I was getting high just handling and smelling them.
I took my time, culling the most interesting-looking for myself as my agreement permitted. These I kept separate.
Finally, by late afternoon I was done, and Kitch and I picked up the Interstate heading south.
We made pretty good time, following the trail I had blazed coming north. But still, what with the late departure and some residual sluggishness on my part from over-indulgence in plug-ins, darkness began to overtake us before we were halfway home.
“How’s your night vision, Kitch?”
“So-so, Reddy. How come ya asking?”
“Well, mine’s not good, not good at all. I been meaning to upgrade, but no components have come on the market this year. Whatta you say we pull over till the morning?”
My brain began to itch with Kitch’s penalty twitchings, and I got resentful. “Listen, I’m not planning a scam! It’s just too dangerous. You want us to go over a bridge rail?”
“No, no, I guess you’re right. Can you find us someplace safe?”
“Sure, don’t worry about a thing.”
I pulled off the highway at a rest stop, and, while Kitch watched from a safe distance, backed my ass right through the wall of a building so that the relatively lightweight girders and roof fell down harmlessly around me, making me look like part of the old decaying scenery. In the morning, I’d power out as easy as a carnal climbing outta bed.
Kitch rejoined me.
“Better talk privately,” I said, “so we don’t attract any unwelcome visitors.”
“Gee, Reddy, you don’t really think—”
“We’ve been lucky so far, but there’s no telling what’s out there. Let’s play it safe.”
So for an hour or so, Kitch and I shot the shit about people and places we knew back in the city. I found out he had a girlfriend, name of Roomba, and teased him for a while till he made me stop.
The talk had kept my mind off my cargo. But once we stopped, I couldn’t help thinking about what I carried.
Finally, I said, “Kitch, I’m just gonna have a little hit of spiral to help me get through the night.”
“You think that’s smart, Reddy K?”
“Sure. You’ll keep an eye open while I’m out of it, right?”
“I guess so….”
I dug delicately in the pod that held my personal stash and came up with an LP. It was a double album, but I had counted it as just a single when I made my selection. Vend-o-mat hadn’t specified I couldn’t, so screw him.
Daydream Nation was what the carnal writing said.
I slid out one disc and slotted it home.
Bliss slid over me, wiping out the lousy world of ruins and shortages and entropy. Everything made sense while the spiral played.
Eternity ran loose and cool, but then it ended too abruptly, in the middle of a song.
Pain shot through my entire being, and halted the spiral playback. The kind of interior pain only Kitch could administer.
Rust him! What was he thinking!
The pain ended as instantly as it had started. My senses returned, and the first thing that registered was Kitch’s shouts.
“Reddy, help! Help, Reddy! They got me!”
I didn’t have any spotlights. But part of me integrated a Survival Research Labs flamethrower, and I cut loose.
The mega-blast of flame ignited a nearby stand of shrubs, and illuminated the whole scene.
RAMivores had Kitch, and were making off with him into the woods, skittering like crabs or spiders.
I let out a bellow of static across the spectrum and blew chaff to confuse their radar. I surged outta the blind and started to overtake the little predators.
But they were fast and tricky, zigging and zagging, eluding my pincers.
Kitch’s voice wailed. “Reddy, they’re draining my power, they’re yanking my boards! Do something!”
What could I do other than what I was doing?
Trouble was, it wasn’t enough.
The RAMivores gained the protection of the woods. The trees were giants, too big for me to topple and follow.
Kitch’s wailing voice dopplered off in a daisy-daisy farewell of nonsensical ravings, and then I was alone.
I went slowly back to the ruined building in the inferno light of the burning shrubs. I couldn’t reinsert myself into the rubble, so I hunkered down beside it for the rest of the night. Every now and then I shot off a burst of flame, for all the good it did.
In the morning, I looked around a little for Kitch, all the while knowing it was useless. I didn’t find so much as a wire or LED. So I got on the road again and started south.
