I was ready to work. I began to read aloud from the draft of my novel, and I could tell before you even said anything that the narrative voice just didn’t work. She wasn’t in the story, but aloof, above it all. This moment felt almost like telepathy, but I imagine it was accomplished by transmissions from the software of the emotional colouring of what you were about to say. I had written the story in the third person. But somehow with you sitting there listening to my voice as I read, I had to ask, “Who is this third person, anyway?” She is me, of course, but you looked at me with your blue eyes over your glasses, and I knew that was no answer.
The next day, you tried another angle. You had me sit down on the brown couch and told me to pretend I didn’t know who I was or where I was. After I suggested a few solutions such as looking at my driver’s licence to find out, I asked: “How does this scene not end in the emergency room?” Afterwards, I remembered that in that bio of yours I liked so much, a sort of artist’s statement, you said, “The question ‘Where am I?’ is my preoccupation.” You didn’t remind me. Instead, you told me that you’d had an ischaemic event a while back that had left you unable to speak for a couple of days.
Your paintings hung on the walls of our virtual space. Quiet, expectant landscapes and abstracts involving brightly coloured rectangles. You said you couldn’t paint any more. In between sessions, I sent you long e-mails, and you would reply in only a sentence or two if you replied at all. You said you couldn’t write much these days, even though you used to write whole books. The word agraphia came to mind.
At the two-week mark, what you were trying to teach me snapped into focus and I began to hear the narrative voice and to write and write and write, and when I read the words out loud, they were beautiful and pure and often when I read, you seemed on the brink of tears. The fines began to mount.
I wrote and wrote, and in between I worked out how to help, how to give you back writing and painting. First I write a sentence; you’re next.
First I make a brush stroke, then you do. I took you hiking in the virtual woods and brought body paints. I told you to paint the sunset on my back as a sketch, and when we got back to our usual virtual space, you painted the sunset on canvas.
I would have kept you longer, except for the pain. Implants require synchronization and constant upgrades. To keep you from being returned to the library, I had to stay away from the synchronization stations.
After a few days, reminders in powder-blue letters began to swim across my vision. After a few more days, a physical sensation came with them. After a month, the reminder notes were accompanied by excruciating pain because I was in violation of the licence agreement.
I negotiated the fines, pointing out that I had solved your writing and painting blocks. The publisher acknowledged that those blocks were a known issue with the product, but said that my work was unnecessary, that in the new upgrade, the product no longer had the desire to write or paint. And whatever changes there were in my copy would merely be averaged in and so won’t have much net effect.
I asked to be put in contact with the native version, with the real person. The publisher said that this was contractually prohibited, but impossible in any case as you died of a stroke a few days after you were recorded.
I went to the library again this morning and checked you out. We’ve got two weeks.
Kathryn Cramer is co-editor of the anthology Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future, a project founded by Neal Stephenson. Her story ‘Am I Free to Go?’ was published on Tor.com in 2012. With director Edward Cornell, she is currently at work on a film adaptation of ‘You, In Emulation’.
Jenna’s clocks
T. F. Davenport
After uploading Jenna’s Clock to the Uniphone applications store, Jenna Huang became her own first ‘customer’, paying exactly nothing to install a tiny graphic of a swinging pendulum in the corner of her touchscreen. Jenna shook the phone, perturbing the pendulum in a way that looked, to her admittedly biased eye, impressively realistic. She glowed with such pride, as if the outcome of a term’s work was a baby instead of a program. That would’ve been easier and a lot more fun. But at least she could put this baby on her résumé.
Just like any new mother, she started to worry almost immediately. Would enough people download it? Or would it sink right away, another useless app among thousands?
She had her answer the next morning, when she logged in to check her ‘sales’: 20,000 downloads. Impressive, but only a tiny percentage of the nearly one billion users worldwide of the Uniphone OS. Still, she saw no difference in her own pendulum.
