committee, and Luke has begun preliminary work on the software … but in the end, it will be your decision.”

  “To do what?”

  “The network can be pushed in any direction. We know how to intervene to do that—to break the symmetry, to make some things a greater source of pleasure than others. Just because it hasn’t happened spontaneously, that doesn’t mean it can’t be achieved by other means.”

  I laughed, suddenly light-headed. “So if I say the word … your ethics committee will choose the music I like, and my favorite foods, and my new vocation? They’ll decide who I become?” Would that be so bad? Having died, myself, long ago, to grant life now to a whole new person? To donate, not just a lung or a kidney, but my entire body, irrelevant memories and all, to an arbitrarily constructed—but fully functioning—de novo human being?

  Durrani was scandalized. “No! We’d never dream of doing that! But we could program the microprocessors to let you control the network’s refinement. We could give you the power to choose for yourself, consciously and deliberately, the things that make you happy.”

  De Vries said, “Try to picture the control.”

  I closed my eyes. He said, “Bad idea. If you get into the habit, it will limit your access.”

  “Right.” I stared into space. Something glorious by Beethoven was playing on the lab’s sound system; it was difficult to concentrate. I struggled to visualize the stylized, cherry-red, horizontal slider control that De Vries had constructed, line by line, inside my head five minutes before. Suddenly it was more than a vague memory: it was superimposed over the room again, as clear as any real object, at the bottom of my visual field.

  “I’ve got it.” The button was hovering around nineteen.

  De Vries glanced at a display, hidden from me. “Good. Now try to lower the rating.”

  I laughed weakly. Roll over Beethoven. “How? How can you try to like something less?”

  “You don’t. Just try to move the button to the left. Visualize the movement. The software’s monitoring your visual cortex, tracking any fleeting imaginary perceptions. Fool yourself into seeing the button moving—and the image will oblige.”

  It did. I kept losing control briefly, as if the thing was sticking, but I managed to manoeuvre it down to ten before stopping to assess the effect.

  “Fuck.”

  “I take it it’s working?”

  I nodded stupidly. The music was still … pleasant … but the spell was broken completely. It was like listening to an electrifying piece of rhetoric, then realizing halfway through that the speaker didn’t believe a word of it—leaving the original poetry and eloquence untouched, but robbing it of all its real force.

  I felt sweat break out on my forehead. When Durrani had explained it, the - whole scheme had sounded too bizarre to be real. And since I’d already failed to assert myself over the prosthesis—despite billions of direct neural connections, and countless opportunities for the remnants of my identity to interact with the thing and shape it in my own image—I’d feared that when the time came to make a choice, I’d be paralyzed by indecision.

  But I knew, beyond doubt, that I should not have been in a state of rapture over a piece of classical music that I’d either never heard before, or—since apparently it was famous, and ubiquitous—sat through once or twice by accident, entirely unmoved.

  And now, in a matter of seconds, I’d hacked that false response away.

  There was still hope. I still had a chance to resurrect myself. I’d just have to do it consciously, every step of the way.

  De Vries, tinkering with his keyboard, said cheerfully, “I’ll color-code virtual gadgets for all the major systems in the prosthesis. With a few days’ practice it’ll all be second nature. Just remember that some experiences will engage two or three systems at once … so if you’re making love to music that you’d prefer not to find so distracting, make sure you turn down the red control, not the blue.” He looked up and saw my face. “Hey, don’t worry. You can always turn it up again later if you make a mistake. Or if you change your mind.”

  THREE

  It was nine P.M. in Sydney when the plane touched down. Nine o’clock on a Saturday night. I took a train into the city center, intending to catch the connecting one home, but when I saw the crowds alighting at Town Hall station I put my suitcase in a locker and followed them up onto the street.

  I’d been in the city a few times since the virus, but never at night. I felt as if I’d come home after half a lifetime in another country, after solitary confinement in a foreign jail. Everything was disorienting, one way or another. I felt a kind of giddy déjà vu at the sight of buildings that seemed to have been faithfully preserved, but still weren’t quite as I remembered them, and a sense of hollowness each time I turned a corner to find that some private landmark, some shop or sign I remembered from childhood, had vanished.

  I stood outside a pub, close enough to feel my eardrums throb to the beat of the music. I could see people inside, laughing and dancing, sloshing armfuls of drinks around, faces glowing with alcohol and companionship. Some alive with the possibility of violence, others with the promise of sex.

  I could step right into this picture myself, now. The ash that had buried the world was gone; I was free to walk wherever I pleased. And I could almost feel the dead cousins of these revellers—re-born now as harmonics of the network, resonating to the music and the sight of their soul-mates—clamoring in my skull, begging me to carry them all the way to the land of the living.

  I took a few steps forward, then something in the corner of my vision distracted me. In the alley beside the pub, a boy of ten or twelve sat crouched against the wall, lowering his face into a plastic bag. After a few inhalations he looked up, dead eyes shining, as blissfully as any orchestra conductor.

  I backed away.

  Someone touched my shoulder. I spun around and saw a man beaming at me. “Jesus loves you, brother! Your search is over!” He thrust a pamphlet into my hand. I gazed into his face, and his condition was transparent to me: he’d stumbled on a way to produce Leu-enkephalin at will—but he didn’t know it, so he’d reasoned that some divine wellspring of happiness was responsible. I felt my chest tighten with horror and pity. At least I’d known about my tumor. And even the fucked-up kid in the alley understood that he was just sniffing glue.

  And the people in the pub? Did they know what they were doing? Music, companionship, alcohol, sex … where did the border lie? When did justifiable happiness turn into something as empty, as pathological, as it was for this man?

  I stumbled away, and headed back towards the station. All around me, people - were laughing and shouting, holding hands, kissing … and I watched them as if they were flayed anatomical figures, revealing a thousand interlocking muscles working together with effortless precision. Buried inside me, the machinery of happiness recognized itself, again and again.

  I had no doubt, now, that Durrani really had packed every last shred of the human capacity for joy into my skull. But to claim any part of it, I’d have to swallow the fact—more deeply than the tumor had ever forced me to swallow it—that happiness itself meant nothing. Lif
e without it was unbearable, but as an end in itself, it was not enough. I was free to choose its causes—and to be happy with my choices—but whatever I felt once I’d bootstrapped my new self into existence, the possibility would remain that all my choices had been wrong.

  Global assurance had given me until the end of the year to get my act together. If my annual psychological assessment showed that Durrani’s treatment had been successful—whether or not I actually had a job—I’d be thrown to the even less tender mercies of the privatized remnants of social security. So I stumbled around in the light, trying to find my bearings.

  On my first day back I woke at dawn. I sat down at the phone and started digging. My old net workspace had been archived; at current rates it was only costing about ten cents a year in storage fees, and I still had $36.20 credit in my account. The whole bizarre informational fossil had passed intact from company to company through four takeovers and mergers. Working through an assortment of tools to decode the obsolete data formats, I dragged fragments of my past life into the present and examined them, until it became too painful to go on.

  The next day I spent twelve hours cleaning the flat, scrubbing every corner—listening to my old njari downloads, stopping only to eat, ravenously. And though I could have refined my taste in food back to that of a twelve-year-old salt junkie, I made the choice—thoroughly un-masochistic, and more pragmatic than virtuous—to crave nothing more toxic than fruit.

  In the following weeks I put on weight with gratifying speed, though when I stared at myself in the mirror, or used morphing software running on the phone, I realized that I could be happy with almost any kind of body. The database must have included people with a vast range of ideal self-images, or who’d died perfectly content with their actual appearances.