Transhuman (23 page)

So, if Kurzweil's Singularity occurs in our lifetime, will we even know it?

HOME FOR THE

HOLIDAYS

Ester M. Friesner

Though we promise this isn't the Baen holiday anthology, we couldn't resist this Christmas story.
Who else but Esther Friesner would think to mix the Singularity with neighborly home-decoration
contests? Her speculations will make you think, but only in the moments when you're not laughing
at this keeping up with the Joneses holiday tale.

All of the houses on Buttermilk Crescent were beautiful. Margaret Barrow observed this fact with the same satisfaction a cat expresses when placed in a room where all the mice are fat and footless. She stood on the front steps of the latest home into which her husband had shunted the family on the usual corporate short notice and complacently regarded the sweep of identical lawns and virtually identical houses, all built to the still-popular faux Colonial model.

There were certain small distinguishing characteristics among the properties, but these were merely superficial matters such as foundation plantings and color schemes. A white house with blue shutters stood across the way from a blue house with gray shutters and catty-corner from a gray house with white shutters, all of said houses otherwise identical. Here a pair of stone lions guarded the entrance to the driveway, there a brace of rosebushes, and over yonder two solar-powered pole lanterns. The path to the front door might be brick or flagstone or even gravel, but the dimensions of the walkway itself were always the same.

Margaret smiled. She liked the sameness of suburbia. It was like the sameness of all those unmarred square inches on a blank canvas, and she knew she owned the only tubes of Cadmium Red and Viridian in town. If all the sky were eternally thick with comets, how could any of them ever truly shine? And Margaret loved to shine. Blindingly so, for preference, and right in other people's eyes.

"This will be delightful," she announced to the crisp November morning, and fairly danced all the way to the mailbox to fetch the first delivery of Christmas catalogs to her new address. When the children came home from school that afternoon, Margaret already had her battle plans drawn up. She was somewhat harried, as the move had bitten into valuable prep time. (In her book, starting Christmas plans on December 26 of the previous year was an amateur's game. She always waited until two weeks before Thanksgiving, no more and no less. She reasoned that if she couldn't clear that self-set bar, she didn't deserve to reign on as the undeniable conquistadora of Christmas. It was a small vanity for which she sometimes came perilously close to paying the price.) She'd claimed the disused fourth bedroom as HQ for Operation Frequent Reindeer, though she intended to use it as a sewing room, come late January.

The children heard the rustle of paper coming from behind the closed door, smelled the unmistakable tang of hot glue, and promptly retired to the basement to jack themselves into the family's Woodstock-O-Matic. Only fools or heroes would dare attempt to survive yet another of Margaret's Christmases without first achieving just the right degree of pseudopot euphoria. As far as they were concerned, they weren't going to see more than a flicker of their mother until Twelfth Night was officially in the can.

A scant few years ago, this was not entirely true. Back then, Margaret would involve the children in her full-court press Nativity plans when it was time to create the perfect family photo for the greeting card, or when she needed a couple of extra pairs of hands to make her dreams a sparkly reality. But technology toboggans on. Image-enhancing software applied to the previous year's photo aged the kids and rejuvenated the parents a treat, and as for those extra pairs of hands. . . . They simply were no longer necessary.

The children, now being teenagers, could not have cared less about their exclusion from the run-up to The Festive Season™. As far as they were concerned, Mom could stay incommunicado until Saint Patrick's Day. As long as their allowances received regular upgrades, the kitchen remained stocked, and the microwave continued to put the
nuke
in
nuclear family
, they could do perfectly well without her. Besides, the more distance between their lives and hers at this time of year, the better. Her white-hot passion for Christmas had the potential for leeching major amounts of precious coolness from their self-images. Christmas catalogs? Who ever heard of someone still doing snail-mailed dead-tree-based acquisitions in this day and age, except for geezersauruses and the desperately retro? They'd told all the kids at their new school that they were orphans, but just imagining the truth (and Margaret) coming to light during the holidays made little Harry and Hermione up the dosage on the Woodstock-O-Matic from

"Jerry" to "Jimi."