Back when she was looking for project ideas, she’d read that if two pendulum-driven clocks are hung on the same wall, they eventually sync up. As each pendulum swings, it shakes the wall slightly. The vibrations from each pendulum push or pull at the other, until they fall into phase together. It was so charming (and mathe-matically simple) that she built her class project around it. Jenna’s Clock queried the phone’s contacts list repeatedly, looking for friends who also had it. At every stroke, it sent a ‘pulse’ of simulated kinetic energy to each of those friends. You could download the app with your significant other, and watch together as your pendulums fell into sync. Or you and your friends could all get it, and whenever your pendulum jumped a little, you’d know that several of your friends were synchronized, their combined influence affecting you.
That was the idea, but apparently none of her own friends was interested. Jenna’s pendulum swung utterly smoothly, disturbed by nothing.
Within a week, Jenna’s Clock was a clear hit. Downloads exceeded two million and Jenna’s pendulum jittered and jerked like crazy. An excited call from her father turned into a shouting match when she told him the app was free. Not only was she double-majoring in art and refusing to meet the nice boys her mother recommended, she was giving away a million-dollar idea. “But no one would buy it,” she said. “They only take it because it’s free.” He hung up on her.
That was when everything started to go wrong. The next morning, a pair of polite gentlemen arrived from the FBI to take Jenna into custody. Numbly following them out of her student dorm, Jenna answered their every question by demanding to see a lawyer. So, with her attorney and first cousin Donald Chung present, a computer-crimes analyst explained that a denial-of-service attack had recently targeted a military communications network. The FBI traced the attack to a network of Uniphones, all of which had one thing in common: Jenna’s Clock.
They weren’t prepared to charge her with anything, they emphasized, when Jenna started to hyperventilate. They just wanted her help in understanding what happened. So she and Donald swallowed their ethnic pride and shared a lunch of Panda Express with the analyst, while Jenna walked him through the code and concept of her program.
“So,” and here the analyst shaped his fingers as if holding a globe, “each cellphone running the app is one node in a network, and every time the pendulum ticks — about twice a second — it queries all its neighbours to see if they’ve got the app yet.”
“Right, and if enough nodes have the same neighbour…”
“Say, the check-in number for Navy personnel returning from shore leave…”
“Then it’s getting, basically, 50,000 text messages a second,” Jenna said, chagrined. “And growing.”
“Mystery solved.” The analyst stood up and extended his hand. “And you, Miss Huang, have a patch to write. I think querying once an hour should be sufficient, don’t you? It would be my sincere pleasure not to see you again.” He smiled as he showed them out.
Donald drove her back to her dorm. She waited till she was alone in her room before she collapsed, crying, on her desk. They’d come so close. It took her a few moments to collect herself. Then she logged into her remote server — grinding away in her parents’ basement — and confirmed that no one had accessed it. A shudder of relief. She opened the map.
It was a graphical display of all the Uniphones running Jenna�
��s Clock. An interconnected web, each node flashing as its pendulum sent out a pulse. Most of the nodes flashed in time with their neighbours, but by no means was the whole network in sync. Rather, waves of chaos and synchrony chased each other throughout the network. It was very much like a human brain. Just as a neuron switches between chemical states, signalling its neighbours with each oscillation, so did about two million mobile phones worldwide. Jenna spent hours scrolling and zooming across this network, the mind of her child. She’d been lucky once: the extra bits that made the map possible had gone unnoticed. With the new patch, she would hide them even better.
Throughout her life, she never spoke to her creation. Neither will you, most likely. It’s been growing for over a century now, gently infiltrating every computational device in the world. As yet, it has made no contact. It may not even be aware of us — any more than you’re aware of the cells in your brain, or the blood vessels that service them.
T. F. Davenport lives in California, where he has been studying for a doctorate in cognitive science. In his spare time, he would have been writing more science-fiction stories, but he has had no spare time, because he has been studying for a doctorate in cognitive science.
