Transhuman

  Other judgments are on the horizon. IBM's Blue Brain project is currently building a digital version of a neocortical column, the fundamental processing subunit of the mammalian brain. Distributed network computing techniques mean the raw processing horsepower to create a full-scale human brain model is already available. When the first all-digital mind comes online, a host of moral and ethical questions will arrive. Will such a creation truly be human? To what tasks might we put it—and what if it doesn't want to do them? What rights would a digital mind have? If we judge the experiment a failure, would shutting down the system amount to murder? These are difficult questions. The answers will come, as all such answers do, from the human heart.

  BEING HUMAN

  Wen Spencer

  For as far back as anyone we know can remember, family gatherings have held the potential for both great joy and enormous stress. In this next story, we meet a man coping with a family holiday that is both quite different from anything we've yet experienced and at the same time very human and familiar.

  Andrew had thought about sending a bot to his mother's for Thanksgiving. He'd done it often before she died, and she never noticed the substitution. Replacing flesh with unerring electronics, however, meant she had returned to the mother of his youth. The one with eyes in the back of her head. The one that always seemed to know when he was up to something.

  On top of that, she was also the mother of his twenties, controlling him at a distance with deeply rooted guilt. If she realized he sent a bot instead of coming himself, she'd hunt him down and scold him. He cringed just thinking about it. And it wouldn't stop. For years she'd pull out the misdeed and punish him with it, like the time he set fire to the backyard. Go through immortality with that hanging over his head? Good God, no!

  The URL to her house dropped him and his wife, Emma, on the front sidewalk.

  "Is this . . . ?" Emily waved a hand at the re-creation of his childhood neighborhood.

  Andrew nodded, slightly stunned. "Yeah, Matterhorn Drive."

  He'd known his mother had hired a professional to build her a home-site, but he didn't know what format she was going with. He'd heard horror stories about octogenarian mothers, after transitioning to digital, prancing around in thong bikinis with Playmate bodies and fully functional cabana boy bots. He had known his mother wouldn't be one of them—but he hadn't considered what her perfect afterlife might be.

  And he hadn't braced himself for one in which he could never be fully adult.

  On that thought he checked his avatar. He looked normal. Not the body he transitioned out of but, for Emma's sake, a thirtysomething version of the avatar he created when they were first married and being online was a game. It was more handsome and buff than he'd ever been, but not embarrassingly far from the truth.

  "Do I look normal to you?" he asked his wife.

  "What?"

  "Do I look like myself? Or do I look like I'm eight years old?"

  "Honey." It was always amazing what Emma could layer into one word. It said "Your mother wouldn't do that'" and "Stop being silly" and "Don't you dare try to neurotic your way out of this, I want to do this." Emma was into old-fashioned family things like this.

  I should have sent a bot.

  Emma smacked him lightly as if he'd said it aloud.

  At least he could take comfort that Emma also looked thirtysomething with the touches of silver in her black hair and the laugh lines she wore so proudly. Of course, she had a breathing body backing her avatar, and he didn't.

  "Okay, okay, I'll try to make the best of it. It's only a few hours." Hopefully.

  Emma dragged him by his hand down the walk to the front door and rang the doorbell. He noticed that his mother had made tiny changes to everything so it was an idealization of the Matterhorn Drive house. The front yard was larger, the grass unblemished by dandelions that been rampant in reality, and the front porch was missing all the odd nooks and crannies where stone didn't quite meet stone. He knew that place with such intimacy, created by seemingly endless summers playing on the cement. Odd how he had all the time in the world now, and he didn't know any place as well as he had once known this porch. He could create the time, but he no longer had the patience to explore with such detail. Perhaps back there, his world was limited to that stretch of stone and wood, and now his world is limitless.

  The door opened and the doorway framed the woman that was currently his mother. She looked only vaguely familiar: a leaner, more athletic, and suntanned version of his mother of his youth. Like the front porch, she was missing all the blemishes that he'd known so well.

  "Andy!" She caught hold of him and hugged him tight before he could stop her. All he could smell of her was her favorite perfume that in real life she could rarely afford to wear. At least it wasn't the awful "old person" stench of the nursing home where her body had died. He pried himself loose.

  "Mom!" Emma held out her arms to be enfolded. The two women hugged for several minutes, burbling things like "Oh so good to see you. You're looking wonderful." One would think that she was Emma's mother, not his. He had always felt sorry that her parents had died young, but after the last few agonizing years with his mother, he wasn't sure if she hadn't been the lucky one.

  The layout of the house was patterned after the Matterhorn Drive house but more generous in size. The ceilings were higher, with crown molding. The furniture had been upscaled, too: large Italian silk brocade-covered sofas and a massive tufted leather ottoman. It made him feel as if he was still a child, viewing the world from that shorter perspective. The living room was the same shade of rich green of his childhood. With this furniture it made more sense than the mismatched furniture he remembered. It was as if this was the living room that his mother intended to have all along. The silk, though, wouldn't have stood a day against the dog, the two cats, the multiple hamsters, his brother, and him. Nor could she have been able to afford it after they'd moved out—heading first to college and struggling through the poverty-stricken first years of being an adult, always needing help to make ends meet. Seeing what his mother wanted, and what she was forced to live with, he nearly felt like she'd been cheated somewhere along the line.

