Transhuman (14 page)

"Now they just pop one sofa after another into place, dance all around, until you find something you love."

Which pretty much summed up how everyone seemed to approach digital life—oh, isn't it great that nothing is real?

A stone fence in the backyard served as the edge of his mother's world. The foliage dressed in full autumn splendor. Dead leaves of vivid reds and yellows elegantly drifting in the pseudo wind. He identified with the leaves—unreal, drifting, dead.

His mother went off to check on the roasting turkey—that slightly boggled him—leaving him and Emma in the perfection of New England fall. Emma picked up on his mood as she could always do when he was still alive. She came and wrapped her arms around him as if her presence could heal everything wrong. There was a time when it did: before the cancer, before he died.

"What is wrong?" Emma asked in a tone that meant she knew full well but felt the need to broach the subject anyhow.

"Nothing." But he really meant 'I don't want to talk about it.'

Emma poked him in the ribs hard.

"This isn't the house I grew up in. I knew that house down to the scratches on the wood floor. This isn't even a perfect copy."

"It has everything that is important: you and your mother. Why does it have to be perfect? Why can't you be happy?"

He couldn't say, "Because I'm dead. My whole family is dead. You're the only thing I love that hasn't died." Dead and unreal as the leaves floating down around them. Instead he said, "I don't see the point of all this. Mom usually runs at a cheaper, slower rate than us, and Dan is twice our clock speed. All of our calendars might be set on the same date, but we're . . ." Dead. But there was no reason to upset her about things she couldn't change. His father passed him and his brother the genes that made them highly susceptible to cancer. Economics made it necessary for him to keep working, even after he was dead, to pay the medical costs of his illness. She was even more the victim than he was; so he said, "Not living at the same speed."

"All that matters is that we're together." Emma hugged him tight. And he clung to her, savoring the realness of her. The smell of her hair, the feel of her bones, and the softness of her skin. Deep down, he knew that her body wasn't any more real than the falling leaves, but Emma herself was alive and real.

Through the living room windows, he could see that his mother was heading for the front door. His brother must have arrived.

"Duty calls." Reluctantly he let Emma go.

His brother wasn't alone. He'd transitioned a few months back when tests showed that he would follow Andrew's path of costly, painful, but ultimately ineffective treatments. In his rare calls, he'd mentioned a new girlfriend. He hadn't said anything, however, about the baby in her arms. "Everyone, this is Marianne and our little girl, Jewel."

There was a moment of silence, and then Emma stepped toward them. "Hi, I'm Emma." But her focus was totally on the baby, who gave her a toothless grin. "Hey, there, little one. Ohh, what a smile!"

"Your baby?" Andrew asked carefully, because John was dead, making the child already half orphan.

"Flesh and blood?"

John caught what he was asking and cried, "No! No, no, no. Nothing like that. That would be just cruel. Marianne was my mentor at my transcending therapy." In other words, she was dead and comfortable about it. Andrew had officially passed through the program, but remained too ambivalent to qualify as anyone's mentor. "Babies are so body intensive; Jewel would be alone too much to be mentally healthy."

"She's completely digital." Marianne surrendered the baby to Emma who continued to coo over it as if it was real.

"Like Bingo, our dog? He's a Pixilated Puppy." He'd turned Bingo off before leaving. The idea of having a baby like that and insisting that it was real would be creepy.

"No more than a Raggedy Ann doll is like a baby," John said. "Pixilated Puppy is an off-the-shelf, cookie cutter program that produces the same dog over and over again. The skin changes to create an illusion of growth but it has one set of 'dog' algorithms. Jewel is custom designed for us, based on our genetic, intelligence, and aptitude profiles. She has a learning program that will ultimately create a unique personality matrix just like the one that they downloaded from our bodies. She'll grow up to be a real human."

They settled into the living room. The baby had the gravitational weight of a black hole; all their attention stayed pinned on it. It squeaked and squealed and explored Emma's face with tiny chubby hands.

"We're really sorry we didn't tell you, but the center told us to not . . ." John trailed off as he realized how that sounded and looked helplessly to Marianne.

Marianne gamely picked up the ball. "Fitting a baby into your life is difficult and can be emotionally draining. The last thing you need is someone ridiculing your decision." John nodded. "It's really an honor to qualify for a baby. But once you're accepted, and they've created your child, you can't back out."

"Couldn't you have adopted—" Their mother paused to find a diplomatic way of finishing. "An already living child? One of those big-eyed South Americans in the spam messages asking you to sponsor them?" Marianne shook her head, saying. "Same status ruling."

"World court ruled that adopted parents have to have the same physical status as the child," John explained. "Only the living can adopt the living."

"They're afraid that virtual parents would preset a child's desire to transition as soon as it became an adult," Marianne said.

Transition
as in
kill themselves
. Dead at eighteen; now there was a waste of effort. John nodded. "And again, it's not fair for a kid not to have parents on the same plane of existence. Not really there for feedings, and potty training, and baths, and bedtime." Sorrow filled Emma's face. It hurt Andrew to see it. He'd left Emma alone when he died. She ate alone. Slept alone. He had done something worse than abandon her—he kept her stranded. He knew he should remind her that the wedding vows ran "til Death do us part" but he didn't have the courage.

