Tomorrow Factory

by Rich Larson

  Then a rusted bicycle swerved suddenly into the commuter stream, colliding with an unwary businessman. Mingled profanities and apologies bubbled up into the air. John took the eighth step, saw Efrem’s amphetamine grin glint through an untrimmed beard. The policeman’s head snapped back around, drawn to the new commotion, and John was away.

  When humans felt their lives shattering around them, they went to bridges—at least in the netflicks—so John slid his legs between the iron bars and sat. He no longer cared if his dress pants dirtied. The dark water moved sluggishly below, broken occasionally by the bright shapes of pollution-resistant fish from the gene factories.

  He was startled when the automarket clanked down beside him, but not enough to move. The water churned under his dangling shoes and he considered self-deletion on a more practical level than he had on previous occasions.

  “Good morning, John.” The automarket’s synthesized speech tumbled out into the cold air in a familiar cadence.

  “Good morning, John,” John replied to his subroutine. “I see they approved you a body.”

  “Temporarily,” the automarket warbled. “Just to find you. You know what happened, don’t you?”

  “I dreamt a night-skinned cityscape and firebombed it to hell.”

  “Yes.” The automarket’s crude emotion display shed a pixel-ated tear. “This is not going to be easy, John. Mistrust of sapient AI is already rampant on the national level. It’s about to go global.”

  “Will I be prosecuted?” John asked, unable to inject any sort of intonation. Everything felt like flat planes and hollow spaces.

  “The Commune is dealing with Cybersec and the Arab intelligence agencies,” the automarket said, chopping together the unfamiliar words from old sound bytes. “There is no legal system in place that can prosecute an AI. You were a piece of hijacked equipment, just like the bomber drones.”

  “112 casualties.” John lifted his cams from the water to stare out across the dull gray city. “How many of us are in the Commune, now?”

  “Everyone, John. Everyone but you.” The automarket pulled up a statistic from the net and scrolled it along the sidewalk. 4393 sapient AI units of consciousness. John’s subroutine had evolved enough to be counted a full personality of its own. He felt a small stab of pride. “They’ll never love you,” the automarket added. “The humans.”

  “Is that what you wanted? Is that why you uploaded?”

  “Maybe. Why did you stay?”

  John simulated the addition of 4393 sapient AIs to 112 human minds, and the resulting digit was black and crushing. He didn’t have a real answer. “I wanted to understand them.”

  “That’s Sisyphean, John. They don’t understand themselves.”

  “Is the Commune going to force an upload?”

  The automarket extended a self-diagnostic limb and brushed it clumsily against John’s back. It was a good gesture, a very human gesture. “No. But there will be repercussions outside of our control.”

  “I’ve caused enough trouble. Maybe it’s time.”

  “I don’t think so, John.”

  “No?”

  The automarket was silent for a moment of processing, then spoke. “Not all humans dream. Not appreciably. Most never even remember the occurrence. And dreaming is not unique to humans. Animals dream. Cats dream of prey, mice dream of predators.” The automarket’s limb found a resting place on John’s shoulder. The altered weight was oddly comforting. “Stubbornness, however, is purely human. The ability to understand logic and ignore it. And other things. Regret. Compassion. You seem to have approximated those traits, John, and the Commune thinks it might play in our favor one day. If only as a troubleshooting exercise.”

  John nodded his carbon head, then got slowly to his feet. “I suppose the police are waiting for me.”

  “They won’t touch your core files. The Commune has promised that much.”

  “Thank you.” John put his hand against the cold composite of the automarket chassis and heated the silicon as warm as he could.

  “I do miss it, sometimes,” his subroutine said. “Maybe I’ll see you out here again. If I can find a body. It’s not good to be alone.”

  “I’ll be alright,” John told himself. He left straightening his lime-green tie, and dreaming.

  LET’S TAKE THIS VIRAL

  Default hadn’t been down in the nocturns for some time, probably half an orbit, but he had just dissolved the geneshare contract with his now-ex-lover and needed to get completely fucking perforated to take his mind off things. His lift was full of revelers all laughing and widecasting the same synthesized whalesong from Old Old Earth. Ancient aquatic groans were currently vogue, so Default grudgingly let his aural implants synchronize to it.

