Stories of Singularity #1-4 (Restore, Containment, Defiance, Augment)

by Susan Kaye Quinn

  He glances at the bag on the seat behind him. My bag. “DNA samples?”

  “Yes.” I try not to let my relief show.

  “It’ll be two hundred chits worth of trade for the first round. I need extra for equipment. And no guarantees it’ll work.”

  Two hundred chits? I’m trying not to choke on my own spit. “I’ll… come up with it.”

  He nods. “The gun will make for a decent down payment. But the tech will take a while to cook up. I’ll let Riley know when it’s ready.”

  I finally let my shoulders drop. “Thanks.”

  He smirks and digs out a small bag from inside his coat. It must be the tech I’m supposed to get in exchange because he hands it to me. “I don’t know what what you did to get stuck with Riley’s rounds, but if you’re going to carry a gun, keep it under wraps. Nomads will take you just for the hardware. And they won’t just tase you to get it.”

  I swallow, pocket the bag of tech, and give him a nod.

  He flicks his black-gloved hand, and the armor ratchets back up into place. The bike backs away in a long arc, turns, and wheels off, weaving around the broken chunks of pavement. I watch him go, wondering if I’m a complete fool for thinking he’ll actually come back. Or bring meds for Eli’s mom. I guess since we completed the trade, that means we’re in business. I still don’t understand what changed his mind. A mutual hatred for all things ascender? A strong desire for the bot-made goods he can only get from a legacy city?

  I guess it doesn’t matter—he’s the only hope I have.

  The trek back to the city’s edge seems even longer than the hike out. Getting back in isn’t as hard as Riley made out—the jammer tracks the patrols well enough, and the jam signal makes me invisible to their sweeps, just like Riley’s shop. I have to wait for the moment they’re out of visual range, then run like crazy until my legs feel like they’re falling off. I collapse when I get back to Riley’s. He’s pissed I lost his gun, but he grouses something about it coming out of my commissions, so at least I’m not fired. I ignore the rest of what he says and stagger out to the tram.

  I finally catch my breath halfway back to downtown. My muscles are complete jelly, and I’m pretty sure I could sleep for a week, but I need to check on Eli and his mom before I crash at my apartment. Then I need to figure out a way to conjure two hundred chits out of thin air. It’s an obscene amount of money—my parents were murdered for less.

  The building bot scans me in. Fatigue weighs me down enough that I take the lift to the fifth floor. Eli’s programmed his household bot to accept me, so I don’t knock, just scan in.

  I freeze at the threshold of the door.

  Eli’s sprawled out on the floor, unconscious and covered in something that looks like blue blood. I stagger over and drop to his side.

  Oh my God, no.

  “Eli!” I shout as I shake his shoulders. His arms are covered in the blue muck, and it’s smeared all over his face, too. “Eli, God, please wake up!”

  He squints, eyes still closed, and moans a little, resisting my hold. I relax back on my heels, relief making all my muscles go weak at once. As my panic steps down, I realize the blue gunk is paint. I drag my gaze up to the canvas on the easel next to him… and my mouth drops open.

  Eli’s painting is incredible. It makes his other works look like a kid’s first sloppy art project.

  It’s a picture of a boy—a puppet on strings, really—suspended in the air. It’s almost entirely in blues, but the look of anguish and delight on the puppet-boy’s face is what’s making me stare and forget to breathe. It’s like he’s being tortured, but the upward cast of his eyes shows him seeing something that lights his face with joy—like all the torments will be worthwhile, if only he can reach that thing that lies just off the canvas. Some heavenly delight that only he can see.

  The damn thing’s making me tear up.

  Eli moans and rolls to the side, curling up like every muscle in his body is cramping. I put one hand on his shoulder, reassuring him. “I’m here, Eli. It’s okay. You’re going to be all right.”

  While I’m talking, I fish my phone out of my pocket and snap a shot of the painting. I don’t know what this could fetch on ArtNet, but I wouldn’t be surprised if two hundred chits is in the ballpark. It’s just that good.