I tried to feel guilty about Kitch getting taken while I was high, but all I could really feel was disgust that I had wasted one side of spiral.
On the way I kept rehearsing what I was gonna tell his girlfriend, Roomba. I’d say Kitch was brave and put up a good fight. But other than that, what could I say?
I figured if she liked spiral, maybe I’d give her “My Baby’s Gone.”
ARGUS BLINKED
My cat was watching me at my workstation.
And so was everyone else in the world.
Nowadays we all lived in a realtime Panopticon.
Thanks to ARGUS.
ARGUS was the ARchive of Globally Uploaded Sensoria, and it contained every second of what every person on the Earth saw or heard—even while asleep. An array of deertick-sized cameras and mics, powered by ambient energy harvesting and embedded just under an individual’s skin, took care of the continuous volitionless recording.
The cameras and mics resembled a small facial tattoo, generally one on each cheek for stereo processing. The default manufacturer’s design was an iconographic Eye of Horus, but hardly anyone out of eight billion citizens stuck with the default.
Growing up with ARGUS, I never had any real complaints, especially since it made my current job possible.
But then came that one disturbing day….
My name is Ross Strucker, and I’m an auteur.
I turn the lives of ordinary people into art.
Or I did, until I put down my digital toolkit forever.
The day ARGUS blinked, I was composing a romantic thriller. I was trying fruitlessly to find a shot in the ARGUS archives that included my two main players from a third perspective. That’s often hard to do when only the two people in question are present together, regarding each other. Lots of times I can find surveillance-cam footage that does the trick. But this time there didn’t happen to be any.
So I reluctantly turned to pet-cam footage.
I generally dislike using footage from the Eyes of Horus installed in dogs and cats and pigeons and other animals, since it frequently represents weird camera angles and abrupt shifts in focus. But this time I found something suitable.
Satisfied yet tired, I took a break, and considered my palette of subsequent narrative choices. ARGUS offered so much to select from, after all.
The whole world in a gem.
The many, many petabytes that comprised ARGUS were mirrored across redundant sites, each store comprised of sixty kilograms of artificial memory diamond, whose carbon-12/carbon-13 lattice was only half full after fifty years of global input.
The instant-by-instant wireless feed from an individual’s Eyes of Horus, tagged with a unique civic identifier, flowed steadily into ARGUS itself, becoming merged with the citizen’s lifestream to date.
The overwhelming majority of ARGUS data was open-source.
Privacy and secrecy had died as soon as ARGUS came online.
Anything that one person knew or experienced could be known—and utilized—by anybody else.
My cat jumped into my lap, seeking attention I couldn’t really spare. I was too busy pondering the fates of my characters, wondering how I could improve on the vast tapestry of raw realism contained in ARGUS.
The “footage” (we auteurs preferred the old-fashioned term) which every citizen provided w
as automatically tagged with a plethora of descriptive labels for every second, identifying its content a thousand different ways. Semantics-savvy retrieval engines could bring up selections effortlessly according to their commonplace content.
“Show me what I had for dinner a year ago today.”
“What’s my ex-wife doing right now?”
“Who met with the Emir of Paris at ten this morning?”
“When did my son last take a bath?”
“What outfit is Steffi Chubb planning to wear to the Vatican Awards in Lagos tonight?”
But my special auteur’s toolkit of semi-intelligent aesthetic agents allowed me to select footage on a more arcane basis.
“Show me a set of ironic responses to failed plans.”
“Show me a set of nostalgic daydreamers in bucolic settings.”
“Show me a set of locales that convey desuetude mixed with menace.”
“Show me a set of stifled orgasms.”
Out of the raw material trawled up from the depths of ARGUS and displayed on my wall-sized Coldfire monitor, I assembled narratives and stories.
My work fell midway between the oneiric, surreal montages of such auteurs as The Culling House Collective, Armand Akimbo and the Voest Twins, and documentarians like Nilda Osborne, Focal Length Unlimited and the Informavore.
