Transhuman

  * * *

  Afterword by Esther Friesner

  As much as I enjoy and appreciate some of the wonderful decorative spectacles of the season—though I do not celebrate Christmas myself—this story just goes to show that sometimes there really is no place like home for the holidays.

  SOUL PRINTER

  Wil McCarthy

  No corner of the universe is harder to know than the heart of another, but might technology not change all that? Read on to see how science might help with that most human problem—and what the solution might mean to us all.

  Steven and Nicole could hear Shanique gagging and muttering as she slammed through the double doors and out into the fountain area.

  "Oh my God." She was saying. "Oh, my God. Extortion? How could they know?"

  A quick blast of October air replaced her as the doors whumped closed.

  "Should have told us you were sick!" Nicole called after her. "That's just rude."

  Steven gave Nicole a playful nudge. "Hey. Do you remember that show, Dinosaurs? It was kind of like The Flintstones, except it was live action, and everyone was dressed in big rubber dinosaur suits."

  Nicole looked over her shoulder at him. "Babe, do I look like I watched those kind of shows?"

  They were alone in the art building, dressed in Saturday sweats and adorned in Greek letters. He wore a Rolex, she a gold bangle around her ankle. All around them were paintings on easels, ceramic sculptures on shelves, a Spanish moss of hand-drawn doodles draping from pushpins. Steven's project, covering most of a table, looked decidedly out of place: a techno-intruder from some other department. There were cables, coils, alligator clips. Nerd gear in paradise, spilling from the back of his laptop like Halloween candy.

  "No," he admitted. Nicole was an E! and Bravo and MTV girl, and looked every inch of it. "But you never know, right? In the show there was this professor. Every week he'd do some crazy experiment on a little kid dinosaur he called Timmy. The kid would end up crushed or vaporized or melted down, and every time the professor would say, 'Looks like we're going to need another Timmy!'"

  Nicole thought that over for a few seconds before asking, "Why are you telling me this, exactly? And before you answer, keep in mind that humoring one's boyfriend is de rigueur. I don't actually care that much."

  If Steven had a crest, it probably would have fallen. But he didn't, so he shrugged and said, "Nothing. Just, you know. We need another Timmy."

  The previous victim, a fellow art student named Shanique Bentzen, had torn the sensor cap off and fled the studio, retching like she was going to barf. The screen image that set her off was simple enough: coffee-brown bodies twined together in the warm glow of a fireplace. Or something like that; the shapes were suggestions, color gradients devoid of edges. They might just as easily be leaves floating in a puddle. There was nothing on the laptop to confirm—or deny—that the machine was doing much of anything.

  "Yuck. It's early to be throwing up." Nicole sounded irritated. "I didn't smell liquor on her breath. Either she's got some kind of stomach bug, or your machine made her sick."

  Steven shrugged, unable to work up any feelings about it other than a selfish impatience. "The machine is fine."

  "Some people get sick from video games. Or shaky movies, like Blair Witch."

  "My pictures don't shake, and if she passed along a virus, we won't feel it till tomorrow. Either way I've got to hand this in Monday morning."

  Nicole wasn't stupid: she caught Steven's drift right away, and shook her head. "I'm not putting that sensor cap on. Sorry. It's your project, you be the Timmy."

  "I have to work the machine," he answered, thumbing the PRINT button for emphasis. The inkjet whined to life, slowly rolling out an interpretation of Shanique's goofy picture.

  "I'll operate it," she suggested. Nicole wasn't unhelpful, either, just . . . picky about how she helped. She was the same way with her sorority sisters, freely giving them her time and attention, but on her own terms.

  "You can't," Steven told her. "It'd take me all day to show you how. Come on, I just need, like, five minutes. If this thing works, I might land A-plusses in all three of my classes. Hell, I might even get rich."

  "You're not rich already?"

  "Richer, then. And I'd owe it all to you."

  "Right. Sure." She eyed the sensor cap, and the bottle of saline gel sitting next to it, with a frown. "You realize what this crap'll do to my hair?"