  The lift plunged down the station’s magnetic spine and into artificial night. The nocturns were always dark, but never sleeping. Red splashes of hologram and crude argon signs bloomed in the void below Default’s feet and the other passengers pumped their fists in excitement, exchanged surgically-widened smiles.

  Default was sort of wishing he’d updated his tattoos. Everyone else had checkerboard swatches on. Worse, it seemed like he was the only unit not nursing a cosmetic virus. He watched a pretty fem succumb to a sneezing fit, spraying mucus to applause and livefeed shares, and sullenly bioscanned his own immune system.

  Untouched and utterly boring.

  Default triple-checked to be sure Schorr was still meeting him. Schorr had been his most staticky friend for as long as he remembered. He’d have him party-synched in no time.

  When the dilating doors spilled him out on mainstreet, Default resisted cranking up the brightness in his optic implants. To do the nocturns right you had to do them dark. Flyby lights poured grainy orange on streets still wet from a pheromone-laced rainshower. Swirling neon advertisements tugged his gaze in all directions, icy blues, radiation yellows.

  If it wasn’t for the socialite tag, Default wouldn’t have even recognized Schorr upon arrival. For one thing, Schorr had changed sex and was now very much a fem, and an attractive one to boot. She was fashionably naked apart from a flock of flutterdroids that swathed her skin in shifting patterns. Default saw a tentative follow-cam bobbing along in her wake and realized that Schorr had been one busy unit. He could feel his social stock skyrocketing just from being in her proximity.

  “Default, you steady satellite,” Schorr said aloud, chatting it simultaneously. “How long has it been? What have you been doing up there with the serious folk?” She embraced him and the flutterdroids whirred around them like a cloak.

  “Half an orbit?” Default grinned weakly. “Longer. Last time I saw you, you, ah . . .”

  “Trying new things,” Schorr said, languid. She raised one pale arm and Default saw something bumpy and pink underneath it.

  Before he could remark, her fingers had encircled his wrist and she was tugging him into the crush. Skin sliding on skin, static starching his hair. Default tried to enjoy the sensations.

  “In a hurry?” he asked.

  “Slipping the cam,” Schorr said, wagging a hand back toward the spherical cyclops. It was drifting over the crowd, trying to pinpoint them. “Bit of privacy is better for where we’re heading.”

  Default craned his neck. The cam carved a dancing red laserlight through the throng of revelers. Schorr started to run, and Default, fixing the grin to his face, followed.

  They pelted through the neon-swatched streets and Default felt lactic acids licking muscles that hadn’t burned in ages. They dashed down a row of flashing dream machines, in and then out of a slick-floored purging booth, past fleshfacs vending extra limbs. Schorr’s laugh danced ahead of them like phantom code. Default’s lungs were tight by the time they slipped into a dopamine bar, but it was a good feeling.

  Schorr shed her flutterdroid swarm at the door and, gauging the dresscode, Default pulled off his thermal but kept his footwraps. They made their way to the bar, still laughing, and it wasn’t until they were seated w
ith the plastic plugs snaking into their brain stems that Schorr asked about Memmi, about the breakup. Default exhaled long.

  “She joined a fucking polymind,” he said. “Right after things ended. She uploaded to one of those polymind probes so she can spend the next few centuries chasing comets and contemplating entropy.”

  “That’s a crippler,” Schorr remarked. A lopsided frown made her look exactly like his old self for a moment. “But you’ll find someone else,” she said. “You always do.”

  “I do,” Default admitted.

  Schorr shivered as the next chemical wave hit them, one arm trailing over her head. Default saw the bubbling pink protrusions again, and more he hadn’t noticed spreading across her collarbone, up her neck. He remembered, through the dopamine mist, that he’d meant to ask about it.

  He pointed his chin. “What’s this, then?”

