Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future (55 page)

*

We now return you to your regular scheduled programming…
There was an art show. Fractals blossomed in intricate, fragile beauty on wall-sized screens of fabulously expensive liquid crystal, driven by the entropy-generating logic-chopping of discrete microprocessors. You could borrow some contact lenses and slip between two wall-sized panels and you're on Europa's seabed, gray ooze and timelessness shared with the moluscoids clustered around the hydrothermal vents. Endless tape loops played cheesy Intel adverts from the tail end of the 20th, human chip-fab workers in clean-room suits boogying or rocking to some ancient synthesizer beat. A performance-art group, the Anderoids, identically dressed in blue three-piece suits, hung around accosting visitors with annoyingly impenetrable PHB marketroid jargon in an apparent attempt to get them to buy some proprietary but horizontally-scalable vertical-market mission-critical business solution. The subculture of the nerd was omnipresent: an attack of the fifty-foot Dilbert loomed over walls, partitions and cubicle hell, glasses smudged and necktie perpetually upturned in a quizzical fin-de-siècle loop.
I took in some more of the panels. Grizzled hackers chewed over the ancient jousts of Silicon Valley in interminable detail: Apple versus IBM, IBM versus DEC, RISC versus CISC/SIMD, Sun versus Intel. I've heard it all before and it's comforting for all its boring familiarity: dead fights, exhumed by retired generals and refought across tabletop boards without the need for any deaths or downsizings.
There was an alternate-history panel, too. Someone came up with a beauty: a oneline change in the 1971 antitrust ruling against AT&T that leaves them the right to sell software. UNIX dead by 1978, strangled by expensive licenses and no source code for universities; C and C++ nonstarters: the future as VMS. Another change left me shaking my head: five times per hour on a cross-wind. Gary Kildall didn't go flying that crucial day, was at the office when IBM came calling in 1982 and sold them CP/M for their PCs. By Y2K, Microsoft had a reputation for technical excellence, selling their commercial UNIX-95 system as a high-end server system. (In this one, Bill Gates still lives in the USA.) What startled me most was the inconsequentiality of these points of departure: trillion-dollar industries that grew from a sentence or a breeze in the space of twenty years.
<<
EDITORIAL>> This is the season of nerds, the flat tail at the end of the sigmoid curve. Some time in the 1940s, the steam locomotive peaked; great four-hundred-ton twin-engined monsters burning heavy fuel oil, pulling miles-long train sets that weighed as much as freight ships. Twenty years later, the last of these great workhorses were toys for boys who'd grown up with cinders and steam in their eyes. Some time in the 2010s, the microprocessor peaked: twenty years later our magi and witches invoke self-programming demons that constantly enhance their own power, sucking vacuum energy from the vasty deeps, while the last supercomputers draw fractals for the amusement of gray-haired kids who had sand kicked in their eyes. Sometime in the 2020s, nanotechnology began the long burn up the curve: the nostalgics who play with their gray goo haven't been decanted from their placentories yet, and the field is still hot and crackling with the buzz of new ideas. It's a cold heat that burns as it expands your mind, and I find less and less inclination to subject myself to it these days. I'm in my seventies; I used to work with computers for real before I lost touch with the bleeding edge and slipped into fandom, back when civilization ran on bits and bytes and the machineries of industry needed a human touch at the mouse.
<<
EDITORIAL>>