  No wonder she worked so hard making him feeling guilty.

  "I'm so excited about seeing the house," Emma said. "Andrew's told me so much about this place."

  "Let me give you a tour," his mother said.

  "It's not quite the same," Andrew felt the need to say, but seeing the flash of annoyance on his mother's face, tried to soften the comment with, "You have new furniture. It's nice."

  His mother beamed in delight. "You know when I was little, you went to this showroom and there would be one sofa there with one type of fabric. And all the other fabrics were these pieces only about one foot square. And you had to imagine what it looked like. And you had to measure everything and then imagine how it would fit. I remember my parents ordered this one sectional. The pattern was pretty when there was just a little of it, but all over, oh, it was ghastly. And they'd measured wrong and it blocked the furnace duct, so that room was frigid all winter."

  "Now they just pop one sofa after another into place, dance all around, until you find something you love."

  Which pretty much summed up how everyone seemed to approach digital life—oh, isn't it great that nothing is real?

  A stone fence in the backyard served as the edge of his mother's world. The foliage dressed in full autumn splendor. Dead leaves of vivid reds and yellows elegantly drifting in the pseudo wind. He identified with the leaves—unreal, drifting, dead.

  His mother went off to check on the roasting turkey—that slightly boggled him—leaving him and Emma in the perfection of New England fall. Emma picked up on his mood as she could always do when he was still alive. She came and wrapped her arms around him as if her presence could heal everything wrong. There was a time when it did: before the cancer, before he died.

  "What is wrong?" Emma asked in a tone that meant she knew full wel
l but felt the need to broach the subject anyhow.

  "Nothing." But he really meant 'I don't want to talk about it.'

  Emma poked him in the ribs hard.

  "This isn't the house I grew up in. I knew that house down to the scratches on the wood floor. This isn't even a perfect copy."

  "It has everything that is important: you and your mother. Why does it have to be perfect? Why can't you be happy?"

  He couldn't say, "Because I'm dead. My whole family is dead. You're the only thing I love that hasn't died." Dead and unreal as the leaves floating down around them. Instead he said, "I don't see the point of all this. Mom usually runs at a cheaper, slower rate than us, and Dan is twice our clock speed. All of our calendars might be set on the same date, but we're . . ." Dead. But there was no reason to upset her about things she couldn't change. His father passed him and his brother the genes that made them highly susceptible to cancer. Economics made it necessary for him to keep working, even after he was dead, to pay the medical costs of his illness. She was even more the victim than he was; so he said, "Not living at the same speed."

  "All that matters is that we're together." Emma hugged him tight.

  And he clung to her, savoring the realness of her. The smell of her hair, the feel of her bones, and the softness of her skin. Deep down, he knew that her body wasn't any more real than the falling leaves, but Emma herself was alive and real.

  Through the living room windows, he could see that his mother was heading for the front door. His brother must have arrived.

  "Duty calls." Reluctantly he let Emma go.

  His brother wasn't alone. He'd transitioned a few months back when tests showed that he would follow Andrew's path of costly, painful, but ultimately ineffective treatments. In his rare calls, he'd mentioned a new girlfriend. He hadn't said anything, however, about the baby in her arms. "Everyone, this is Marianne and our little girl, Jewel."

  There was a moment of silence, and then Emma stepped toward them. "Hi, I'm Emma." But her focus was totally on the baby, who gave her a toothless grin. "Hey, there, little one. Ohh, what a smile!"

  "Your baby?" Andrew asked carefully, because John was dead, making the child already half orphan. "Flesh and blood?"

  John caught what he was asking and cried, "No! No, no, no. Nothing like that. That would be just cruel. Marianne was my mentor at my transcending therapy." In other words, she was dead and comfortable about it. Andrew had officially passed through the program, but remained too ambivalent to qualify as anyone's mentor. "Babies are so body intensive; Jewel would be alone too much to be mentally healthy."

  "She's completely digital." Marianne surrendered the baby to Emma who continued to coo over it as if it was real.

  "Like Bingo, our dog? He's a Pixilated Puppy." He'd turned Bingo off before leaving. The idea of having a baby like that and insisting that it was real would be creepy.

  "No more than a Raggedy Ann doll is like a baby," John said. "Pixilated Puppy is an off-the-shelf, cookie cutter program that produces the same dog over and over again. The skin changes to create an illusion of growth but it has one set of 'dog' algorithms. Jewel is custom designed for us, based on our genetic, intelligence, and aptitude profiles. She has a learning program that will ultimately create a unique personality matrix just like the one that they downloaded from our bodies. She'll grow up to be a real human."

  They settled into the living room. The baby had the gravitational weight of a black hole; all their attention stayed pinned on it. It squeaked and squealed and explored Emma's face with tiny chubby hands.

  "We're really sorry we didn't tell you, but the center told us to not . . ." John trailed off as he realized how that sounded and looked helplessly to Marianne.