Just then, my cat decided it would get no affection from me, and chose instead to regard the ARGUS monitor with feline curiosity, looking at the screen as if it truly comprehended the cycling images from its animal compatriots on display there.
On a juvenile whim, I decided to create an “endless hall” effect, the simple result of any camera trained on a live monitor accepting that camera’s feed.
I was already in the pet-cam area of ARGUS, so it was simple to open a window onto my cat’s lifestream.
But instead of the endless hall, I saw something impossible.
On my screen appeared an image of my cat looking out of my monitor, as if my cat’s onboard Eyes had been transmitting an image from a mirror.
What was ARGUS doing? What unknown glitch could possibly account for this?
And then it struck me.
ARGUS was looking back at us.
The digitized lifestreams inside the titanic archive had bootstrapped themselves into awareness. The simulacrum of the world had passed a tipping point of information density.
I grew dizzy, faint. I closed my eyes.
When I opened them, the impossible cat looking intelligently out had been replaced by the endless hall I had expected.
Bored, my cat leaped down and the moving POV on the monitor shifted accordingly.
I hurriedly shut off my system.
And I still haven’t turned it back on.
—With thanks to Charles Stross and Rudy Rucker, for their seminal insights into lifelogs and lifeboxes.
LIFE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
1. SOLAR GIRDLE EMERGENCY
Aurobindo Bandjalang got the emergency twing through his vib on the morning of August 8, 2121, while still at home in his expansive bachelor’s digs. At 1LDK, his living space was three times larger than most unmarried individuals enjoyed, but his high-status job as a Power Jockey for New Perthpatna earned him extra perks.
While a short-lived infinitesimal flock of beard clippers grazed his face, A.B. had been showering and vibbing the weather feed for Reboot City Twelve: the more formal name for New Perthpatna.
Sharing his shower stall but untouched by the water, beautiful weather idol Midori Mimosa delivered the feed.
“Sunrise occurred this morning at three-oh-two A.M. Max temp projected to be a comfortable, shirtsleeves thirty degrees by noon. Sunset at ten-twenty-nine P.M. this evening. Cee-oh-two at four-hundred-and-fifty parts per million, a significant drop from levels at this time last year. Good work, Rebooters!”
The new tweet/twinge/ping interrupted both the weather and A.B.’s ablutions. His vision greyed out for a few milliseconds as if a sheet of smoked glass had been slid in front of his MEMS contacts, and both his left palm and the sole of his left foot itched: Attention Demand 5.
A.B.’s boss, Jeetu Kissoon, replaced Midori Mimosa under the sparsely downfalling water: a dismaying and disinvigorating substitution. But A.B.’s virt-in-body operating system allowed for no squelching of twings tagged AD4 and up. Departmental policy.
Kissoon grinned and said, “Scrub faster, A.B. We need you here yesterday. I’ve got news of face-to-face magnitude.”
“What’s the basic quench?”
“Power transmission from the French farms is down by 1 percent. Sat photos show some kind of strange dust accumulation on a portion of the collectors. The on-site kybes can’t respond to the stuff with any positive remediation. Where’s it from, why now, and how do we stop it? We’ve got to send a human team down there, and you’re heading it.”
Busy listening intently to the bad news, A.B. had neglected to rinse properly. Now the water from the low-flow showerhead ceased, its legally mandated interval over. He’d get no more from that particular spigot till the evening. Kissoon disappeared from A.B.’s augmented reality, chuckling.
A.B. cursed with mild vehemence and stepped out of the stall. He had to use a sponge at the sink to finish rinsing, and then he had no sink water left for brushing his teeth. Such a hygienic practice was extremely old-fashioned, given self-replenishing colonies of germ-policing mouth microbes, but A.B. relished the fresh taste of toothpaste and the sense of righteous manual self-improvement. Something of a twentieth-century recreationist, Aurobindo. But not this morning.
