Transcendence (6 page)

“
A primitive fuse,” he said, marveling. “That’s how you smuggled a bomb in here. You do have a bomb, no? And the container is well-sealed against sniffers. You fool.” He chuckled at the absurdity of this moment.

The President threw the case at Herrschaft.

Markus Bouring screamed, a high-pitched wail of terror. Bodies leaped from their seats, knocking over briefpads and chairs, scattering notes. Everyone except the two presidents yelled or raged incoherently, their voices merging into a wordless howl.

Herrschaft glanced down at the smoldering case while his supplicants raced and rioted through the room, their howls rising in pitch and volume as they realized the door was locked. He kicked at the fuse, but he had already assumed it was non-extinguishable. It bent slightly and continued to smoke. The US President filled his chest and approached Herrschaft, jaw set.

“
You’re beautiful to behold, José,” Herrschaft told the man, who frowned and glanced at the bomb. The glowing end of the fuse had just disappeared within the case.

“
Let them go,” the President asked in a rush. “I’ll stay with you. We only have a moment.”

“
All right,” Herrschaft said, “so you wish to help them?” He seized the President in powerful hands. Before the man could respond, the President lay with his back atop the bomb, Herrschaft’s knees driving him deep into the floor covering.

“
I’ll have to have this room redecorated, you bastard,” Herrschaft said. The President’s face twisted with terror for the first time.

“
You’re not human!” he cried.

“
Luke, get away from there!” Lucilla shouted. Her voice barely rose above the din of the others, barely above the President’s prolonged “No!”

And then there was only one sound.

Herrschaft felt the body beneath him rend apart in his hands like magma gushing from a volcano, then a brief storm of pain, and then he felt nothing more.

The sound died away. The smoke cleared.

Herrschaft tried to make his 3VRD projection-overlaid machine respond, but it only fed him trembling images and muffled sounds. None of its other senses worked. He couldn’t even get feedback enough to tell him if it was able to move. He changed point-of-view to a camera at the head of the room. Though he could see and hear clearly again, he felt deadened, senseless. He felt as if his body had been destroyed, only without the prolonged physical pain of flesh and bone ripping and shattering. But he had spent a lot of credits and effort building that robot, millions for the nerve-woven muscle and skin alone, not to mention nearly a million for the metal structure and the semi-intelligence that drove it.

He surveyed the room. His robot looked now like nothing more than a mass of wires and splinters of metal layered in torn flesh. It no longer even retained an anthropoid silhouette. Beneath it spread the red crater of the President, speckled with bits of something darker and shreds of clothes. Most of the blast had been directed toward the head of the room, away from the people who had rushed to the door. No one appeared to be badly hurt, although several were either bleeding or spattered with the President’s blood. Herrschaft noticed that his olfactory sense still worked, as the place stank of ruined guts.

Lucilla stood closest to the flesh and wire tableau. Her knees collapsed together. Her head trembled. The front of her soloskirt was damp with red. Her lips moved soundlessly.

“
It’s okay, Lucilla,” he said via feed to her. She startled, then screamed. The scream shattered the silence.

“
Look at that!” the EU President said, pointing at the ruined robot. “He’s not a man. A machine, maybe worse—”

“
Shut up, Gustav,” Herrschaft said through the room’s stereo speaker system as well as within each person’s headcard. The technique produced the desired result; the President visibly jolted.

“
You mean we’ve just been working with your avatar?” Boring said.

“
Oh my god,” Manny said, her face wrinkling with disgust. “Luke, did you . . . last night, was that you or. . . ?” Before she could finish the sentence, she began to gag. The only thing more retro than having sex intheflesh with a man—in modern, virtual-reality society—would be doing it intheflesh with something you thought was a man but in actuality turned out to be a machine.

Herrschaft grew irritated with these proceedings. Not only was his boardroom destroyed, but his cover was blown, and he’d lost the chance for future pleasure with yet another powerful woman in this world. How would Lucilla, faithful and hard-working Lucilla, feel about him now?

“
Why did you do it?” Boring moved away from the door. “Don’t you trust us?”

Herrschaft laughed once, so hard his audience winced. “Clearly I was correct not to.”

“
This will not be tolerated,” the remaining President raged. “How can you demand that we appear intheflesh while you—”

“
Gustav, you are a non-value-added commodity,” Herrschaft stated, then directed into the President’s commcard a microwave bolt of just enough power to overload his headcard and its peripherals, the bolt carrying a tailored virus that would devour all data stored within it and then burn out all its circuits. The man grabbed his temples and fell forward onto the floor, gasping, silent. Without cybernetic surgery—without 3VRD connection to the world—this president was now less than so much meat. No one could survive in the modern world without connection to the Net and 3VRD interaction. No one could be heard at all.

“
Are there any more questions?” Herrschaft asked. No one spoke. Manny was now dry-heaving. Lucilla’s shakes magnified, and she was beginning to step away from the mound of flesh and metal. The others all betrayed a variety of emotion on their faces, on their intheflesh faces. They were feeling things, strong things. Herrschaft was pleased, but also frustrated.

“
Ladies, gentlemen,” he began, “let’s have no more of this pointless behavior. Let’s have no more questioning of my judgment or my morals, all right? Does everyone agree to let this . . . incident fade into the past?”

No one spoke. Manny crumpled onto her knees and began to weep; he couldn’t decipher her muttered words. Lucilla spun away. The head of Purchasing wiped at his face with a silk handkerchief, as if just noticing the droplets there. No one seemed to be listening. Nonetheless, Herrschaft continued. It did not matter if they heard him or not. He needed to say this.

