Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (21 page)

He gasped. "The Veil."

"Yes, the Veil. It's been riding on the top of your cortex for God knows how long now, breaking you up, keeping you fluid. Robbing you of your personality. You were nothing better than a psychopath in harness."

He closed his eyes, stunned. She said, "We understand Veil technology here, Eugene. We use it ourselves, sometimes, on sacrificial victims. They can emerge from the well, touched by the Gods. Troublemakers turned divinely into saints. It fits in well with the old Mayan traditions of trepanation; a triumph of social engineering, really. They're very competent here. They
managed to capture me without knowing anything about the spook apparat but rumors."

"You tried to take them out?"

"Yes. They caught me alive and won me over. And even without the Veil I have enough perception left to tell a spook when I see one." Again, she smiled. "I was faking mania when I attacked you. I only knew you had to be stopped at any cost."

"I could have ripped you apart."

"Then, yes. But now you've lost your maniac phase, and we've killed your implanted weapons. Cloned bacteria producing schizophrenic toxins in your sinuses. Altered sweat glands oozing emotional hormones. Nasty! But you're safe now. You're nothing more or less than a normal human being."

He consulted his interior state. His brain felt like a dinosaur's. "Do people really feel like this?"

She touched his cheek. "You haven't begun to feel. Wait until you've lived with us awhile, seen the plans we've made, in the finest traditions of the Predator Saints.…" She looked reverently at the machine-pumped corpse across the room. "Overpopulation, Eugene— that's what ruined us. The Saints took the moral effort of genocide upon themselves. Now the Resurgents have taken up the challenge of building a stable society— without the dehumanizing technology that has always, inevitably, been turned against us. The Mayans had the right idea— a civilization of social stability, ecstatic communion with the Godhead, and a firm appreciation of the cheapness of human life. They simply didn't go far enough. They didn't kill enough people to keep their population in check. With a few small changes in the Mayan theology we have brought the whole system into balance. It's a balance that will outlast the Synthesis by centuries."

"You think primitives armed with stone knives can triumph over the industrialized world?"

She looked at him pityingly. "Don't be naive. Industry really belongs in space, where there's room and raw materials, not in a biosphere. Already the zaibatseries are years ahead of Earth in every major field. The Earth's industrial cartels are so drained of energy and resources trying to clean up the mess they inherited that they can't even handle their own industrial espionage. And the Resurgent elite is armed to the teeth with the weaponry, and the spiritual inheritance, of the Predator Saints. John Augustus Owens dug the cenote of Tikal with a low-yield neutron bomb. And we own stores of twentieth-century binary nerve gas that we could smuggle, if we wanted, into Washington, or Kyoto, or Kiev.… No, as long as the elite exists, the Synthetics can't dare to attack us head-on— and we intend to go on protecting this society until its rivals are driven into space, where they belong. And now you and I, together, can avert the threat of paradigmatic attack."

"There'll be others," he said.

"We've co-opted every attack made upon us. People want to live real lives, Eugene— to feel and breathe and love and be of simple human worth. They want to be something more than flies in a cybernetic web. They want some
thing realer than empty pleasures in the luxury of a zaibatsu can-world. Listen, Eugene. I'm the only person who has ever put on the spook's Veil and then returned to humanity, to a thinking, feeling, genuine life. We can understand each other."

The spook considered this. It was frightening and bizarre to be rationally thinking on his own, without a computer helping to manage his stream of consciousness. He hadn't realized how stiff and painful thinking was. The weight of consciousness had crushed the intuitive powers that the Veil had once set free. He said incredulously, "You think we could
understand
each other? By ourselves?"

"Yes!" she said. "You don't know how much I've needed it!"

The spook twitched in his straitjacket. There was a roaring in his head. Half-smothered segments of his mind were flaming, like blown coals, back into blazing life. "Wait!" he shouted. "Wait!" He had remembered his name and, with it, what he was.

*

Outside Replicon's Washington headquarters, snow was sifting over the altered evergreens. The head of security leaned back in his chair, fiddling with his light pen. "You've changed, Eugene."

