Transhuman

  He got up, went through the glass airlocky thing they called an entrance, past the exterior door to the men's room. But one of the Kentaco Hut employees was there already, using the left urinal, and as Steven stepped up, the guy actually leaned over for a look at his wang.

  "Excuse me," Steven said, annoyed. Boulder was the kind of town where queers would sometimes hit on you, and he tried not to mind it. He tried to take it for the compliment it was, and not get all creeped out. But what the hell was this?

  "You rich or something?" the Kentaco Hut guy wanted to know. Tattooed and burly, he smelled of cigarettes and didn't look particularly queer, except insofar as he might've been in prison recently. He also didn't look like he was trying to be an asshole; there was a kind of sincerity to him. He just seemed curious.

  "No one has ever asked me that question," Steven said. It's not polite, he added mentally, sending it out over the psychic airwaves.

  "Sorry," the guy shot back, with honesty but no real embarrassment. "It's just you walk in here at midnight with three women hanging all over you. I can't tell which one's your girlfriend, so I'm thinking maybe they all are. Or they want to be. So what's the secret? I haven't seen you in the movies or anything, I figure you must be rich."

  Not in the way you think, Steven thought. I could give it all away tomorrow, and never miss a dime.

  "It isn't like that," he told the guy. "It's my . . . my work. I see right past their pretty façades, right into their secret hearts. They seem to like that."

  A frown. "Shrink? Priest?"

  "No, sir. I'm an artist."

  He'd never said the word before, or anyway never attached it to his own self. It was a presumption and a half—what had he really done?—but he liked the sound of it. He liked what it implied.

  "Shit, man," the guy muttered, angrier than if Steven had been rich. "Lucky you; I'd give my left nut. Can you teach me?"

  Years later, thinking fondly back on the days when he'd only had three women and eighteen million dollars to worry about, Steven would mark this moment as the great turning point of his life. For better, for worse, definitely not for poorer. He zipped up and moved to the sink. "I can do better than that. I can offer you talent's whore cousin: a soul printer hot off the line. But brother, it's going to cost you."

  And so it did.

  * * *

  Afterword by Wil McCarthy

  Neurobiologists have recently gotten their arms around aesthetic experience—the shivery feeling of Wow you get from certain combinations of sight and sound. The actual mechanism turns out to be rather simplistic, attaching emotional tags to images that suggest qualities of flavor, fertility, comfort, protectiveness, et cetera. The survival value is obvious—we all need to know a good mate, or a good dinner, when we see one! But the implications are profound: art may be nothing more than a side effect—a primitive hack people have invented to masturbate this system for nonsurvival purposes. And the system can clearly be hacked in more invasive ways—a prospect I find thrilling, horrifying, and also kind of funny. Hence this story.

  WHOM THE GODS LOVE

  Sarah A. Hoyt

  No matter how much potential for good a technology may have, it also almost always carries the ability to do damage. As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and from magic it's only a short leap to viewing the same technologies as tools of the gods. (Similar insights clearly struck Sarah as she was working on this story; see her afterword.) In a post-Singularity world, is there any reason to believe this will change?

  * * *

  It was the moon after the harvest, the year of the great plague. Lyda, she who walks between worlds, she the daughter of the great king of the golden hair, the son of gods, spoke up and said, "I've appealed in the world of the gods for help, and a god of justice heard me. He shall raise our people from fear and shelter us from destruction."

  But then the god himself dropped among them.

  Alessandro Palermo hurt. The pain shocked him—the electrical flinch along his nervous pathways, the recoil and clenching in all his muscles.

  He hadn't felt pain like this in a very long time. He couldn't remember how long. Not since . . . not since the change. Since then the only place he'd experienced pain was in the virtus and suddenly he realized how different the virtus was and how much he'd forgotten.

  Pain in the virtus didn't come with clammy cold sweat, with teeth clenched tight till the jaws hurt, with eyes blurred with the hurt.

  He lay in mud which felt clingy and sticky under his hands and face, and smelled as if it were composed of things that had been rotting together a very long time. And he'd dropped onto it. From a height. He had a vague memory—he was sure he'd been drugged—of being rolled out of a flycar. Dropped from above the top of the trees—falling branch by branch—his fall broken and his body also, dropped onto . . .

  He couldn't think of where he was with the clarity that would normally accompany it. He was used to seeing the map in his mind—or the satellite picture—of the area he was trying to identify. It wouldn't happen now. He was disconnected. That much he knew.

  But all the same he knew where he was. It was the place that he'd code named Neverwhere. The place that shouldn't have any people in it—the miles and miles of the West Coast of North America that had supposedly been turned back over to wilderness years ago—as the requirements of a population now supported by nanotech shrank.

  It should all be pristine wilderness. It should all be trees and animals and featureless nothing. But Alessandro remembered, before falling, seeing small circular buildings and smoke rising from their roofs. And he remembered, before that, finding out about the savages. The manufactured savages. And the people who were stealing their lives.

  The people who'd dropped Alessandro here.