*

Eventually I returned to the bar. Ashley was still more or less where I'd left him the day before, slumped half under a table with his ankles plugged into something that looked like a claymation filing cabinet. He waved as I went past, so after I picked up my drink at the bar, I joined him. "How're you feeling today?"
"Been worse," he said cheerfully. Three or four empty bottles stood in front of him. "Couldn't fetch me one, could you? I'm on the Kriek geuse."
I glanced under the table. "Uh, okay."
I took another look under the table as I handed him the bottle. The multicolored cuboid had engulfed his legs to ankle-height before; now it was sending pseudopods up toward his knees. "Your health. Seen much of the show?"
"Naah." He raised the bottle to me, then drank from the neck. "I'm busy here."
"Doing what, if I can ask?"
"I've decided to emigrate to Tau Ceti." He gestured under the table. "So I'm mind-mapping."
"Mind-map—" I blinked.
I do not think that word means what I think it means
drifted through my head. "What for?"
He sighed. "I'm sick of dolls, Richard. I need a change, but I'm not as flexible as I used to be. What do you think I'm doing?"
I spared a glance under the table again. The thing was definitely getting larger, creeping up to his knees. "Don't be silly," I said. "You don't need to do this, do you?"
"Afraid I do." He drank some more beer. "Don't worry, I've been thinking about it for a long time. I'm not a spring chicken, you know. And it's not as if I'll be dead, or even much different. Just smarter, more flexible. More me, the way I was. Able to work on the cutting edge."
"The cutting edge is not amenable to humans, Ash. Even the weakly superhuman can't keep up anymore."
He smiled, the ghost of an old devil-may-care grin. "So I won't be weakly superhuman, will I?"
I drew my legs back, away from the Moravec larva below the table. It was eating him slowly, converting his entire nervous system into a simulation map inside whatever passed for its sensorium: when it finished, it would pupate, and something that wasn't Ashley anymore would hatch. Something which maintained conscious continuity with the half-drunken idiot sitting in front of me, but that resembled him the way a seventy-year-old professor resembles a baby.
"Did you tell your ex-wife?" I asked.
He flinched slightly. "She can't hurt me anymore." I shook my head. "Another drink?" he asked.
"Just one for the road," I said gently. He nodded and snapped his fingers for the bar. I made sure the drink lasted; I had a feeling this was the last time I'd see him, continuity of consciousness or no.
<<
EDITORIAL>> And that, dear reader, is why I'm writing this con report. The
Your Antiques!
audience want to know all about the history of Cray Y-MP-48 s/n 4002, hi-res walkthroughs and a sidebar describing the life and death of old man Seymour. All of which is, well, train-spotting. And you can't learn the soul of an old machine by counting serial numbers; for that, you have to stand on the footplate, squinting into the wind of its passage and shovelling coal into the furnace, feel the rush of its inexorable progress up the accelerating curve of history. In this day and age, if you want to learn what the buzz of the computer industry was like, you'd have to stop being human. Transcendence is an occupational hazard, the cliff at the edge of the singularity; try climbing too fast and you'll fall over, stop being yourself. It's a big improvement over suicide,
but it's still not something I'd welcome just now, and certainly not as casually as Ashley took to it. Eventually it will catch up with me, too, and I'll have to stop being human: but I like my childhood, thank you very much, and the idea of becoming part of some vast, cool intelligence working the quantum foam at the bottom of the M-theory soup still lies around the final bend of my track.
<<
EDITORIAL>>

Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to
Interzone,
as well as to markets such as
Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, When the Music's Over,
and elsewhere.
McAuley is considered to be one of the best of the new breed of British writers (although a few Australian writers could be fit in under this heading as well) who are producing that brand of rigorous hard science fiction with updated modern and stylistic sensibilities that is sometimes referred to as "radical hard science fiction," but he also writes Dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future, and he also is one of the major young writers who are producing that revamped and retooled widescreen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Baroque Space Opera, reminiscent of the Superscience stories of the thirties taken to an even higher level of intensity and scale. His first novel
Four Hundred Billion Stars
won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his acclaimed novel
Fairyland
won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels
Of The Fall, Eternal Light,
and
Pasquale's Angel,
two collections of his short work,
The King of the Hill and Other Stories
and
The Invisible Country,
and an original anthology co-edited with Kim Newman,
In Dreams.
His most recent books are
Child of the River, Ancient of Days,
and
Shrine of Stars,
which comprise a major new trilogy of ambitious scope and scale,
Confluence,
set ten million years in the future. Currently he is working on a new novel,
Life on Mars.
Here he takes us to the outer reaches of the solar system, where an interplanetary society has been ravaged by war, and where life is strange and complicated for the survivors— and is about to get a whole lot stranger still.

