by David Brin
“Stomach pains. Maybe appendicitis.”
“We’ll have a man over in—” He stopped. I had made the mistake of upturning my agonized face. His eyes lit on my forehead mark. The screen winked into blackness as rapidly as though I had extended a leprous hand for him to kiss.
“Doctor,” I groaned.
He was gone. I buried my face in my hands. This was carrying things too far, I thought. Did the Hippocratic Oath allow things like this? Could a doctor ignore a sick man’s plea for help?
Hippocrates had not known anything about invisible men. A doctor was not required to minister to an invisible man. To society at large I simply was not there. Doctors could not diagnose diseases in nonexistent individuals.
I was left to suffer.
It was one of invisibility’s less attractive features. You enter a bath-house unhindered, if that pleases you—but you writhe on a bed of pain equally unhindered. The one with the other, and if your appendix happens to rupture, why, it is all the greater deterrent to others who might perhaps have gone your lawless way!
My appendix did not rupture. I survived, though badly shaken. A man can survive without human conversation for a year. He can travel on automated cars and eat at automated restaurants. But there are no automated doctors. For the first time, I felt truly beyond the pale. A convict in a prison is given a doctor when he falls ill. My crime had not been serious enough to merit prison, and so no doctor would treat me if I suffered. It was unfair. I cursed the devils who had invented my punishment. I faced each bleak dawn alone, as alone as Crusoe on his island, here in the midst of a city of twelve million souls.
* * *
How can I describe my shifts of mood, my many tacks before the changing winds of the passing months?
There were times when invisibility was a joy, a delight, a treasure. In those paranoid moments I gloried in my exemption from the rules that bound ordinary men.
I stole. I entered small stores and seized the receipts, while the cowering merchant feared to stop me, lest in crying out he make himself liable to my invisibility. If I had known that the State reimbursed all such losses, I might have taken less pleasure in it. But I stole.
I invaded. The bath-house never tempted me again, but I breached other sanctuaries. I entered hotels and walked down the corridors, opening doors at random. Most rooms were empty. Some were not.
Godlike, I observed all. I toughened. My disdain for society—the crime that had earned me invisibility in the first place—heightened.
I stood in the empty streets during the periods of rain, and railed at the gleaming faces of the towering buildings on every side. “Who needs you?” I roared “Not I! Who needs you in the slightest?”
I jeered and mocked and railed. It was a kind of insanity, brought on, I suppose, by the loneliness. I entered theaters—where the happy lotus-eaters sat slumped in their massage chairs, transfixed by the glowing tridim images—and capered down the aisles. No one grumbled at me. The luminescence of my forehead told them to keep their complaints to themselves, and they did.
Those were the mad moments, the good moments, the moments when I towered twenty feet high and strode among the visible clods with contempt oozing from every pore. Those were insane moments—I admit that freely. A man who has been in a condition of involuntary invisibility for several months is not likely to be well balanced.
Did I call them paranoid moments? Manic depressive might be more to the point. The pendulum swung dizzily. The days when I felt only contempt for the visible fools all around me were balanced by days when the isolation pressed in tangibly on me. I would walk the endless streets, pass through the gleaming arcades, stare down at the highways with their streaking bullets of gay colors. Not even a beggar would come up to me. Did you know we had beggars, in our shining century? Not till I was pronounced invisible did I know it, for then my long walks took me to the slums, where the shine has worn thin, and where shuffling stubble-faced old men beg for small coins.
No one begged for coins from me. Once a blind man came up to me.
“For the love of God,” he wheezed, “help me to buy new eyes from the eye bank.”
They were the first direct words any human being had spoken to me in months. I started to reach into my tunic for money, planning to give him every unit on me in gratitude. Why not? I could get more simply by taking it. But before I could draw the money out, a nightmare figure hobbled on crutches between us. I caught the whispered word, “Invisible,” and then the two of them scuttled away like frightened crabs. I stood there stupidly holding my money.