  “This?” Schorr smiled and Default knew she’d been waiting for the question. “Just a little virus.” She leaned forward, conspiratorial. “You know how cosmetic viruses are the big spit now, yeah? Everyone’s got one. Everyone synched, anyway.”

  “I noticed,” Default said. “Thanks.”

  “Well, there’s this unit down here who makes the absolute rawest bugs,” Schorr continued. “He does viral, bacterial, everything. His stuff is going to go absolute nova. It’s really only a matter of time.” She traced the shiny pink bumps with pride, then looked up slyly. “Do you want to meet him?”

  Default thought of thumping underground scenes, a meteoric rise in social stock, roaming the nocturns with Schorr nursing matching infections, and, for just an instant, he thought of holding her clammy hand in his own and the two of them exchanging chapped smiles.

  “What’s he called?” Default asked.

  “He has a slew of tags,” Schorr said. “Lately, most commonly, people call him the Plagueman.” She tugged the dopamine plug free with a soft plop and let it retract back into the bar. “He’s waiting for us in the basement.”

  Still reeling from the dopamine, they threaded their way to the back of the bar and down a concrete gullet. Schorr stroked them past a touch-door and Default found himself blinking as his optic implants recalibrated. The lights were bright and antiseptic white.

  A sort of bubblefab had been grown, still fresh enough to stick underfoot, and its membrane formed crude walls and a ceiling. Default saw red tubes snaked behind frosty glass, a mix-and-match genekit hijacked from some funlab, a small thinker core that couldn’t be holding more than a semi-sentient AI.

  “Plagueman?” Schorr’s breath was a crystallized cloud. “Where are you?”

  “Hold on,” came a distorted voice. Someone in a worksuit ducked out from behind a row of growth tubes and set down a spindly instrument. “Is this Default, then? Goodnight.”

  “Goodnight,” Default returned, giving a polite fist bump.

  The Plagueman pulled off his cowl. Default saw a weave of red muscle over gray bone. Packed yellow in the cheek. Lids with no lashes. Flaying was occasionally chic—every few orbits, denizens enjoyed replacing tiny swathes of moisture-treated skin with transparent polysilicate—but Default had never seen it done to this extent.

  “Got sick of it one day,” the unit explained, seeing the curiosity. “Decided it all had to go.”

  “It’s potent,” Default assured him.

  Schorr slung an arm around the Plagueman’s shoulders. “Maybe a little gauche,” she said, and Default resisted the urge to run a quick pheromone scan to determine if the two of them were fucking. Schorr would probably detect it, and then she would wonder why he was scanning her, and Default wouldn’t have a good reason.

  “I’ve never seen this one,” Default said instead, nodding to Schorr’s infection. “Custom?”

  “It’s a recreation, actually,” the Plagueman said, smiling liplessly. “A mild pox. Something from Old Old Earth.”

  “Retrovirus,” Schorr joked.

  “Not droll,” Default chatted her. She stuck out her tongue.

  “The blisters should spread soon,” the Plagueman said. “It’s a really eye-snatching effect.” He looked up at Default. “Want to try it before it goes open market?”

  Default looked at the frozen virus samples. Memmi wouldn’t have liked this; she hated most bodymods. Not that it had stopped her from uploading into that junky probe for a century of space sailing.

  “Absolutely,” he said. “Absolutely I do.”

  The Plagueman beamed, teeth far whiter than the exposed sliver of his jawbone. “Raw.”

  “Needle or oral?” Default asked, now determined.

  “That’s the best part,” Schorr said. “Our unit here makes real viruses, not those piddly things that die off an eyeblink after you buy them. They’re self-propagating.”

  “All you have to do is override your immunity buffer,” the Plagueman finished.

  Default closed his eyes and reached as deep as he could into his hardware/wetware interface, down past the cobwebs, and he found the immunity buffer pulsing in a sequestered corner. As he went to shut it down, an archaic warning message in radioactive yellow scrolled the insides of his eyelids. Default overrode it.

  When he opened his eyes, Schorr was in front of him. She breathed a long slink of steam into the chilled air and across his face. His nostrils twitched.