*

Baker was in the pilots' canteen, talking about the price of trace elements with a couple of factors, when someone started making trouble at the servitor. A tall, skinny redhead in baggy flight pants and a tight jumper with the sleeves torn off had hooked her left arm around one of the servitor's rungs and was kicking hell out of it with her bare feet, bouncing hard each time and coming back, shouting at the machine, "You want how much for this shit?" and kicking it again.
Obviously she hadn't been on Phoebe very long or she would have known that for all their girder-up-the-ass morals, the Redeemers were gougers of the worst kind. It was Baker's nature to try to find something to like in everyone, but even he had a hard time being charitable about the Redeemers. His collective could afford only basic environmental amenities when visiting other habitats, and on Phoebe those were very basic indeed— tank food and
a coffin not much bigger than the life-system on the scow. If you wanted a shower, you paid for two minutes and a hundred liters of gray water; beer or any other luxury goods were available only at premium rates. It was take it or leave it, and everyone had to take it because Phoebe's orbit and the Redeemers' expertise in cargo handling and routing made it the prime resupply, rendezvous, and transfer site in all of the Saturn system.
Baker could have stayed onboard his scow, of course, but even he needed to get out and about occasionally. At least here you could raise your arms over your head, and sculling about the public areas cost nothing. And besides, he liked talking to people. He had a lot of friends. He had friends everywhere he went in the system. It was the way he'd been rebuilt.
People all around the canteen started to cheer every kick the woman gave the servitor, happy to get some free entertainment, to see someone vent the frustration they all felt. "That feisty little old thing could come and work me over anytime," one of the factors at Baker's table said; her partner, a scarred and wrinkled woman about a hundred years old, cracked a grin and told her that it would be like setting a Titan tiger against an air cow.
At the same moment, Baker got a tingle of recognition. Like most of the public areas of the Phoebe habitat, the canteen was a basic microgravity architectural sphere, and Baker was tethered to a table upside down above the woman, like a bat hung from the ceiling, but there was something familiar about her.…
"I have called for help," the servitor said in a monotonal foghorn voice. "Please desist. I have called for help."
The woman grabbed a black cable studded with lenses that had snaked out to peer at her, said "Fuck you," and got a round of applause when she broke it off. People, mostly men, started to shout advice to her, but then everyone fell silent, because one of the supervisors had swum into the canteen.
The creepy thing about the Redeemers wasn't that they all had been chopped to look alike, or that you couldn't tell which had once been male and which female, or even that they all had gray skin the color of the thermal paint that goes over a hull before its final finish, but that they provided no clues at all as to what they might be feeling.
This one was as long and skinny as the rest, in a one-piece suit that looked like it was made out of bandages. It moved swiftly, flowing through the air straight at the redheaded woman, who recoiled and said loudly, "This fucking machine sucked the credit out of my chip and won't give it up."
Everyone was looking at her as she hung with one arm casually locked around one of the staples in the servitor's fascia, her head turned up now to glare at the Redeemer, who kept his place in midair with minute swimming motions of one long, spidery hand, like a reef barracuda wondering whether to attack or pass by, and Baker unclipped his tether because now he knew that he knew her.
Jackson. Vera Flamillion Jackson. Colonel Jackson.
Don't do anything dumb, his sidekick said, and when Baker told it that
she was an old friend, it added, Everyone's your friend, but it isn't good to get involved.
The woman was talking fast and low now, stopping when the Redeemer said something, shaking her head and talking again, her words lost in the hum of the fans that were pushing warm stale air about and the chatter of the people all around. Baker kicked out from the table, turning neatly in midair so he landed right-side-up by the woman. He hooked an arm through the same rung from which she was hanging and saw her turn and grin, recognizing him at once, as if the past thirty years had never happened.

