Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future

by Gardner Dozois

  I strolled round the hall slowly, lingering over the ancient mainframes: starting with the working Difference Engine and the IBM 1604 console, then the Pentium II laptop. All of them were pre-softwear processors: discrete industrial machines from back before the prêt-à-porter brigade acquired personal area networks and turned electronics into a fashion statement. Back when processor power doubled every eighteen months and bandwidth doubled every twelve months, back before they'd been overtaken by newer, faster-evolving technologies.

  I was examining a particularly fine late-model SPARCstation when somebody goosed me from behind. Strangers don't usually sneak up on me for a quick grope— more's the pity— so when I peeled myself off the ceiling and turned round, I wasn't too surprised to see Lynda grinning at me ghoulishly. "Richard!" she said, "I knew you'd be around here somewhere! How's tricks?"

  "Much the same. Yourself?"

  "Still with the old firm." The old firm— Intangible Business Mechanisms, as they call themselves today— is a big employer of witches, and Lynda is a particularly fine exponent of the profession, having combined teaching at MIT and practice as a freelance consultant for years. Another of those child prodigies who seem attracted to new paradigms like flies to dog shit. (I should add: Lynda isn't her real name. Serial numbers filed off, as they say, to protect the innocent.) "Just taking in a little of the local color, dear. It's so classical! All these hardwired circuits and little lumps of lithographed silicon-germanium semiconductor. Can you believe people once relied on such crude technologies?"

  "Tactless," I hissed at her: an offended anorak-wearer was glaring from beside the Altair-1. "And the answer is yes, anyway. But it was all before your time, wasn't it?"

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that," she said. "I had a laptop, too, when I was a baby. But by the time I was in my teens, it was all so boring, dinosaur-sized multinationals being starved to death by the free software crowd and trying to drown them in a sea of press releases and standards initiatives, to a Greek chorus singing laments about Moore's Law only giving room for another five years of improvements in microprocessor design before they finally ran up against the quantum limits of miniaturization. I remember when House of Versace released their first wearable collection, and there was me, a sixteen-year-old goth with more CPU power in her earrings than IBM sold in the 1990s, and it was boring. The revolution had eaten its own sense of wonder and shat out megacorporations. Would you believe it?" She blinked, and wobbled a little, as if drunk on words. I think her thesaurus was running at too high a priority level.

  I surreptitiously looked at her feet: she was wearing heavy black boots, the preferred thinking environment of the security-minded. (Steel toe caps make for great Faraday cages.) Then I eyeballed her up and down; judging by the conservative business suit, she had deteriorated a lot in the past year, to the point where she needed corporate meme support. When I first met Lynda, she'd been wearing a fortune in homemade RISC processors bound together by black lacy tatters of goth finery, cracking badly secured ten-year-old financial transactions every few milliseconds. (And selling any numbered offshore accounts she detected to the IRS for a thief-taker's cut, in order to subsidize her nanoassembler design start-up.) Now she was wearing Armani.

  <> A business suit is a future-shock exoskeleton, whispering reminders in its wearers' ears to prompt them through the everyday niceties of a life washed into bleeding monochrome by the flood of information they live under. Corporate workers and consultants today— I gather this, because I dropped out of that cycle a few years ago, unable to keep up with a new technological revolution every six months— live on the bleeding edge of autism, so wrapped up in their work that if their underwear didn't tell them when to go to the toilet, their bladders would burst. And it's not just the company types who need the thinking environment: geeks became dependent on low-maintenance clothing years before, and it's partly thanks to their efforts that the clothing became sentient (if not fully independent).

  Clothes today say far more about someone's corporate and social status than they did in the twentieth century; we can blame the Media Lab for that, with their radical (not to say annoying) idea that your clothes should think for you. A conservative business suit by a discreet softwear company screams PHB groupware; sneakers and a sloganeering T-shirt or combat pants go with the Freeware crowd, anarchoid linuxers and hackers, some of them charging a thousand bucks an hour for their commercial services. A 1980s-yuppie would have been astonished at the number of body piercings in the boardrooms, the vacant, glassy stares of brain-webbed executives being steered round the local delicatessen by their neckties while their suit jackets engineered a hostile takeover in Ulan Bator and their shoes tracked stock prices. But then, an eighties' yuppie would be a living fossil in this day and age, slow and cold-blooded and not sufficiently intelligent to breathe and do business simultaneously. O brave new world, to have such cyborgs in it.

  <>

  *

  We arrived back in the bar. "I think I need a drink," said Lynda, wobbling on her feet. "Oops! So sorry. Er, yes. This is so slow, Richard! How do you handle the boredom?"

  "Excuse me?" The bartender handed me another Jolt, this one nicely chilled. A large margarita slid across the bartop and somehow appeared in her hand.

  "This!" She looked around vaguely. "Real time!"

  I stared at her. Her pupils were wide. "Are you on anything I should know about?" I asked.

  "Sensory deprivation. My suit's powered down." She shook her head. "I feel naked. I haven't been offline in months; there are things happening that I don't know about. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm not sure. Is it always like this?"