Not even the beggars. Devils, to have invented this torment!
So I softened again. My arrogance ebbed away. I was lonely, now. Who could accuse me of coldness? I was spongy soft, pathetically eager for a word, a smile, a clasping hand. It was the sixth month of my invisibility.
I loathed it entirely, now. Its pleasures were hollow ones and its torment was unbearable. I wondered how I would survive the remaining six months. Believe me, suicide was not far from my mind in those dark hours.
And finally I committed an act of foolishness. On one of my endless walks I encountered another Invisible, no more than the third or the fourth such creature I had seen in my six months. As in the previous encounters, our eyes met, warily, only for a moment. Then he dropped his to the pavement, and he sidestepped me and walked on. He was a slim young man, no more than forty, with tousled brown hair and a narrow, pinched face. He had a look of scholarship about him, and I wondered what he might have done to merit his punishment, and I was seized with the desire to run after him and ask him, and to learn his name, and to talk to him, and embrace him.
All these things are forbidden to mankind. No one shall have any contact whatsoever with an Invisible—not even a fellow Invisible. Especially not a fellow Invisible. There is no wish on society’s part to foster a secret bond of fellowship among its pariahs.
I knew all this.
I turned and followed him, all the same.
For three blocks I moved along behind him, remaining twenty to fifty paces to the rear. Security robots seemed to be everywhere, their scanners quick to detect an infraction, and I did not dare make my move. Then he turned down a side street, a gray, dusty street five centuries old, and began to stroll, with the ambling going-nowhere gait of the Invisible. I came up behind him.
“Please,” I said softly. “No one will see us here. We can talk. My name is—”
He whirled on me, horror in his eyes. His face was pale. He looked at me in amazement for a moment, then darted forward as though to go around me.
I blocked him.
“Wait,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. Please—”
He burst past me. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he wriggled free.
“Just a word,” I begged.
Not even a word. Not even a hoarsely uttered, “Leave me alone!” He sidestepped me and ran down the empty street, his steps diminishing from a clatter to a murmur as he reached the corner and rounded it. I looked after him, feeling a great loneliness well up in me.
And then a fear. He hadn’t breached the rules of Invisibility, but I had. I had seen him. That left me subject to punishment, an extension of my term of invisibility, perhaps. I looked around anxiously, but there were no security robots in sight, no one at all.
I was alone.
Turning, calming myself, I continued down the street. Gradually I regained control over myself. I saw that I had done something unpardonably foolish. The stupidity of my action troubled me, but even more the sentimentality of it. To reach out in that panicky way to another Invisible—to admit openly my loneliness, my need—no. It meant that society was winning. I couldn’t have that.
I found that I was near the cactus garden once again. I rode the liftshaft, grabbed a token from the attendant, and bought my way in. I searched for a moment, then found a twisted, elaborately ornate cactus eight feet high, a spiny monster. I wrenched it from its pot and broke the angular limbs to fra
gments, filling my hands with a thousand needles. People pretended not to watch. I plucked the spines from my hands and, palms bleeding, rode the liftshaft down, once again sublimely aloof in my invisibility.
* * *
The eighth month passed, the ninth, the tenth. The seasonal round had made nearly a complete turn. Spring had given way to a mild summer, summer to a crisp autumn, autumn to winter with its fortnightly snowfalls, still permitted for esthetic reasons. Winter had ended, now. In the parks, the trees sprouted green buds. The weather control people stepped up the rainfall to thrice daily.
My term was drawing to its end.
In the final months of my invisibility I had slipped into a kind of torpor. My mind, forced back on its own resources, no longer cared to consider the implications of my condition, and I slid in a blurred haze from day to day. I read compulsively but unselectively. Aristotle one day, the Bible the next, a handbook of mechanics the next. I retained nothing; as I turned a fresh page, its predecessor slipped from my memory.
