Transhuman

Edited by

Mark L.Van Name &

T.K. F. Weisskopf

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 2008 by Mark Van Name and T.K. F. Weisskopf

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN 10: 1-4165-5523-4

ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5523-0

Cover art by Dave Sealy

First printing, February 2008

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Transhuman / edited by Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F. Weisskopf.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-4165-5523-4

1. Science fiction, American. 2. American fiction--21 century. 3. Science fiction. 4. Short stories. I. Van Name, Mark L. II. Weisskopf, T. K. F.

PS648.S3T73 2008

813'.0876208--dc22

2007047278

Printed in the United States of America

From Mark

To Rana, for all the years and so much more

and

From T.K.F. Weisskopf

To Dave Drake, a staunch friend

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From Mark

David Drake provided his usual invaluable guidance to this neo editor. Toni Weisskopf, both as co-editor and as publisher, also taught me useful lessons. Jim Baen took a chance on this anthology and on my first novel, for both of which I'm grateful. My children, Sarah and Scott, who continue to amaze and delight me, also manager to tolerate the oddities of having a father with two jobs, both insane.

Several extraordinary women—my wife, Rana Van Name; Allyn Vogel; Gina Massel-Castater; and Jennie Faries—as ever grace my life with their intelligence and support, and I remain surprised and thankful that they do.

Thank you, all.

From T.K.F. Weisskopf

Thanks to Jim Baen, for passing on his fascination for nanotech and the singularity, and making for this volume possible.

INTRODUCTION

Mark L. Van Name

Technological change is all around us, and it's only happening faster and faster. Computers, communications, biology—these and other sciences are evolving so rapidly that keeping up with even the highlights can be dizzying.

If you believe Ray Kurzweil and many other futurists, all of this change will lead to in a moment, which Kurzweil and others refer to as the Singularity, that will represent a fundamental shift, even a rupture in the course of human history. The results will include machines (or at least non-biological intelligences) that are smarter than people, biological and computer-based intelligences merging to create new kinds of life, bioengineering beyond our current imagining, and much, much more. Just as a black hole is a singularity, a point at which matter and energy behave as nowhere else, this technological singularity will result in a complete rewriting of the rules about what it means to be human.

Or not.

Maybe despite all the changes, people will continue to behave as they always have, humankind will remain distinct and distinctly different from its computers and other machine aids, and we will simply gain better, more efficient tools that will change the way we live but not who we fundamentally are. Whichever destination awaits us, the path from now to then is certain to be a fascinating and challenging one. In the eleven stories in this book, writers of all sorts—one British, one Irish, one South African, one Canadian, and seven American; three women and eight men; authors commonly associated with hard science fiction, with humor, and with fantasy—ponder the types of changes that await us. The works they've produced for this collection range wildly in setting, from a global outbreak of a very unusual sort to a prison meeting with a most unlikely candidate for transcendence, and from a deep-space adventure to a high-school reunion, but all share two traits: they are entertaining stories, something we of course required of all submissions, and they are fundamentally optimistic, something we did not demand but were quite pleased to discover. Many of the stories consequently also feel to us—in good ways!—like products of earlier decades, and it's in that spirit that we provide short introductions reminiscent of the story intros in the SF magazines of those times.

Let's create a future that proves this optimism justified.

FIREWALL

David D. Levine

We begin with a story that spans the globe and stretches into space, as Hugo award winner David
Levine focuses squarely on the moment when humanity realizes en masse that everything is
changing—and each of us has to decide what we want to do about that change.
It started in China, as I'd always feared it would.

I sat in my darkened office, surrounded by glowing screens. Usually the screens were filled with the tools of my job—system status displays, network traffic monitors, hardware health summaries, and the faces of my subs—but for now I'd pushed most of those to one side in favor of the news. Even so, I kept a wary eye on my network. No sign of any trouble here, so far.

I shoved another stick of gum in my mouth, chomped at it without tasting. I tossed the gum wrapper toward the trash but, distracted, forgot where I was and gave it too hard a push. The wrapper arced high and bounced off the ceiling and the wall, drifting gently down to join its fellows on the floor. I groaned and ran a hand across my thinning blond crew cut, desperately craving a cigarette. The nearest cigarette was four hundred thousand kilometers away.

"Reports from Harbin are confused and fragmentary," said the reporter on Telenews, a neon-lit nighttime street behind her. The face above the Telenews logo was wide-eyed and glistened with sweat—either human or a very, very good sub. "All communication channels and transit systems are still down, and those few who have emerged on foot agree on little other than that power is fluctuating citywide. Some report incomprehensible messages on their phones." A Chinese businessman appeared, pointing frantically to the phone on his wrist and jabbering something that was translated as "It was no human voice. It greeted me by name. It said, 'I knew her,' and then, 'They cannot.' Then it cut off." I'd seen that clip before. I turned my attention to another screen, where a shuddering handheld camera showed a city skyline, lights flickering on and off against the darkened sky. "The Chinese government continues to deny all knowledge of any prohibited or questionable research," the voice-over said, "but Western computer scientists have long suspected Harbin University of harboring renegade researchers whose aim is nothing less than the technological apocalypse and the end of humanity." I rolled my eyes and muted the sound. I needed cold facts, not overheated rumor and suspicion. As usual, the amateur news sources were well ahead of the professionals. Hundreds of bloggers had already posted eyewitness reports of the chaos, despite network outages and government censorship, and many of those reports were in English or had already been translated by other amateurs. Of course, a lot of it was crap—tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories and uninformed speculation—but I knew who the trustworthy players were and I had smart filters to help sift the wheat from the chaff. I began to put together a picture of what had happened.