  "How long have you been down?" I asked.

  "I'm unsure. Since I saw you in the show? I wanted to get into your headspace and see what it was like, but it's so cramped! Maybe half an hour; it's a disciplinary offense, you know?"

  "What, going offline?"

  Her eyeballs flickered from side to side in the characteristic jitter of information-withdrawal nystagmus. "Being obsolete."

  I left Lynda in the safe custody of a hotel paramedic, who didn't seem to think there'd be any permanent side effects once her clothing had rebooted. I headed back to the con, fervently glad that I'd stepped off the treadmill a couple of releases after Ashley, way before things got this bad.

  <> Information withdrawal is an occupational hazard for the well-connected, like diabetic hypoglycaemia; if the diabetic doesn't get their sugar hit, or the executive their info-burn, they get woozy and stop working. On the other hand, you can only take it for so long…

  Lynda is 26. At 16, she was cracking financial cryptosystems. At 17, she was designing nanotech assemblers. At 20 she was a professor, with a patent portfolio worth millions. Today she's an executive vice-president with a budget measured in the billions. She will be burned out completely by 30, out of rehab by 32 (give or take a case of tardive dyskinesia), with a gold-plated pension and the rest of her life ahead of her— just like the rest of us proto-transhumanists, washed up on the evolutionary beach.

  <>

  *

  Back in the con proper, I decided to take in a couple of talks. There's a long and sometimes contradictory series of lectures and workshops at any Toast gathering, not to mention the speakers' corners, where any crank can set up a soap-box and have their say.

  First I sat through a rather odd monologue with only three other attendees (one of them deeply asleep in the front row): a construct shaped like a cross between a coatrack and a praying mantis was vigorously attacking the conceit of human consciousness, attempting to prove (by way of an updated version of Searle's Chinese Room attack, lightly seasoned à la Penrose) that dumb neurons can't possibly be intelligent in the same way as a, well, whatever the thing on the podium was. It was almost certainly a prank, given our proximity to MIT (not to mention the Gates Trust-endowed Department of Amplified Intelligence at Harvard), but it was still absorbing
to listen to its endless spew of rolling, inspired oratory. Eventually the construct argued itself into a solipsistic corner, then asked the floor for questions; when nobody asked any, it stormed off in a huff.

  I must confess that I was half-asleep by the time the robot philosopher denounced us as nonsapient automata, sparing only half my left eye to speed- read Minsky's Society of Mind for clues; in any event. I woke up in time for the next talk, a panel discussion. Someone had rounded up an original stalwart of the Free Software Foundation to talk about the rise and demise of Microsoft. There was, of course, a Microsoft spokesdroid present to defend the company's historic record. It started with the obligatory three-minute AV presentation about how Our Great Leader and Teacher (Bill) had Saved the World from IBM, but before they could open their mouths and actually say anything, Bill's head appeared on-screen and the audience went wild: it was like the Three Minute Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  (I used to use the man's software like everyone else, but after the debacle of Windows NT 6.2, and the ensuing grand jury investigation and lynchings, well—)

  After the Microsoft talk I went back to my temporary apartment to estivate for a few hours. At my age, I need all the regeneration time I can get, even if I have to take it hanging upside down in a brightly colored cocoon woven to the side of a tower block's support column. I run some quackware from India that claims to be a white-box clone of the Kaiser-Glaxo program the Pope uses; my tent and travel-equipment designs come courtesy of the Free Hardware Foundation. Having lost my main income stream years ago due to the usual causes, principally cumulative future shock and the letdown from the Y2K consultancy business, I'd be lost without the copylefted design schemata to feed to my assembler farm: I certainly can't afford the latest commercial designs for anything much more exotic than a fountain pen. But life on a twenty-century income is still tolerable these days, thanks to the FHF. More about those angels in Birkenstocks later, if I can be bothered to write it.

  I awoke feeling refreshed and came down from my cocoon to find a new wardrobe waiting for me. I'd got my tent to run up conservative geek-chic before my nap— urban camo trousers, nine-inch nails T-shirt, combat boots, and a vest-of-pockets containing numerous artifacts— and it whispered to me reassuringly as I pulled it on, mentioning that the fuel cell in my left hip pocket was good for thirty hours of warmth and power if I had to venture out into the minus-ten wind chill of a Boston winter. I pumped my heels, then desisted, feeling silly: in this day of barely-visible turbogenerators, heel power makes about as much sense as a slide rule.

  Outside my spacious dome tent, the floor of the hotel had sprouted a many-colored mushroom forest. Luggage and more obscure personal servants scurried about, seeing to their human owners' requirements. Flying things buzzed back and forth like insects with vectored-thrust turbojets. A McDonald's stall had opened up at the far side of the hall and was burning blocks of hashish to make the neighbors hungry; my vest discreetly reminded me that I had some nose plugs.

  I had been asleep for three hours. While I had been asleep, Malaysian scientists had announced the discovery of an earth-sized planet with an oxidizing atmosphere less than forty light-years away; the Gates Trust, in their eternal pursuit of favorable propaganda, had announced that they were going to send a Starwhisp to colonize it.

