"No," he agreed. "The natural state is lost, shattered like an eggshell. Even if— when— we finally manage to restore it, gather up all the shards and glue them together, it will no longer be natural, but something we have decided to maintain and preserve, like a garden. It will be only an extension of our culture."
"Nature is dead," Judith said. It was a concept she had picked up from other posthumans.
His teeth flashed with pleasure at her quick apprehension. "Indeed. Even off Earth, where conditions are more extreme, its effects are muted by technology. I suspect that nature can only exist where our all-devouring culture has not yet reached. Still… here on Earth, in the regions where all but the simplest technologies are prohibited, and it's still possible to suffer pain and even death.… This is as close to an authentic state as can be achieved." He patted the ground by his side. "The past is palpable here, century upon century, and under that the strength of the soil." His hands involuntarily leapt. This is so difficult, they said. This language is so clumsy. "I am afraid I have not expressed myself very well."
He smiled apologetically then, and she saw how exhausted he was. But still she could not resist asking, "What is it like, to think as you do?" It was a question that she had asked many times, of many posthumans. Many answers had she received, and no two of them alike.
The offworlder's face grew very still. At last he said, "Lao-tzu put it best. 'The way that can be named is not the true way. The name that can be spoken is not the eternal name.' The higher thought is ineffable, a mystery that can be experienced but never explained."
His arms and shoulders moved in a gesture that was the evolved descendant of a shrug. His weariness was palpable.
"You need rest," she said, and, standing, "let me help you into your tent."
"Dearest Judith. What would I ever do without you?"
Ever so slightly, she flushed.
*
The next sundown, their maps, though recently downloaded, proved to be incomplete. The improbably named Skookle River had wandered, throwing off swamps that her goggles' topographical functions could not distinguish from solid land. For two nights the party struggled southward, moving far to the west and then back again so many times that Judith would have been entirely lost without the navsats.
Then the rains began.
There was no choice but to leave the offworlder behind. Neither he nor Harry Work-to-Death could travel under such conditions. Judith put Maria and Leeza in charge of them both. After a few choice words of warning, she left them her spare goggles and instructions to break camp and follow as soon as the rains let up.
"Why do you treat us like dogs?" a Ninglander asked her when they were under way again. The rain poured down over his plastic poncho.
"Because you are no better than dogs."
He puffed himself up. "I am large and shapely. I have a fine mustache. I can give you many orgasms."
His comrade was pretending not to listen. But it was obvious to Judith that the two men had a bet going as to whether she could be seduced or not.
"Not without my participation."
Insulted, he thumped his chest. Water droplets flew. "I am as good as any of your Canadian men!"
"Yes," she agreed, "unhappily, that's true."
When the rains finally let up, Judith had just crested a small hillock that her topographics identified as an outlier of the Welsh Mountains. Spread out before her was a broad expanse of overgrown twenty-first-century ruins. She did not bother accessing the city's name. In her experience, all lost cities were alike; she didn't care if she never saw another. "Take ten," she said, and the Ninglanders shrugged out of their packs.
Idly, she donned her goggles to make sure that Leeza and Maria were breaking camp, as they had been instructed to do.
And screamed with rage.
*
The goggles Judith had left behind had been hung, unused, upon the flap-pole of one of the tents. Though the two women did not know it, it was slaved to hers, and she could spy upon their actions. She kept her goggles on all the way back to their camp.
When she arrived, they were sitting by their refrigeration stick, surrounded by the discarded wrappings of half the party's food and all of its opiates. The stick was turned up so high that the grass about it was white with frost. Already there was an inch of ash at its tip.
Harry Work-to-Death lay on the ground by the women, grinning loopily, face frozen to the stick. Dead.
Outside the circle, only partially visible to the goggles, lay the offworlder, still strapped to his litter. He chuckled and sang to himself. The women had been generous with the drugs.
"Pathetic weakling," Child-of-Scorn said to the offworlder, "I don't know why you didn't drown in the rain. But I am going to leave you out in the heat until you are dead, and then I am going to piss on your corpse."
"I am not going to wait," Triumph-of-the-Will bragged. She tried to stand and could not. "In just— just a moment!"
The whoops of laughter died as Judith strode into the camp. The Ninglanders stumbled to a halt behind her, and stood looking uncertainly from her to the women and back. In their simple way, they were shocked by what they saw.
Judith went to the offworlder and slapped him hard to get his attention. He gazed up confusedly at the patch she held up before his face.
"This is a detoxifier. It's going to remove those drugs from your system. Unfortunately, as a side effect, it will also depress your endorphin production. I'm afraid this is going to hurt."
She locked it onto his arm, and then said to the Ninglanders, "Take him up the trail. I'll be along."
They obeyed. The offworlder screamed once as the detoxifier took effect, and then fell silent again. Judith turned to the traitors. "You chose to disobey me. Very well. I can use the extra food."
She drew her ankh.
Child-of-Scorn clenched her fists angrily. "So could we! Half-rations so your little pet could eat his fill. Work us to death carrying him about. You think I'm stupid. I'm not stupid. I know what you want with him."