I no longer bothered to enjoy the few advantages of invisibility, the voyeuristic thrills, the minute throb of power that comes from being able to commit any act with only limited fears of retaliation. I say limited because the passage of the Invisibility Act had not been accompanied by an act repealing human nature; few men would not risk invisibility to protect their wives or children from an invisible one’s molestations; no one would coolly allow an Invisible to jab out his eyes; no one would tolerate an Invisible’s invasion of his home. There were ways of coping with such infringements without appearing to recognize the existence of the Invisible, as I have mentioned.
Still, it was possible to get away with a great deal. I declined to try. Somewhere Dostoevsky has written, “Without God, all things are possible.” I can amend that. “To the invisible man, all things are possible—and uninteresting.” So it was.
The weary months passed.
I did not count the minutes till my release. To be precise, I wholly forgot that my term was due to end. On the day itself, I was reading in my room, morosely turning page after page, when the annunciator chimed.
It had not chimed for a full year. I had almost forgotten the meaning of the sound.
But I opened the door. There they stood, the men of the law. Wordlessly, they broke the seal that held the mark to my forehead.
The emblem dropped away and shattered.
“Hello, citizen,” they said to me.
I nodded gravely. “Yes. Hello.”
“May 11, 2105. Your term is up. You are restored to society. You have paid your debt.”
“Thank you. Yes.”
“Come for a drink with us.”
“I’d sooner not.”
“It’s the tradition. Come along.”
I went with them. My forehead felt strangely naked now, and I glanced in a mirror to see that there was a pale spot where the emblem had been. They took me to a bar nearby, and treated me to synthetic whiskey, raw, powerful. The bartender grinned at me. Someone on the next stool clapped me on the shoulder and asked me who I liked in tomorrow’s jet races. I had no idea, and I said so.
“You mean it? I’m backing Kelso. Four to one, but he’s got terrific spurt power.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He’s been away for a while,” one of the government men said softly.
The euphemism was unmistakable. My neighbor glanced at my forehead and nodded at the pale spot. He offered to buy me a drink too. I accepted, though I was already feeling the effects of the first one. I was a human being again. I was visible.
I did not dare spurn him, anyway. It might have been construed as a crime of coldness once again. My fifth offense would have meant five years of Invisibility. I had learned humility.
Returning to visibility involved an awkward transition, of course. Old friends to meet, lame conversations to hold, shattered relationships to renew. I had been an exile in my own city for a year, and coming back was not easy.
No one referred to my time of invisibility, naturally. It was treated as an affliction best left unmentioned. Hypocrisy, I thought, but I accepted it. Doubtless they were all trying to spare my feelings. Does one tell a man whose cancerous stomach has been replaced, “I hear you had a narrow escape just now?” Does one say to a man whose aged father has tottered off toward a euthanasia house, “Well, he was getting pretty feeble anyway, wasn’t he?”
No. Of course not.
So there was this hole in our shared experience, this void, this blankness. Which left me little to talk about with my friends, in particular since I had lost the knack of conversation entirely. The period of readjustment was a trying one.
But I persevered, for I was no longer the same haughty, aloof person I had been before my conviction. I had learned humility in the hardest of schools.
Now and then I noticed an Invisible on the streets, of course. It was impossible to avoid them. But, trained as I had been trained, I quickly glanced away, as though my eyes had come momentarily to rest on some shambling, festering horror from another world.
It was in the fourth month of my return to visibility that the ultimate lesson of my sentence struck home, though. I was in the vicinity of the City Tower, having returned to my old job in the documents division of the municipal government. I had left work for the day and was walking toward the tubes when a hand emerged from the crowd, caught my arm.
“Please,” the soft voice said. “Wait a minute. Don’t be afraid.”
I looked up, startled. In our city strangers do not accost strangers.
I saw the gleaming emblem of invisibility on the man’s forehead. Then I recognized him—the slim man I had accosted more than half a year before on that deserted street. He had grown haggard; his eyes were wild, his brown hair flecked with gray. He must have been at the beginning of his term, then. Now he must have been near its end.
