“Do you think she’s in heaven?” Caitlyn asked after a while.
“I think if ever anyone deserved to go to heaven, it was your mum.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Maybe not, but it’s as close as you’ll get.”
“What I mean,” she clarified, “is do you believe that people keep existing after they die?”
“That depends on what you mean by ‘die.’ Look at me, for example.” He tapped the resonant surface of his prosthesis. “I’m missing a foot. Does that make me 1/12 dead?”
Caitlyn smiled. “Of course not.”
He frowned. “I say it does. So part of me’s dead, and yet here I am, standing next to you. And I’m a lucky one. The world’s hospitals are filled with patients who are far more dead than I am.”
They shared a companionable silence for a while. The sun had turned orange, and although Barry couldn’t see them, he knew the shadows along the faces of the angels were beginning to lengthen. Caitlyn’s hand was like a lifeline between his fingers, although Barry would have been hard pressed to say who was saving whom.
In the distance, church bells began to ring.
~It’s time,~ TJ prompted.
Barry sighed, and felt the dryness clog his throat.
Meeting Caitlyn—making a difference for Caitlyn—was without question the most rewarding thing Barry had ever done. It didn’t seem right to let that end because of a couple of faulty neurons.
“Caitlyn.” He struggled to get the words out. “I’m going away for a while.”
“Where to?”
“I don’t know yet. Somewhere back o’ Bourke. I might go walkabout, or maybe even visit that space station they’re building for old people. But I’ll be gone for … well, for a very long time, and I’m not going to tell anybody where. I need to get away from the press for a while.”
Caitlyn’s fingers tightened around his palm. “But you’ll still be in touch, right?” In a sudden rush of words she added, “Because I don’t know if I could handle not hearing from you anymore. Not seeing you is fine, but I don’t think I can make it through the day without your messages.”
Caitlyn’s voice, always so carefully modulated, had picked up a subtle tremor. She gripped the sides of his shirt and pressed her face against his stomach. Her weight pulled him off-balance, and he stepped sideways to compensate.
“Everyone goes away,” she whispered. “Mom died. Dad’s never home. Promise me you won’t vanish, too. Promise me you’ll always be there.”
There was a very long pause.
“I promise, Caitlyn.”
Barry stroked her hair, an unruly landscape beneath his palm. His voice faded to a whisper. “I won’t stop posting status updates, and these old bones will never rest in a cemetery. I promise.”
She sniffed and glanced up. “I know you’re just saying that to make me feel better. But thanks for promising anyway.”
Barry drew down his brows in mock severity. “Are you calling me a liar? Because no one slanders my honesty unless they want to get slapped with a million-dollar lawsuit.” He took hold of her shoulders. “Now, I have a question for you, and it’s far more important than the one you asked me a few seconds ago. Do you believe that people keep existing after they die?”
“I hope so. I guess …” she looked again at the headstone. “I guess I’m looking for a reason to believe.”
Barry struggled to speak past the paralysis in his throat.
“Well,” he said. “You just keep looking.”
They spent the afternoon together, and when the red sun finally began to vanish in the west, they sat sipping slurpees at a takeaway fish ’n’ chip shop. They said goodbye and Barry promised to call Caitlyn on her birthday, and then he watched, for a very long time, after she rode away on the bus that would take her home.
After the sun was gone, he boarded a bus of his own, and traveled for two days. The depot where he got off was remote. There were no signposts, no buildings; just a wire-mesh rubbish bin and a wooden lean-to that rattled in the wind blowing off the desert.
The sun was a blazing thread along the horizon. Alone with the dawn, Barry waited for the bus to rumble away before setting down his backpack and propping his foot on a solitary rock. He rolled up the leg of his striders and, with gentle affection, released the straps that held the prosthesis in place.
Freed from its harness, the stump of his leg seemed sad and shrunken. The neural links and endocrine sensors were buried deep inside, invisible. The lack of weight beneath his knee was disorienting.
