The Hard SF Renaissance

by David G. Hartwell

  Again, I chose pragmatism. I had a lot of catching up to do, and I didn’t want to die at fifty-five from a heart attack if I could avoid it. There was no point fixating on the unattainable or the absurd, though, so after morphing myself to obesity, and rating it zero, I did the same for the Schwarzenegger look. I chose a lean, wiry body—well within the realms of possibility, according to the software—and assigned it sixteen out of twenty. Then I started running.

  I took it slowly at first, and though I clung to the image of myself as a child, darting effortlessly from street to street, I was careful never to crank up the joy of motion high enough to mask injuries. When I limped into a chemist looking for liniment, I found they were selling something called prostaglandin modulators, anti-inflammatory compounds that allegedly minimized damage without shutting down any vital repair processes. I was sceptical, but the stuff did seem to help; the first month was still painful, but I was neither crippled by natural swelling, nor rendered so oblivious to danger signs that I tore a muscle.

  And once my heart and lungs and calves were dragged screaming out of their atrophied state, it was good. I ran for an hour every morning, weaving around the local back streets, and on Sunday afternoons circumnavigated the city itself. I didn’t push myself to attain ever faster times; I had no athletic ambitions whatsoever. I just wanted to exercise my freedom.

  Soon the act of running melted into a kind of seamless whole. I could revel in the thudding of my heart and the feeling of my limbs in motion, or I could let those details recede into a buzz of satisfaction and just watch the scenery, as if from a train. And having reclaimed my body, I began to reclaim the suburbs, one by one. From the slivers of forest clinging to the Lane Cove river to the eternal ugliness of Paramatta Road, I criss-crossed Sydney like a mad surveyor, wrapping the landscape with invisible geodesics then drawing it into my skull. I pounded across the bridges at Gladesville and Iron Cove, Pyrmont, Meadowbank, and the Harbor itself, daring the planks to give way beneath my feet.

  I suffered moments of doubt. I wasn’t drunk on endorphins—I wasn’t pushing myself that hard—but it still felt too good to be true. Was this glue-sniffing? Maybe ten thousand generations of my ancestors had been rewarded with the same kind of pleasure for pursuing game, fleeing danger, and mapping their territory for the sake of survival, but to me it was all just a glorious pastime.

  Still, I wasn’t deceiving myself, and I wasn’t hurting anyone. I plucked those two rules from the core of the dead child inside me, and kept on running.

  Thirty was an interesting age to go through puberty. The virus hadn’t literally castrated me, but having eliminated pleasure from sexual imagery, genital stimulation, and orgasm—and having partly wrecked the hormonal regulatory pathways reaching down from the hypothalamus—it had left me with nothing worth describing as sexual function. My body disposed of semen in sporadic joyless spasms—and without the normal lubricants secreted by the prostate during arousal, every unwanted ejaculation tore at the urethral lining.

  When all of this changed, it hit hard—even in my state of relative sexual decrepitude. Compared to wet dreams of broken glass, masturbation was wonderful beyond belief, and I found myself unwilling to intervene with the controls to tone it down. But I needn’t have worried that it would rob me of interest in the real thing; I kept finding myself staring openly at people on the street, in shops and on trains, until by a combination of willpower, sheer terror, and prosthetic adjustment I managed to kick the habit.

  The network had rendered me bisexual, and though I quickly ramped my level of desire down considerably from that of the database’s most priapic contributors, when it came to choosing to be straight or gay, everything turned to quicksand. The network was not some kind of population-weighted average; if it had been, Durrani’s original hope that my own surviving neural architecture could hold sway would have been dashed whenever the vote was stacked against it. So I was not just ten or fifteen percent gay; the two possibilities were present with equal force, and the thought of eliminating either felt as alarming, as disfiguring, as if I’d lived with both for decades.

