Godlike Machines (24 page)

It was probably good therapy for me, just then. It probably helped me get by without Dad.

But like I say, it only took a couple weeks for the wire to lose its efficacy. I could still feel a little tickle that let me know, more or less, what the groupmind was thinking, but it never loomed up large. And I could get as angry or happy as I wanted and my neighbors never seemed to notice, so I guess I wasn’t transmitting much.

Here’s what happened as I steamed east, away from Detroit and the ruins of my father’s city/museum. It was smooth sailing for the first couple hours, then I started to hear ominous
clunks
and thuds. I knew it must be the little daisy cutters. Some of them must have found soft spots in the bag’s armor-that was the point of a billion little daisy cutters instead of just one big one—a brute-force attack on the entire defensive perimeter of the target. An attacker only has to find one hole—a defender needs to be seamless.

The Zepp’s idiot lights got redder and redder as time went by, one critical system after another failing. By the time I thought to bring her down—I was in shock, I guess, plus I was young then-it was too late. Altitude controls were locked.

I watched, helpless, clutching the pack’s canisters, as we drifted in the winds, sometimes going higher, sometimes dipping down. The Carousel was a destabilizing force: every time the wind gusted, it rocked like a pendulum, and as the zepp’s gyros wound down, we rocked with it.

The zepp set itself down in North Carolina, amid the leftovers of the old UNC campus, settling gently. I slid/stumbled down the ramp with the pack in hand. The zepp was still losing altitude, inching lower and lower. Soon enough, the gondola would come down on the top of the Carousel, doing who-knew-what damage. I did a little executive planning and decided that I had a way better chance of bringing the Carousel up to nominal than I did the daisy-cutter wormed zepp, and I blew the cargo hoist loose, cutting the zepp free so that it lofted away, to ply its idiot way through the skies, unmanned and dying.

The thing about immortality is, it’s complicated. A mixed blessing. Dad’s immortality was a much simpler thing, really: a collection of hacks and tricks to wind back his body’s clock, to repair the damage of the ages, to make him young again. Like his yogurt, for his liver.

With me, it was all about the germ plasm. I’d been modded down in my nuclei, a transhuman by birth, a native of the transhuman condition. And no one knew what that meant, really. Including me.

So while it was apparent early on that I was aging slowly-retaining maximal brain plasticity by keeping my physical age as young as possible-no one seemed to suspect just how slowly I was going to age. I was chronologically 13 when I landed in North Carolina, but I was physically more like 10. At the time, I assumed that meant that I’d just go on, aging slowly, but aging.

Not so, as it turned out.

Twenty years later, I was still 11. Maybe 13. Let me put it this way: no pubes. This was not what I had in mind when I pictured immortality. I had ... stirrings. But they were like phantom limbs, there but not there, elusive, an itch I couldn’t scratch.

The cultists were mildly curious about this, in the same way that they were mildly curious about most things. They weren’t worked up about it or anything. They didn’t get worked up about anything. That was the point. But they liked having kids and they wanted to know when I’d be ready to help out in that department. So they asked, every now and again, frankly. And I told them the truth. Why not? They weren’t going to throw me out—not as long as they thought I was a wirehead.

The only person who had a problem with my perpetual adolescence was me. There were moods that came on me, now and again, sudden and ferocious. Terrors, too. It came with the brain plasticity—I could adapt to anything, but nothing ever stuck. I could never approximate the incredible conviction of the cultists—not even the lesser conviction of the normals who traded with them every now and again. I’d believe something for a day or two-like wanting to overthrow the cult and rescue the wireheads from their surgical bondage—and then it would seem like a stupid idea, and then a distant memory. Only my journals showed me how changeable my weather was. When I got them down off the seat I kept them on in the Carousel and thumbed through them, it wrenched something in my chest. Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I cried for a long time.

Mostly I tried to distract myself from all of this. One good way to do that was to keep the Carousel tuned up. The cultists liked it—it was a relaxing place to sit and watch a show, something they didn’t get much of in Raleigh Durham since the wires went in.