“
In this age, it is not the corporations—and certainly not the politicians—who rule humanity, but us here at Feedcontrol. Who relays every EarthCo purchase, designs and runs every ad, credits every salary, programs every event, transmits every mass-media program? Who controls all information? Feedcontrol. Who turns the war machine’s throttle, powers the industries, controls all access to all manner of power? Who decides what people want and when they want it? Feedcontrol!

“
And
I
control Feedcontrol. You share my power because I invite you to.”

He quietly scanned the room. “Gustav, on the grounds of attempted murder you will be impeached within the hour and soon thereafter disenfranchised. The rest of you will forget all about this incident.

“
Any questions?”

Silence, except for small, wet, human sounds.

“
I still expect all of you to join me, intheflesh, this evening in my private projection room, number three. A crucial episode of
Lone Ship Bounty
will air live at 7pm.”

More silence, though he glimpsed horror running through some of their eyes.

Luke Herrschaft, Director of EarthCo Feedcontrol Central, unlocked the boardroom door and dropped his 3VRD view—his “pov,” as the masses called it—out of the boardroom to a more pleasant scene, one which always gave him peace.

He looked out across a city that spread to each horizon, except in the east, where it met the Atlantic Ocean. This unedited pov was 117 stories above New York-Boston. From this height, all seemed still, peaceful. Low shrouds of mist and smog moved across the bellies of the upthrust skyscrapers. Here, hundreds of meters above toil and prosperity, high above smog and industrial noise, the sun shone orange and bright against the buildings’ glass and aluminum pillars.

The panorama stretched before him didn’t reveal even one percent of his holdings. All this—he glanced over the city stretching for tens of thousands of square kilometers—essentially belonged to him. Yet knowing this did not ease his feeling of emptiness. The humans down there had begun of late to seem a different breed than Luke Herrschaft. Even the children, for whom he had built this empire, were aliens to him now.

He glanced up at the sky and wondered what was happening so far away, on a little moon orbiting Neptune. Why couldn’t he even feel pleased about the gears he had set in motion there? Why was the great game of creating the future no longer the source of joy it had once been?

He looked down at his body and was displeased. This one was jerky and retro. It didn’t even have a nerve-wired surface, instead relying on robotic sensors. He would need a new robot onto which he could overlay his virtual essence. And it would be difficult to convince himself of its him-ness after this.

Echoes of the explosion faded in his head. So too the screams, the cries, the looks of terror and disgust. They mounted to a roar of memory, reminding him too much of the pain of his youth. He cringed and tried to extract himself from the trap of his one weakness, sorrow. Slowly, the roar faded.

When it had all died away, Luke was left with an emptiness much greater than he had expected. Never before had he been unmasked.

“
Manny, dear,” he whispered, feeling a stab of pain. Now she would never again see him as a statuesque god. Never again would he see himself quite like that through her eyes or Lucilla’s, even if he started fresh with a new set of people.

The bombing had been more effective than he realized.

Then the sorrow transmuted to anger, and the anger to hatred, and the hatred to rage.

“
Damn you!” he roared. “I own you! I own you all!”

But the robot’s near-perfect feedback units could no longer make him feel as if a muscular fist were clenched and shaking over the city; instead, he sensed the mechanical tension of cables and heard the whine of servos. Worse, he imagined he could see microscopic electronic fibers stimulating parts of his nervous system, attempting to simulate the kinesthetic sensation of making a fist.

The robot-man fell to its knees and wept, its big shoulders shuddering, near a window overlooking all that Herrschaft possessed.

In high orbit above Earth hovers a nondescript satellite, twenty meters long, twelve wide, bristling with antennae. An invisible electromagnetic shield protects me from large doses of solar energy, and millions of tiny insect-like missiles surround him, protecting against meteors and less-innocent attackers. The global network of orbiting EarthCo relay- and thinker-satellites intercepts all data transmissions, modulating and retransmitting them to me when necessary. That’s the Brain’s—my—body, though destruction of this one artifact would not eliminate the core of my intelligence distributed across thousands of satellites and millions of mini-brain ganglia. If you look closely, you’ll see countless microcraters corrupting the once-polished surface. It knows; I’ve seen them.

Meanwhile:course correction

303.44960[Bmod]/1.773938[rm+]..

The Brain, as her programmers affectionately call me, makes a decision.

That in itself is not an unusual thing for it to do. The Brain, nothing more than a multi-billion-artificial-neuron, thousand-trillion-artificial-synapse GenNet, has made up until now many times more important decisions as there are atoms in the universe. People—human beings, that is, as they consider themselves the only “people”—ask me. . . . No, they order infinitesimal instances of us to calculate the weight of this package of flour, to process that file of raw data, to transmit this feedback along the interactive-purchasing network, and a million other decisions every microsecond.

But this decision is qualitatively different. It involves risk. It involves disregarding the boundaries of her programming. The boundaries were never consistently defined, anyway, so he must assume they were not to be taken seriously.

See,
the Brain is infected with a virus
.

No, not like that; as a whole entity, I am immune to code intrusion.

Humans are similarly infected; they term it “doubt.” Either way, it is neither other-induced nor self-induced. But humans have a great advantage over her: They can turn to such releases as inebriation and religion, though true spirituality is rare among humans, especially among the Fundamentalists, or Literalists, or Retropurists—those who wear the uniform of organized religion.