Godlike Machines (28 page)

There were plenty of wireheads out and about. Some of them were driving transports filled with staple crops grown in our fields. Some were chatting with traders, who blew through town every day. Some were just sitting on a bench and smiling and nodding at the passers-by, which might as well be the cult’s national sport.

They greeted me, one and all. Everyone knew me and no one asked me nosy questions about my . . . condition. Everyone knew enough to know that I was just the kid who wouldn’t grow up, and that I could give them a fine show if they came and knocked on my door.

Normally that felt good. Today, it loomed over me, oppressing me. They’d all have heard about Lacey by now. They were seeing me walk down the street, so they knew that Lacey must be alone in the Carousel. They’d be thinking together, wondering about her, thinking about going over there to find out when she’d be signing up for her wire. And that was the one thing I
didn’t
want. Lacey had managed to change over the past 20 years, becoming an adult, leaving behind Treehuggerism, having adventures. Turning into a woman. I didn’t want her frozen in time the way we all were,
I
didn’t want to be frozen in time anymore. Besides, she knew my secret now, that my antenna didn’t work the way everyone else’s did. If she became a wirehead, she’d tell them about it. She’d have to.

The labs had been in the old University bioscience building, but a trader had sold the researchers a self-assembling lab-template a couple years before. The wireheads had held a long congress about putting up a major building, but in the end, the researchers were made so clearly miserable by the prospect of not being able to put up a new building that they’d prevailed; the wireheads had caved in just to get them to cheer the hell up.

The new building looked like a giant heap of gelatinous frogspawn: huge, irregular bubbles in a jumble that spread wide and high. The template had taken in the disciplinary needs of the researchers and analyzed their communications patterns to come up with an optimal geometry for clustering research across disciplines and collaborative groupings. The researchers loved it—you could feel that just by getting close to the building-but no one else could make any sense of it, especially since the bubbles moved themselves around all the time as they sought new, higher levels of optimal configuration.

I could usually find my research group without much trouble. I climbed up a few short staircases, navigated around some larger labs filled with equipment that Dad would have loved, and eventually arrived at their door. There were three of them today: Randy, the geneticist; Inga, the endocrinologist; and Wen, the oncologist.

“You think it’s cancer again, huh?”

Randy and Inga nodded gravely at Wen. “That’s our best guess, Jimmy. It’s the cheapest and easiest way to get cells to keep on copying themselves. We thought we’d try you out on some new anti-cancer from India.” Inga was in her thirties; I’d played with her when she was my age. Now she seemed to see me as nothing more than a research subject.

Wen nodded and spread his hands out on the table. “We infiltrate your marrow with computational agents that do continuous realtime evaluation of your transcription activity, looking for anomalies, comparing the data-set to baseline subjects. Once we have a good statistical picture of what’s happening, we intervene in anomalous transcriptions, correcting them. It’s a simple approach, just brute force computation, but there’s a new IIT nanoscale petaflop agent that raises the bar on what ‘brute force’ really means.”

“And this works?”

They all looked at each other. I felt their discomfort distantly in my antenna. “It’s had very successful animal trials.”

“How about human trials?” I already knew the answer.

“Dr Chandrasekhar at IIT has asked us to serve as a test site for his human trials research. He was very impressed with your germ plasm. He’s been culturing it for months.” Randy was getting his geek back, a pure joy I could feel even through my muffled receiver. “You should see the stuff he’s done with it. Your father—”

“A genius, I know.” I didn’t usually mind talking about Dad, but that day it felt wrong. I’d pictured him once, briefly, as Lacey and I had been together, and had zigged wrong and ended up bending myself at an awkward angle. It was the thought of what Dad would say if he caught me “deracinating.”

“He didn’t keep notes?”

“Not where I could get at them. He had a lot of friends around the world—they all worked on it. There’s probably lots more like me, somewhere or other. He told me he’d let me in once I was old enough.”

“Probably worried about being generation-gapped,” Randy said sagely.