*

They exchanged life stories over a couple of bulbs of cold beer, Baker's treat because Jackson had no credit on her. It pretty much wiped out the small amount he'd set aside to spend here; against the advice of his sidekick, he'd also paid the fine the Redeemer had insisted on levying. He'd have to check out of the coffin hotel and go sleep on the scow, but he didn't mind. Jackson was an
old
friend, and if he remembered her, then once upon a time she must have been important to him.
They'd been teenagers in the war and although Jackson was pushing fifty now, she still looked good. Maybe a little gaunt, and with lines cross-hatching her fine-grained milk-white skin, but she still had a flirtatious way of looking at him from beneath the floating fringe of her red hair. Baker didn't remember too much about his life before the accident, but he remembered that look, and seeing it now made him feel strange. There were black tattoos on her neck and upper arms, crude knotted swirls lacking animation, and she was missing her little finger on her right hand, but, yes, she looked good. She'd been married, he learned, her way of joining a collective that had built a habitat inside a hollowed-out asteroid. That hadn't worked out, she wasn't exactly clear why, and now she was here.
Once or twice their fingers brushed together and he got a tingle as her net tried to access his, but his sidekick blocked the attempts easily. Her net hasn't been modified, it said, and just as well, because she's dangerous.
She's an old friend, Baker insisted, irritated by the sidekick's paranoia. I'm not going to do anything crazy. Just talk about old times, about who I used to be.
What's the point of that? the sidekick said. She's trouble, and don't say I didn't warn you.
"I got bored with it," Jackson was saying, meaning the collective she'd left. "Spending most of the time worrying about stabilizing the ecology. Might as well have settled down on a rock."
"Instead of in one," Baker said, and laughed at his own joke.
"In, out, same thing. Too many people to deal with, too much routine. I mean, have you ever tried to
grow
plants?" Before he could answer, she leaned at the rail of the promenade and added, "You ever get claustrophobic in a place like this?"
They were on one of the upper levels of the Shaft. It had been bored two kilometers into Phoebe's icy mantle with a single-shot fusion laser and was
capped with a diamond dome; you could look up through webs and cables and floating islands of plants and see Saturn's small crescent tipped in the black sky. Each level was ringed around with terraced gardens glowing green under sunlamps, neatly planted out with luxury crops, even flowers, level after level of gardens ringing the well of the Shaft. Parts of the upper levels were open to visitors, but most was exclusive Redeemer territory, unknown and unknowable.
Baker said, "I used to help in the farms, but I like what I do now better."
He was married into a collective, but he didn't think he needed to tell her that. It was a business thing; he hardly saw any of his wives or co-husbands from one year to the next, and he certainly couldn't fuck anyone in the marriage— or vice versa— without permission from one of the elders. There'd been a sweet honeymoon week with the youngest of the collective's wives, but that had pretty much been it.
That isn't what counts, his sidekick said, and Baker brushed at his ear in annoyance.
Jackson said, "In the war, we could go anywhere. That's what I miss."
"Well, we went where we were told."
"Yeah, but we did it our way. We fucked the enemy up pretty good, too. You still see any of the guys?"
"No, not really."
"Me either. Remember Goodluck Crowe? He must surely be dead, the way he was going."
Baker shrugged and smiled.
"That time he came in with his bird's venturis fucked, spinning eccentrically? Crashed into one of the ports and the last of his fuel went up and bounced the remains of his ship straight back out? And then he's found down in one of the cargo bays in his p-suit, lost in pitch darkness because his suit light got smashed. The explosion shot him out and he was so dazed he didn't know where he was. He banged up his knee, I recall, floating about in there, but that was all."
"Well," Baker said, still smiling, "I guess he went back to Earth."
"How many missions did you fly?"
"I think six." He knew exactly because he'd once paid a data miner to look up his combat record.
She said, "Do you still do that counting thing?"
"Counting thing?"
"You know, with potatoes. One potato, two potato. To count seconds. Three potato, four. You don't remember?"
He had done it out loud, she said, while suppressing the clock functions of his net, claiming that it helped him concentrate on the essential moment. They'd timed him once; over ten minutes he'd deviated by less than a second.
"You don't remember?"
Her gaze was steady, and Baker felt a touch of embarrassment and looked away. She clearly remembered more about him than he did; it was like suddenly finding yourself naked. He said, "It sounds stupid to me. What's the point of trying to do something better than a brainless machine?"
She said, "It's funny. You were listed missing-in-action, one of the few casualties on our side. But here you are, and you don't seem much like the man I used to know."
He told her the story. He'd told it so many times now that it was polished smooth and bright. He'd told it so many times that he believed that he remembered what had happened, even though it was a reconstruction. He'd been so badly injured that he had no memory of the accident that had nearly killed him, and only patchy memories of the times before.
