Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (84 page)

*

In the weeks that followed, Jamil resumed in full the life he'd made for himself in Noether. Five days in seven were for the difficult beauty of mathematics. The rest were for his friends.
He kept playing matches, and Margit's team kept winning. In the sixth game, though, Jamil's team finally scored against her. Their defeat was only three to one.
Each night, Jamil struggled with the question. What exactly did he owe her? Eternal loyalty, eternal silence, eternal obedience? She hadn't sworn him to secrecy; she'd extracted no promises at all. But he knew she was trusting him to comply with her wishes, so what right did he have to do otherwise?
Eight weeks after the night he'd spent with Margit, Jamil found himself alone with Penina in a room in Joracy's house. They'd been talking about the old days. Talking about Chusok.
Jamil said, "Margit lost someone very close to her."
Penina nodded matter-of-factly, but curled into a comfortable position on the couch and prepared to take in every word.
"Not in the way we've lost Chusok. Not in the way you think at all."
Jamil approached the others, one by one. His confidence ebbed and flowed. He'd glimpsed the old world, but he couldn't pretend to have fathomed its inhabitants. What if Margit saw this as worse than betrayal— as a further torture, a further rape?
But he couldn't stand by and leave her to the torture she'd inflicted on herself.
Ezequiel was the hardest to face. Jamil spent a sick and sleepless night beforehand, wondering if this would make him a monster, a corrupter of children, the epitome of everything Margit believed she was fighting.
Ezequiel wept freely, but he was not a child. He was older than Jamil, and he had more steel in his soul than any of them.
He said, "I guessed it might be that. I guessed she might have seen the bad times. But I never found a way to ask her."

*

The three lobes of probability converged, melted into a plateau, rose into a pillar of light.
The umpire said, "Fifty-five point nine." It was Margit's most impressive goal yet.
Ezequiel whooped joyfully and ran toward her. When he scooped her up in his arms and threw her across his shoulders, she laughed and indulged him. When Jamil stood beside him and they made a joint throne for her with their arms, she frowned down at him and said, "You shouldn't be doing this. You're on the losing side."
The rest of the players converged on them, cheering, and they started
down toward the river. Margit looked around nervously. "What is this? We haven't finished playing."
Penina said, "The game's over early, just this once. Think of this as an invitation. We want you to swim with us. We want you to talk to us. We want to hear everything about your life."
Margit's composure began to crack. She squeezed Jamil's shoulder. He whispered, "Say the word, and we'll put you down."
Margit didn't whisper back; she shouted miserably, "What do you want from me, you parasites? I've won your fucking game for you! What more do you want?"
Jamil was mortified. He stopped and prepared to lower her, prepared to retreat, but Ezequiel caught his arm.
Ezequiel said, "We want to be your border guards. We want to stand beside you."
Christa added, "We can't face what you've faced, but we want to understand. As much as we can."
Joracy spoke, then Yann, Narcyza, Maria, Halide. Margit looked down on them, weeping, confused.
Jamil burned with shame. He'd hijacked her, humiliated her. He'd made everything worse. She'd flee Noether, flee into a new exile, more alone than ever.
When everyone had spoken, silence descended. Margit trembled on her throne.
Jamil faced the ground. He couldn't undo what he'd done. He said quietly, "Now you know our wishes. Will you tell us yours?"
"Put me down."
Jamil and Ezequiel complied.
Margit looked around at her teammates and opponents, her children, her creation, her would-be friends.
She said, "I want to go to the river with you. I'm seven thousand years old, and I want to learn to swim."

In closing, appropriately enough, dancing here as we are on beginning brink of the new century, there follow three very short and conceptually daring looks ahead to what the human race may have in store for it during the twenty-first century. Which of them, if
any
of them, comes the closest to predicting what actually
will
happen, of course will be for future scholars (if there
are
any) to decide, looking back at this book as a historical curiosity from the brink of the next century. (My own guess, for what it's worth, is that, imaginative as they are, none of them will turn out to have come even close to what
really
happens.)