  "I was going to mess it up anyway. As soon as we're done here."

  "Oh," she said, mulling that. "Well, I might let you."

  But a statement like that was just for show. For someone with such a strong sense of self, Nicole was remarkably compliant around the bedroom, and rarely refused him anything. The Greek system encouraged this: the frats were about brotherhood, but the sororities, for all their other alleged activities, were fundamentally about the brothers. About test-driving potential husbands from the frats' well-heeled gene pool. It had seemed strange to Steven at first, but it made a kind of sense: she was a sex object, he was a money object, and together they formed a couple their friends could admire and envy. That was no worse—no more or less fake—than any other system the world had come up with.

  Was it?

  After another token protest, Nicole gave up and squirted her scalp down with gel from the squeeze bottle. "It's cold," she complained, setting the bottle down and working the stuff in with brightly painted fingernails. Finally, frownily, she pulled the cap down over her head. It came down as far as her ears, a ski hat made of metal disks and coiled wires. Not nearly the resolution of an MRI scanner, but Steven had built the thing for two hundred dollars, making some home-brew improvements on the standard design.

  "It looks great," he assured her. It looked like a dead octopus.

  Glaring: "Just hurry up."

  There was no elegant way to start the AmygdalArt program over, so he rebooted the PC and opened the ERPEEG software, capturing a quick baseline of Nicole's resting brain. The flat-screen—thirty two viewable inches, fresh from Best Buy!—showed scattered activity in the frontal and temporal lobes, not much else.

  "Awful quiet in there," he teased.

  But the view was changing already, her mind responding to the sight of itself. The visual cortex was lighting up, red and orange against a brain-shaped background of cool blue.

  Then, when she turned to look at Steven, it changed again, the twin loops of the cingulate gyrus coming to life, igniting the prolactin and oxytocin cell bodies in the hypothalamus below it. It was all blurry and washed-out on the screen—definitely low-res—but there was sense to it if you knew what you were seeing. He felt immediately guilty; he was invading her privacy and she didn't even know. In spite of her protests, she was enjoying this. Being sat down, examined, fussed over . . . it made her feel loved, or at least cared for. It made her happy, and there were seventy ways Steven could abuse that knowledge even if he consciously tried not to. Her vaginal tissues would be swelling and moistening right about now.

  Damn. Another opportunity to slip over to the dark side. Did life ever stop offering these?

  "I'm going to show you some pictures," he said, clicking on the AmygdylArt icon, which kicked off the main program itself and also launched a PowerPoint slide show in a separate window. The first image was a square, black on a background of white, for calibration purposes. The second was an old stone grist mill Steven had scanned in from a jigsaw puzzle box.

  "Better," Nicole offered, when the scene clicked over.

  The third image was George Clooney.

  "Ugh. Worse."

  "It's not an eye test," Steven said. "Probably better if you just hold still. The Wernicke language centers are pretty close to V4 in the visual cortex, and we don't want any cross-traffic."

  "My, that's a polite way to tell someone to shut up."

  The images cycled in silence for a while, as Steven took a jeweler's screwdriver to his breakout panel—a circuit board bridging the cable betwee
n sensor cap and laptop—and adjusted the gain potentiometers by hand. His breath seemed loud; Nicole's even louder.

  Finally, the images began to morph and jumble. The lights on the ERPEEG scan brightened, widening and narrowing in response, mapping the inner nuances of Nicole's aesthetic experience. Which of course drove further changes in the images, smaller and subtler with each passing second, like a slowed-down version of the Automatic Fine Tuning on an analog radio.

  And then suddenly she was ripping the sensor cap off without regard for her hair, or his delicate wiring. Her eyes, welling up with tears, were riveted to the screen.

  "God, Steven! That's . . . that's . . ." Her voice cracked. "Jesus, what a stupid invention!"

  And then she, too, fled the studio.

  It's true what they say: a rich man can make all your dreams come true. Well, nearly all; there are still things money can't buy, and other things it shouldn't. But a rich man can change your life, and when he doesn't (why should he?), you're bound to resent it. Ergo you're bound to resent him, like everyone else he's ever met. Ergo, it kind of sucks to be that guy.