  But was that just the prosthesis defending itself, or was it partly my own response? I had no idea. I’d been a thoroughly asexual twelve-year-old, even before the virus; I’d always assumed that I was straight, and I’d certainly found some girls attractive, but there’d been no moonstruck stares or furtive groping to back up that purely aesthetic opinion. I looked up the latest research, but all the genetic claims I recalled from various headlines had since been discredited—so even if my sexuality had been determined from birth, there was no blood test that could tell me, now, what it would have become. I even tracked down my pre-treatment MRI scans, but they lacked the resolution to provide a direct, neuroanatomical answer.

  I didn’t want to be bisexual. I was too old to experiment like a teenager; I wanted certainty, I wanted solid foundations. I wanted to be monogamous—and even if monogamy was rarely an effortless state for anyone, that was no reason to lumber myself with unnecessary obstacles. So who should I slaughter? I knew which choice would make things easier … but if everything came down to a question of which of the four thousand donors could carry me along the path of least resistance, whose life would I be living?

  Maybe it was all a moot point. I was a thirty-year-old virgin with a history of mental illness, no money, no prospects, no social skills—and I could always crank up the satisfaction level of my only current option, and let everything else recede into fantasy. I wasn’t deceiving myself, I wasn’t hurting anyone. It was within my power to want nothing more.

  I’d noticed the bookshop, tucked away in a back street in Leichhardt, many times before. But one Sunday in June, when I jogged past and saw a copy of The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil in the front window, I had to stop and laugh.

  I was drenched in sweat from the winter humidity, so I didn’t go in and buy the book. But I peered in through the display towards the counter, and spotted a HELP WANTED sign.

  Looking for unskilled work had seemed futile; the total unemployment rate was fifteen percent, the youth rate three times higher, so I’d assumed there’d always be a thousand other applicants for every job: younger, cheaper, stronger, and certifiably sane. But though I’d resumed my on-line education, I was getting not so much nowhere, fast as everywhere, slowly. All the fields of knowledge that had gripped me as a child had expanded a hundredfold, and while the prosthesis granted me limitless energy and enthusiasm, there was still too much ground for anyone to cover in a lifetime. I knew I’d have to sacrifice ninety percent of my interests if I was ever going to choose a career, but I still hadn’t been able to wield the knife.

  I returned to the bookshop on Monday, walking up from Petersham station. I’d fine-tuned my confidence for the occasion, but it rose spontaneously when I heard that there’d been no other applicants. The owner was in his sixties, and he’d just done his back in; he wanted someone to lug boxes around, and take the counter when he was otherwise occupied. I told him the truth: I’d been neurologically damaged by a childhood illness, and I’d only recently recovered.

  He hired me on the spot, for a month’s trial. The starting wage was exactly what Global Assurance was paying me, but if I was taken on permanently I’d get slightly more.

  The work wasn’t hard, and the owner didn’t mind me reading in the back room when I had nothing to do. In a way, I was in heaven—ten thousand books, and no access fees—but sometimes I felt the terror of dissolution returning. I read voraciously, and on one level I could make clear judgments: I could pick the clumsy writers from the skilled, the honest from the fakers, the platitudinous from the inspired. But the prosthesis still wanted me to enjoy everything, to embrace everything, to diffuse out across the dusty shelves until I was no one at all, a ghost in the Library of Babel.

  She walked into the bookshop two minutes after opening time, on the first day of spring. Watching her browse, I tried to think clearly through the consequenc
es of what I was about to do. For weeks I’d been on the counter five hours a day, and with all that human contact I’d been hoping for … something. Not wild, reciprocated love at first sight, just the tiniest flicker of mutual interest, the slightest piece of evidence that I could actually desire one human being more than all the rest.

  It hadn’t happened. Some customers had flirted mildly, but I could see that it was nothing special, just their own kind of politeness—and I’d felt nothing more in response than if they’d been unusually, formally, courteous. And though I might have agreed with any bystander as to who was conventionally good-looking, who was animated or mysterious, witty or charming, who glowed with youth or radiated worldliness … I just didn’t care. The four thousand had all loved very different people, and the envelope that stretched between their far-flung characteristics encompassed the entire species. That was never going to change, until I did something to break the symmetry myself.