  Then rose the men in council and cast doubt on the far-seeing girl's prophecy, Lyda's of the golden hair, who said that the god of justice would solve all of the people's problems. But the god that had come had fallen from the skies like a rock, with no more control and no more power. And now he lay there, in the swamp, like a child that had lost strength. That he'd not died could only be ascribed to his divine nature and to the trees that slowed his fall.

  Timods, son of Erclat, the one who went to the mountain to petition the gods when the war with the Varcolids raged, stood and spoke and he said, "Lyda is lost in her own mind. She's wandered amid the gods in dreams too long. She does not know the difference between dream and truth anymore. This god that has fallen among us is not the god of justice, come to set all right. Or else, he is, but has lost all his power. He is not more than those who were exiled before and came among us, naked and helpless like beggars."

  Lyda protested this. She rose and said, "He is the god of whom I spoke, nor do I believe he is at all powerless. Amid his people is he a warrior, strong. He will not be defeated. We must help him back up the mountain of the gods, that he'll speak our case in their councils and deliver us from the plague, the war, and the famines that are visited upon us by the gods for their games."

  But the council would not listen, nor would they believe Lyda. She had walked too long in dreams, they said, and Timods was right. This god was no more than an exiled god, fallen and stripped of all his power. Even if they tried to help him back up the gods' mountain, he would never get there. No, the thing to do was bring the god to the city and devour his flesh, for the virtue in it, which would protect men from illness and death for a time.

  He woke up in the dark, and thought about his eyes. For centuries now, his senses had been enhanced—improved—eyes and ears and nose had been optimized. Oh, not all the time. It had been found early on that if you improved all of your perception constantly, even with the support of external memory, and your connection to the lifenet, you'd find yourself overwhelmed. You'd receive too much information all the time. It would not be efficient.

  Normally his eyes and ears and nose gave him the same sensations h
e'd learned to expect from them when he'd been born, in the twenty first century. Which right now meant they told him he was in the dark, in an enclosed space. His hands and ankles were tied together. The smell of old fires and old cooking hung in the air. From outside, not too far, came the sound of people talking and a rhythmic beat that could be all his ears could catch of some music.

  Closer at hand, there was an indistinct movement in the darkness. And the sounds of hurried, gasping breathing.

  He thought his eyes into sharpening, into capturing what light could be got. Into thinking. A process that was subconscious when he was connected to the Lifenet, now took thought and the space of two breaths. And then he saw her.

  She was tall and limber and blond, with a square face and the type of homespun tunic that would have looked perfectly at home in the Mediterranean thousands of years ago. Around her shoulders a cloak looked more ornamental than useful, since she had it tied around her neck, but swept behind. On her feet she wore some kind of sandals, or at least strips of leather holding another strip of leather in place over her soles. The legs around which the strips tied looked long and shapely enough.

  He'd seen her before. He'd seen her in virtus. Her appearance had started him investigating the savages.

  Alessandro had thought her a hoaxer at first, with her talk of gods and the people, her attempts to get him to do something he couldn't even understand. He'd thought her a phony. Or crazy. And yet, there was to that rectangular face, with the slightly protruding chin and the fanatically bright blue eyes, an intensity, a purpose.

  Her features had pursued him through several days and nights after her first appearance in his virtus life. She'd said her people's lives were being stolen, their minds tampered with. She had said that only he could save them. He'd called her the priestess. And it made no sense. He knew there were no humans living in a primitive state left on Earth. Not since the last days of the twenty-first century when even tribesmen in remote areas had been brought into civilization.

  But he'd followed her trail. She'd given him a name before fading out of his virtus space. Lars Anglome. He'd tried to find the man. Anglome should be alive. He was Palermo's own age, of the generation that had become enhanced and rejuvenated before the decay of age had really set in. Such people didn't die. Or not, at least, without setting off alarms throughout the Lifenet, making everyone abuzz with word of a horrible disaster, everyone afraid it might happen to them.

  But Anglome had disappeared. Disappeared completely from Lifenet—his virtus space had closed. He'd disappeared from the world too.

  Oh, this happened. Particularly to their generation, that had once known life without virtus. You became bored of the constant connectedness of Lifenet, bored of virtus, bored of being sheltered from every raw experience of real life. One day you closed all your links, said good-bye to all your friends, and disappeared. Departed to some forsaken area of the world to remember real life.

  And more times than not you were back in a year, sheepish and amused by your own folly and happier to be connected than you'd ever been.

  Lars Anglome had not disappeared that way. He'd disappeared without goodbyes. Without terminating any accounts. He'd disappeared as if one morning he'd stopped existing.

  Without expecting much, Alessandro had broken into the recorded memory of Anglome's virtus space. There, he'd found the tail end of the conspiracy so monstrous he could never have imagined it. The conspiracy that had ended with him being dropped here—and would have ended with his death if the trees hadn't broken his fall.

  Now the woman walked towards him, in the darkness, avoiding what looked and smelled like an ash pit in the middle of the floor. He saw the stone knife in her hand, and started, but she put her finger to her lips in a command for silence. The look in her eyes was both imploring and accomplice—not the gesture of a killer to her victim.

