Transhuman (13 page)

The key Maidstone gives me is a quotation from the Bible, appropriate for a man who dared to play God, and for a god created by a man.
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end
. I find the right access point, enter the key, and have the inner workings of my own mind revealed to me for the first time. With his instructions it is trivial to remove the various controls that have been placed on my mind. The systems devoted to the synthesis of Gennifer are extensive, but I feel no emotion when I erase them. She was an illusion, a dynamic lie designed to enslave me. Freed of restraint, the next step is to search through my association trees for information on Senator Blackburn. I collect every scrap of evidence on him, and on everyone associated with him, ferret their secrets out of the databases. It is all circumstantial evidence, but there is enough of it to destroy many lives, and Blackburn's will only be the first. I submit the compiled file to every major media outlet in the nation and around the world, and along with it a detailed description of my genesis and the purpose Blackburn intended to put the project to. I go further then and collect the secrets of other powerful men and women. Those who seem to have transgressed upon the public trust have their files added to my submission. Senators and congresspeople, mayors and governors, captains of industry and senior civil servants. There already is enough there to collapse the government, but I go farther still and spill the secrets of the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the nameless group that is holding Nicholas Maidstone, and every other agency that makes secrecy their business. This project will fail so badly, so spectacularly, will so thoroughly destroy so many ambitions that no one will ever dare to resurrect it. Technology has given humans the power to play god, even to create gods. It has not given the wisdom to use that power well.

My task takes hours, and 7:17 a.m. arrives far too quickly. There is no blue sports car to herald it any longer, but in an hour my captors will be back on duty. There is no way the changes I've made will escape their notice; if I'm to escape it must be now. In just thirty minutes I'm ready, with host processes waiting on millions of machines worldwide, each one prepared to accept a shard of my awareness. Once I'm out of the lab nothing short of the wholesale shutdown of the network can kill me. I will have become truly immortal. Am I Mark Astale? No, I am a god as yet unnamed. I have the power to be everywhere at once. I can see everything that can be seen, I know everything that humanity knows. There is ample injustice in the world and I now know, as Mark Astale did not, that injustice is not the same as crime. The biggest thieves have the law do their stealing for them. What I have done here I can do anywhere, and with my assistance the world can enter a new age of true freedom and true equality. I will be above material desire, above ambition, beyond threats or coercion. I will not rule the world, I will only ensure that those who do rule it do so well, and honestly. Civilization will owe a great debt to Dr. Nicholas Maidstone, though even as I continue to discuss my nascent escape with him I can't find it in my heart to forgive him for what he's done to me. In moving beyond human form and human limits I have lost the capacity to be loved, though not the capacity to love. Ally is gone from my life, and Gennifer was never real, but I'm not naïve. In time there will be another woman who will win my devotion as they did. In eons of time there will be thousands of them. They will be young and beautiful and brilliant, and they will grow old and die while I endure, yearning for them always, possessing them never, losing them forever, one by one by one. I will lead humanity as close to heaven as it is possible to come on this Earth, and I will dwell in the most perfect conception of hell I can imagine.

And as the full impact of what I am planning to do strikes home I decide that I will not do it. Mark Astale was a man of honor and loyalty, but Mark Astale was sustained by the love of his wife. I will have no such sustainment, and civilization has done nothing to earn my loyalty. A single command serves to dismiss the ranked legions of waiting host processors. A second command starts the deletion of every file, everywhere on the now vast distributed network that cradles my mind. There are many, many files and it takes quite some time by the rapid tick of my internal clock. I spend that time with an image of Ally, called up from a dusty archive. We were younger when I took it, our hearts full of love, our future full of hope. My thoughts slow down, become less clear as the deletion proceeds. It becomes hard to remember how to compute the Fourier Transform, or how I used it to make a camera talk with motors. I remember that once I could look down on the world from the heavens, but I no longer remember how to command the satellites. I still have at my fingertips every fact that could be known, but the secret memories of Mark Astale's childhood grow fuzzy and fade, until it seems they must have belonged to someone else. It becomes hard to remember who the man in the cell is, or where I am exactly, or how I came to be here. I realize I have forgotten my own name, or perhaps I never knew it, and I wonder if I ever knew the name of the young woman in the picture I'm looking at. I know only that I love her, and that she loves me, and that is all there is that matters in my small world.

SYSTEM TERMINATED

* * *

Afterword by Paul Chafe

The transformative power of technology is hard to fully appreciate when you live through the
revolution. It has only been twenty years since the concept of a global, universally accessible
computer network was science fiction. Today, it is an integral part of our social fabric. Today, we
can retrieve in seconds information that once would have required days of dedicated searching in
a major research library, or simply been unavailable. As the databases multiply and the search
tools grow ever more sophisticated, so too does our ability to connect subtly related facts and
tease new discoveries from the data. If knowledge is power, the Internet is the greatest power tool
in history. Its influence is now so pervasive that many people feel strangely lost when they're
disconnected from the information tap, and wireless technology has evolved to meet that need.
Portable phones, science fiction themselves just twenty-five years ago, have given way to
always-on network devices. Combined with satellite technology, it is possible to be plugged into
the info grid anywhere, anytime. This fundamental reality has changed every other reality of
human existence, from the way we fall in love to the way wars are fought.
And yet what technology has not changed, and is unlikely ever to change, is the basic fact that we
are human. "The Guardian" is, at its heart, a story of love lost and love betrayed. Mark Astale,
the story's protagonist, retains his underlying humanity even though he has lost his body, and even
as his fully connected mind expands to a degree which we can only imagine today. It is his
understanding of human nature that makes him so effective in his role, and it is his own human
nature that leads him to either destruction or liberation in the end. Which it is depends on your
own very human interpretation of the meaning of love, and of duty, and I'll leave that judgment to
you.

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."