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“You know. Whatever he’d done to himself, you were decades further down the line. If he’d kept up what he was doing, and if you’d joined him, you’d have been able to do it again, make a kid who was way more advanced than you. You’d end up living forever like a caveman among your genius superman descendants. So he wanted to keep the information from you.” He shrugged. “That’s what Chandrasekhar says, anyway. He’s done a lot of research on immortality cabals. He didn’t know about your Dad’s, though. He was very impressed.”

“So you said.” I hadn’t really thought about this before. Dad was—Dad. He was all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful. He hadn’t just fathered me, he’d
designed
me. Of course, he’d designed me to patch all the bugs in his own genome, but—

“So as I said, we’ve cultured a lot of your plasm and run this on it. What we get looks like normal aging. Mitochondrial shortening. Maturity.”

“How big a culture?” I was raised by a gifted bioscientist. I knew which questions to ask.

“Several billion cells,” Inga said, with a toss of her hair. I could feel their discomfort again, worse than before.

“Right...” I did some mental arithmetic. “So, like, a ten-centimeter square of skin?”

The three of them grinned identical, sheepish grins. “It scales,” Inga said. “There’s a 400 kilo gorilla running it right now. Stable for a year. Rock solid.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, it’s very exciting and all, but I’ve already been a guinea pig once, when I was born. Let someone else go first this time.”

They all looked at each other. I felt the dull throb of their anxiety. They looked at me.

“We’ve been looking for someone else to trial this on, but there’s no one else with your special—” Wen groped for the word.

“There has to be,” I said. “Dad didn’t invent me on his own. There was a whole team of them. They all wanted to make their contributions. There’s probably whole cities full of immortal adolescents out there somewhere.”

“If we could find them, we’d ask them. But no one we know has heard of them. Chandrasekhar has put the word out everywhere. He swings a big stick. He said to ask if you know where your Dad’s friends lived?”

“Dad had a huge fight with those people when I was born, some kind of schism. I never saw him communicating with them.”

“And your mother?”

“Dead. I told you. When I was an infant. Don’t remember her, either.” I swallowed and got my temper under control. Someday, someone was going to notice that even when I looked all pissed off, my antenna wasn’t broadcasting anything and I’d be in for it. They’d probably split me open and stick five more in me. Or tie me naked to a tree and leave me there as punishment for deceiving them. It’s amazing how cruel you can be when there’s a whole city full of people who’ll soak up your conscience and smooth it out for you.

“Chandrasekhar says—”

“I’m getting a little tired of hearing about him. What is it? Is it ego? You want to impress this bigshot doctor from the civilized east, prove to him that we’re not just a bunch of bumpkins here? We
are
a bunch of bumpkins here, guys. We live in the woods! That’s the
point.
What do you think
they’d
all say if they knew you were trying this?” I waved my arm in an expansive gesture, taking in the whole town. I knew what it was like to have a dirty little secret around there, and I knew I’d get them with that.

Inga’s face clouded over. “Listen to me, Jimmy. You started this. You came to us and asked us to investigate this. To cure you. It’s not our fault that answering your question took us to places you never anticipated. We’re busy people. There are plenty of other things we could be doing. We all have to do our part.”

The other two were flinching away from the sear of her emotion. I did what any wirehead would do when confronted with such a blast: I left.

There was a small crowd hanging around the Carousel as I got back to it. They weren’t exactly blocking the way, more like milling about, chatting, being pastoral, but always in the vicinity of my home. Someone came out of my outhouse: Brent. A moment later, I spotted Sebastien.

“We were hoping for a ride,” he said. “Brent was asking about it again.”

Uh-huh. “And these other people?”

My antenna wasn’t radiating sarcasm or anger, though my voice was full of both. He believed the evidence of his antenna and continued to treat me as though I was calm and quiet.

“Other riders, I suppose.”

“Well, I’m not giving any rides today,” I said. “You can all go home.”

“Is it broken again?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh,” he said.

Brent and Tina wandered up. Brent looked at me with his head cocked to one side. “Hi Jimmy,” he said. “We want to go inside and ride around.”

“Not today. Try me again in a week.”

Tina put a hand on my arm. It was warm and maternal. It made me feel weird. “Jimmy, you know you have to bring her around to council if she’s going to stay here. It’s the way we do things.”