  If you wake up one day and find you are that guy—say, because your dad's holographic display company just IPOed in Yet Another Market Bubble, and you're twenty percent owner—there are really only three responses. And ultimately, all of them suck in some deeply fundamental way.

  OPTION ONE: Keep to your own kind. This is harder than it sounds, because there are only a few million truly rich people alive, and they're clustered in skyscrapers, on islands, in tight-knit communities that ordinary people only hear about in movies. The world is a collection of small villages, with all that that implies. If you're not born to your wealth it's even harder, because to the old-money types, even if they never come out and say it, you'll always be a sort of hillbilly. Your old friends treat you differently, too. "Your kind" is a rare breed, and often a lonely one.

  OPTION TWO: Philanthropy. There's only so much you can spend on houses and cars, clothing and travel and fine cuisine. Twenty million will do it, so you set that much aside for yourself and a little more for the kids, if you have 'em or you plan to have 'em.

  If you really have your eyes on the future you set aside enough that the interest on the interest will keep your dynasty going forever, inheritance taxes and all. But that can make feebs and drunks of your grandkids if you're not careful, as any high-end financial planner will tell you. Tread cautiously, amigo.

  Anyway, as a philanthropist you set some money aside and give the rest away. Making dreams come true, yes. Making the world a better place, or anyway a different one. But this takes discipline, and generates its own resentments. There's always somebody who deserves your money and doesn't get it. C'est la vie.

  OPTION THREE: Blend in. Get a regular job, a regular place to live, and resist the urge to buy stuff that'll make you stand out. In many ways this is the ideal way to handle things: the secret millionaire next door. Find a girl who loves you for yourself, raise children without the fear of kidnapping, basically live a normal life, minus the quiet desperation thing.

  But it's hard to pull off. Harder than you think, harder than Steven Yirsley ever guessed it would be. Free to do (within limits) whatever he wanted, wherever he wanted, he went back to school while his baby face could still pass him off as a nineteen-year-old. He didn't go to Yale or Harvard or anyplace like that, but back to CU Boulder, his alma mater. Not to upgrade his electrical engineering degree into a masters, but to round himself out as a human being. To do his entire college experience over again, and do it right. It was, after all, a luxury he could afford.

  He'd only been gone four years, but that was his entire adult life and, what, almost twenty percent of his total life? Going back was strange; the place hadn't changed, but all his old friends were gone. He majored in general studies, taking whatever classes he pleased and generally keeping a low profile. Drinking it in, unhurried.

  But there were women in college, all kinds of women, and when spring had sprung and the bare legs and midriffs were out, he went a little crazy. It was so much easier to impress the ladies with raw spending power than with his, you know, actual self. By halfway through his second term, he'd bought a Viper, joined a fraternity, hooked up with a tight little blonde he had nothing in common with, and gone a good ways down the road to alcoholism and worse. Summer vacation in Lisbon hadn't helped one bit.

  But this was his fourth term, and he was starting to feel some inner pressure, to do something real with his life again. No philosophy courses this time; instead he'd indulged his love of the human brain, signing up for Functional Neural Imaging and Advanced Neuroanatomy, and one art class to round things out.

  So when his art teacher, the decidedly frizzy Assistant Professor Lydia Englund, M.A., had assigned her class a project to "use your unique, personal skill set to produce unique, personal visuals," it seemed natural enough to build his own event-related positional EEG scanner and show off the twinkling lights of his own brain. Nothing could be more unique or personal than that, right?

  But immediately he'd noticed that the pattern changed when he looked at it. Pathways lit up between his visual cortex, amygdala, and fusiform gyrus. The images had an emotional effect—his brain liked seeing itself in action—and the emotions in turn brightened the images, and then responded to the brightening in a funny sort of feedback loop. Hello, me! Hello, me! It didn't get him high or anything, but it was . . . fascinating.