  So for the past week, I’d dragged all the relevant systems in the prosthesis down to three or four. People had become scarcely more interesting to watch than pieces of wood. Now, alone in the shop with this randomly chosen stranger, I slowly turned the controls up. I had to fight against positive feedback; the higher the settings, the more I wanted to increase them, but I’d set limits in advance, and I stuck to them.

  By the time she’d chosen two books and approached the counter, I was feeling half defiantly triumphant, half sick with shame. I’d struck a pure note with the network at last; what I felt at the sight of this woman rang true. And if everything I’d done to achieve it was calculated, artificial, bizarre and abhorrent … I’d had no other way.

  I was smiling as she bought the books, and she smiled back warmly. No wedding or engagement ring—but I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t try anything, no matter what. This was just the first step: to notice someone, to make someone stand out from the crowd. I could ask out the tenth, the hundredth woman who bore some passing resemblance to her.

  I said, “Would you like to meet for a coffee sometime?”

  She looked surprised, but not affronted. Indecisive, but at least slightly pleased to have been asked. And I thought I was prepared for this slip of the tongue to lead nowhere, but then something in the ruins of me sent a shaft of pain through my chest as I watched her make up her mind. If a fraction of that had shown on my face, she probably would have rushed me to the nearest vet to be put down.

  She said, “That would be nice. I’m Julia, by the way.”

  “I’m Mark.” We shook hands.

  “When do you finish work?”

  “Tonight? Nine o’clock.”

  “Ah.”

  I said, “How about lunch? When do you have lunch?”

  “One.” She hesitated. “There’s that place just down the road … next to the hardware store?”

  “That would be great.”

  Julia smiled. “Then I’ll meet you there. About ten past. OK?”

  I nodded. She turned and walked out. I stared after her, dazed, terrified, elated. I thought: This is simple. Anyone in the world can do it. It’s like breathing.

  I started hyperventilating. I was an emotionally retarded teenager, and she’d discover that in five minutes flat. Or, worse, discover the four thousand grown men in my head offering advice.

  I went into the toilet to throw up.

  Julia told me that she managed a dress shop a few blocks away. “You’re new at the bookshop, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what were you doing before that?”

  “I was unemployed. For a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Since I was a student.”

  She grimaced. “It’s criminal, isn’t it? Well, I’m doing my bit. I’m job-sharing, half-time only.”

  “Really? How are you finding it?”

  “It’s wonderful. I mean, I’m lucky, the position’s well enough paid that I can get by on half a salary.” She laughed. “Most people assume I must be raising a family. As if that’s the only possible reason.”

  “You just like to have the time?”

  “Yes. Time’s important. I hate being rushed.”

  We had lunch again two days later, and then twice again the next week. She talked about the shop, a trip she’d made to South America, a sister recovering from breast cancer. I almost mentioned my own long-vanquished tumor, but apart from fears about where that might lead, it would have sounded too much like a plea for sympathy. At home, I sat riveted to the phone—not waiting for a call, but watching news broadcasts, to be sure I’d have something to talk about besides myself. Who’s your favorite singer/author/artist/actor? I have no idea.

  Visions of Julia filled my head. I wanted to know what she was doing every second of the day; I wanted her to be happy, I wanted her to be safe. Why? Because I’d chosen her. But … why had I felt compelled to choose anyone? Because in the end, the one thing that most of the donors must have had in common was the fact that they’d desired, and cared about, one person above all others. Why? That came down to evolution. You could no more help and protect everyone in sight than you could fuck them, and a judicious combination of the two had obviously proved effective at passing down genes. So my emotions had the same ancestry as everyone else’s; what more could I ask?

  But how could I pretend that I felt anything real for Julia, when I could shift a few buttons in my head, anytime, and make those feelings vanish? Even if what I felt was strong enough to keep me from wanting to touch that dial … .