"He's the client. He pays the bills."
"What are you to him but an ugly little ape? He'd sooner fuck a cow than you!"
Triumph-of-the-Will fell over laughing. "A cow!" she cried. "A fuh-fucking cow! Moo!"
Child-of-Scorn's eyes blazed. "You know what the sky people call the likes of you and me? Mud-women! Sometimes they come to the cribs outside Pole Star City to get good and dirty. But they always wash off and go back to their nice clean habitats afterward. Five minutes after he climbs back into the sky, he'll have forgotten your name."
"Moooo! Moooo!"
"You cannot make me angry," Judith said, "for you are only animals."
"I am not an animal!" Child-of-Scorn shook her fist at Judith. "I refuse to be treated like one."
"One does not blame an animal for being what it is. But neither does one trust an animal that has proved unreliable. You were given two chances."
"If I'm an animal, then what does that make you? Huh? What the fuck does that make you, goddamnit?" The woman's face was red with rage. Her friend stared blankly up at her from the ground.
"Animals," Judith said through gritted teeth, "should be killed without emotion."
She fired twice.
*
With her party thus diminished, Judith could not hope to return to Canada afoot. But there were abundant ruins nearby, and they were a virtual reservoir of chemical poisons from the days when humans ruled the Earth. If she set the ankh to its hottest setting, she could start a blaze that would set off a hundred alarms in Pole Star City. The wardens would have to come to contain it. She would be imprisoned, of course, but her client would live.
Then Judith heard the thunder of engines.
High in the sky, a great light appeared, so bright it was haloed with black. She held up a hand to lessen the intensity and saw within the dazzle a small dark speck. A shuttle, falling from orbit.
She ran crashing through the brush as hard an
d fast as she could. Nightmarish minutes later, she topped a small rise and found the Ninglanders stand ing there, the offworlder between them. They were watching the shuttle come to a soft landing in the clearing its thrusters had burned in the vegetation.
"You summoned it," she accused the offworlder.
He looked up with tears in his eyes. The detoxifier had left him in a state of pitiless lucidity, with nothing to concentrate on but his own suffering. "I had to, yes." His voice was distant, his attention turned inward, on the neural device that allowed him to communicate with the ship's crew. "The pain— you can't imagine what it's like. How it feels."
A lifetime of lies roared in Judith's ears. Her mother had died for lack of the aid that came at this man's thought.
"I killed two women just now."
"Did you?" He looked away. "I'm sure you had good reasons. I'll have it listed as death by accident." Without his conscious volition, his hands moved, saying, It's a trivial matter, let it be.
A hatch opened in the shuttle's side. Slim figures clambered down, white med-kits on their belts. The offworlder smiled through his tears and stretched out welcoming arms to them.
Judith stepped back and into the shadow of his disregard. She was just another native now.
Two women were dead.
And her reasons for killing them mattered to no one.
She threw her head back and laughed, freely and without reserve. In that instant Judith Seize-the-Day was as fully and completely alive as any of the unworldly folk who walk the airless planets and work in the prosperous and incomprehensible habitats of deep space.
In that instant, had any been looking, she would have seemed not human at all.
Toast: A Con Report
CHARLES STROSS
Although he made his first sale back in 1987, it's only recently that British writer Charles Stross has begun to make a name for himself as a writer to watch in the new century ahead, with a sudden burst in the last couple of years of quirky, inventive, high-bit-rate stories such as "Antibodies," "A Colder War," "Bear Trap," and "Dechlorinating the Moderator" in markets such as Interzone, Spectrum SF, Odyssey, and New Worlds. In the fast-paced and innovative story that follows, he shows us that all this "posthuman" stuff may be arriving a lot faster than anyone thinks that it is…
Charles Stross is also a regular columnist for the monthly magazine Computer Shopper. Coming up is his first collection, Toast, and Other Burned Out Futures. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.
*
Old hackers never die; they just sprout more gray hair, their T-shirts fade, and they move on to stranger and more obscure toys.
Well, that's the way it's supposed to be. Your Antiques! asked me to write about it, so I decided to find out where all the old hackers went. Which is how come I ended up at Toast-9, the ninth annual conference of the Association for Retrocomputing Meta-Machinery. They got their feature, you're getting this con report, and never the two shall meet.
Toast is held every year in the Boston Marriot, a piece of disgusting glass-and-concrete cheesecake from the late 1970s post-barbarism school of architecture. I checked my bags in at the hotel reception, then went out in search of a couple of old hackers to interview.
I don't know who I was expecting to find, but it sure as hell wasn't Ashley Martin. Ashley and I worked together for a while in the early zeroes, as contract resurrection men raising zombies from some of the big iron databases that fell over on Black Tuesday: I lost track of him after he threw his double-breasted Compaq suit from a tenth-floor window and went to live in a naturist commune on Skye, saying that he was never going to deal with any time-span shorter than a season ever again. (At the time I was pissed off; that suit had cost our company fifteen thousand dollars six months ago, and it wasn't fully depreciated yet.) But there he was, ten inches bigger around the waist and real as taxes, queuing in front of me at the registration desk.