  I stow my phone and help Eli as he struggles up to sitting. When he creaks open his eyes, he stares with horror at the painting, then at me, then at his blue-paint-soaked hands… then back to the painting.

  “Oh no,” he whispers.

  I don’t know what that’s about, but I help him up to sitting on the stool. It’s like he’s been tasered, the guy’s shaking so bad. I notice there are two holes in the wall that weren’t there before.

  “What happened?” I ask.

  “They’re going to let her die,” Eli says, the words shuddering out of him. He keeps avoiding looking at the Puppet Boy painting, so I don’t ask about that. For now.

  Besides, I have something much more important to tell him. “The ascenders might be willing to let her die. But I’m not.”

  He squints up at me, like he’s not understanding my words. He gestures with his hands, but they’re covered in blue paint, still wet. I grab a part of his arm that’s not coated and haul him out of the seat.

  “Come on, let’s get you cleaned up.” I have to hold him up on the way to the kitchen sink.

  He fumbles to help me scrub the paint off, but mostly he’s bracing his legs against the cabinet to keep from falling down. The blue sloughs off like skin—the wet parts mask the already-dried layers beneath. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph… how long has he been painting? And what is this crazy, inspired, amazing art thing he’s made? It’s like it came out of nowhere.

  I peer at him as we get most of the paint off. He seems to be pulling himself together. He edges away from me, and I let him go. Then he turns his back to the counter and struggles to hold himself up with slippery wet hands.

  “Five percent,” he says, staring at the floor of the kitchen. It’s warped with age and chipped with use.

  “She’s got a lot better odds than that.”

  “You don’t have to say that, Cy,” he says quietly, not looking at me.

  “I’m going to get the gen tech she needs.”

  He blinks, frowns at the floor, then slowly looks up at me. “What?”

  “It’s already done. It’ll take a couple weeks, maybe more, but—”

  “But it’s… Cy, it’s… that’s so illegal.”

  I smirk. “That’s my specialty. Haven’t you noticed?”

  “But you’ll be banished.” He says it like that’s the worst thing that could happen to me. I’m not so sure. But then his face goes blank. “We’ll all be banished.”

  “Only if we’re caught,” I say quietly. “I’m exceptionally good at not getting caught.”

  Then his eyes get a little wider, like he’s finally awake, finally come back from whatever thing knocked him out and left him covered in paint on the floor.

  And I know what that look means: hope.

  He barrels into me, even though only a foot separates us, grabbing me in a hug that’s as fierce as it is brief. When he rebounds away, I clamp a hand on his shoulder and look him in the eyes. He’s trying to duck away, so I won’t see the tears shining in them.

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” I say, for some reason needing to warn him. “It’s expensive, and the meds are tough to get, and it might not even work.” I glance at the Puppet Boy painting. “You just keep doing your art—you know how that makes your mom happy—and I’ll work my end with Riley and the meds. We’ll make it happen, okay?”

  He winces at the painting, like it pains him. “I don’t know, Cy.”

  I point a finger in his face. “Don’t you even do that. You are absolutely not going to give up. Do you understand me? We don’t give up.”

  He nods, rapidly, but he doesn’t look convinced.

  That’s okay.

  I know, deep in
my gut, this is going to work. My grandfather would have said a thousand Hail Mary’s trying to make it work—for all I know, he prayed for a miracle before calling the priest with the meds to cut his life short. But I’m going to do better than that. I’m going to win this by refusing to play by the ascender’s rules… not this time, and really, not ever again.

  All I have to do is not get caught.

  In the future, I believe technology will challenge us to remember what it means to be human. Even today, technology is racing ahead, integrating with our bodies via cybernetic limbs and our minds via the ever-present web. Humans are a tool-using species, but our tools are so quickly expanding our reach—both physically and mentally—that the day when we bring that technology inside our bodies for simple convenience and enhanced performance is not far off.