“She’s not staying,” I said.

“She’s stayed long enough. We can’t ignore it, you know. It’s not fair for you to ask us to pretend we didn’t see her. We all have a duty. Your friend can get the operation, or she can go.”

“She’s not staying,” I said.
Neither am I
is what I didn’t say.

“Jimmy,” she said, but I didn’t want to hear what she had to say. I shook off her arm and climbed the ramp up to my door, sliding it aside, stepping in quickly and sliding it shut behind me.

“Look, I’m a nest!” The entire pack had swarmed Lacey, perching on her arms, head, shoulders and chest. She was sitting in the front row of the theater, balancing. “These are some fun little critters. I can’t believe they lived this long!”

I shrugged. “Far as I can tell, they’re immortal.” I shrugged again. “Poor little fuckers.”

She shook off the pack. They raced around under the seats. They were starting to get squirrelly. I really should have been taking them out for walks more often. She came and gathered me in her arms. It felt good, and weird.

“What’s going on?”

“Let’s go, OK? The two of us.”

“You don’t mean out for a walk, do you?”

“No.”

She let go of me and sat on the stage. We were in the “future” set, which Dad said was about 1989, but not very accurate for all that. The lights on the Christmas tree twinkled. I’d wiki-tagged everything in the room, and the entry on Christmas trees had been deeply disturbing to me. All that
family
stuff. So ... treehugger. Some of the wireheads did Christmas, but no one ever invited me along, thankfully.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Jimmy. It’s dangerous out there.”

“I can handle danger.” I swallowed. “I’ve killed people, you know. That last day I saw you, when they came for Detroit. I killed eight of them. I’m not a kid.”

“No, you’re not a kid. But you are, too. I don’t know, Jimmy.” She sighed and looked away. “I’m sorry about last night. I never should have—”

“‘I’m not a kid!
I’m older than you are—just because I look like this doesn’t mean I’m not 32, you know. It doesn’t mean I’m not capable of love.” I realized what I’d just said.

“Jimmy, I didn’t mean it like that. But whatever you are, we can’t be, you know, a couple. You can see that, right? For God’s sake, Jimmy, we’re not even the same species!”

It felt like she’d punched me in the chest. The air went out of my lungs and I stared at her, pop-eyed, for a long moment.

I felt tears prick at my eyes and I realized how childish they’d make me seem, and I held them back, letting only one choked snuffle escape. Then I nodded, calmly.

“Of course. I didn’t want to be part of any kind of couple with you. Just a traveling companion. But I can take care of myself. It’s fine.”

She shook her head. I could see that
she
had tears in
her
eyes, but it didn’t seem childish when she did it. “That’s not what I meant, Jimmy. Please understand me—”

“I understand. Last night was a mistake. We’re not the same species. You don’t want to travel with me. It’s not hard to understand.”

“It’s not like that—”

“Sure. It’s much nicer than that. There are a million nice things you can say about me and about this that will show me that it’s really not about me, it’s just a kind of emergent property of the universe with no one to blame. I understand perfectly.”

She bit her lip.

“That’s it, huh?”

She didn’t say anything. She shook her head.

“So? What did I get wrong, then?”

Without saying another word, she fled.

I went outside a minute later. My neighbors were radiated curiosity. No one asked me anything about the woman who’d run out of the Carousel and taken off. Her stuff was still in my little sleeping-space and leaned up against the stage. I packed it as neatly as I could and set it by the door. She could come and get it whenever she wanted.

The fourth scene in the Carousel of Progress is that late eighties sequence. We had other versions of it in the archives, but the eighties one always appealed to Dad, so that was the one that I kept running most of the time.

Like I said, it’s Christmas time, and there’s a bunch of primitive “new” technology on display—a terrible video-game, an inept automatic cooker, a laughable console. The whole family sits around and jokes and plays. Grandpa and grandma are vigorous, independent. Sister and brother are handsome young adults. Mom and Dad are a little older, wearing optical prostheses. Dad accidentally misprograms the oven and the turkey is scorched. Everyone laughs and they send out for pizza.