  <> Insert snide comment about clones, eyes of needles, possibility of passage through, at this juncture; the whole point of a Starwhisp is that it's too small to carry any cargo much bigger than a bacillus. Probably the GT was just trying to tweak the American public's guilt complex over the breakup of NASA.

  <>

  *

  The Pope had reversed her ruling of last week on personality uploads, but reasserted the indivisibility of the soul, much to the confusion of theologians and neuroscientists alike.

  There had been riots in Afghanistan over the forcible withdrawal of the Playboy channel by the country's current ruling clique of backwoods militiamen. (Ditto Zimbabwe and Arkansas.)

  Further confirmation of the existence of the sixth so-called gravitoweak resonance force had been obtained by a team of posthumans somewhere in high orbit. The significance of this discovery was massive, but immediate impact remained obscure— no technological spin-offs were predicted in the next few weeks.

  Nobody I knew had died, or been born, or undergone major life-revising events. I found this absence of change obscurely comforting; a worrying sign, so I punched up a really sharp dose of the latest cognitive enhancer and tried to drag my aging (not to say reeling) brain back into the hot core of future-surfing that is the only context in which the antiquities of the silicon era (or modern everyday life, for that matter) can be decoded.

  I got out into the exhibition hall only to discover that there was a costume show and disco scheduled for the rest of the night. This didn't exactly fascinate me, but I went along and stared anyway while catching up on the past few hours' news. The costume show was impressive— lots of fabric, and all of it dumb. They had realistic seventies' hackers, eighties' Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, nineties' venture capitalists, and millennia resurrection men, complete with some bits of equipment too precious to put on public exhibition— things like priceless early wearable computer demos from the Media Lab, on loan for the evening: all badly glued Velcro, cell-phone battery compartments run up on a glue-gun renderer, and flickering monochrome head-up displays. Toward the end, one of the models shambled on stage in a recent (three-month-old, hence barely obsolete) space suit: a closed-circuit life-support system capable of protecting its owner from any kind of hostile environment and recycling their waste for months or years. It probably qualified as an engineering miracle (closed-circuit life support is hard) but it left me with a lingering impression that a major cause of death among its users would be secondary consequences of sexual frustration.

  The disco was, well, a disco. Or a rave. Or a waltz. These things don't change: people dress up, eat, take intoxicants, and throw themselves around to music. Same old same old. I settled down with the drinks and the old crusties in the bar, intent on getting thoroughly wasted and exchanging tall stories with the other fogies.

  About four or five drinks later; an advertisement crawled through my spam filter and started spraying hotly luminous colors across my left retina. I was busy swapping yarns with an old Cobol monkey called Solipsist Nation and I didn't notice it at first. "Is something wrong, my friend?" he asked.

  "S'spam. Nothing," I said.

  Solly pulled out a huge old revolver— a Colt, I think— and looked around. Squinting, he pointed it at the floor and pulled the trigger. There was no bang, but a cloud of smoke squirted out and settled rapidly to the ground, clustering densely around a small buglike object. The visuals stopped.

  "It's nothing now," he agreed, putting his gun away. "There was a time when things were different."

  "When they didn't hide behind microbots. Just hijacked mail seryers."

  He grinned, disquietingly. "Then they went away."

  I nodded. "Let's drink a toast. To whatever made the mail spammers go away."

  He raised his glass with me, but I didn't see him drink.

  <> Something the junk advertisers don't seem to understand: we live in an information-supersaturated world. If I don't want to buy something, no amount of shouting or propagandizing will budge me; all it will do is get me annoyed. On the other hand, if I have a need for your product, I can seek it out in an eyeblink.

  <>

  *

  We now return you to your regular scheduled programming…

  There was an art show. Fractals blossomed in intricate, fragile beauty on wall-sized screens of fabulously expensive liquid crystal, driven by the entropy-generating logic-chopping of discrete microprocessors. You could borrow some contact lenses and slip between two wall-sized panels and you're on Europa's seabed, gray ooze and timelessness shared with the moluscoids clustered around the hydrothermal vents. Endless tape loops pl
ayed cheesy Intel adverts from the tail end of the 20th, human chip-fab workers in clean-room suits boogying or rocking to some ancient synthesizer beat. A performance-art group, the Anderoids, identically dressed in blue three-piece suits, hung around accosting visitors with annoyingly impenetrable PHB marketroid jargon in an apparent attempt to get them to buy some proprietary but horizontally-scalable vertical-market mission-critical business solution. The subculture of the nerd was omnipresent: an attack of the fifty-foot Dilbert loomed over walls, partitions and cubicle hell, glasses smudged and necktie perpetually upturned in a quizzical fin-de-siècle loop.

  I took in some more of the panels. Grizzled hackers chewed over the ancient jousts of Silicon Valley in interminable detail: Apple versus IBM, IBM versus DEC, RISC versus CISC/SIMD, Sun versus Intel. I've heard it all before and it's comforting for all its boring familiarity: dead fights, exhumed by retired generals and refought across tabletop boards without the need for any deaths or downsizings.