Sunlight 24

by Merritt Graves

  “We just found out that Martin got early admission into Harvard, and it’s been crazy. His first pre-semester starts next week, so he’s trying to get ahead in all his Lawrence classes,” said Abigail.

  Martin leaned forward, clearly liking to be teed up like this. “Yeah, pre-sems are supposed to be optional, but optional is never actually optional. It’s an arms race. And everyone knows how it ends, but they stack up the nukes anyway. Each year it gets a little earlier and a little heavier and you just have to deal with it because you know everyone else will be,” he confided with an aw shucks kind of resignation.

  “Fortunately, Martin’s good at putting his head down, especially since he got his A14a peptides adjusted. I don’t see how anyone’s going to be able to outdo him there—”

  Martin broke in, “You’ve just got to keep going, keep pushing. You can’t be satisfied.”

  “So . . . what would winning look like then?” I asked.

  Martin, clearly amused at my naiveté, glanced from Abigail to Lena and back to Abigail, before saying, “Getting a job that makes you enough money to keep Revising. I mean, if you really think about it, this is the quintessential point in your life that everything hinges upon, unless your parents have . . . you know, some other way to speed things up. Abigail’s issue is that she doesn’t know what boat she wants to be on yet so she dabbles in this and that, but I keep telling her that the important thing is getting on a boat while you still can.”

  “And then it’s over?” I asked.

  “No, but it’s infinitely easier to stay ahead of the AI and everyone else once you’re on board,” Martin concluded, eyeing his girlfriend.

  Abigail blushed again. She was standing in a peculiar position, her legs scrunched together, like she was on a pillar and the rest of the floor was lava. “I know Martin’s right. I’m just afraid that if I get on the ‘wrong boat,’ if you will, I won’t be able to get off again. Or if I do, it’ll be so far out of the way that it won’t matter.” I was surprised to hear something like despair seeping into her words.

  “It definitely doesn’t matter to the AI we’re up against; it just does its thing. And its winning at it. Do you think the people on the last flight out of Saigon were too choosy about getting a window seat?”

  “I know, I know, but you have to choose something the AI won’t be able to get at for a while, so I was thinking philosophy or writing since they’re so uniquely human.”

  Martin, again seeming flabbergasted, said, “You can wax human all day, dear, but if the machines don’t like it, it’s not going to get you anywhere. After all, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, ‘An author ought to write for the youth of his generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.’ The youth—the youth that matter anyway—are Revised and the critics and schoolmasters will certainly either be Revised, too, or entirely synthetic; so you best start writing for them.”

  Martin’s attention then jumped across to Lena who had until now seemed more preoccupied with how the caterers were laying out the display of Moleche. “And how will you possibly know what they’ll want to read?” she asked.

  “That’s the crux of the matter,” Martin replied, amused. “You won’t—at least without making yourself more like them. That’s why you should go to MIT. Learn about molecular nanotechnology or genetic algorithms or neural nets—it doesn’t matter, just as long as it’s something they’d find useful.”

  “I suppose,” said Abigail, with a face that said the opposite. “But I’d hate to bore Lena and Carter so . . . maybe this is a conversation best left for later. How about we get some punch? I’m pretty thirsty now that I think of it,” Abigail said as she turned toward Lena.

  “I need to check on the caterers anyway. All the food’s being 3D printed on site—my mom has like fifteen different kinds of printers in the kitchen—but the art of extrusion seems lost on them. It looks like somehow they’ve gotten it in their heads that the coq au vin is supposed to have a dessert glaze.”

  “Too bad they’re not Revised,” said Abigail.

  “If they were, they wouldn’t be caterers,” Martin replied.

  And it was true; they wouldn’t be. But the tone in which he said it was more offhanded than I would’ve expected, almost as if he’d long ago concluded that un-Revised people weren’t his problem. I’m not sure what I’d expected exactly, given I’d already decided he was a tool, but the realization took the lightness I’d been floating in and shoved it back inside, disorienting me in a gentle turn as I followed the steps of some of the dancers in the middle of the room.