He held my arm. I trembled. This was no deserted street. This was the most crowded square of the city. I pulled my arm away from his grasp and started to turn away.
“No—don’t go,” he cried. “Can’t you pity me? You’ve been there yourself.”
I took a faltering step. Then I remembered how I had cried out to him, how I had begged him not to spurn me. I remembered my own miserable loneliness.
I took another step away from him.
“Coward!” he shrieked after me. “Talk to me! I dare you! Talk to me, coward!”
It was too much. I was touched. Sudden tears stung my eyes, and I turned to him, stretched out a hand to his. I caught his thin wrist. The contact seemed to electrify him. A moment later, I held him in my arms, trying to draw some of the misery from his frame to mine.
The security robots closed in, surrounding us. He was hurled to one side, I was taken into custody. They will try me again—not for the crime of coldness, this time, but for a crime of warmth. Perhaps they will find extenuating circumstances and release me; perhaps not.
I do not care. If they condemn me, this time I will wear my invisibility like a shield of glory.
An essay-story—or story-essay—about a danger …
… and great opportunity.
THE DISCONNECTED
RAMEZ NAAM
Welcome to the 22nd Century.
You live in the Golden Age of humanity, or at least, the most golden yet. Together, we’ve conquered poverty and hunger; we’ve reversed the warming of the planet and destruction of the species we share it with; we’ve all but ended war and violence and crime. We’ve cured diseases; we’ve healed broken minds; we’re on the verge of curing hate and anger and despair.
You live in the most connected age of humanity yet—an age where everyone is linked; when our very thoughts are connected to one another through technology in our brains; where knowledge or tools or the continuous chatter of all humanity or any of a billion possible desires are just a thought away.
That connectivity is at the heart of our society’s success. Our scientists and inventors are fast
er and more insightful than ever, buoyed by the near instant availability of knowledge, by neutrally integrated software tools, by the intimate experience of the minds of their peers, the potential to access new ways of seeing and thinking. Our teams of scientists, more than ever, resemble hive minds—drawing on the strengths of all their human and machine members, achieving things collectively far beyond what the disparate parts could ever hope to.
Nature has been saved. Most of it, anyway. Discoveries and innovations from the groupminds of our scientists have allowed us to halt the warming of the planet and the acidification of the seas. Soon we may even reverse it. We’ve learned to grow more food on less land, even amid vast regions suffering drought and heat. We’ve returned a billion hectares we once used to grow food to nature and parkland. We grow our meat and our fish humanely, now, through miracles of biological science, so that no animal must ever feel pain or suffer death to feed us. The scars of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries run deep, but across the land and seas, those species we managed to save are once more flourishing, and expanding. New ones we’ve created are joining them.
Our politics—if that word even applies—are the least corrupt humanity has ever seen, the most representative of the will of the people. Our dialogue is deeper now. Soundbites and the politics of hate have been obsoleted by our ability to share rich and complex knowledge in an instant, to see the perspectives of others without the reflexive rejection that once met ideas from “the other side.” More and more of our decisions are made through direct collective democracy of our enlightened populace. We still entrust some decisions to select people, of course. We have representatives, officials, what you might call “leaders.” They are more transparent to us than ever. We’ve experienced their thoughts, know their intentions, their values, their integrity. We know they serve the public interest.
The ten billion of us who share this planet are more empathic than ever. We understand one another, across the boundaries of race or gender or nationality. We have met each other, seen through each others’ eyes. Primate tribalism has been superseded by global connection, and been replaced by mutual comprehension. We now recognize everyone as part of our tribe. Nations and ethnicities and interest groups haven’t ceased to exist … but they’re being subsumed, bit by bit, by the global network that binds all together. Disagreements are as frequent as ever, but they’re less hate-filled, less prone to violence.