Transhuman (26 page)

The angels sang. Who'd ever guess that cherubs knew all the words to "Ding, Dong, the Witch Is Dead"?

Kirkland Barrow came home for Christmas, but only after the police assured him that his wife really was missing. He left the kids with his mother, where they'd been bunking since Thanksgiving. All the neighbors came by to make soft, encouraging noises of hope at him, with one exception.

"Dinah Pendleton asked if you'd mind stopping by," Kerry Turnbull told Mr. Barrow. "She does want to wish you well in finding Margaretdear, but it's simply impossible for her to come here to do it."

"Housebound, eh?" Kirkland clicked his tongue.

"You might say that," said Kerry.

Kirkland crossed the street and went right up to Dinah's door, pausing only to admire the marvelous Christmas display. Dinah opened the door just as he was coming to the end of his "Wowwwwwww!"

"Oh, do you like what I've done, Mr. Barrow?" she asked with a mild smile.

"It's really something, Mrs. Pendleton," he replied. "Especially the tree." He gestured to where the fabulous pine stood tall, toys in place, trunk unmarred. "My wife really would have—will get a kick out of—"

He stopped and shook his head. "Who'm I kidding?" he said in a plaintive voice. "Margaret's gone, gone for good. She'd never take off like this, not so close to Christmas. The police say they're on the case, but if XTreem PrejuNestCo's best system couldn't protect her—" He turned a desperate gaze on Dinah.

"Mrs. Pendleton, you're right across the street. What happened?" In his helplessness, he underscored the question with an unthinking blow to the door frame. His fist crushed an ornament attached to the palm frond garland.

Dinah cried out and lunged forward to cup one hand around the squashed decoration. "I— I'm sure I wouldn't know, Mr. Barrow," she said breathlessly. "I don't— don't pay attention to— I mean, I'm just— just a house— housewife. I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave. I've got to fix this before my husband comes home."

Kirkland Barrow left as bidden. He was used to complying with oddly intense requests from Christmas-obsessed females. He didn't see that the moment he turned his back, Dinah removed her hand to reveal an instantly reconstituted ornament where a flattened one had hung. It was a pomegranate, and she took the trouble to make it even plumper and redder than before. Well, when you had a windfall of raw material practically throw itself into your lap, you might as well make use of it. Dinah ran her fingertips lightly over the scarlet fruit. An image of Margaret's face swam to the surface. It showed the same shocked expression she'd worn at the precise instant she'd been . . . acquired. No one else would notice it, but knowing it was there made Dinah smile. It was Christmas. She deserved a treat for putting so much of herself into the holiday.

"Implants!" she muttered with a smug little sniff. "Implants are for pikers." She flowed back into her shadowy interior and closed the door.

* * *

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 between 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.