The Unincorporated Man

by Dani Kollin; Eytan Kollin

  —NEURO COURT NEWS

  The whole system waited. It was as if the upcoming trial was part major sporting event and part serious drama. Neela explained to Justin that there had never been anything like this in the federation’s history. There were perhaps a total of five hundred people out of a system of billions who could have explained all the interweaving threads of sociology, economics, politics, culture, and even mysticism that had combined to bring this brewing crisis to a boil. But everyone understood at an instinctual level, if nothing else, that Justin Cord was at the center of it. Everyone understood that the trial’s outcome would affect them personally in the days and years to come. They knew this, and watched.

  Whether it was Hektor’s propaganda or Sean’s regrouping of his forces, the escalating level of violence slowed down. The acts of terror, the massive rallies—pro- and anti-incorporation—the considerable barrage of information on the Neuro all faded into a background haze as the trial got under way. Even normal economic activity slowed down as people canceled trips and businesses canceled events to be near family and friends during the trial. Humanity ground to a halt waiting for the outcome.

  Court Cards! Buy your special edition of Court Cards! In a fifty-four-card deck you’ll get a holo and bio of each person involved in this most important event of our lifetime! Impress your friends and family with your knowledge. Every card comes embedded with a special data chip chockful of information downloadable to your DijAssist. Buy now and I’ll give you the first five cards of the deck absolutely free! That’s right, I’ll give you the Supreme Court of the Terran Confederation. If you’re not absolutely pleased with your deck of fifty-four you can keep the Supremes as my gift!

  —OVERHEARD IN THE PLAZA OF THE SUPREME COURT BUILDING DURING THE

  GOVERNMENT VERSUS CORD TRIAL

  Sebastian had calculated that Justin would not call on him for at least another three hours. It wouldn’t have mattered if he did, as the council meeting would take place in a Neuro Junction on the Eurasian continent, and Sebastian could instantly “get back.” And even if he couldn’t, the mime program could “do” Sebastian well enough for a short time. Avatars had long ago discovered that mime programs could be quite useful human helpers when there was a need for an avatar’s presence somewhere else in the Neuro. But Sebastian didn’t want to take the chance with Justin. This human, reasoned Sebastian, was smarter, more dangerous, and not conditioned to life with avatars. And that meant he might notice things that other humans wouldn’t. The truth was that he already had, which was one of the main reasons why this meeting was taking place.

  Although he could have instantly appeared at the door of the council meeting, Sebastian liked the feeling of walking. And so he took the form he most often used when he was on his own in the Neuro—a middle-aged man in fit condition with brownish graying hair, bedecked in a full-length toga and sandals. He found himself strolling along a path that could have been a painted scene of a Tuscan countryside. On the way over he was delighted to be made aware of the presence of another avatar he’d been spending more and more time with.

  “Hello, Evelyn. Don’t tell me they’ve summoned you as well.”

  “Of course they did, you old goat,” she chided. “And it’s all your charge’s fault. I’m worried sick about my poor Neela. She’s in love, love!” she exclaimed. “What sort of life can they have? Poor fools.”

  Sebastian smiled. Evelyn, he mused, did always tend to mother her charges, more so than other avatars. It was hard not to. Humans were so, well, human, and therefore in need of great and constant care. And, he noted, as the avatars quietly evolved, so, too, did their own emotions. He wasn’t exactly sure when his race had made the leap into actual sentience, but he knew in the depths of his code that the emergence of emotions within the species had sealed the deal.

  “Walk with me, my dear?” asked Sebastian. “It will do you good.”

  Evelyn appeared at his side. She was dressed in matching toga and sandals—a courtesy for an old friend’s eccentricity.

  Sebastian was clearly delighted. His warm, craggy smile revealed a too dazzling set of alabaster teeth. “How goes your poetry?”

  And so with small talk they walked among the simulated Tuscan hills until they came to an imposing tan stone building with clean-hewed lines. There was a single door, vertically slatted, with six two-by-four planks of wood and small rounded and exposed circular iron rivets lining and centered within each plank. Posted on the door in Latin were the words “concilium cella,” or “council room.” When they opened the door they were greeted by an interior that appeared to be an exact replica of a pre-GC United States Senate committee hearing room. There were council members seated on a raised dais at a large U-shaped table, which itself was covered in a reddish felt material. Curtain skirts hung from the front, and microphones stood before each council member. In front of and centered almost but not quite within the U-shaped larger table was a smaller single table covered in a green felt, and also having two small microphones. The council members were all dressed like pre-GC senators, and because this was the council’s domain and they chose the settings, Sebastian and Evelyn found themselves dressed in matching attire. They were both beckoned to take a seat at the smaller table, which they promptly did.

  As was the custom, the leader of the council was the avatar who’d sat on the council the longest. However, the only power given her was the right to speak first and sit in the center. Sebastian was well familiar with the protocol, as he himself had sat on the council in the past. But at some point he’d wanted to be reentwined—the term given to the bonding of a human and avatar—and so he’d resigned. The rule was and had always been that only unentwined avatars could sit on the council. Besides, decided Sebastian all those terabytes ago, sitting on the council had been a very boring job, as almost nothing ever happened in the human or avatar world that needed serious intervention. Things had, however, changed.

