And this is the final part of the revolution.
Hack-boy comes round to Rakhman’s house on Metal Street the day after the White Wolves withdrew to barracks.
We haven’t any more stuff, Rakhman says. He hands hack-boy a glass of tea. They sit on the low bench against the front of his trash-built house.
I don’t need any more stuff, hack-boy says. I can’t hack any more stuff.
The two men drink their tea and do not speak for several minutes, as men do, content in the presence of their friends.
Do you think the President will resign? hack-boy says.
If it keeps the gas flowing, Rakhman says. That’s all anyone cares about.
Do you think they’ll ask us to be in the government?
Maybe you. Not us.
But we’ll own the network, hack-boy says.
We’ll make money, says Rakhman.
Wait a moment . . . I mean, they call it the Zabayeen network, but we built it, hack-boy says.
They finish their tea. Hack-boy asks, Do you think I could ask your daughter Nur on a date?
Rakhman looks at the slit of sky above Metal Street.
No, he says.
There’s still broken glass and rubble in Golden Rukh Square. The tank was careful to avoid the legendary bird of the nation on its pillar when it scooped the President’s statue out from under its shadow. The scrubby grass will probably never recover. Concrete looks so cheap a way to pave a victory.
Hack-boy walks around the great circle, shading his eyes with his hand to better appreciate the statue to the revolution. In bronze, many times life size and free from any sense of proportion or scale: a game console, a satellite dish, and a fridge. Stuff. The revolution of stuff. No one remembers the Zabayeen. Or the hack-boys. Ay. ■
The Cyborg and the Cemetery
Nancy Fulda
The trouble with dying, Barry Bradfield reflected as he strode between the regimented plots of Waverly Cemetery, was that people insisted on making such a ruckus about it.
Monuments, obituaries, news reports, biographies; he’d been alive long enough to see a lot of people die, and the one constant in the passing of all those brilliant minds was the public’s determination to turn the entire affair into a dog and pony show.
That was no way to honor a man’s life.
Barry’s pace quickened, carrying him around a corner and along a broad, sunlit walkway past a tableau of stone angels. His left ankle whirred briskly with every second stride, and a casual observer might have assumed that his lurching gait was caused by the motorized prosthesis affixed beneath his knee. The reality was precisely the opposite. It was Barry’s biological right leg that hobbled him. The nerve disease that he’d been concealing for the past five years was finally reaching critical mass.
In short, Barry Bradfield was dying. And he and his prosthetic leg were the only ones who knew it.
“Look at this place,” Barry said, his breath coming in short bursts between each step. “Why do we even have places like this?”
The prosthesis transmitted the neurological equivalent of a snort. ~I expect most people find them comforting.~
“Most people aren’t me, TJ.”
~Most people don’t talk to themselves while speed-walking through graveyards, either.~
“I’m serious,” Barry said as they passed a cluster of Celtic crosses. “Why do we insist on viewing death as a binary event?”
~We’ve had this conversation already.~
Barry permitted himself the ghost of a smile. “And we’ll probably have it again. I’m an untreated dementia patient. Repetition is inevitable.” Step, whirr, step, whirr. “When I was born without a leg, did my parents write an obituary for the 8 percent of me that was missing? When my brain started to break, did I commission a headstone for my degenerate neurons? No. But maybe I should have. We’re all dying a little bit every day, so why this obsession with the last, dangling threads of a man’s existence? Why not fuss over the first part of him that carks it, instead?”
~Do you want a different answer than the one I gave you last Tuesday?~
“You’re the mind-reader. You tell me.”
~I knew you’d say that.~
“Bah.”
Barry felt, rather than heard, the chuckle rippling along the transmitters in his cerebral cortex. TJ’s sense of humor was remarkably like a human’s.
In retrospect, it was not surprising that TJ had become so adept at modeling human behavior. He’d been predicting Barry’s actions—or trying to—ever since the pediatric surgeons grafted endocrine receptors onto the immature stump of flesh beneath Barry’s knee.
That had been in the early days of smart prosthetics, and the ensuing halts and stumbles of 10-year-old Barry’s electronic leg became a cause of intense concern for his mother. Every time one of the leg’s overzealous motor movements resulted in stitches, she swore with compelling fervor that she was going to throw out ‘That Junky Contraption’.
They didn’t throw it out. But the name stuck, and Barry’s prosthetic leg was, from that time forth and forever, known in the Bradfield household as “TJ Contraption.”
TJ and Barry learned to accommodate each other. They grew up like brothers, linked through Barry’s hormone receptors and through the triple row of micro-transmitters nestled against his brain tissue. They cheated on tests together, watched pretty girls together, won their first tennis championship together. TJ shared the emotional whiplash of each experience.
Scientists had expected the first human-level artificial intelligence to emerge in a laboratory, but laboratories are sterile, and cognition is as deeply rooted in chemistry as it is in electronics. Anger, fear, passion, sorrow; these are physiological states, rendered in lipids and amino acids. And by the time Barry was thirty-four years old, TJ had spent a quarter of a century studying them.