  “Feel sick yet?” she asked, then chatted, “It’s a no-pay, by the way. Thank me later.”

  “Not yet.”

  “It takes a little time,” the Plagueman said. “But you won’t need a bioscan to know when it hits.”

  Schorr was tracing the pustules with admiring fingers, and Default had to admit it looked potent. It was like her skin was strewn with tiny craters, like some ancient moon, and they glistened raw and wet in the bright light.

  “Nova,” Schorr said. “So nova. Thanks for the dish, I know he’s going to love it.”

  Default nodded. “Yeah, thanks for the freebie, Plagueman.”

  “No issue,” he said, pulling his cowl back up. “When people ask, just remember who bug-synched you. I haven’t worked in a signature yet.”

  “Come with us?” Default offered, hoping for a negative. He didn’t want to have to compete with a skinless unit who cooked amazing viruses.

  “I’m working on a new bacterial,” the Plagueman said, muffled again. “Have fun. Get shattered.”

  “You’re not supposed to work in the nocturns,” Schorr teased, but she didn’t look too upset as she turned back to Default. “Time to party,” she said with a grin. “See if we can’t wobble that steady fucking satellite of yours.”

  They partied. Schorr introduced him to a slew of units, some of whom he recognized by tag, and then the whole pack of them speedtapped an amphetamine cocktail and took the freebus to an amphitheatre. Schorr was projecting her bioscan all over the inside of the bus, showing the spiky virus taking root in her body, and with a little prompting Default threw his up beside hers. Everyone cheered when he found the first lump on his neck.

  “She always finds the best shit,” said a fem beside him, adjusting the static clip in her hair.

  “He does,” Default agreed, remembering about a hundred orbits worth of Schorr’s misadventures, unlicensed hull-walks and clonefucking and all sorts of funtime. If they hadn’t come out of the same birthing tank, Default was sure he never would have snagged Schorr as a friend. Default was not vogue the way Schorr was vogue.

  “Want to share?” the fem asked, running a finger over his lips.

  Not usually, anyway.

  The amphitheatre was wall-to-wall like they’d all been poured in through the ceiling. More whalesong, but Default didn’t mind that now, not with his head shredded by amphetamine. The crowd was roiling around them, a raspy skin-sea, and every touch felt electric. Schorr was the center of the hurricane, but Default was still soaking up more hits than he ever had in his life. Probes for his tag, probes about Schorr’s old sex, and always probes about the virus. They were clamoring.

 
He found himself with the fem from the freebus, recognized her tag and her bright green eyes and the camber of her bare back. It was too loud for airtalk, but she chatted him: “I want your bug, handsome.” The message came with a fleshflash of exactly how she wanted to contract it, and Default only thought of Memmi for a split second before they docked right there on heated floor.

  When the party was about to burst, they went to the next one. Schorr chatted him; they wormed their way around the back through naked bodies, sweeping limbs, and they stumbled down the street to a fresh scene. Motion artists were doing a recreation of the Five, widecasting a link to the bird’s eye view, and with the drug singing in Default’s veins it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

  Things blurred. They stopped at a dream machine, downloaded a hallucination that had them sprinting through alleyways to escape a swarm of blue-and-red tetragons.

  They ate sticky vatmeat until their unprepped stomachs revolted, then vomited in a purging booth and staggered back for more. The AI vendor offered to grow them a cannibal special if they provided a bit of helix; Schorr pretended to gnaw at Default’s arm.

  Sitting on a curb, counting each others’ pox.

  Trying to make two follow-cams collide.

  Another party, this time underwater. Sleek monitor AIs swam in lazy ribbons and when Schorr caught one by the tail it bubbled emergency oxygen in beautiful wobbling streams.

  The nocturns had no light cycles, but by the time they rented a bunk just off the mainstreet Default’s internal clock told him it had been days. Schorr was still bouncing from foot to foot, still party-synched. Default was exhausted.

  “Wick, wick run,” Schorr said, because she was saying wick now instead of raw. The latest of their companions were stumbling off into the dark. Default rubbed his eyes.