Margaret had just finished agonizing over whether to go with the Arctic Splendor (blue) fairy lights for the eaves or opt for Dawn Aurora (blue) when the door announced a visitor. "Who is it?" Margaret asked the air, and because air is literally two-thirds A.I. (at least under the Barrows' roof), the aether answered back: "Blockwatch mandatory retina scan confirms identity of caller as Kerry Turnbull, 605

Buttermilk Crescent, second wife of William Turnbull, mother of—Margaret disabled the feature with a curt command before it got to the part covering Kerry's latest blood test results and book purchases.

"Just a minute!" she called out. "I'll be right there." Shortly thereafter, Kerry Turnbull was seated on the living room sofa, behaving admirably. If compliments were paintballs, Margaret's entire home would have been drenched in dye and draped in deflated gelatin spheres. She liked that, and as a reward promoted Kerry to mutual dear-designate conversational status, quite the suburban social coup for a first-time visitor. As she served her guest more tea in an exquisite antique Meissen cup, Margaret pleasantly remarked, "You know, Kerrydear, we're getting along so well. I'm so glad I didn't go redbutton on your tushie."

"Oh, so am I, Margaretdear," Kerry replied, helping herself to a home-baked madeleine. "I realize I should have called ahead. Too past tense of me, just showing up on your doorstep like that." Her hand completely engulfed the madeleine, the revamped pores of her palm digesting and absorbing the little cake directly into her bloodstream.

"Oh my!" Margaret gasped in admiration of her neighbor's enhancement. "I've heard about those things, but that's the first one I've ever seen. Do you like it?"

"Love it to death and pieces. So much more convenient than retouching my makeup every time I eat. Not that I eat that much these days, hahahahaha. You have no idea how long you have to wait to get a reputable company to robo-ream a clogged in-home Lipo-suk unit, and what with the holidays coming—"

"You must give me the contact info for your implanter," Margaret said. "I'm dreaming of an upgraded Christmas."

"Well, I have to warn you, something like this costs the earth," Kerry replied, holding up her palm. The untrained eye could not tell that it was anything more than boring old normal human flesh, and the trained eye would need a jeweler's loupe to locate the implant site. "But the only alternative costs the galaxy. You know, I'd kill for an E-Mask-U-Lite overlay. It's so thin you don't even know it's covering your whole face, and you can change your makeup palette instantly." She sighed. "I'm afraid I'll never be able to afford it on my salary."

"Salary?" Margaret raised one eyebrow. "You work outside the home?"

"Don't you?" Kerry countered.

Margaret shrugged and looked modest. "Goodness, no. What do you do for a living, Kerrydear?"

"I design and install home security systems. You know, alarms, panic rooms, that sort of thing. That's what was so embarrassing about you nearly pushing the panic button when I came to call. Of all people, I should've known better. I did the system for almost every home on Buttermilk Crescent, including yours."

"Oopsie!" Margaret hid her mouth with one hand and uttered a giggle worthy of an anime schoolgirl. "So sorry, Kerrydear, but you probably just did the system for the former owners. We had that old thing ripped out and a new one put in for us before our move here. It's XTreem PrejuNestCo's latest model. My husband, Kirkland, says panic rooms are for pikers. I'm so glad you came calling when I'd reached a good stopping point in my housework, or I'm afraid I would've pinged the No Soliciting command first and answered questions later."

"Don't you mean you would have asked questions later, Margaretdear?" Kerry inquired. She extruded a miniature Sip-'n'-Snort siphon from her right nostril and drank her tea. Margaret pursed her lips in thought, then said, "No, I'm pretty sure no one except the coroner gets to ask questions at an autopsy, Kerrydear," she said. "But what do I know? I'm just a housewife."

Kerry Turnbull left promising to inform the other families of Buttermilk Crescent of the inadvisability of just popping by to welcome the newcomers. Margaret thanked her and suggested she also let them know that a friendly wave while jogging past the Barrow property might be a no-no as well.

"The security system's been calibrated to view certain colors and styles of clothing as potentially hostile," she said. "And when you add the running man factor and a raised hand that statistically might be brandishing a weapon—"

It was just as well that Kerry's promise was fulfilled. Margaret was strapped for time and didn't want any more callers. November was fading fast and there was so much yet to do in preparation for Christmas that she probably would have zapped her own offspring if they'd been stupid enough to disturb her while she labored over the master plan. She did not feel that her priorities were skewed. She'd been raised to believe that if the cause were patriotic enough, the women of America were honorbound to sacrifice a child or two, and what was more representative of the values that made this country great than hard work, dedication, and tinsel?