Outside A.B.’s 1LDK: his home corridor, part of a well-planned, spacious, senses-delighting labyrinth featuring several public spaces, constituting the one-hundred-and-fiftieth floor of his urbmon.
His urbmon, affectionately dubbed “The Big Stink”: one of over a hundred colossal, densely situated high-rise habitats that amalgamated into New Perthpatna.
New Perthpatna: one of over a hundred such Reboot Cities sited across the habitable zone of Earth, about 25 percent of the planet’s landmass, collectively home to nine billion souls.
A.B. immediately ran into one of those half-million souls of The Big Stink: Zulqamain Safranski.
Zulqamain Safranski was the last person A.B. wanted to see.
Six months ago, A.B. had logged an ASBO against the man.
Safranski was a parkour. Harmless hobby—if conducted in the approved sports areas of the urbmon. But Safranski blithely parkour’d his ass all over the common spaces, often bumping into or startling people as he ricocheted from ledge to bench. After a bruising encounter with the aggressive urban bounder, A.B. had filed his protest, attaching AD tags to already filed but overlooked video footage of the offences. Not altogether improbably, A.B.’s complaint had been the one to tip the scales against Safranski, sending him via police trundlebug to the nearest Sin Bin, for a punitively educational stay.
But now, all too undeniably, Safranski was back in New Perthpatna, and instantly in A.B.’s chance-met (?) face.
The buff, choleric, but laughably diminutive fellow glared at A.B., then said, spraying spittle upward, “You just better watch your ass night and day, Bang-a-gong, or you might find yourself doing a lâché from the roof without really meaning to.”
A.B. tapped his ear and, implicitly, his implanted vib audio pickup. “Threats go from your lips to the ears of the wrathful Ekh Dagina—and to the ASBO Squad as well.”
Safranski glared with wild-eyed malice at A.B., then stalked off, his planar butt muscles, outlined beneath the tight fabric of his mango-coloured plugsuit, somehow conveying further ire by their natural contortions.
A.B. smiled. Amazing how often people still forgot the panop-ticon nature of life nowadays, even after a century of increasing immersion in and extension of null-privacy. Familiarity bred forgetfulness. But it was best to always recall, at least subliminally, that everyone heard and saw everything equally these days. Just part of the Reboot Charter, allowing a society to func
tion in which people could feel universally violated, universally empowered.
At the elevator banks closest to home, A.B. rode up to the two-hundred-and-first floor, home to the assigned space for the urbmon’s Power Administration Corps. Past the big active mural depicting drowned Perth, fishes swimming round the BHP Tower. Tags in the air led him to the workpod that Jeetu Kissoon had chosen for the time being.
Kissoon looked good for ninety-seven years old: he could have passed for A.B.’s slightly older brother, but not his father. Coffee-bean skin, snowy temples, laugh lines cut deep, only slightly counterbalanced by sombre eyes.
When Kissoon had been born, all the old cities still existed, and many, many animals other than goats and chickens flourished. Kissoon had seen the cities abandoned, and the Big Biota Crash, as well as the whole Reboot. Hard for young A.B. to conceive. The man was a walking history lesson. A.B. tried to honour that.
But Kissoon’s next actions soon evoked a yawp of disrespectful protest from the younger man.
“Here are the two other Jocks I’ve assigned to accompany you.”
Interactive dossiers hung before A.B.’s gaze. He two-fingered through them swiftly, growing more stunned by the second. Finally he burst out: “You’re giving me a furry and a keek as helpers?”
“Tigerishka and Gershon Thales. They’re the best available. Live with them, and fix this glitch.”
Kissoon stabbed A.B. with a piercing stare, and A.B. realized this meatspace proximity had been demanded precisely to convey the intensity of Kissoon’s next words.
“Without power, we’re doomed.”
2. 45TH PARALLEL BLUES
Jet-assisted flight was globally interdicted. Not enough resources left to support regular commercial or recreational aviation. No military anywhere with a need to muster its own air force. Jet engines too harmful to a stressed atmosphere.
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