The spook shrugged. "You mean the skin? The zaibatsery apparat can deal with that. I'm dead tired of this bodyform, anyway."

"No, it's something else."

"Of course, I was robbed of the Veil." He smiled flatly. "To continue. Once the traitress and I had become lovers, I was able to discover the location and guard codes of the nerve-gas armaments. Immediately thereafter I faked an emergency, and released the chemical agents within the sealed bunker. They had all sought safety there, so their own ventilation system destroyed all but two of them. Those two I hunted down and shot later the same night. Whether the cyborg Owens 'died' or not is a matter of definition."

"You won the woman's trust?"

"No. That would have taken too long. I simply tortured her until she broke." Again, he smiled. "Now the Synthesis can move in and dominate the Mayan population, as you would any other preindustrial culture. A few transistor radios will knock the whole flimsy structure over like a deck of cards."

"You have our thanks," said the chief. "And my personal congratulations."

"Save it," said the spook. "Once I've faded back into the shadows under the Veil, I'll forget all this anyway. I'll forget that my name is Simpson. I'll forget that I am the mass murderer responsible for the explosion of the Leyland Zaibatsery and the death of eight thousand orbiters. By any standards I am a deadly hazard to society who fully deserves to be psychically destroyed." He fixed the man with a cold, controlled, and feral grin. "And I face my own destruction happily. Because now I've seen life from both sides of the Veil. Because now I know for sure what I've always suspected. Being human just isn't enough fun."

In the clever and ingenious chiller that follows, we learn that no matter how smart you are, even if you're a super-genius of superhuman capability, you always have to worry that there might be someone out there who's smarter
still.…

Ted Chiang has made a big impact on the field with only a handful of stories, five stories all told, published in places such as
Omni, Asimov's Science Fiction, Full Spectrum 3, Starlight 2,
and
Vanishing Acts.
He won the 1990 Nebula Award with his first published story, "Tower of Babylon," and won the 1991
Asimov's
Reader's Award with his third, "Understand," as well as winning the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in that same year. After 1991, he fell silent for several years before making a triumphant return in 1998 with his novella "Story of Your Life," which won him another Nebula Award in 1999. Since then, he's returned in 2000 with another major story, and it's to be hoped that he'll prove more prolific in the years to come. It will be interesting to see how he develops, as he could well turn out to be one of the significant new talents of the new century. He lives in Kirkland, Washington.

*

A layer of ice; it feels rough against my face, but not cold. I've got nothing to hold on to; my gloves just keep sliding off it. I can see people on top, running around, but they can't do anything. I'm trying to pound the ice with my fists, but my arms move in slow motion, and my lungs must have burst, and my head's going fuzzy, and I feel like I'm dissolving—

I wake up, screaming. My heart's going like a jackhammer. Christ. I pull off my blankets and sit on the edge of the bed.

I couldn't remember that before. Before I only remembered falling through the ice; the doctor said my mind had suppressed the rest. Now I remember it, and it's the worst nightmare I've ever had.

I'm grabbing the down comforter with my fists, and I can feel myself trembling. I try to calm down, to breathe slowly, but sobs keep forcing their way out. It was so real I could
feel
it: feel what it was like to die.

I was in that water for nearly an hour; I was more vegetable than anything else by the time they brought me up. Am I recovered? It was the first time the hospital had ever tried their new drug on someone with so much brain damage. Did it work?

*

The same nightmare, again and again. After the third time, I know I'm not going to sleep again. I spend the remaining hours before dawn worrying. Is this the result? Am I losing my mind?

Tomorrow is my weekly checkup with the resident at the hospital. I hope he'll have some answers.

*

I drive into downtown Boston, and after half an hour Dr. Hooper can see me. I sit on an examination table behind a yellow curtain. Jutting out of the wall at waist-height is a horizontal flatscreen, adjusted for tunnel vision so it appears blank from my angle. The doctor types at the keyboard, presumably calling up my file, and then starts examining me. As he's checking my pupils with a penlight, I tell him about my nightmares.