Bruce Sterling's "Spook" appears elsewhere in this anthology, and his biographical information can be read there.
Geoffrey A. Landis is a physicist who works for NASA, and who has recently been working on a Martian Lander program. He's a frequent contributor to
Analog
and to
Asimov's Science Fiction,
and has also sold stories to markets such as
Interzone, Amazing,
and
Pulphouse.
Landis is not a prolific writer by the high-production standards of the genre, but he
is
popular. His story, "A Walk in the Sun" won him a Nebula and a Hugo Award in 1992; his story, "Ripples in the Dirac Sea" won him a Nebula Award in 1990; and his story, "Elemental" was on the Final Hugo Ballot a few years back. His first book was the collection
Myths, Legends, and True History,
and he has just published his first novel,
Mars Crossing.
He lives in Brook Park, Ohio.
Robert Charles Wilson made his first sale in 1974, to
Analog,
but little more was heard from him until the late eighties, when he began to publish a string of ingenious and well-crafted novels and stories that have since established him among the top ranks of the writers who came to prominence in the last two decades of the twentieth century. His first novel
A Hidden Place
appeared in 1986. He won the
Philip K. Dick Award for his 1995 novel
Mysterium,
and the Aurora Award for his story, "The Perseids." His other books include the novels
Memory Wire, Gypsies, The Divide, The Harvest, A Bridge of Years,
and
Darwinia.
His most recent book is a new novel,
Bios.
He lives in Toronto, Canada.

Homo Sapiens Declared Extinct

BRUCE STERLING

AD 2380: After a painstaking ten-year search, from the Tibetan highlands to the Brazilian rainforests, it's official— there are no more human beings.
"I suppose I have to consider this a personal setback," said anthropologist Dr. Marcia Raymo, of the Institute for Retrograde Study in Berlin. "Of course we still have human tissue in the lab, and we could clone as many specimens of
Homo sapiens
as we like. But that species was always known primarily for its unique cultural activity."
"I can't understand what the fuss is about," declared Rita "Cuddles" Srinivasan, actress, sex symbol, and computer peripheral. "Artificial Intelligence love to embody themselves in human forms like mine, to wallow in sex and eating. I'm good for oodles of human stuff, scratching, sleeping, sneezing, you can name it. As long as AIs honor their origins, you'll see plenty of disembodied intelligences slumming around in human forms. That's where all the fun is, I promise— trust me."
The actress's current AI sponsor further remarked via wireless telepathy that Miss Srinivasan's occasional extra arms or heads should be seen as a sign of "creative brio," and not as a violation of "some obsolete, supposedly standard human form."
A worldwide survey of skull contents in April 2379 revealed no living citizen with less than thirty-five percent cultured gelbrain. "That pretty well kicks it in the head for me," declared statistician Piers Euler, the front identity for a collaborative group-mind of mathematicians at the Bourbaki Academy in Paris. "I don't see how you can declare any entity 'human' when their brain is a gelatin lattice, and every cell of their body contains extensive extra strands of industrial-strength DNA. Not only is humanity extinct but, strictly speaking, pretty much everyone alive today should be classified as a unique, postnatural, one-of-a-kind species."
"I was born human," admitted three-hundred-eighty-year-old classical musician Soon Yi, speaking from his support vat in Shanghai. "I grew up as a human being. It seemed quite natural at the time. For hundreds of years on the state-supported concert circuit, I promoted myself as a 'humanist,' supporting and promoting human high culture. But at this point, I should be honest: that was always my stage pretense. Let's face it: gelbrain is vastly better stuff than those gray, greasy, catch-as-catch-can human neurons. You can't become a serious professional artiste while using nothing but all-natural animal tissue in your head. It's just absurd!"
Gently fanning his wizened tissues with warm currents of support fluid, the grand old man of music continued: "Wolfgang Mozart was a very dull creature by our modern standards but, thanks to gelbrain, I can still find ways
to pump life into his primitive compositions. I also persist in finding Bach worthwhile, even in today's ultracivilized milieu, where individual consciousness and creative subjectivity tend to be rather rare, or absent entirely."
Posthumanity's most scientifically advanced group, the pioneer Blood Bathers in their vast crystalline castles in the Oort Cloud, could not be reached for comment.
"Why trouble the highly prestigious Blood Bathers with some trifling development here on distant Earth?" demanded President Arno Hopmeier of the World Antisubjectivist Council. "The Blood Bathers are busily researching novel realms of complex organization far beyond mere 'intelligence.' We should feel extremely honored that they still bother to share their lab results with creatures like us. It would only annoy Their Skinless Eminences if we ask them to fret over some defunct race of featherless bipeds."
A Circumsolar Day of Mourning has been declared to commemorate the official extinction of humanity, but it is widely believed that bursts of wild public enthusiasm will mar the funeral proceedings.
"When you sum them up," mused Orbital Entity Ankh/Ghlh/9819, "it's hard to perceive any tragedy in this long-awaited event. Beasts, birds, butterflies, even the very rocks and rivers, must be rejoicing to see humans finally gone. We should try to be adult about this: we should take a deep breath, turn our face to the light of the future, and get on with the business of living.
"Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese) —'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FARSIGHTED.'
"This historical moment is a serious occasion that requires a sense of public dignity. My dog, for instance, says he'll truly miss humanity. But then again, my dog says a lot of things."