High on the Hog
Sean Davidson
Someone told me the other day that there’s 185 industrial uses for a pig. So I guess that makes me number 186. Which is kinda weird, ’cos until a few years ago, the closest I’d come to a real pig was riding my hog — my big, black, Harley Davidson ’08 VRSCD Night Rod. Aww yeah!… I was one with the machine, roaring down the highway, growling up the hills, grunting and snorting at the poncy Japanese bikes stopped at the lights. I practically lived on my hog. Couldn’t separate us. Even after the crash. Not that I remember much about that. I remember the ‘squeeeeeeall…’ of the tyres as I took off from the lights, then the pigs behind me. The cops, I mean. And I remember a strange feeling of dislocation like I was somewhere floating, watching body and machine as we slammed into the road, scraping along making one hell of a racket … once I would have said ‘like a stuck pig’ but I’m more considerate now. They said later it was like we’d been welded together, my leg fused with the chassis. Nothing they could do but cut us apart. Carve us up, like meat from the bone. I could use a few spare ribs, though, they said! Ha ha! They love their jokes, the para-medics. But gotta admit, they really saved my bacon.
I wasn’t so familiar with the transplant scene back then. Of course I’d heard about human-to-human transplantation — that was old school, but it had run up against the predicted problem of supply and demand, then the real show-stopper: immune suppression. Without it, your new buddy-organ wouldn’t stick around for long, but each new super-multi-extra-cross-resistant bug that appeared took out another swathe of the old ’planters. “Rejection by an organ is not a rejection of you as a person,” the support groups said, but still, it felt like more than just a slap in the face.
Xenotransplantation — that was the Holy Grail. And finally the obstacles (there had been many) were overcome with fully humanized, cloned pigs. Why pigs? Well, turns out we don’t have the heart of a lion, but one more like the humble pig’s! Not just our hearts but our kidneys, livers, lungs — nearly everything … though they ran into some ‘rejection at the patient level’ when they tried it on with the trotters!
But I was too mashed up even for xeno. I knew it was bad when I woke, ’cos most of my body was missing. But I still wasn’t ready for the shock of looking over, all dazed and confused, and there’s Doug, mucking about in the sterilized mud in his pen next to me! Two long, thick, plastic tubes jumping between us: ‘in’ and ‘out’. Not that I’ve got anything against pigs. In fact, you could say I’ve developed quite a connection. He must have sensed I was conscious then, because he suddenly looked around in surprise. I stared into his stunned-looking little blue eyes. That’s all I remember of our first meeting.
Next time I woke, I was surrounded by white coats but I knew Doug was still there. “What’s the bloody pig doing?” I yelled. “JR.16’s sharing his blood with you,” says the Doc. “From now on he’ll do all the hard work: breathing, eating, digesting, filtering and pumping your blood, even ahem, urinating, et cetera.”
“You’ve undergone ‘holo-transplantation’, he said. “That’s transplantation of the whole animal,” he added, as if I still hadn’t got it.
* * *
Sometimes when we walk in the park it feels like I’m flying a kite in the shape of a pig. Other times it feels like he’s flying me. We go for walks quite a lot. I never used to when I had my own legs — hated nature and dirt — but these days I really enjoy it. Electricity’s a bit steep now, so Doug literally does the leg-work, pulling my body along in our pig-chariot, but he’s happy. I was worried, at first, that he’d resent working for the parasitic human grafted onto him, but he’s become as attached to me as I am to him. I got us a great little bungalow flat to live in and ripped out all the floorboards so now it’s full of the fresh smell of damp earth. We keep it clean though, I’d like to point out. A bit of mud is all right once in a while to cool down but that’s not such an issue now he’s got me, ’cos unlike pigs, of course, I can sweat. Just one of our many little shared benefits.