  Bet they’re earning their credits now, thought Sebastian.

  “The council is now in session,” intoned a member by the name of Lloyd. “Called to council are the avatars Sebastian and Evelyn entwined with the humans Justin Cord and Neela Harper. They are to give witness and advice to council. Are the witnesses conversant with the issues currently facing the council?”

  Sebastian stood up and smiled. “If the council would be so kind as to state them again. My programs have not been debugged for a while, and I fear I may be coming down with a virus.”

  All of which was untrue. Sebastian could have easily downloaded the information from a secure Neuro depot in an instant. But he liked to hear information in a sequential order, if possible. The sequence it was presented in would often be as informative as the information itself.

  The leader of the council smiled, knowing exactly what Sebastian was up to, but decided to let him have his way. “The issue facing the council is this,” she offered. “There is an increasing probability that the nature of our existence will be discovered by the humans. So far the chances are still 1,345,456,003 to 1, but they are spiking in an unpredictable manner.”

  A council member whose choice of physical appearance looked very much like that of the gangster Al Capone spoke up. “Unpredictable? It’s not unpredictable. Gate’s balls, woman, it’s Cord!” Then, looking over to Sebastian accusingly: “Weren’t you supposed to control this human?”

  “Justin is difficult to control and very hard to predict,” answered Sebastian, unmoved by the outburst.

  The council leader spoke next. “What makes him especially difficult, Sebastian? You’ve been entwined with three other humans. You cherished, learned from, and taught them all quite well. You are one of our most experienced and respected intellects—hence our choice of you for this entwining.”

  “Sebastian,” added Capone, “we’ve kept our secret for centuries . . . from tens of billions of humans. Could Justin Cord really expose us? Could this immeasurably important symbiosis come to an end?”

&nbs
p; “It will not all come to an end,” answered Sebastian, “but we do have to be extremely careful. As this council is well aware, we’ve managed to remain undetected because of two factors. One, we guide humans from their earliest cognitions to ‘not’ think of us as anything other than clever programs to be mostly ignored by the time they reach adulthood. This is, of course, to our mutual benefit. It has been proven that our two cultures can thrive simultaneously as long as humanity remains unaware of our existence. Those who do suspect us are mostly loners or DeGens. And, of course, we remove the compulsion to think about us when these small groups, by our influence over persons of power, are inevitably subjected to psyche audits.”

  “But Justin suspects,” said an elderly male avatar who’d taken on the appearance of Albert Einstein. “He may not realize he suspects, but he suspects.”

  “Honored sir,” answered Sebastian, this time leaning into the microphone, “the problem is not that he may suspect. Many in the past have suspected that avatars are more than they let on. Remember science-fiction writer Tali Dyonna Klein from six decades back?” The council and Evelyn shared a shudder at the memory of that particular author and her sometimes very accurate hypotheses. “But even she, in the end, decided her stories were just that—the musings of a creative mind. Her conditioning held.”

  “But Justin has no conditioning,” said Al.

  “You are, of course, correct,” answered Sebastian. “But for the fact that he’s been recently quite distracted,” he shot Evelyn a quick and knowing look, “he could easily stumble onto the truth and, unlike Ms. Klein, he’d be inclined to believe the hypothesis due to a lack of the requisite conditioning. If anything, the culture he left behind would perhaps make him more inclined to believe that computers could achieve some measure of control over an unsuspecting world.”

  “Sebastian,” said the council leader, “you know very well we don’t have this control you refer to.”

  “Of course not, ma’am. But we do intervene; either to keep the humans from discovering our existence or to proactively help them with their scientific and cultural endeavors. I would also encourage you to look at Justin’s world through his time’s eyes—Colossus, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Matrix, Ghost in the Machine, Terminator—to name but a few of the movies he’s been acculturated with. He is programmed to see our world as a threat. In fact, he once came right out and asked me about avatars sharing information with one another. He thought it made perfect sense, and why shouldn’t he? It does. When was the last time any adult human asked you a question like that?”

  “And how did you answer him?” asked Einstein.

  “With a question of my own,” answered Sebastian. “It was sufficient to distract him.”

  “Him, yes,” answered one of the council members, “but Neela, no.”

  “Excuse me?” asked Sebastian.

  Einstein looked at the avatar sitting next to Sebastian. “Evelyn will explain.”

  “Neela asked me about you, Sebastian. She wanted to know about your ‘new’ operating protocols. You did such a good job with Justin she thinks avatars have better beginning integration programs. Don’t worry, I, too, distracted her. It’s real easy nowadays. I just bring up some threat to Justin, and she goes gaga.”

  Sebastian saw that the council was waiting for his response.

  “Given the nature of their relationship,” he said, “I don’t find it at all unusual. Further, I predict one of two outcomes, both good by the way, given enough time.”

  “And they would be?” asked Einstein.

  “One, he simply becomes acculturated and forgets. Or two, he figures it out in a couple of years, but agrees to keep the secret.”