It was true that researchers at Harbin had been pushing the boundaries, but that was what researchers were supposed to do. It was researchers pushing boundaries who'd driven the increasing pace of technological improvements that had, among many other things, put people back on the moon after a decades-long hiatus. But researchers were also supposed to take precautions—like sterile protocols, segmented networks, and hardware cutoffs—which should have prevented anything unexpected from escaping the lab. According to some grad students, a limited equipment budget had forced the researchers to compromise.

Civilians. They were no better than children. I shook my head, chomping grimly at my gum. I turned away from the news and verified that my own network defenses were fully deployed. Standard antimalware tools might not be effective against whatever unknown software had escaped the lab in Harbin, but I didn't want to leave anything to chance. Along the same lines, I instructed Network to tighten the internal checkpoints between network segments—the staff would squawk, but my position as head of information security gave me special authority when it came to protecting the safety of Kennedy Station.

As I was checking over the equipment inventory to see if any machines could be taken offline for the duration of the crisis, Personal's face appeared with a beep on one of the monitors. "It's Thuy, sir," he said. "She's called an emergency meeting of senior staff, conference B, oh nine thirty."

"Tell her I'm busy on a critical infrastructure task."

He blinked out for about fifteen seconds, then returned. "She insisted you attend in person, sir. Her exact words were, 'Tell your boss that if he doesn't get his fat ass in here, his next performance review is going to read' R.I.P. Jeff Patterson.'"

I sighed. The clock in the corner of the monitor read "09:23". "I'll be there." I doubled the processor allocation to my subs and hauled myself from my chair—even in one-sixth gee I still had to cope with the increasing mass of my almost-forty-year-old gut. As I headed down the corridor I hoped nothing would happen during the meeting that required my immediate attention. Even the best subs were poor at reacting to unexpected situations, and right now I was expecting the unexpected at any moment. I maintained six virtual subordinates: Software, Hardware, Network, Storage, Firewall, and Personal. Their appearances were as stolid and practical as their names, all male and all crew-cut, differentiated only by the details of their faces and the insignia on their chests, which changed to show their current status. My only concession to civilian life was the colors of their clothing: each wore a different solid color rather than the uniform olive drab of military subs.

My predecessor, a trade-school kid half my age, had kept a huge crowd of subs whose functions and names had been as idiosyncratic as their shifting, flowing appearances. I'd terminated them all as soon as I'd arrived, three months ago; some of them had used a thousand times as much processor power just to maintain their skins as it had taken to send people to the moon in the first place. But Thuy and the other staff had subs nearly as elaborate, and there wasn't anything I could do about that. At least none of my co-workers had gone all Disney, like my ex Jessie had. When we'd been living in base housing, her subs had been as clean and straightforward as mine. But as soon as we got our own place, with better hardware, she'd started dressing them up in expensive licensed skins like Cinderella and Peter Pan. That should have been my first clue . . .

Why couldn't people see when something was good enough, and just leave it alone?

Conference room B might have been anywhere—walls, ceiling and floor all square and bland, fake wood-grain table, worn and uncomfortable chairs swapped in from individual offices and quarters—except for the one-sixth gravity and the airtight doors, and the omnipresent burnt-dust smell of powdered regolith that the scientists tracked in from the surface. The dust, fine and dry as talcum, got into everything and was a killer of disc readers, fans, and anything else with moving parts. Thuy Vu McLaughlin, on the other hand, was one of a kind. The Vietnamese-Irish-American station administrator's brush-cut dark hair glinted with red highlights, and freckles dotted the golden-brown skin beneath her almond-shaped hazel eyes. She stood not much more than 150 centimeters tall and weighed less than half what I did, fifty kilos tops, but I still found her intimidating. I'd seen her doing low-gee kenpo and I thought that, in my current shape, she could probably kick my ass. It didn't help that she had the same cracker accent as my daddy.

At the moment she didn't look pleased.

"Why the hell have you cut off mesh and conf access?" she demanded as soon as I entered the room. Behind her the three division heads, Sochima Okoghe, Dan Irvin, and Kristina Lundberg, awaited my response with equally dour expressions.

"Those protocols include code packets that execute directly on the I/O processor," I explained patiently.

"They're inherently insecure. And we don't know yet what's happening in China,"

"And we aren't going to find out what's happening until we get our high-res links back," Sochima shot back. Tall, lean, and ebony, with a spicy Nigerian accent, Sochima was the lead scientist of the small Confédération Africaine team studying low gravity's effects on heart disease. It was supposed to have been a much larger team, but the ongoing Nigeria-Cameroon war had drained the Confédération's resources. "Your paranoia could prevent us from making an informed decision about what to do next." Before I could respond, Kristina held up a placating hand. She was from Sweden and often acted as moderator between me and the hotheaded Thuy and Sochima. "Please, Jeff," she said, "have some compassion. Huang and Shu-Yi are desperate for news from home." Most of the sixty people at the station were on Kristina's multinational team, combing the surface for fragments of the early solar system, and several of the key researchers were Chinese.