  Some days I thought: it must be like this for everyone. People make a decision, half-shaped by chance, to get to know someone; everything starts from there. Some nights I sat awake for hours, wondering if I was turning myself into a pathetic slave, or a dangerous obsessive. Could anything I discovered about Julia drive me away, now that I’d chosen her? Or even trigger the slightest disapproval? And if, when, she decided to break things off, how would I take it?

  We went out to dinner, then shared a taxi home. I kissed her goodnight on her doorstep. Back in my flat, I flipped through sex manuals on the net, wondering how I could ever hope to conceal my complete lack of experience. Everything looked anatomically impossible; I’d need six years of gymnastics training just to achieve the missionary position. I’d refused to masturbate since I’d met her; to fantasize about her, to imagine her without consent, seemed outrageous, unforgivable. After I gave in, I lay awake until dawn trying to comprehend the trap I’d dug for myself, and trying to understand why I didn’t want to be free.

  Julia bent down and kissed me, sweatily. “That was a nice idea.” she climbed off me and flopped onto the bed.

  I’d spent the last ten minutes riding the blue control, trying to keep myself from coming without losing my erection. I’d heard of computer games involving exactly the same thing. Now I turned up the indigo for a stronger glow of intimacy—and when I looked into her eyes, I knew that she could see the effect on me. She brushed my cheek with her hand. “You’re a sweet man. Did you know that?”

  I said, “I have to tell you something.” Sweet? I’m a puppet, I’m a robot, I’m a freak.

  “What?”

  I couldn’t speak. She seemed amused, then she kissed me. “I know you’re gay. That’s all right; I don’t mind.”

  “I’m not gay.” Any more? “Though I might have been.”

  Julia frowned. “Gay, bisexual … I don’t care. Honestly.”

  I wouldn’t have to manipulate my responses much longer; the prosthesis was being shaped by all of this, and in a few weeks I’d be able to leave it to its own devices. Then I’d feel, as naturally as anyone, all the things I was now having to choose.

  I said, “When I was twelve, I had cancer.”

  I told her everything. I watched her face, and saw horror, then growing doubt. “You don’t believe me?”

  She replied haltingly, “You sound so matter-of-fact. Eighteen years? How can you just say, ‘I lost eighteen years’?”

&
nbsp; “How do you want me to say it? I’m not trying to make you pity me. I just want you to understand.”

  When I came to the day I met her, my stomach tightened with fear, but I kept on talking. After a few seconds I saw tears in her eyes, and I felt as though I’d been knifed.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you.” I didn’t know whether to try to hold her, or to leave right then. I kept my eyes fixed on her, but the room swam.

  She smiled. “What are you sorry about? You chose me. I chose you. It could have been different for both of us. But it wasn’t.” She reached down under the sheet and took my hand. “It wasn’t.”

  Julia had Saturdays off, but I had to start work at eight. she kissed me goodbye sleepily when I left at six; I walked all the way home, weightless.

  I must have grinned inanely at everyone who came into the shop, but I hardly saw them. I was picturing the future. I hadn’t spoken to either of my parents for nine years, they didn’t even know about the Durrani treatment. But now it seemed possible to repair anything. I could go to them now and say: This is your son, back from the dead. You did save my life, all those years ago.

  There was a message on the phone from Julia when I arrived home. I resisted viewing it until I’d started things cooking on the stove; there was something perversely pleasurable about forcing myself to wait, imagining her face and her voice in anticipation.

  I hit the PLAY button. Her face wasn’t quite as I’d pictured it.

  I kept missing things and stopping to rewind. Isolated phrases stuck in my mind. Too strange. Too sick. No one’s fault. My explanation hadn’t really sunk in the night before. But now she’d had time to think about it, and she wasn’t prepared to carry on a relationship with four thousand dead men.

  I sat on the floor, trying to decide what to feel: the wave of pain crashing over me, or something better, by choice. I knew I could summon up the controls of the prosthesis and make myself happy—happy because I was “free” again, happy because I was better off without her … happy because Julia was better off without me. Or even just happy because happiness meant nothing, and all I had to do to attain it was flood my brain with Leu-enkephalin.