  From there, it seemed a simple matter to flash up a set of "reference images"—faces, buildings, landscapes, animals—and feed them through a neural-networked morphing filter that maximized the emotional response as measured by the scanner. And an even simpler matter to collage the morphed images together, apply a Photoshop smoothing filter, and feed it right back into the eyeballs again. The end result: a visual image tailored for maximum emotional impact. In a word, Art.

  But so far Steven's testing wasn't going too well, and he was running out of Timmies.

  A rich woman isn't the same thing at all, by the way. Not at all. A woman—even a dumpy one—already has something every man wants, that loses value if she gives too much of it away. She has to be stingy, and learns at an early age to live with the resentment. Adding money to that mix doesn't really change who she is, or how she moves in the world.

  A poor woman isn't the same thing, either, because she's free to marry above her station. Not necessarily able to, but free in principle. On the slightest invitation she could strip off that serving uniform and join the party as a guest, without fear of getting beaten or arrested. You see it all the time in the movies.

  Ergo, a poor girl who comes into some money isn't anything all that miraculous. She dresses a little better, gets her hair and nails done by a proper salon, maybe feels the occasional twinge of superiority. But it's easier for her to blend, to feel and act like the mythical "normal person," at least to the extent that any normal person can.

  A straight-up sorority girl in many ways—almost stereotypical—Nicole Most was nevertheless a free spirit, fond of Latin dancing and floppy felt hats. For pleasure she read exactly one book every month, favoring romance novels and biographies of famous women. She didn't suffer fools gladly, and she seemed to find a lot of fools in the world. "Mean Girl" was one of the nicknames her sisters gave her, like a superhero moniker, with blue-and-cream sweats in place of a cape. They also called her "Wabbit."

  What she was doing with a guy like Steven was an excellent question. Shouldn't he be too geeky for her? Did money really make that much difference, or did opposites really attract? Xenophilia: a genetic compulsion to hybridize with someone really different. She liked his sense of humor, and he liked the way she constructed an air of cool wisdom out of basically zero life experience. Anyway, Steven had to admit: in the bedroom they were magic.

  And on the dance floor, she was magic. At Paradiso on Saturday nights, the Omega Rho girls showed up tipsy, waved their fake IDs at the bouncer, ordered a quick round of co
urage, and hopped up on the raised strip that divided the upper and lower decks of the dance floor.

  The dance was called The Booty Train, and looked pretty much like you'd expect from the name, only . . . what, edgy? Artistic? Nicole in particular lent a sensuous jangle to it, the movement of her arms suggesting not only the wheel rods of a locomotive but the kneading of a masseuse, the jabbing of a boxer, the gripping and tugging of a man doing it doggie-style. "The whimper of rough, desperate, sexuality," Steven's psych professor had called this dance once, during a lecture on crime and courtship behaviors.

  Which sounded a lot like sour grapes; looking up at it now, with a beer in his fist, the Offspring's "Spare Me the Details" in his ears and a low, warm buzz in his gray matter, Steven felt a definite sense that all was right in the world. If Nicole was here—the middle car in a Booty Train of five—then she couldn't be all that pissed off at him. This was, after all, a sanctioned Greek event; she knew he'd be here.

  And it wasn't like it was his fault or anything, that her mind contained, or at least responded to, such weird images. What set her off was a hazy, misshapen picture of a man with his shirt off, with a spatter of blood across his chest and a pile of what looked like dead puppies and kittens at his feet. His face a mask, unreadable. Oversized in the background, even hazier and more distorted, was the face of a woman, haughty and amused and yet also visibly afraid.

  It was hard to tell, but Steven thought the man in the picture might be him. The woman was even harder to identify, but it might be Nicole, standing behind her man in some weird metaphorical way. Or even egging him on? Tugging at his puppet strings? Anyway the image, however striking and ugly, was much more her creation than his. If anything he should be mad at her.

  Beside Steven now, his friend and frat brother Don "Juan" Cowen was leaning on a brass rail and drawling through an anecdote, half shouting to be heard above the noise.