  This may, in fact, be the only hope we have of staying ahead of the machine intelligences we are so eagerly trying to build. Either the robot overlords will take over… or we’ll beat them to the punch by becoming full-fledged cyborgs ourselves. Either way, some of the most compelling stories for SF writers today are found in this technology-immersed future where we are the machines—or at least are engaged in a bare-knuckled fight for survival against them. And I’m not talking a Terminator-style battle, but rather something far more disturbing: that we may create machines that are simply better than us. At everything.

  Our time at the top of the evolutionary food chain may be reaching its end. As some futurists say, strong artificial intelligence may be our last invention. In a way, science fiction holds our arsenal of thought-experiments, girding us for the fight and helping us prevent those possibilities from becoming reality. This is why I’m writing the Singularity series—to hopefully stir the minds of my readers and get them thinking about technology’s effect on our mind-body-soul connection before it becomes a fact of everyday life.

  Before we get to the fourth Story of Singularity, one that dives into exactly what it means to be an "augmented" human...

  ... a bonus story! This is just a short flash fiction outtake from the first novel, The Legacy Human, following a young girl with a satchel of paintbrushes. Eli had a brief encounter with her on the tram, buying gray market brushes from her with the largess he'd recently acquired from his patron, Lenora. It's a just a vignette in the novel, expanded here to give a deeper look at the legacy humans who've made their life under the shadow of ascenders in Seattle...

  Defiance was originally published in the Future Chronicles Anthology

  Amazon

  Risha hurried through the entrance of the market, grasping her satchel of paintbrushes in one hand and pushing aside the rough canvas flaps of the tent with the other. The thick smell of human-made foods and human-type stink reassured her. After her encounter on the tram, barely being saved from the virtual reality addict by a handsome boy several years older than her, it was good to be back where the dangers were more familiar. And less likely to end up with her dead.

  Plus she was a whole chit richer than when she left!

  She had no idea why the boy bought her gray-market brushes for a full chit—any fool could see they were worth less than half that. It left a weird feeling in her chest: kindnesses weren’t the kind of thing you traded in Seattle. The city was filled with bots and left-over humanity and the occasional ascender, with their super smart nanotech brains… humans were at the bottom of that pile, and you had to fight to even get a fair trade half the time. At least the gray market was better than the black, where a reasonable bit of bargaining could still get you dead, if you angered the wrong types.

  But the boy had given her a kindness… and now she had a whole chit riding in her account. It was a full half-chit more than her uncle would expect back for the two brushes she’d sold. Risha wound her way past heaps of clay pots and woven throw rugs, her fingers crossed. Maybe Tuval would have one of his amazing chocolate pastries in his stall today. Why… for a half chit, maybe she could even bargain him for two! But she’d have to eat them quickly. Destroy the evidence, before her uncle found out.

  “Hey Risha!” The voice stopped her dogged search for the smell of chocolate buried in human odors. It was Samuel the Orphan. His parents had been exiled by the ascenders. The bots took care of him now, but Risha only ever saw him at the market.

  “Hey Samuel.” She gave him a tight smile, but her eyes were still hungry for Tuval’s stall.

  “I found something perfect for you.” Samuel was her age, fourteen, but he acted like he’d been a grizzled trader all his life.

  “I don’t have money for shells,” she said, absently, still peering through the bustling commerce for Tuval’s stall. Samuel haunted the beaches where the ascenders won’t go, scavenging seashells then trying to sell them. It’s not much of a business—although she’d seen a few of the girls use them to decorate their hair.

  “Not for sale,” Samuel said as he dug through his bags. He had dozens of them, small and large, all carrying his worthless bounty from the sea. “This one’s special.”

  Risha frowned. Not for sale? Was this some kind of new trade gimmick? Samuel’s face lit up as he found his prize: he pulled an unbroken shell the size of Risha’s thumb from his weathered paper bag. It caught the dim light of the market and gleamed blue.

  He held it out to her. “It’s perfect. Not a scratch. And the pearling on it is blue. Very rare.”