  “Martin—you said that you got into Harvard, right?” I asked, a little more accusatory than I’d intended.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s Harvard University out east, right . . . where it’s still cold?”

  Martin gave me a strange, mechanical grimace. “Well, obviously.”

  I waited for a few seconds for Lena to say something—to call him on this about-face with his parents that I’d recalled from Syd’s footage—before continuing hesitantly when she didn’t. “And you’re okay with that? I’ve just heard about it being adversarial and defining success in a really conventional way and . . .”

  Martin squinted his eyes, puzzled. “It’s not the kind of opportunity you can say no to, I’m afraid. And the cold: that’s as simple as resetting your nerve circuits to a lower level.

  I looked at Lena, still waiting for the imminent barrage, but her face remained smooth, not seeming to perceive any conflict or contradiction. She turned to me after a few moments of silence with a reassuring expression. “Martin had one hell of an application and, crazy it as sounds, I’m not surprised. He’s incredibly determined when he sets his sights on something.”

  “I see,” I said in barely a whisper.

  “How about we go get that punch, okay?”

  As I watched her lips form the words, I suddenly had a feeling that some terrible mistake had been made, like I was a boy again and had been separated from my parents.

  “Is that okay, Carter?” asked Lena again.

  I nodded slightly and looked around the ballroom. The rows of ice gargoyles along the walls were lit by arcing floodlights that made it seem like their eyes were shifting, awake and watching everything, waiting for just the right moment to animate. Beside them at intervals were splashing fountains, surrounded by elegant masked forms speaking foreign tongues, spinning and shaking atop the obsidian floor.

  My thoughts became jumbled. I was so disoriented that as Lena led me through a semi-circle of guests it felt like the whole house was on its side, and instead of pulling me she was lowering me on a cord, down into a previously unseen cave.

  “You’re not looking so hot, sport,” Martin said, offering me a glass of punch. I tried to take it, but my hand was shaking, and the glass slipped and shattered on the floor. I opened my mouth to apologize, but I couldn’t breathe.

  “Carter, are you okay?” asked Lena. “We’ve got a Medpad upstairs if you think we should call a doctor.”

  The fear the words created snapped the cord and suddenly the ballroom was right side up again and I was standing next to the punchbowl where caterers were hurriedly sweeping up the glass shards.

  “Sorry, something must’ve washed over me . . . but I’m fine now.”

  “Are you sure? There are plenty of guest rooms you can lie down in.”

  “No, I’m okay, but uh—I’ll get another glass, if that’s cool.” A few seconds later Lena handed me one and I took a long gulp, not realizing how thirsty I’d been.

  “This is our song so Abs and I are gonna go bust some moves. See you guys in a bit,” Martin said to Lena.

  “Alright. Go tear it up.”

  I stared at Lena as she watched them disappear into the crowd. Everything about her was how I’d imagined it would be, except for the way the chandelier light was bending her image slightly, like it was underwater. It was perfect—her skin, her smile, her white dress, the way she made me
focused—but the refraction was odd, like it was hiding a really important detail about the way the picture was supposed to look.

  I sifted through my mind, turning over everything, knowing it must be there somewhere, when a text from Ethan scrolled across my film. Hey man, are you about ready?

  Almost. Hang on for a minute, I thought back through my BCI, knowing I wasn’t at a place where I could slip away and let him in yet. The problem with feigning illness and going up to a Medpad was that Lena would check on me. Better just to wait a while longer. Let people get drunker. More chaotic. Just not too long, since Jaden would be waking up any time after midnight.

  “So, what did you think of your first Lawrence small talk experience?” She made a jerking-off and throwing it gesture.

  “Aces.”

  “Good, ’cause there will be more. The sad thing is he doesn’t even want to go to Harvard: that’s his dad’s plan. But that’s not going to stop him from humble-bragging all night about it.”