“This is where we part ways, old mate,” Barry said bleakly. “A crazy one-legged man in the bush is just a crazy one-legged man in the bush. But a crazy one-legged man with a smart-prosthesis … People might go looking for his family.”
The status lights along the prosthesis flickered as if in salute.
~Don’t worry, Barry. I’ll take good care of her.~
“I know you will, mate.” Almost reverently, he set the familiar lump of plastic in the rubbish bin. “I know you will.”
TJ, who had spent the past three days transferring his central awareness to a collection of online servers, silently withdrew from the prosthesis. The lights faded. An emptiness settled over Barry’s mind. Within seconds, names and faces began to blur in his memory.
Barry figured he had a couple of months before his brain shut down altogether. Maintaining the link with TJ might have delayed that process, but TJ had other work to do. The Synth Autonomy laws, still in committee in the USA, needed financial backers. The companies Barry had founded needed competent administration. And of course, there was a promise to be kept to a gentle, trusting young lady named Caitlyn.
Armed with Barry’s identity—with his online banking data, his social networking accounts, his e-mail address, some specialized voiceprint software and a host of online print-and-ship services—TJ would see to the completion of every project they’d started together. The biological portion of Barry Bradfield might be doomed to degeneration, but TJ would last forever.
And that changed everything.
The sun was up, and the day began to grow warm. With his backpack slung over his shoulders and his weight supported by a stout walking stick, Barry hobbled along a dirt trail that he could not properly see, into the wilds of the outback. ■
Bootstrap
Kathleen Ann Goonan
It’s a cool day when I bumble across the nanoshirt, near-hidden beneath a wash of dull brown leaves in the vestibule of City Drugs.
I only bend down because of a slight silky shimmer: it could be something I might work into one of my sculptures.
I stuff it in my pocket and go in to pick up a week’s worth of SMOOTH™ (Synaptic Modulation Of Overactive Tension Hormones), paid for by the VA. I have weird wiring that made my childhood a speedy, whirring, undecipherable hell. An IED added brain lesions, bitterness, and a meager disability check, and subtracted a wife, memories, and sleep.
They ought to call it Tame. I hate it, but stopped taking it twice. Once I woke up in jail, another time in an emergency psychiatric observation ward. Inconvenient.
My wiring gave me a taste for color and form and disconnected me from standard templates of meaning. Having squandered scholarship money on two years of art, architectural history, and philosophy (I have strong gifts in utterly useless areas) I impulsively joined the Army to serve my country and to get more education money. I have dim memories of the Army sending me to various programs, so apparently those gifts weren’t really useless, but the IED put an end to that.
I found I could make a slight living jarring the sensibilities of others with what the Washington Post, a few years back, called (drum roll, please) Visionary Outsider Art. “Scavenging The Urban To Create The Posturban Environment,” as the Post put it. The publicity helped get my gallery started.
I am two months behind in the rent.
Canned music inside the store. Ariel, at the end of an aisle, looks up and smiles—a magn
et, an oasis, and, briefly, my girlfriend. Tall, with a narrow face, pale spooky eyebrows, long graying hair, and a voice like sandpaper. She grows herbs that she sells, along with her art, at some of the fairs we both frequent. We seemed to be getting serious, but she called it off. She understands that my worst problems are from the IED, but still can’t live with them. Better to be friends.
I guess.
“Hey, Ariel.”
“Hey, yourself.” Her smile is a bit odd, today, kind of self-satisfied. “Exactly on time, as usual. Everything good?”
“Just super.” She scans my bracelet, does some clicky thing with the scanner, hands over my bottle of SMOOTH™, and tilts her head. “Anything new in the works? Or are you still ruminating?”
I shrug. My biggest complaint, with which she had no patience, is that I’m stuck in an artistic rut.
She gifts me with one of her heartbreaking grins, extra-large. “Well, you never know. Take care.”
Outside, I gaze at the Capitol dome for a moment, a personal touchstone since I was a kid, then begin the walk home.