A History of the Human and PostHuman Species
GEOFFREY A. LANDIS

A View from Evolutionary Ecology

In the twenty-first century (as old-style humans counted the ages of the world), the intense pressure of evolutionary forces began to splinter the human race into subspecies.
First among these splinters was the set of humans who had control over technology. They had, by any older reckoning, nearly infinite power. We can call them potentates, for the potency of the tools they had at their whim. They were, for the most part, humans hooked into computers, with all of human technology available at their electronic fingertips.
The first law of ecology is that species radiate to fill all available niches, and technology was an available niche.
Most of the human race were not potentates, of course. The majority were ordinary people, living and working at meaningless jobs, struggling to eat and mate and raise a family and die in relative comfort.
The potentates were different. Hooked up to computers, nearly infinitely wealthy, they were for the most part antisocial— the computer hookups acted as a social force that selected humans with low requirements for interpersonal ties. By a century, massively parallel computational power was subsumed into biocomputational chips that were then refined until they were engineered directly into the genetics of those who could control the technology, and the potentates had become isolated from the old-style humans.
For the most part, the potentates were benevolent— or at least, indifferent— toward the humans of whom they were the unacknowledged masters. But not all. A few of them viewed the ordinary humans as disease. Engineered plagues, released by fringe elements, killed large portions of the world population. The less-fringe potentates engineered antiplague viruses to kill the engineered plagues, but each episode reduced the number of ordinary humans— and put pressure on them to adapt.
Huge numbers of the potentates simply immersed themselves into virtual realities, and by failing to breed, left the realm of ecology. Why do you need a real world when the virtual worlds are infinite in complexity, each deliberately designed for allure? Genetic diversity decreased as most potentates didn't breed— but the ones that did breed produced dozens, in a few cases even thousands, of children.
New species adapted to fit into the human ecologies. (The first law of ecology again: adaptive radiation of species into available niches.) Molds, funguses, diseases, and cockroaches all adapted to fit into the human sphere, and humans learned to live with them. In a house, every clear surface became covered with a fine, downy coating of mold, and after a while, humans
adopted a mindset that this is right and natural— a surface bare of mold would be like a lawn bare of vegetation. (The second law: Species co-evolve to live together.)
Spaceflight was an obsession of a few of the potentates, and this led to a second radiation, this one purposeful. It was named the exodus. Ecologies were adapted for the Moon, for Mars.
The ecologies for the Moon were lifeforms made of mostly silicon-based materials: silicon gels for flesh, silicon carbide bones, low-vapor-pressure fluorinated silicone oils instead of blood. Carbon was the limiting resource of the basic raw materials (silicones require carbon), and so mining lifeforms were engineered to sieve carbon out of the low concentrations of the regolith, along with trace phosphorus, fluorine, and hydrogen. Call them photovoltaic trees, with roots that snaked down hundreds of meters into the lunar regolith, seeking the microscopic traces of carbonaceous chondritic material. The lunar life used DNA, but in a highly encapsulated form, redesigned to bond not to water molecules but to hydrogen bonds of engineered fluorinated silicones. The life simply froze solid during the 158-hour lunar nights, since energy storage turned out to be evolutionarily too expensive.
The Mars ecologies were more conventional, but still highly engineered. Even the definition of the word "biological" had to be somewhat stretched— is something alive if it has no biological precursors? If its DNA has been put together, base by base, by machines, and not inherited from ancestors?