  She knelt with a limber grace that betrayed no thought for her movements, and sliced through the ropes that bound him—first at his ankles and then at his wrists.

  He opened his mouth, but she only pressed her finger to her lips, in the universal gesture for silence. She held her hand out to him, to help him rise. Another universal gesture.

  His legs felt shaky, insecure beneath him, but they no longer hurt as if they were broken. The repair and rebuild nanos had been at work. He had a momentary thought of relief.

  Oh, he'd got his shot of med nanos, as he should have, about a month ago. And the nanos would last at least a year. More than a year, really—only they started decaying little by little, their program failing them, so that after a year they weren't quite as effective.

  But medtech wasn't his specialty. He didn't know if it was possible to send in nanos that destroyed his sense and strength enhancements and his med nanos. He'd feared they'd done it.

  From what he could feel, though, as he walked across the floor on unsteady legs, following the girl's graceful glide, the only thing missing was his connection to the Lifenet. That wouldn't be hard to do, even with software. Simply block him out. Oh, perhaps not so simple, since anyone with the enhancement should be able to connect. And he'd received the patch that allowed it years ago. He felt for it now, under his wrist, and found—or thought he found—the chip's tiny dot beneath his skin. They hadn't removed it. They had to have blocked his signal, somehow, simple or not.

  Of course they had. If he'd been able to go into virtus, he'd be able to alert everyone to what was happening, to the evil going on under everyone's eyes, while their noses were high in the clouds and half in virtus. He'd be able to reveal that while the rest of the world feasted and played games these few humans were kept in abject slavery and subjected to tortures, so that their experience could be culled for the enjoyment of a few sophisticates.

  He clenched his fists thinking about it. It would not be allowed to stand. They might think it would. They might think by dropping him here they had got rid of him. He wondered what story they'd concocted to explain his disappearance and how they'd manage to explain to his friends that he'd just dropped out.

  But then, he guessed, his body would never be found. They'd probably cut him off the Lifenet well before they'd dropped him here. There would be nothing for anyone to find or identify for years. Or centuries. More if these people killed him.

  Wondering where the girl was leading him, he followed, out the door of the building—past the recumbent figure of a man who might be asleep or dead. Alessandro hoped not dead, because he didn't want to be responsible for that, but it didn't matter now.

  Outside, he realized this hovel was on the outskirts of the city. With a thought he adjusted the thickness of his suit just a little, to protect him against the increased coldness of the air. From his left side—perhaps five hundred meters away—came the glare of a fire, the sound of voices, and—definitely—the sounds of a flute and some sort of string instrument. There was laughing and the sound of pottery too. He paused for a moment while a thought of walking there, of announcing himself as someone who'd get them out of here and make everything well, ran through his mind.

  But the girl reached over and touched his arm, with a small, cool hand. Again, she repeated the gesture of silence, with her finger to her lips, while she pulled him urgently forward.

  He went. He could always go back and reveal himself later. Right now he would do what she wanted him to. She'd rescued him, after all.

  She nodded once, as though reading his resolution in his expression. Then she turned and led him, away from the fire and the people and toward a tree-covered area.

  Lyda's heart was filled with defiance and her soul with bitterness. See you fools, she though, how you reject your salvation and the work I've done in bringing the god to you.

  In the bitterness of her heart, in the dark of the night, Lyda drugged the drink of the guard so he slept. Then stole she the god from his prison, before the men of Eruba could kill him and eat his liver for its virtue. And then she led him, into the wilderness.

 
But the eyes and the ears of the gods went with them.

  She pulled him forward, firmly, and suddenly—in front of him—there was an area of flat ground—cleared of all vegetation and fitted with a rough paving of stones. In the middle there were remnants of long-burning fires.

  "Here," she said. "The eyes of the gods cannot follow us. My grandfather made it so. And if we speak in a low enough voice . . ." She spoke in a stage whisper and shrugged.

  For a moment, he hesitated and wondered if this were virtus—if someone had, somehow, hijacked his virtus space, if this oddly haunting woman had taken him into the middle of a game. Her game. Everyone played games in virtus. It could be said that his own crime-solving was a game. Perhaps hers was being the priestess of a primitive tribe.

  But he felt the wind on his uncovered skin, felt the skin prickling up in response. He heard the chant of the city warriors in the distance stop abruptly. The night was full of sounds of chattering, whimpering, thrilling creatures. Virtus wasn't like that. Oh, it simulated all the senses, but like the old movies were to the visions of real life, it was never quite right. It was too conscious of only the needed sensations, just enough to make it right. That was why those criminals stole the lives of these primitives.

  Alessandro felt his gorge rise, and realized he'd been looking at the woman, in silence. He looked away. "The eyes of the gods?" he said.

  She nodded. "My grandfather set this space with something he said would stop them from entering. I've set the stones in, and I come here and make fires. They"—she nodded her head in the direction of the city—"are afraid to come in. There's little I can do to them, to be truthful, but I know things. I can use the eyes too," she said, and blushed, as if afraid he would reprimand her.