The Carousel was a four-part show with an intro and afterword, “the longest-running stage show in the history of the world,” in which primitive robots told the story of how General Electric and Thomas Edison had rescued them from the dark ages. The robots rotated in and out, appearing behind scrims and delivering corny jokes, singing and tapping their toes, while their electrical appliances clattered, clanked, and showed themselves off.

Dad had loved the Carousel. Not in the “I love chocolate” sense of love. In the “I love you, darling, and I want to marry you and spend the rest of my life with you,” sense. Disney World—where the Carousel ended up some time after the ‘64 World’s Fair-had not fared well in the Mecha Wars. All of the Animal Kingdom and Epcot were fused—glass ruins, and most of the Magic Kingdom had burned down. But the Carousel had been only a little scuffed, its control systems fused from EMP weapons.

Dad and I spent a week separating the Carousel from its foundations. It was like digging an old tree out of a forest-digging a wide circle around it, taking the whole root ball with it. In the Carousel’s case, it was the control apparatus for the show, spanning two basement levels beneath it. The entire Magic Kingdom was built two storeys off the ground, specifically to leave room for the control systems. Over the years, these systems had sprawled sideways and downwards, retrofitted solid-state controllers replacing the original mechanicals. We took lots of pictures-visual and millimeter-wave radar—of the whole setup and emailed them to a little cluster Dad had that could evolve itself to solve complex vision problems. Overnight, they mailed us back clean architectural as-built diagrams that helped a lot.

Dad had a lot of older, less collectable mechas he kept around for duty like this. We’d driven down to Florida on the path of the old 1-75 in a platoon of these things, each of us driving at the head of a column of lumbering beasts that were slaved to our control units. They weren’t much to look at, they weren’t all that smart, but those big boys were
strong.
Twenty-two of them lifted and carried the Carousel all the way home to Detroit. The Pack were in a frenzy once we got back, delighted to have me around again. They’d patrolled the museum-city while we were away, emailing me with anything urgent that they didn’t know how to cope with. That was before the wumpuses, so there wasn’t much by way of risk to our humble home.

Once we got the Carousel home, we set to work restoring it. Dad was insistent that we not fix it
too
well. In a couple of the scenes, the Dad robot was really weird around the neck, its cervical controllers bulging at the flesh like it had swallowed a wheel-rim, sideways. I was pretty sure we could do better than that, but Dad insisted that that was part of the charm, and so I printed a new controller that was an exact match. I even resisted the temptation to replace the glassy, weird eyeballs with something vat-grown from one of my kits.

“It’s not supposed to be realistic, Jimmy,” he said. “You need to understand that.”

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I came to understand it eventually. It was the show. It had a dream-like quality, a kind of ethereal logic that seemed perfectly sensible in the show, but which evaporated when the show ended like the secret technique for levitating evaporating as you wake from sleep.

Each of the four sequences showed the progress that technology made, generation to generation. A wood stove turns into an electric range, then a self-cleaning range, then a voice-controlled microwave oven. At every turn, the world
progressed
, got
better.
The problems posed by each stove got solved. We had lots of different sound-tracks we could run for the ride-it had been redesigned several times—but the original one held the key for me: “At every turn in our history there was always someone saying ‘Turn back. Turn back.’ But there is no turning back. Not for us. Not for our carousel. The challenge always lies ahead. And as long as man dreams and works and builds together, these years too can be the best time of your life.”

I lived in the future that they were talking about in the ride, but we didn’t have “progress” anymore. We’d outgrown progress. What we had was
change.
Things changed whenever anyone wanted to change them: design and launch a fleet of wumpuses, or figure out a way to put an emotional antenna in your head, or create a fleet of killer robots, or invent immortality, or gengineer your goats to give silk. Just do it. It’ll catch on, or it won’t. Maybe it’ll catch itself on. Then the world is ... different. Then someone else changes it.

The status quo doesn’t protect itself, it needs defending if it’s going to stay put. The problem is that technology gives more of an advantage to an attacker than to a defender. A defender needs to mount a perfect defense. An attacker needs to find one hole in the defense. So once technology gets going, anything can be knocked down-evil doesn’t stand-but nothing much can be erected in its place. Look at Dad’s museum.