When the news finally went public, there was a lot of hype about whether TJ was “truly” sentient. TJ was the only one who didn’t seem to care. “I think, therefore I am,” he said through speech synthesizers at press conferences. “What I am, precisely, remains to be discovered. And I’m okay with that.”
The next forty years had been a blur of sensationalism and entrepreneurial adventure. With TJ’s help, Barry went on to play pro rugby, set a new 500m record in windsurfing, and became the top-ranked tennis player in Australia. He’d married, divorced, founded three corporations, and married again.
He’d had a long and glorious life, and it had all led here—now—to this.
Barry’s phone vibrated at his hip. TJ checked the message. ~Caitlyn says you’re late. She also says that famous Synthetic Identity Advocates like yourself ought to demonstrate better time management.~
“Right. Tell her we’re almost there. Have the Americans passed that Synth Autonomy law yet?”
~It’s stalled in committee.~
“Bother. Well, if they ever get unbogged, the legal documents naming you as my executor will be retroactively effective.”
~Only in the USA.~
“One step at a time, old mate. One step at a time. Other nations’ll follow soon enough.”
Flesh and bone wore out; Barry couldn’t prevent that. But TJ would last forever, and so would the synthetic identities that were his progeny. And that changed everything.
The crash of surf rose over the cliffs on the far end of the cemetery. Barry’s head swiveled to watch the angels as he passed. The last time he had joined Caitlyn at Waverly, he’d been able to read the inscriptions etched beneath each figure. Now …
“It’s time, TJ,” Barry said. He straightened his shoulders and forced his gaze toward the path. “It’s too soon, but it’s time.”
They’d known for years that this day would come, and they’d known for years what they would do when it did. Barry couldn’t halt the decay creeping along his synapses, but he could protect the people he loved.
~There she is,~ TJ said.
Barry tipped his hat against the glare. His strugg
ling eyes detected a slender blue smudge, glowing with sunshine, near the bottom of an unpaved slope. As he watched, the figure moved a few steps to the left, then back to the right.
~She doesn’t see us yet.~ A pause. ~ You gonna stand her up?~
Barry was tempted. Concealing his condition from CEOs and synth engineers was hard enough. Concealing it from a sincere, brave, and mostly neglected twelve-year-old seemed a Herculean task.
The blur at the base of the hill shifted again—pacing perhaps? Or checking text messages on a phone? Barry wished, not for the first time, that he could piggy-back on TJ’s webcams the same way TJ could spy on his optical nerves.
The canvas of his mind pictured Caitlyn’s youthful face turning upward, struggling to see him against the glare.
It was not too late to retreat. It would be easy enough to have TJ send an apology; heaven knew Barry had been forced to cancel appointments before. But his feet were already moving and TJ, picking up the change in his mood, added spring to his stride.
He wanted to say goodbye, hang it all. Even if she never realized that’s what he was doing.
As they navigated the descent, TJ said: ~The stockholders are ready to vote. Do you want to add any comments to your ‘yea’?~
“Just that Lyon’s a wombat. I suspect you’ve already done that, though.”
~Within the first five minutes, mate.~
“Good on you.”
Barry grinned. Twelve years, and the other Board members still hadn’t noticed. The 3-D avatar TJ manipulated would not have passed police scrutiny, but it was convincing enough at the poor resolutions common in video conferences.
“Granddad!” Caitlyn had spotted them and was now sprinting up the hill. The pale smudge of her face cracked into a smile that even Barry’s degenerate neurons could not ignore.
~Brace for impact,~ TJ signaled. ~She’s comin’ left.~
Barry shifted his weight to keep from being toppled by an exuberant hug. “I wasn’t sure you’d make it,” Caitlyn exclaimed.
“Well, I wasn’t sure either,” Barry answered. “But here I am. Let’s have a Captain Cook at you, yeah?” He leaned close to see her for real. Yes, there she was, with her gravity-defying ringlets and her nose slightly too big and the heavy glasses that made her eyes seem so large. She was like an artist’s rendition of innocence; perfect in her simplicity.
Caitlyn stepped back and squeezed his knobby fingers. “I’m glad you’re here. It didn’t seem right, somehow, coming to see Mum all by myself.”
They left the paved walkways and began crossing the familiar route to Miriam’s grave. TJ warned Barry of dips and loose stones along the way. When Caitlyn looked toward him Barry asked, “How’re you and your Dad getting along?”
A shrug. “About like always. At least he doesn’t yell at me for talking to you. Not like Mum used to.”
“Don’t be too hard on Miriam.” Barry hesitated, then decided that if there was ever a time for honesty, it was now. “I was never there for your Mum when she was little. I don’t think she ever forgave me for that.”
“Well, I forgive you,” Caitlyn said. She had a way of cuddling every word when she talked, like it would get away if she wasn’t extra gentle with it. “I know we don’t see each other much, but after Mum died, when you used to message me every day ...” Her headshake sent ringlets jouncing. “It’s strange. I spend all day with people, but I don’t feel close to any of them. Not the way I feel close to you.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of modern technology. Relationships aren’t constrained by location.”