Over the millennia, the life on the Moon and Mars devolved. The potentates had envisioned an ultimate stage where humans would fill the top predator role in their engineered ecology, but their plans never quite worked. The engineered ecology was not complex enough to support such a niche, and the human-equivalent sophonts (not by any stretch of biological definition could they actually be called human) failed to reproduce their numbers, and eventually simply died away. New species eventually adapted (that first law again) and radiated into all niches.
On the Earth, meanwhile, the nonhuman ecology crashed. Too many species had been wiped out, deliberately or as a side effect of other human activities, for the ecology to sustain itself. (The third law of ecology: The stability of an ecosystem is proportional to its species' diversity.) This was a natural catastrophe: Ecology is a science of chaos, and ecological crashes happen every few tens of millions of years, give or take, with or without humans. It was hard, however, on those humans who were not potentates.
Over the course of about a millennium, humanity began further speciation. Other than the potentates, the remainder of humanity adapted into new forms that the potentates termed "hrats," humans that had adapted to the plagues and unsuccessful extermination attempts of the potentates. As yet, the potentates and the hrats were still technically subspecies— they were still mutually fertile, when they chose to interbreed— but there was less and less cross-breeding occurring as the ecological niches of the hrats and the potentates diverged.
The potentates evolved slowly to be larger in size— they were at the top of the food chain, and there was no evolutionary pressure toward smaller size.
The various human hrat subspecies, on the other hand, evolved to be smaller— there was a tremendous pressure to use fewer resources, to be faster, more agile, more adaptable.
Over the course of a hundred millennia, the potentates evolved. Intelligence was no longer a selection force. The potentates had genetically engineered into their biological structure most of the technology that had put them at the top of the food chain, fiber-optic receptors for direct high-bandwidth computer links, and microwave transceivers for low-bandwidth communications. What, exactly, did they need intelligence for? (The fourth law of ecology: Attributes not required by a species for survival will be lost.) Fat and happy (they engineered themselves to be happy) and with a low reproduction rate— at the top of their food chain with no natural enemies, they had to have a low reproduction rate, or they would kill their own ecology— they became, in all essential respects, dinosaurs. Huge and invulnerable, over the course of a quarter of a million years they lost the desire and the need to control the Earth.
The humans that the potentates had once denigrated as "hrats" live in a species-depleted, struggling ecology. The great ecological crash had resulted in a die-off, and the hrats lived in an ecology where survival of large animals was a difficulty. No global transportation systems— or at least none accessible to hrats— were left functional, so the hrats speciated, evolving separate forms on different continents and in different climatic zones on each continent. Like the potentates, the hrats also evolved away from intelligence— in the struggle for survival, traits that required a prolonged infancy and adolescence were too hard to maintain.
By a million years, there were no truly intelligent species on Earth.
Which is not to say that
genus homo
was extinct, far from it! With the extinction in the crash of all the species of large mammals (with the exception of dogs, preserved by the potentates), species of
homo
radiated to fill all of the open evolutionary niches. As the ecology recovered complexity, much of the diversity came from hominid species, now adapted to fill niches from grazers— hominid deer— to omnivores— hominid apes and pigs— and even some carnivore slots, hominid bears and jackals competing with the canine descendants to prey on squirrels and hominid deer.
In many ways, it was a beautiful and placid world: a new Eden.