  “I missed the humble part,” I said, feeling myself start to settle down. “But why didn’t you call him out?”

  She gave me a faux-serious, professorial look. “Carter. Martin would convince himself black is white if it meant getting the next social accolade. You’ve got to pick your battles. If I gave him shit about all the things he’d never listen to me about, he’d never listen to me about all the things he otherwise would. Besides . . . tonight we’re celebrating.”

  “That’s right,” I said, cuffing her on the shoulder. “State Hybrid Football Champions. And when do I get to meet the hero of the game?”

  “I suppose I could sneak away for a few minutes. People seem to be doing okay by themselves.”

  “Yeah, they’re getting nice and drunk off your spiked punch,” I said, smiling as I held up my empty glass, my biostat monitor reporting a .05% increase in blood alcohol.

  “What? I didn’t spike it.”

  “Someone did.”

  “God . . . kids these days,” said Lena in a mock authoritative voice as she led me down a hallway to a staircase. “Whatever, as long as they don’t piss in the fountain. Dad has it filled with holy water from the Jordan River and is constantly checking the purity. He’s got some test for trace minerals that tells him what water comes from where.”

  “Well, if you order that and everything else you think people’ll trash now, you won’t be scrambling tomorrow morning. When are your parents getting home, anyway?”

  She stretched out the left side of her mouth. “Tomorrow morning.”

  “See what I’m saying?” I said as we reached the base of the staircase.

  “Yeah, I know. I guess I’m just praying that there’s an upper bound to how mad my parents will get since we won state. And I mean . . . at some point it’s just negligence on their part leaving me here alone, considering it was yesterday. What did they think was going to happen?”

  “Hopefully, they’ll see it that way, too.”

  At the end of another long hall, we stepped into a cold, dark expanse. “Okay, this is where I lead all the transient boys I meet at the park. Mom put in a lot of soundproofing to keep Dad from hearing the machinery, but it also works for . . .”

  “I can think of worse places to be murdered than down here in this cool workshop.” We both laughed. “But I must warn you I do have an ultra-high-frequency scream for resonant shattering. Picked it up on my last Revision.”

  “I don’t know. Dad added a drywall layer with a gap, plus fiberglass insulation. I think I’ll be alright.”

  She turned on the lights and there in front of me was a room almost as long and wide as the ballroom above, everything bright and clean and state of the art. One side was lined with worktables and CNCs and 3D printers printing everything you could think of: glass, resins, polymers, metals, and even biomaterials like muscles and ligaments. On another side were electron microscopes, genotyping microarrays, and both in vitro and forensic genomic sequencers. Stuff I only knew about because it was stuff I wanted to get at auction for Uncle Richard’s yard.

  The room was open and cavernous but some of the sections were partitioned by transparent hanging tarps and blue-tinted projection walls. In the far back corner hung electronic blueprints, equations, and a crisscross of AR monitors displaying all kinds of different readouts and diagrams that, when I zoomed in with my film, I could see were all of football drone prototypes.

  “Is this where Icarus was born?” I said, gesturing across the room.

  “It was mostly at the school’s shop. I guess you could say he was conceived back there, though. Immaculately because the tech team had just left, and I was stewing over the fact that no matter what we did we just couldn’t get the robos reacting to a wide enough array of parameters. There were just too many overlapping rules—like if the outside line backers are showing blitz then check to a slant route, but what if the safeties are cheating up, too, then throw deep, right? But not if you don’t have the protection package for a seven-step drop. And then if a rusher’s approaching at x kilometers an hour looking to apply x newtons of force coming across the frame left to right, then spin left x degrees and roll, though not if the defensive end has gotten off his block. They go on and on and on, many of them contradictory. If you generalize too much, it throws a pick every time it sees a new defensive front, and if it’s too complicated it freezes, gets sacked, and coughs up the ball just the same. We had really solid self-learning models, so it would get there eventually, but it wasn’t there yet.”