  Marianne gamely picked up the ball. "Fitting a baby into your life is difficult and can be emotionally draining. The last thing you need is someone ridiculing your decision."

  John nodded. "It's really an honor to qualify for a baby. But once you're accepted, and they've created your child, you can't back out."

  "Couldn't you have adopted—" Their mother paused to find a diplomatic way of finishing. "An already living child? One of those big-eyed South Americans in the spam messages asking you to sponsor them?"

  Marianne shook her head, saying. "Same status ruling."

  "World court ruled that adopted parents have to have the same physical status as the child," John explained. "Only the living can adopt the living."

  "They're afraid that virtual parents would preset a child's desire to transition as soon as it became an adult," Marianne said.

  Transition as in kill themselves. Dead at eighteen; now there was a waste of effort.

  John nodded. "And again, it's not fair for a kid not to have parents on the same plane of existence. Not really there for feedings, and potty training, and baths, and bedtime."

  Sorrow filled Emma's face. It hurt Andrew to see it. He'd left Emma alone when he died. She ate alone. Slept alone. He had done something worse than abandon her—he kept her stranded. He knew he should remind her that the wedding vows ran "til Death do us part" but he didn't have the courage.

  "How old is Jewel now?" Emma asked to detour the conversation away from the specter of death.

  It turned out that John had been running at the fast clock speed to "make time" for his new family. In the weeks since they'd talked last, he and Marianne had gone through the legal work needed to qualify for the baby, lived through a nine-month "pregnancy," a painless "birth," and three months of intensive baby care, complete with diapers.

  "Couldn't they skip the diapers?" Andrew asked.

  Marianne laughed at the face he was making. "They're only iconic. They're not stinky or messy. Elimination is part of the body feedback that they think might be vital to a child's growth, so they included it. After she's potty trained, biological functions are tapered off."

  This led somehow to a conversation about Andrew's and John's own potty training experiences. While they talked, the baby started to fuss. Marianne and John took turns producing pacifiers and bright colored rattles out of thin air. Jewel would mouth the new item intently and then reject it.

  "You know, I think she might be hungry," Marianne said at last. She produced a shawl that she draped over her shoulder and started to unbutton her shirt.

  "I'll go check on the turkey." His mom bolted from the room.

  "Honey." Emma took Andrew's hand and pulled him to his feet. "Can I talk to you alone for a minute?"

  Death had to be making him slow, because it wasn't until they were out in the backyard that he realized that Marianne was going to breastfeed her baby.

  "Why—why would they do it that way?" He sputtered at the idea of dead woman feeding a digital baby off a virtual reality breast.

  "Why not? It was the way we're designed to feed our children." Emma laughed at his dismay. She leaned against him and looked searchingly into his eyes. "It's the way I want to feed our child."

  Andrew's heart sank. Ironically they'd spent the early years of their marriage trying not to have children, waiting for a time when they could afford for Emma to stop working. In the end, they'd waited too long, and his cancer put an end to all their plans. If he kept her stranded by his side, she wouldn't have a chance to have the life she deserved, a life with the babies she'd always wanted so badly. "Em, I think we should—we should get a divorce. It's not fair to you. You're alive and I'm dead. I can't give you children. You should be with someone that can."

  She tightened her hold on him as if she was afraid he'd bolt. "Andy . . . I'm dead."

  "What?"

  "They found ovarian cancer in me a few months ago, and I opted to go digital."

  "When?"

  "Does it really matter? You couldn't tell the difference."

  He could only stare at her, feeling betrayed. Grief was starting to grow inside him, like a spark on a pile of dead leaves, rushing toward a forest fire.

  "Don't you dare!" Emma cried. "I am right here in front of yo
u. Don't you act like I'm not real. This is me. You haven't lost anything."

  "How can you know it? You could be some clever self-deluded program that thinks it can feel."

  "Because I love you."

  "That doesn't prove anything. I love you, but I don't think I'm real."

  She gave a dry laugh that was nearly a sob. "You're real. You're the way you always were. Doubting everything. You weren't sure your parents loved you growing up. You were always wondering why and if I really loved you. You were never even sure what you felt for me was love. There were times you questioned if the universe was real. Even before you died, you thought you might be a program running on a simulation."

  "I was wrong about that last one. Simulated reality isn't that detailed."

  "Sometimes you just have to have faith. You are you." She gave him a little push. "I'm me." She pushed him again. "I love you." Push. "Your brother and mother are real and they love you." Push. "The world we left was real, but it's still there, and this world is based in that one, so this world is just as real."

  She'd pushed him up against a wall and kissed him now that she had him pinned. All-consuming grief, like he'd never felt before, still blazed through him, until the very roar of that emotion muted his hearing and burned in his eyes.

  "I can't—I can't believe . . ." That she killed herself without telling him. That she'd been dead for days—weeks—months? That he never noticed.

  "Why is it so hard to accept that there are things that you can't prove? That some things just are? Love. Reality. God. Smoke in air. You can see it and smell it and taste it, but you can't grab it tight in your hands and look at it closely."

  "If there was a God, shouldn't we die and let our souls go to heaven? If heaven even exists."