"Richard! How are you?"
"Fine, fine." (I'm always cautious about uttering the social niceties around hex-heads; most of them are oblivious enough that as often as not a casual "How's it going?" will trigger a quarter-hour stack-dump of woes.) "Just waiting for my membership pack.…"
There was a chime and the door of the badge printer sprang open; Ashley's membership pack stuck its head out and looked around anxiously until it spotted him.
"Just update my familiar," I told the young witch on the desk; "I don't need any more guides." She nodded at me in the harried manner that staff on a convention registration desk get.
"The bar," Ashley announced gnomically.
"The bar?"
"That's where I'm going," he said.
"Mind if I join you?"
"That was the general idea."
The bar was like any other con bar since time immemorial, or at least the end of the postindustrial age (which is variously dated to December 31, 1999, February 29, 2000, or March 1972, depending who you talk to). Tired whiskey bottles hung upside down in front of a mirror for the whole world to gape at; four pumps dispensed gassy ersatz beer: and a wide range of alcohol-fortified grape juice was stacked in a glass-fronted chiller behind the bar. The bartop itself was beige and labeled with the runes DEC and VAX 11/780. When I asked the drone for a bottle of Jolt, they had to run one up on their fab, interrupting its continuous-upgrade cycle; it chittered bad temperedly and waved menacing pseudopodia at me as it took time out to spit caffeinated water into a newly spun bucky bottle.
Ash found a free table and I waited for my vessel to cool enough to open. We watched the world go by for a while; there were no major disasters, nobody I knew died, and only three industry-specific realignments or mergers of interest took place.
"So what brings you here, eh?" I asked eventually.
Ashley shrugged. "Boredom. Nostalgia. And my wife divorced me a year ago. I figured it was time to get away from it all before I scope out the next career."
"Occupational hazard," I sympathized, carefully not questioning the relationship between his answer and my question.
"No, it bloody isn't," he said with some asperity, raising his glass for a brief mouthful followed by a shudder. "You've got to move with the times. Since I met Laura I've been a hand crafted toy designer, not a, an—" he looked around at the other occupants of the bar and shuddered, guiltily.
"Anorak?" I asked, trying to keep my tone of voice neutral.
"Furry toys." He glared at his glass but refrained from taking another mouthful. "That's where the action is, not mainframes or steam engines or wearables or MEMS or assemblers. They're all obsolete as soon as they come off the fab, but children will always need toys. Walking, talking dolls who're fun to be with. I discovered I've got a knack for the instinctual level—" Something small and blue and horribly similar to a hairy smurf was trying to crawl out of one of his breast pockets, closely pursued by a spreading ink stain.
"So she divorced you? Before or after children?"
"Yes and no, luckily in that order." He noticed the escaping imp and, with a sigh, unzipped one of the other pockets on his jacket and thrust the little wriggler inside. It meeped incoherently; when he zipped the pocket up, it heaved and billowed like a tent in a gale. "Sorry about that; he's an escape artist. Special commission, actually."
"How long have you been in the toy business?" I prompted, seeking some less-hazardous territory.
"Two years before we got married. Six years ago, I think." Oh gods, he was a brooder. "It was the buried commands that did it. She was the marketing face; we got a lot of bespoke requests for custom deluxe Tele-tubby sets, life-sized interactive droids, that kind of thing. Peter Platypus and his Pangolin Playmates. I couldn't do one of those and stay sane without implanting at least one buried Easter egg; usually a reflex dialogue, preferably a suite of subversive memes. Like the Barney who was all sweetness and light and I-love-you-you-love-me until he saw a My Little Pony; then he got hungry and remembered his velociraptor roots."
"I suppose there were a lot of upset
little girls—"
"Hell, no! But one of the parental investment units got pissed enough to sue; those plastic horsies are expensive collectors' items these days."
"Do you still get much work?" I asked.
"Yes." He downed his glass in one. "You'd be amazed how many orcs the average gamer gets through. And there's always a market for a custom one. Here's Dean—" The wriggling in his pocket had stopped; it looked rather empty. "Excuse me a moment," he said, and went down on hands and knees beneath the table in search of the escape artist.
<
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*
Later, while my luggage sniffed out a usefully plumbed corner and grew me a suite, I wandered around the hardware show.
Hardware shows at a big con are always fascinating to the true geek, and this one was no exception. Original PCs weren't common at Toast-9, being too commonplace to be worth bringing along, but the weird and wonderful was here in profusion. In the center of the room was an octagonal pillar surrounded by a cracked vinyl loveseat: an original Cray supercomputer from the 1980s in NSA institutional blue. Over in that corner, that rarest and most exotic of beasts, an Altair-1 motherboard, its tarnished copper circuit tracks thrusting purposefully between black, insectoidal microprocessor and archaic hex keypad (the whole thing mounted carefully under a diamond display case, watchful guardian demons standing to either side in case any enthusiasts tried to get too close to the ancient work of art).
Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future Page 41