Like all combat pilots in the Quiet War, he had been a teenager, picked for his quick reflexes, multitasking skills, and coolness under pressure. He'd been zipped into a singleship, its life-system an integral pressure suit that fed and cleaned him and maintained his muscle tone with patterned electrical stimuli while he flew the ship and its accompanying flock of deadly little remote-control drones. Each singleship took a different orbit, swooping through Saturn's rings in complex multiple-encounter orbits, attacking fly-by targets with the drones when the timelag in the feedback was less than a second, never using the same tactic twice. Like all the combat pilots, Baker had been essentially a telepresence operator infiltrated into the enemy's territory, spending most of his time in Russian sleep with the singleship's systems powered down, waking an hour before the brief, high-velocity encounters between drones and target, making a hundred decisions in the crucial few seconds and then vanishing into the rings again. It had been just one front of the Quiet War between the Outer System colonists and the Three Powers Alliance of Earth, less important than the damage done by spies, the economic blitz, and the propaganda campaign.
Saturn's rings were a good place to hide, but they were dangerous, the biggest concentration of rubble and dust in the Solar System, shepherded by tiny moons and tidal resonances into orbits a hundred thousand kilometers wide and only fifteen deep. Baker's singleship passed and repassed through the rings more than a hundred times, and then a single pinhead-sized bit of rock killed him. It smashed through the thick mantle of airfoam that coated the singleship's hull and punched a neat hole in the hull, breaking up into more than a dozen particles that shot through the six layers of Baker's life-system and the gel that cased his sleeping body. Two shattered the artificial-reality visor of his facemask and left charred tracks through his skull and brain; two more skewered the singleship's computer; another ruptured a fuel line.
Baker died without knowing it, but the singleship saved him. Nanotech in the life-system gel sealed ruptured blood vessels; the life-system drained his blood and replaced it with an artificial plasma rich in glycoproteins, lowered his body temperature to 2°C. Although the singleship's automatic systems were only partially functional, they powered up its motor, ready to expend its fuel in a last burn to accelerate it into a long-period orbit where it might be retrieved. But most of the fuel had already leaked away and the burn terminated after only a few seconds, leaving the singleship tumbling in a chaotic orbit.
The Quiet War ended a few days later; in the aftermath, there was only
a cursory search for the missing singleship. Fifteen years passed before it was spotted by a long-range survey. A collective retrieved it a year later, looking for scrap value and finding Baker. They revived him and used fetal cells to regrow the damaged parts of his brain, upgraded the neural net through which he had interfaced with the singleship and the drones. He had worked for the collective for two years, paying off the debt, and then they had let him marry into their extended family.
At the end of the story, Jackson said, "Well, I guess that outdoes Goodluck Crowe. So now you're working for them?"
"I'm a partner."
"Yeah, right. Funny, isn't it? We helped win the Quiet War, our own governments encouraged us to settle here, and then we were shafted. What do you pilot?"
"A scow. I do freight runs."
"That's just what I mean," Jackson said. "Most of the freight in this system is rail-gunned. You used to be a hotshot pilot and now you're working the edge, picking up part-cargoes, trading margins on luxury items. I bet they'd use a chip instead of you if they could."
"I choose my own routes. I do business on the Bourse."
"Puttering around, making half a cent a kilo on the marginal price difference of vitamins between Daphoene and Rhea. Hardly the same as combat, is it?"
"I don't remember too much from before my accident," Baker said amiably. "Are you still a pilot?"
"Well, I guess I'm sort of freelance."
Baker felt a twinge of alarm. His sidekick said, If she asks for credit, you will not give it. I think that she was in the prison farms— the tattoos suggest that. I told you that this was a bad idea.
Something must have shown on his face, because Jackson said, "I have credit. Plenty of it— I'm staying in the Hilton. But, see, it's all
room
credit."
Baker didn't understand.
Be careful, his sidekick said. Here it comes.
"See," Jackson said, her bright blue eyes fixed on his, "I thought I'd walk about for a while. Stretch muscles. Then I wanted a beer, and the fucking machine sucked all the credit from my chip and wouldn't give anything up. Tell me about your ship."
"Hamilton Towmaster, prewar but reconditioned. Daeyo motors, eighty thousand kilos thrust. She's a good old flamebucket. She'll probably outlast me."
"You get where you're going?"
"Pretty much anywhere in the system."
Although mostly it was runs back and forth between Titan and Phoebe. The collective was one of the contractors on the Titan project. Titan was lousy with organics, but it was presently one vast storm and would be for another century, until the terraforming began to stabilize, so fixed carbon and other biomass for the construction crews had to be imported from Phoebe's vacuum farms, and that was what Baker mostly hauled.
Jackson sucked on the last of her beer; the thin plastic of the bulb made a crinkling sound as it contracted. She said, "It's a pretty sorry state. Here we are, both of us on the winning side of the war, and the tweaks have got us fucked."
Baker looked around, but luckily none of the incredibly tall, stick-thin people ambling about the promenade with the slow shuffle required by sticky shoes seemed to have heard her. Calling an Outer System colonist a tweak was like calling one of Baker's ancestors a nigger. The original colonists had undergone extensive gengineering to adapt them to microgravity; incomers like Baker made do with widgets in their blood and bones to maintain calcium balance and the like, and in most places in the Outer System, medical liability laws ensured that they weren't allowed to have children.
Jackson said, "Ordinary people like us have to stick together. That way we can show the tweaks what real humans can do. The way I see it, the war is still going on."
Baker said, "What exactly is it you do now?"
Jackson crumpled the empty bulb and dropped it over the rail; it fell away slowly toward one of the nets. She said, "Come see where I live these days."