  She took it, just to be polite, and turned it over, admiring it. “It is pretty, Samuel. You should be able to find a buyer for this one.”

  He looks disappointed. “No, it’s for you.”

  She tried to hand it back to him. “I told you—I don’t have chits for shells.” Although a twinge in her chest nagged at her: she was dying to spend a half chit on a pastry that wouldn’t last the next five minutes. The boy on the tram hadn’t hesitated to help her when she needed it… and now she was hoarding her windfall like it belonged just to her.

  Samuel took her hand but just folded her fingers over the shell. “And I told you—this one’s for you. I knew it as soon as I saw it. It’s pretty and different. Unique.” He dropped her hand, his gaze suddenly intense on the bags before him.

  Risha’s face heated as she stared at her fingers closed around the shell. Another kindness. “Thank you.”

  He nodded but kept his head down.

  She wished she hadn’t been so adamant about not having chits for shells… but now it was too late for that. “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  Samuel peeked up. His gaunt cheeks spoke of an ascender-allowance-only diet—the kind that barely kept you moving. She had never noticed it before. The heat in her cheeks grew stronger.

  “Come on.” Risha held out her hand, the one not holding the shell.

  Samuel shuffled around his barricade of sacks, and she towed him toward Tuval’s stall. If he was still open, she reckoned a kindness would taste even better than his famed chocolate pastry.

  The floor is freshly swept from the last fight round. The blood’s gone, and the new gouges in the concrete blend with the old. My opponent is in his corner, and I’m in mine, with the ref holding up his hands to quiet the crowd. The competition matrix quickly winnowed to the two of us, but this month’s prize is mine for the losing. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself. And I haven’t even taken my dose of Resilience yet—I’m just trying to psyche myself up the old-fashioned way with positive talk and bravado. Because I really need to win this one. The prize is a shiny-new Resurrection mod, fresh from the shops, and that’s no standard augmentation. Winning it is key to my plans. My chances of survival are slim, even with the augment—but they’re zero without it.

  “Miriam Levine,” the referee intones.

  I nod to let him know I’m ready.

  “Zachary Haddock.” The ref lifts his chin to my opponent, who also gives the go-ahead.

  Zach was my sparring partner last week, which just means he’s seen all my latest moves. Not that he doesn’t already know my head inside and out. He�
��s three years older than me and acts like he’s my big brother. Which is cool most of the time, but in the ring? It’s a liability.

  And I know Zach wants this mod as badly as I do.

  The ref raises his hands again, keeping us in our corners until his signal. “Blood draws are allowed, but only flesh-on-flesh.” It’s the standard rule recitation. Mostly for the kids in the crowd. “If you draw blood with your augment, you’re immediately disqualified with a standard suspension from competition.”

  Six months. It’s not that long to wait. It’s more the shame that goes with the suspension. The lack of trust from your fellow warriors. Plus, the next time you step in the ring… it’s not good.

  “Standard drug enhancers only,” he continues. “At the start bell. Early dosing will result in immediate disqualification.”

  Only fools dose early. It’s not like that ten-second edge buys you anything in the fight.

  The ref lowers both hands, gesturing to our leg augments—we both have a full set—and Zach’s arm. The rest of our mods are internal. “Off-book augment use is authorized in the final round, but standard foul rules still apply.”

  That means we can get creative with our augments. Which I fully plan to do.

  “Points awarded for augment use. Pin for the win. Ready?”

  The crowd tenses. Zach and I drop into our fight poses but stay in our corners.

  “Fight!” A bell tones. I snap my tongue to activate my dose of Resilience, and I feel it even before I leave my corner. Sharper eyesight. Reduced anxiety. Higher tolerance for pain. The dull aches from the previous, unenhanced bouts quickly fade. I’m primed, ready for anything from extended combat to a long-duration march, all without being slowed down by the need for sleep or food or any normal human fatigue, mental or physical. In fact, I won’t be sleeping for a good twenty-four hours, no matter how inconvenient that might be.