First useful object I spot is a carved wooden head set out for the trash. I stash it in my pack. On the next block a box of renovation debris catches my eye. As usual, I soon have to edit to accommodate more promising objects.
Manufactured objects, when removed from their function, hold a mysterious beauty for me. I am of the OOO school of thought—Object-Oriented-Ontology. As I explained to Ariel, objects have their own being, unknowable to us, which has as much “being-ness” as we do. Furthermore (my own twist) putting matter into particular forms imposes upon it a kind of slavery from which I liberate it through arranging it in new relationships. I free it by un-purposing it, you might say—
Right. That’s where she bursts out laughing, too.
I enjoy wending through streets, a secret agent of unpurposing. My conversations with objects result in no hurt feelings, no arguments. They speak, I listen, we play.
I unlock the alley entrance of my shop/studio/home, which smells of planed wood and melted slag. I’m hanging up my jacket when I remember the shirt.
I bump on the water, hold the rag over the utility sink and stare at a shimmering silver net, specked with pinheads of color, revealed as water pulls it straight, tiny as a doll’s shirt but with infinite stretch: I veer from care to trying to tear it and cannot.
My hands tingle. A memory breaks through the SMOOTH™ —surprising, because that’s what SMOOTH™ is supposed to prevent—a long-ago DARPA talk.
Back then, this shirt, if it is what I think it is, was experimental. The lecturing neurobiologist passed a prototype around and mentioned that if they were given the go-ahead by the FDA only the rich could afford them but that it would give them an edge a million times more tailored and focused than mere smart pills or produced-for-the-masses memory drugs. Nanothreads embedded with synaptic enhancement agents give the wearer unprecedented neuroplasticity with drugs that slip through the blood-brain barrier.
How had some fool lost this marvelous thing? Corporate thievery? A lab theft? Someone killed for it and then ditched the evidence?
My mind runs in those kinds of circles.
When I was a kid I’d tried out my dog’s electric collar while my mother laughed and called me creative. I’m still one of those Immediate Learners (my middle-school label, more pleasant than Dangerously Impulsive), so I strip down and wriggle into it. Clings to me like second nature.
A banging on the shop door. I make my way out of my “studio” (a junk-strewn back room) and into my “showroom” and admire the way sunlight burnishes my “works of art,” making them seem like miracles of intuition and me the rich miner of form, color, heft and delicacy.
Ha! A rare positive thought. Maybe the shirt is giving me a mood lift.
I admit a couple. They glance around and leave quickly. I step outside and jam my hands in my pockets, wistful for paying customers and the energy that once brought them in. As I gaze down the street, I notice that the near-winter sun now has a pale quality, like skim milk, that’s sharp and stings my brain. I don’t know how else to put it. I glide into pictures. A boy flinging rocks at me. They sting.
Sam Eber. The letters of his name shimmer in the air in wavy letters, each letter a different, glowing color.
I am not pleased. A simple slant of light brought up a long-ago memory so powerful that it was like reliving it. Must be the shirt, and it’s scary; beyond my control.
Still, something compels me to leave it on. My old habit of curiosity, perhaps. Maybe it exudes seductive chemicals.
I’m in the middle of welding and glass-etching when a blinding headache and a wave of sickness send me to the bathroom. I try to get the shirt off but it seems to have melded to my skin. I stagger to the shower and slide to the floor as hot water pelts me.
And begin to understand.
There is no voice; no schematics dance before my eyes. It’s just what you might call insight, a flash of right-brain Answer, though I’d not even asked a question.
I know how I could make more money by buying the shop next door and knocking down the wall, enlarging. Sure, I’ve toyed with the idea, but now I have a plan; what I want the workmen to accomplish every day and how I’ll publicize the grand opening and how I’ll hang on while the project gets underway.
I learn—it’s more like remembering—how to become a truly celebrated artist, how to be internationally sought-after: who to meet, what to say. My future unrolls like a red carpet. Man, it is fine and bright.