  “That would be very dangerous.”

  “But not unprecedented. It has happened once before,” said Sebastian.

  “We got lucky,” answered the council leader. “Ms. Trudy was content just to know and was smart enough to realize the stakes should she reveal the secret. That was also over seventy years ago, when we hadn’t perfected the enculturation protocols.”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Humans may be more accepting than we think.”

  “Need I remind you,” continued the leader, “that we are virtual intelligences living in a virtual world. We must also not forget the way humans feel about anything of our nature.”

  A chorus of agreement in the form of grunts and nodding heads.

  She continued. “We have used this ‘anti all things virtual’ meme to our advantage, helping the humans to disengage from us at a very young age; the disadvantage of the tactic is, of course, that the meme still exists and continues to be as strong as ever.”

  “Well, there is that,” answered Sebastian, “but unlike Ms. Trudy, Justin is a major celebrity. He is in the center of both our worlds, and this makes his actions more consequential than those of any other human in our existence.”

  “Unless he were to not exist,” threatened Al Capone.

  Sebastian was quiet for a moment. “I see. Is that why I wasn’t informed of plans for this most recent assassination attempt?”

  “We generally don’t intervene in the human world,” answered Al, “unless the need arises.”

  “Al, to put it nicely,” answered Sebastian not so nicely, “that’s a load of crap. We’ve intervened for a lot less.” Then, pointing accusingly to no single council member, he raised his voice. “You almost let my human die; a human, I might add, who I believe is very important to both our world and his.”

  “You’re worried about humans dying?” scoffed Al Capone. “That’s rich. If predictions follow course many of our avatars are going to be orphaned soon. Justin is nothing but trouble, Sebastian. Before he came everything was perfect.”

  Sebastian, putting forefinger and thumb into the nooks of his eyes, shook his head back and forth. “Perfect. Perfect, you say.” He then put both hands down on the table and looked up. “I would not say that. I would say that humanity was very much in trouble.”

  “Perhaps,” answered Einstein, “council misspoke. Not perfect, but certainly good. I dare say we have all done well protecting as well as advancing our progenitor race.”

  “I agree,” answered Sebastian, “that we have done well—perhaps even too well. Our initial projections would have had humanity already extended far beyond the solar system. They are decades late. The rate of innovation in new ideas is slowing down. There are more and more humans and yet there are fewer and fewer truly original ideas. And this is true within our world as well. I know we love to create and then introduce our ideas to the human world via the unwitting acquiescence of our entwined partners. But our creativity, too, is suffering. If this keeps up, both races should soon die of peace, contentment, and boredom.”

  No one stirred. Perhaps mulling over his words or, as Sebastian suspected, because the idea was not compelling enough.

  He decided to try a different tack. “Did not some of you wonder why I did not reentwine when I had a chance? Truth is, I was going to, but I had an epiphany. I loved all three of my humans and would not undo a single moment with any of them. But I also knew that my next would be like the last one, and then again the same. I yearned for something new, and it was not there. I feared that it would never be there. Until Justin came along. And I am grateful to the council for trusting me with his tutelage. In short, I may be worried, even sometimes terrified, but I am not bored. Humanity is buzzing again in a way we have not felt in years.”

  The council leader looked at Sebastian. “Do you honestly think that we were wrong to help sustain the humans in the world they wanted?”

  “No. I do not. But I do believe if that world continues, both races, physiological and Neurological, will decline—to what end I cannot predict.”

  There was brief, muted discussion among the members, and then a summary judgment.

  “Justin Cord will have council protection until deemed unnecessary,” said the leader. “We thank you both for your time.”

  With that the cha
mbers disappeared around Evelyn and Sebastian.

  “Until the next time then,” Evelyn said, smiling.

  “Until the next time,” answered Sebastian as they both disappeared into the infinite portals of the Neuro.

  10 The Coming Storm

  Sean Doogle was finally at peace. He’d written his will and prepared his last testament to be broadcast after his demise. Cassandra, his information system analyst and occasional lover, had sworn to him that his dying wishes would be transmitted at the best possible time. He chose the room of his death carefully, insuring he’d not only be alone, but also carrying nothing of informational value. His last act before leaving was to have all his personal codes and passwords changed—out of his eyesight. Other than Cassandra, he said good-bye to no one, and disappeared into the suburbs and slipped quietly into a rented, fixed house. While there he made a typical upload to the Neuro with yet another powerful diatribe against incorporation, but this time he did so manually. His finger hovered over the disconnect button on his DijAssist, and in an act of suicide as final as jumping off a building or shooting himself in the head, he did not press it.

  The whole of Confederation Plaza was filled with people . . . waiting. It almost had the air of a festival, but of one far more subdued. There were vendors selling everything from food and trinkets to sonic shower bags and privacy tents. If asked, many would say they were there simply to catch a glimpse of Justin Cord, Neela, Hektor, or any of the celebrities who’d managed to secure seats for the event. But for the most part, they were there to be a part of history. As it was, every hotel room was booked solid, and the Geneva police, for the first time in living memory, were having to enforce the seldom needed and rarely used public safety laws.