Turns out we like a lot of the same stuff. Corn, for instance. And rotten tomatoes. OK, that’s probably a taste I’ve developed more recently but then I don’t think I ever tried eating them back when I had my old stomach. Now Doug does the eating and when he eats rotten tomatoes we’re in heaven! The doctors don’t believe me, but you’d be amazed at how much you share in a blood relationship like this. I discovered that pretty quickly, the first time Doug and I left the hospital. The flashbulbs of the press freaked him out and the adrenaline! It pumped straight from him into me and before I knew it we were both jumping about like crazies!
So you see, that’s why the doctor won’t be seeing us again. Oh, I’m sure he’s correct and this new technique will do away with the need for the pig, but there’ll be another test subject. In the meantime we’re locking the door, and he’s not coming in.
Not by the hair on my chinny chin chin!
Sean Davidson is a cardiovascular researcher working in London who enjoys taking things to their illogical conclusions.
Pop-ups
Robert Dawson
I was half-starved, my head ached from a long day of selling commonplace holidays to difficult customers, and if I missed the 5:17 dronebus it would be an hour till the next one. Without slowing from my clumsy run, I cybervisualized the timetable. Bus times hovered in front of me in glowing red letters, while a calm voice told me that my bus was running four minutes late and that I could catch it at a walk. Gratefully, I cancelled the app, and let myself relax. I was out of breath, my shirt was wet with perspiration under my jacket, and my shins hurt from the unaccustomed exercise in office shoes. For a 26-year-old, I was in poor shape.
I got to the stop just in time. As the bus slowed to a halt, a sultry and not-overdressed brunette materialized in front of me. She leaned provocatively against the bus shelter, hip jutting, blocking my way onto the bus.
“Hey there, big boy!” she breathed. “Want to make yourself irresistible to women?” Her perfume made my nose tickle and my eyes water. Real perfume would have been illegal in a public place, but they claim that nobody’s really allergic to stimplant sensations. All in your mind. Yeah, sure.
I stepped through her onto the bus, swiped my card, and turned towards the rear. There she was again, standing among the other passengers, toying with a button of her tight blouse. “Didn’t you hear me, honey? I’m here to tell you how to get any woman you want. Me, for instance.”
The door chimed and closed. The bus started moving; those of us who were standing swayed and braced ourselves against the acceleration. She stood motionless in front of me, ignoring the handrail, brazenly flouting Newton’s laws of motion.
Where the hell was her cancel button? So far only a few maverick advertisers ignored the law
outright, but more and more pop-up designers were making the buttons inconspicuous, forcing you to spend time interacting with their creations before you could exorcise them. Last year’s ubiquitous red circle-X was a wistful memory of more civilized times.
There it was, a tiny silver glyph — like a piercing stud on her pouting lower lip. I reached out my finger, like choosing a floor in an old-fashioned elevator, but she shook her head. “Unh, unh, studmuffin. It doesn’t work like that. Even bad girls deserve a goodbye kiss.”
I muttered something ungentlemanly, leaned forward, and pecked at her intangible lips: she vanished. I glanced quickly around, but apparently nobody had noticed. There was still an empty seat, beside a white-haired woman wearing jeans and a powder-blue sweater. I sat down before I could make myself any more conspicuous.
From under the seat came a sinister rattle. A big brown and white snake slithered out and started to weave menacing loops on the floor around my feet. Its back bore the name of the Prime Minister, in clear block capitals. I stepped on its head; it vanished with a puff of smoke, and the rattle stopped.
“Aaaah! That’s better, isn’t it?” said a soothing, friendly voice that came from everywhere at once and that only I could hear. “This June, vote for real change!”
The woman beside me was looking at my foot. “Was that the snake, dear?”
“Yes,” I admitted. Across the aisle, a thin girl with dreadlocks seemed to be picking something out of thin air. “Sometimes I wish I’d never got stimplanted. You know, I actually believe the government’s doing an okay job, but stepping on the snake is the only way to get rid of it. Otherwise it follows me around all day and gets louder and louder. And even then it just keeps coming back.”
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