It all paid off. On Thanksgiving morning, just as the newsdroids covering the big New York City parade broadcast the traditional close-up of Santa waving to the crowds from his bulletproof sleighbubble, Margaret emerged from her den to announce that her home decorating design for the coming season was complete and that she'd start turning the dream into reality as soon as everyone finished their pumpkin pie.

As it turned out, there was no need for that postpie caveat. Mr. Barrow had come home the night before, scented which way the glitter-thick wind blew, and whisked himself and the kids off to his mother's house for a potential-fatality-free Thanksgiving. Margaret found the note he'd left on her PDA and smiled. Dear Kirkland! He understood what the holidays meant to her. She nuked herself a slab of Faux-turkey (Tofurkey's fiber-and-Omega-3-enhanced cousin, now with five pecent more real hagfish!), popped a slice of pumpkin pie-flavored chewing gum into her mouth, and got down to work. The first thing she noticed when she stepped outside, armed to the teeth for the job at hand, was that nearly all of the other homes on Buttermilk Crescent already had their Christmas decorations up and running. The street-long exhibition of artistic taste in all its permutations from trashy to
très élégant
gleamed and glittered, twinkled and glowed. There were reindeer on rooftops, angels on high, and Dickensian carolers on doorsteps. Some homeowners had opted for the chaste Classicism of white lights, others went with an illuminated rainbow palette.

Margaret walked down the street, taking it all in. The big yellow-with-white-shutters house at the head of Buttermilk Crescent was buried in frosty flakes to the windowsills and displayed a family of snowmen on the lawn. They were superb representations of the family who dwelled there, and included a snow dog, a snow cat, a pair of snow hamsters, and an ice aquarium where snow fish swam through luminous aquamarine waters.

Margaret bent down and picked up a rock from the still-green lawn of the next house over and tossed it lightly, underhand, into the fluffy drifts of white. It vanished, leaving no hole to mark the spot where it had fallen, nor in fact any trace whatsoever that a solid object had penetrated the "snow." Excellent, Margaret thought. For a moment she'd had some doubts as to the nature of the decorations this house was sporting, but her small and simple test had revealed that here, too, her new neighbors were employing the architectural analog of Kerrydear's facial E-Mask-U-Lite. She knew all about such things in the same way that a soon-to-be-victorious general knows the favorite strategy of his foe on the field of battle. There were several such projection programs on the market, but the most popular was the season-specific Ho-Ho-Holograms. A few moments spent selecting the display most pleasing to the owner's eye (and, by implication, most impressive to the owner's neighbors), a quick and painless installation of the projection unit, a flip of the switch sometime during the parade, or whenever you felt it was time to get down and jolly, and there you were: Christmassed to the eyeballs. Pikers. Margaret's thoughts as to neighbors who employed such decorating devices echoed her husband's assessment of anyone whose home lacked the capability to enforce (with extreme prejudice) one's Do Not Call list. Quick and painless? That was for dentistry and childbirth, not Christmas. If your decorations weren't real, your holiday spirit was as ersatz as no-cal fruitcake. Hadn't anyone been paying attention to what Holy Writ had to say about the true meaning of Christmas?

The Star of Bethlehem was special because it outshone all the rest. That took effort, not switch-flipping. On the other hand, when you lived among lazy-boned heathens, everyone got to see who really owned Christmas!

Margaret walked home in a prayerful state of mind, opened her garage door, viewed the boxes brimful of decorations, and got to work. With her manual implants set on Shred, Margaret soon had her order of fresh evergreen boughs from the deep woods of Maine taking root in the mulched remains of the very boxes they'd come in. She smiled with innocent joy as she engaged her microvision lenses and watched the nutrient-and nano-impregnated cardboard work its wondrous forced-growth hoodoo on the hapless greenery. Twigs turned to trees, albeit of strictly controlled dwarf size. Anything taller than the windowsills simply would not do. Fat pinecones popped into existence with a report like gunfire. You could almost hear the local squirrels cheering over this unexpected bounty. Alas, as they would soon discover, the squirrel who touched any part of Margaret Barrow's holiday display would go from furry-tailed rat to frizzle-tailed splat in the blink of a beady black eye. One of the first seasonal chores Margaret did was rerouting part of the XTreem PrejuNestCo system's intercept-and-obliterate powers to the outdoor decorations.