  “Then how’d you make it work?” I asked.

  We’d been walking through the room and had stopped at a blueprint of Icarus. She looked at me and smiled a perfect smile. A smile that was so easy for her and so heart-wrenching for me. “I didn’t. I made a human-robo interface, so it didn’t have to.”

  “Wait, wait. So someone was controlling it from the sidelines?” I was about to say, ‘And you took back-to-back timeouts to make the switch,’ but caught myself at the last second, knowing there was no way I’d be able to explain why I’d been at a Lawrence football game two weeks ago.

  “Yeah, our human quarterback who’d just come out with a shoulder injury had. He’d logged about ten hours with Icarus up until then, but always told Coach Rickman that he just wasn’t ‘feeling it yet,’ even though Icarus had 1.8x his speed and accuracy.

  “He probably just didn’t feel like giving the glory to a robo.”

  Lena shrugged, motioning me forward into another room, smaller and more tightly packed than the first. “He did when the season was on the line. And the backup was about to go in.”

  I thought about all the Revision I’d done because I felt like not just the season but everything was on the line. I still would’ve done some of it, but not the super risky stuff. Not the stuff that could get hacked or invited a severe immune system rejection. Half of the shit inside me felt like time bombs.

  We’d stopped again in front of a wall of robos in different stages of assembly. At the very end was Icarus, looking shiny and new in its offseason storage, bigger in person than it seemed on the field. Every last inch of the league’s 6’4’’ height limit for bots, covered head to toe in grey polycarbon plating. “Want to take it out for a test drive?”

  “I only have a 38LXY broadband connection. Things run a little slower in Alaska.”

  “You’ll be fine. It’s designed to work in even the lowest signal environments since there are thousands of people drawing bandwidth on their BCIs and films at games. And it’s not like you can make ‘em turn them off.”

  “But how . . .”

  “How do you control it? Just like you would in a VR game. But it’s optimized to play football, so any motion that doesn’t have a football corollary is a little trickier. It’s not like a buddy bot or anything.”

  “That’s good. I’m pretty burned out on buddy bots, to be honest.”

  “They’re like everyone’s excuse to turn into a twelve-year-old and get something to say dirty words.”

/>   “I know, I know. Kids these days.” I sighed. “Oh, here . . . I’m seeing it on my interface, but it says I need a password.”

  “Temp guest pass is Doyle7a5a21dkrx3h.”

  I was about to say, “How am I supposed to remember that?” before I realized that I didn’t need to. I just played it back on my film, did a speech-to-text translate, and then copied and pasted.

  “Alright, I think I’m in.”

  “Now sit back in this chair here. You’ll still have control over your body if you need it, but you’re going to want to have as much focus as you can in the interface. It’ll be a little awkward at first since you’ll have less neuronal feedback, but just move like you normally would. Starting slow and building up.”

  “Kind of like being a baby.”

  “At least until the connections get stronger from the Hebbian learning. The shortcut is just kind of imagining how things would feel. Trusting it. That’s how our QB Carl Gatley put it, anyway. He said he ‘just trusted the flow.’”

  I took a wobbly step in Icarus and then another, almost knocking a welding machine off a table.

  “How many glasses of punch did you say drank again, Carter?”

  “Ha ha,” I said, firming up on the third step, and fourth, and by the fifth I was more or less walking in the same direction. “It is a little hard to hear you, though.”

  “That’s because it only has about a fourth of the hair cells in the basilar membrane and cochlea as we do—washing out the sound. Which are more than made up for by its seismic sensors that anticipate pocket pressure. But it just takes practice getting the brain to recognize those new signals—especially when there’s no direct analogue. Carl wasn’t any good for at least a solid week.”

  “But he probably wasn’t trying that hard, either,” I said, stepping back in an awkward drop and pretending to release the ball.

  “You said you played quarterback, right?”

  I nodded in Icarus.

  “Throw me a pass then.”

  “In here? There are millions of Benjies worth of equipment.”