"Did you ever have any before the accident, Leon?" He gets out his little mallet and taps at my elbows, knees, and ankles.

"Never. Are these a side effect of the drug?"

"Not a side effect. The hormone K therapy regenerated a lot of damaged neurons, and that's an enormous change that your brain has to adjust to. The nightmares are probably just a sign of that."

"Is this permanent?"

"It's unlikely," he says. "Once your brain gets used to having all those pathways again, you'll be fine. Now touch your index finger to the tip of your nose, and then bring it to my finger here."

I do what he tells me. Next he has me tap each finger to my thumb, quickly. Then I have to walk a straight line, as if I'm taking a sobriety test. After that, he starts quizzing me.

"Name the parts of an ordinary shoe."

"There's the sole, the heel, the laces. Um, the holes that the laces go through are eyes, and then there's the tongue, underneath the laces…"

"Okay. Repeat this number: three nine one seven four—"

"—six two."

Dr. Hooper wasn't expecting that. "What?"

"Three nine one seven four six two. You used that number the first time you examined me, when I was still an inpatient. I guess it's a number you test patients with a lot."

"You weren't supposed to memorize it; it's meant to be a test of immediate recall."

"I didn't intentionally memorize it. I just happened to remember it."

"Do you remember the number from the second time I examined you?"

I pause for a moment. "Four zero eight one five nine two."

He's surprised. "Most people can't retain so many digits if they've only heard them once. Do you use mnemonic tricks?"

I shake my head. "No. I always keep phone numbers in the autodialer."

He goes to the terminal and taps at the numeric keypad. "Try this one." He reads a fourteen-digit number, and I repeat it back to him. "You think you can do it backward?" I recite the digits in reverse order. He frowns, and starts typing something into my file.

*

I'm sitting in front of a terminal in one of the testing rooms in the psychiatric ward; it's the nearest place Dr. Hooper could get some intelligence tests. There's a small mirror set in one wall, probably with a video camera behind it. In case it's recording, I smile at it and wave briefly. I always do that to the hidden cameras in automatic cash machines.

Dr. Hooper comes in with a printout of my test results. "Well, Leon, you did… very well. On both tests you scored in the ninety-ninth percentile."

My jaw drops. "You're kidding."

"No, I'm not." He has trouble believing it himself. "Now that number doesn't indicate how many questions you got right; it means that relative to the general population—"

"I know what it means," I say absently. "I was in the seventieth percentile when they tested us in high school." Ninety-ninth percentile. Inwardly, I'm trying to find some sign of this. What should it feel like?

He sits down on the table, still looking at the printout. "You never attended college, did you?"

I return my attention to him. "I did, but I left before graduating. My ideas of education didn't mesh with the professors'."

"I see." He probably takes this to mean I flunked out. "Well, clearly you've improved tremendously. A little of that may have come about naturally as you grew older, but most of it must be a result of the hormone K therapy."

"This is one hell of a side effect."

"Well, don't get too excited. Test scores don't predict how well you can do things in the real world." I roll my eyes upward when Dr. Hooper isn't looking. Something amazing is going on, and all he can offer is a truism. "I'd like to follow up on this with some more tests. Can you come in tomorrow?"

*

I'm in the middle of retouching a hologram when the phone rings. I waver between the phone and the console, and reluctantly opt for the phone. I'd normally have the answering machine take any calls when I'm editing, but I need to let people know I'm working again. I lost a lot of business when I was in the hospital: one of the risks of being a freelancer. I touch the phone and say, "Greco Holographics, Leon Greco speaking."

"Hey Leon, it's Jerry."

"Hi Jerry. What's up?" I'm still studying the image on the screen: it's a pair of helical gears, intermeshed. A trite metaphor for cooperative action, but that's what the customer wanted for his ad.

"You interested in seeing a movie tonight? Me and Sue and Tori were going to see
Metal Eyes
."

"Tonight? Oh, I can't. Tonight's the last performance of the one-woman show at the Hanning Playhouse." The surfaces of the gear teeth are scratched and oily-looking. I highlight each surface, using the cursor, and type in the parameters to be adjusted.