I’ve thought about leaving North Carolina and heading back to Detroit, believe me I have. But the cult isn’t so bad. They’re all nice and friendly and they come as close to stability as anything I’ve ever experienced. Plus they’re pretty good with medical technology, and their biologists don’t mind if I ask them nosy, ignorant questions about curing my immortality—at least enough to get my testicles to descend.

Twenty years have gone by and I have two—count ‘em, two—pubic hairs. I call them Yeti and Sasquatch. I am as flexible as a ten-year-old-I can get my forehead down on my knee or clasp my arms over my shoulder—and I can run around all day. But like I said, I can’t stay interested in much for longer than a few days. My brain and body are so plastic that I can’t manage to do anything that requires any kind of stability. I’m like the perfect metaphor for the whole world.

No one knows how to de-immortalize me yet. All I want is a little bit of it, a little bit of aging. A couple more years. Life’s pretty good at 18, it seems to me. 18 would be a good age.

I didn’t recognize Lacey when I saw her. It had been twenty years, and the years had changed her.

I was out in the bush, looking for wild mushrooms. Mostly you got kombucha, big ones, and they made delicious tea. Supposedly they were a little hallucinogenic, but it appeared that my marvelous immortal liver didn’t much care to have me enter a state of elevated reality, so all I got out of it was tea. It was good tea, though.

I had the pack with me. I’d built them new bodies, better suited to the quiet life among the cultists. The bodies resembled furry mechanical squirrels. They could crawl all over you without freaking you out or making you feel threatened, which was exactly what I wanted from them. They were still frisky-even though they had aged a little and become a little less experimental, a little more prone to hanging around the Carousel and its immediate grounds. The canisters containing their nervous systems and brains could keep them alive for some time yet, I was sure, but they wouldn’t live forever. Lucky little bastards.

It was crisp autumn and the leaves were ten million flaming colors, crunching underfoot as we sought out the kombuchas. I was bending to inspect something that Pepe had found—Pepe still loved to have more than one PoV, so I’d given him four squirrels to drive at once—and when I looked up, I was staring into her boots, lace-up numbers, old fashioned with thick waffle-soles.

I kept looking up. She was a woman, in her mid-thirties. Her hair had grown out into an irregular mob of curls, her round face rosy-cheeked from the chilly weather. Fine lines radiated out from her drawn-up bow lips, and her eyes had small lines to match at their corners.

“Hello,” I said. She wasn’t a wirehead, I could tell that just by looking at the hair. They liked to wear it short so as not to interfere with the antenna.

“Jimmy?” she said, putting her hand to her chest. She was wearing a smart cowl that breathed gently around her, keeping her warm and dry.

I cocked my head, trying to place her. She looked so familiar, but I couldn’t place her, not exactly—

“Jimmy!” she said, and grabbed me in a hard hug. There was a woman under that cowl, boobs and hips. She was a whole head taller than me. But the smell was the same. Or maybe it was the hug.

“Lacey!” I said, and squeezed back, barely getting my arms around her.

She practically lifted me off my feet, and she squeezed so hard that all the breath went out of me.

“Lacey!” I croaked, “easy there!”

She set me down, a little reluctantly, and took a step back. “Jesus Christ, Jimmy, you haven’t changed
at all.”

I shrugged. “Immortal,” I said.

She put her hand to her chest and looked at me, her mouth open. “Yeah, of course,” she said. “Immortal.”

“I’m trying to cure it,” I said. “Not all the way. But I thought if I could age up to, you know, 18 or so . . .”

“Jimmy,” she said, “please stop talking about this for now. I’m out of weirdness quotient for the day.”

I had some snacks in my bag—the tortillas and tomatoes that the cult favored for staple crops—so I sat down and spread out my picnic tarp and offered her a seat, then something to eat.

She sat down and we ate together. We used to do this, back in Detroit, sneak picnics together out in the boonies, in an abandoned building or, in a pinch, cupped in one of my mecha’s hands. We fell into the easy rhythm of it as though no time at all had passed since then. For me, none had—at least not physically.