“No, it’s more than that.” The grass was uneven, difficult to navigate even with TJ’s help. Barry pretended not to notice the way Caitlyn slowed her pace for his benefit. “It’s like you understand me. The real me, the deep-down part of me that no one else ever sees.”
Barry felt his mouth and throat working. He had spent the bulk of his life migrating between continents; first as an athlete, then as the world’s first synthetic identity specialist. Being the talk of the century had been a heady experience, but it had never produced the wrench in his gut that accompanied Caitlyn’s straightforward declarations of affection.
Love had a way of shaping its own topologies. Barry was seldom within two thousand clicks of his granddaughter, but he spoke with her nearly every day. The connection between them was as real as the electrons that sustained it, and as heedless of age or geography.
He was going to miss her so much.
“So …” Caitlyn said, drawing the word out for effect. “Did they move the stockholder’s meeting? Because you said you might be late because you had to—” She broke off, aghast. “Granddad! You didn’t send TJ to the meeting again?”
Barry smiled. “Let’s just say TJ’s freeing up my time for more important things.”
“That is so dishonest.” When Caitlyn disapproved of something, her voice grew calm rather than agitated. Right now, it was positively serene.
“Is it?” Barry slapped the prosthesis through the fabric of his striders. “TJ here’s as much a part of me as my flesh-and-blood leg. More, in some ways. Most of the time, he knows what I’m about to say before I do.”
“But everyone thinks you’re actually there.”
Barry gave her a long and studious look. “Have you ever been in school,” he asked finally, “but your mind was elsewhere until the teacher called your name? And then the part of you that was listening all along jumped to attention and you found you could answer the question anyway?” He waited for her to nod. “It’s a bit like that. If something important happens, TJ will let me know. So you see, I am at the meeting, in every sense that matters.”
Caitlyn’s eyes were wide behind her glasses. “But he’s—no offense, TJ—but he’s artificial.”
“So what?” Barry waved his knuckles first in Caitlyn’s direction, then in his own. “You’re wearing glasses. I’m wearing a hearing aide. Are we less human because we use gadgets to interface with the world? If TJ says the same things I would and votes the way I would have, where’s the difference?”
They walked in silence for a few steps. Against the distant rumble of the surf, it was almost impossible to hear the gentle whir of TJ’s motors.
“Some people call me a cyborg,” Barry said after a while. “And they’re right, but they have a skewed understanding of what being a cyborg really means.” More steps. More whirring. “We’re all cyborgs, you know. All of humanity. We have been ever since our ancestors first shaped sticks into tools or wrapped dead animals around their skin.”
“The difference,” Caitlyn said firmly, “is that TJ is plugged into your nervous system.”
“That’s just a question of interface. Technology has always been about augmenting our natural abilities; it helps us think faster, hit harder, do more with less effort. The reason you don’t like being called a cyborg—” Barry held up a hand to forestall her protest. “The reason you don’t like being called a cyborg is because you’ve got this idea that technology dehumanizes us. But it’s exactly the other way around. Compulsive tool-usage is an expression of humanity in its purest form. Take it away, and we are nothing.”
“Are you going to keep ranting about this, or are you going to ask me how my algebra test went?”
“I don’t have to ask,” Barry said. “I know from your online status updates that you scored an average of …”
~ninety-eight,~ TJ prompted.
“… 98 percent on your exams last semester. I therefore conclude that you aced this one, too. Of course, technically, you don’t deserve the credit, because your calculations were done using a pencil and therefore aren’t entirely your own work.”
“Granddad!”
Barry felt his voice grow serious. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he wanted Caitlyn to understand.
“Think about it. You wear a wristwatch to keep track of time. You use a cell phone to store addresses, and you use an array of orbiting satellites to send me e-mail when I’m in Uga
nda. How is TJ different from any of those?”
Caitlyn put her hands on her hips. “My cell phone doesn’t impersonate me to my friends.”
“That so? What’s the point of voice mail, then?”
She didn’t have a response for that one. Ah, youth. She’d held up her end of the argument pretty well, but with barely one decade to his eight, she didn’t stand a chance.
~Don’t get cocky,~ TJ said.
Sure enough, a moment later Caitlyn said: “TJ’s a synthetic identity. It’s wrong to let him impersonate you at a meeting because it’s like switching places with someone else.”
“A minute ago you were arguing that it’s dishonest because TJ’s artificial, and now you’re arguing that it’s dishonest because he’s genuine? Make up your mind, young lady.” Barry tapped his chest. “TJ’s me. And I’m TJ. That’s the beauty of it.”
They had reached Miriam’s headstone. It looked lonely, here on the hill among the crosses and the angels; just a simple marker with no frills. Barry would have gladly paid for more, but since Miriam had wanted nothing from him in life, he and Caitlyn had decided she probably wouldn’t appreciate any financial favors in death.
The wind carried the cry of magpies and the smell of the sea, rippling Caitlyn’s hair. They stood side by side and let it wash over them, as if it could carry away old sorrows.
Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies Page 11