Dizzy, filled with the sick glamour of it all, I spend half an hour trimming my heavy beard into cool face-art, order a salad and espresso from across the street instead of my usual Philly cheese steak and root beer, and realize that I am going mad.
I run outside and over a few blocks till I get a good square view of the Capitol dome, white-shining as the sun, and trace in my mind its lineage back to Greece, Rome, Istanbul, Michelangelo and the Renaissance, a form that slept for centuries, then was used here as a symbol of the designed, revolutionary concept of self-governance.
You can’t build a dome by yourself.
I wonder what the next thing will be. I wonder how form, design, will change us. I wonder how I can be a part of this revolution.
When I say wonder I mean I wonder real, real hard, like I can just shove the world into the next good place. Past the Enlightenment and the Atomic Age through our present dark age of omnipresent war and people like me. I wonder again who made the shirt and why it landed in my path.
The light changes. I cross.
A shot of neurotransmitters—I see their names in my vision—unfolds the city streets, making the dulling gray sky silver with promise and the thought of slogging through rain, sleet, and snow this winter a promising glory. Everything is as it ought to be, ontologically perfect, instead of imperfect, bent, unfulfilling, dark.
A marvelous feeling. But it leaves corners open in which I ask, as I stride: How does this shirt know what to sharpen?
Oh, it has answers, too, which pour into me, a process that makes me really suspicious. It’s that DARPA thing and the fact that I was somehow involved in ... something .... Something that makes me afraid the shirt is a weapon.
If so, can’t I repurpose it?
Perhaps I can, because democracy is how it learns. Evolution is democracy; what works is what works, a tautology, and yet each part has a stab at the light, an opportunity to eke meaning from chaos. Churn the neurons, cast the thought-tendrils to the light, prune ruthlessly ...
The way children learn. The way each of our brains is shaped.
And can be reshaped now, with purpose, in adulthood.
“Neu-ro-plas-ti-city,” I say, relishing the verbal wave.
While I’m thinking all this, saying all this, seeing all this, like it’s transposed into the air before me, like I’m part of a boot-up program—I round the corner to home. I soak a swath of scarlet silk in starch and lay it over some piled-up junk, pry open a g
allon of discarded yellow house paint and splatter a long line of gold along its dips and curves, so that it looks like a mountain range splintered into peaks and valleys at sunrise.
The bell jangles. A middle-aged woman, conservatively dressed, stands in the doorway. I can’t place her. Decorator? She lacks their characteristic verve and enthusiastic chatter, the nuanced attire, the clicking brains with which they sort and categorize: useful; not-useful.
She takes a step towards me. Her dull browns and tans are those of a woodland creature skilled in the art of camouflage. When her eyes meet mine, a sudden tensing as if for action.
Had they run all surveillance vids from the city looking for that glint that I’d seen? Had they then followed me back here?
Years of watching for the enemy, because my life depended on it, made that part of me the most reliable aspect of my personality. Which is why I live alone.
As I watch her warily, a memory of a man outside a car window flashes into vision. His face distorted, he is running at the car with a baseball bat. He smashes the back window where I am trapped in my car seat as my mother screeches out of the driveway and I am covered in shimmering glass.
I am screaming, straining against my bonds. I love him. I fear him. He is tiny in the distance, and I know he is crying when we round the curve and he is gone forever. I had no words then and I have never had words for that.
In fact, I never knew it happened before now but it illuminates my entire life like a blast of sunlight. As I wipe sweat from my forehead, the woman takes a few steps to the right, her low sensible heels making slow deliberate beats, heel-toe, ka-tap, ka-tap.
“Can I help you?”
She looks up; smiles. I am not fooled. “Just looking.”
She reaches toward a large stainless steel arc, part of a dismantled sign, perched upright like a “C”, then stops. “May I touch it?”
“Why a shirt?”
Her startled look betrays her. “What?”
“Why not a patch, a pill, robotic interior sensors that deliver substances as needed?”
“Are you all right?”
Twelve Tomorrows - Visionary stories of the near future inspired by today's technologies Page 12