"How old is Jewel now?" Emma asked to detour the conversation away from the specter of death. It turned out that John had been running at the fast clock speed to "make time" for his new family. In the weeks since they'd talked last, he and Marianne had gone through the legal work needed to qualify for the baby, lived through a nine-month "pregnancy," a painless "birth," and three months of intensive baby care, complete with diapers.

"Couldn't they skip the diapers?" Andrew asked.

Marianne laughed at the face he was making. "They're only iconic. They're not stinky or messy. Elimination is part of the body feedback that they think might be vital to a child's growth, so they included it. After she's potty trained, biological functions are tapered off." This led somehow to a conversation about Andrew's and John's own potty training experiences. While they talked, the baby started to fuss. Marianne and John took turns producing pacifiers and bright colored rattles out of thin air. Jewel would mouth the new item intently and then reject it.

"You know, I think she might be hungry," Marianne said at last. She produced a shawl that she draped over her shoulder and started to unbutton her shirt.

"I'll go check on the turkey." His mom bolted from the room.

"Honey." Emma took Andrew's hand and pulled him to his feet. "Can I talk to you alone for a minute?" Death had to be making him slow, because it wasn't until they were out in the backyard that he realized that Marianne was going to breastfeed her baby.

"Why—why would they do it that way?" He sputtered at the idea of dead woman feeding a digital baby off a virtual reality breast.

"Why not? It was the way we're designed to feed our children." Emma laughed at his dismay. She leaned against him and looked searchingly into his eyes. "It's the way I want to feed our child." Andrew's heart sank. Ironically they'd spent the early years of their marriage trying not to have children, waiting for a time when they could afford for Emma to stop working. In the end, they'd waited too long, and his cancer put an end to all their plans. If he kept her stranded by his side, she wouldn't have a chance to have the life she deserved, a life with the babies she'd always wanted so badly. "Em, I think we should—we should get a divorce. It's not fair to you. You're alive and I'm dead. I can't give you children. You should be with someone that can."

She tightened her hold on him as if she was afraid he'd bolt. "Andy . . . I'm dead."

"What?"

"They found ovarian cancer in me a few months ago, and I opted to go digital."

"When?"

"Does it really matter? You couldn't tell the difference."

He could only stare at her, feeling betrayed. Grief was starting to grow inside him, like a spark on a pile of dead leaves, rushing toward a forest fire.

"Don't you dare!" Emma cried. "I am right here in front of you. Don't you act like I'm not real. This is me. You haven't lost anything."

"How can you know it? You could be some clever self-deluded program that thinks it can feel."

"Because I love you."

"That doesn't prove anything. I love you, but I don't think I'm real." She gave a dry laugh that was nearly a sob. "You're real. You're the way you always were. Doubting everything. You weren't sure your parents loved you growing up. You were always wondering why and if I really loved you. You were never even sure what you felt for me was love. There were times you questioned if the universe was real. Even before you died, you thought you might be a program running on a simulation."

"I was wrong about that last one. Simulated reality isn't that detailed."

"Sometimes you just have to have faith. You are you." She gave him a little push. "I'm me." She pushed him again. "I love you." Push. "Your brother and mother are real and they love you." Push. "The world we left was real, but it's still there, and this world is based in that one, so this world is just as real." She'd pushed him up against a wall and kissed him now that she had him pinned. All-consuming grief, like he'd never felt before, still blazed through him, until the very roar of that emotion muted his hearing and burned in his eyes.

"I can't—I can't believe . . ." That she killed herself without telling him. That she'd been dead for days—weeks—months? That he never noticed.

"Why is it so hard to accept that there are things that you can't prove? That some things just are? Love. Reality. God. Smoke in air. You can see it and smell it and taste it, but you can't grab it tight in your hands and look at it closely."

"If there was a God, shouldn't we die and let our souls go to heaven? If heaven even exists." She shook her head. "I've always believed that God let us develop technology because it lets us grow. Look at Jewel."

"A program mimicking a real person?"

She swatted him. "No. Jewel is like every baby. An infant always explores its own body first, the limits of its own container. And then its tiny little world: the crib that it sleeps in, the playpen full of toys, the vast plain of the living room floor, the giants that are its family. The universe is huge and can only be learned by exploring."

"I don't see where you're going with this."

"There's no way we can learn Earth as well as we learned our parent's house. Each and every little nook and cranny. There's no time. We grow old and die before more than a little bit of it gets familiar. And Earth is such a little bit of the universe. If we're going to 'grow up' we need more time. Maybe going digital is all part of the plan."

He was crying, a programmed response to the pain he felt. But he'd never felt grief like this: so raw and overwhelming. This version of "him" couldn't have been preprogrammed with something he'd never experienced. It was real grief. It was ironic that he could finally start to believe he might be real because he felt so bad.

"Stop it!" Emma hit him, tears shimmering in her eyes. "I'm right here! I'm real! I'm me."

"Yes. I know."

"And I want a baby. We waited and waited for the right time. We waited until it was too late." He opened his mouth, groping for arguments, and then realized that Jewel was as real as he believed her to be. If he closed his mind to the possibility that she could be "real," then to him, she never would be. If he opened his heart and mind, then she was truly his niece. This was house that his mother called home. This was his family that loved him. And this day they would be together to give thanks for all their blessings.

"All right. Let's call her Faith—so I won't forget."

* * *

Afterword by Wen Spencer

After twenty-two years, my husband and I have learned that we have certain irreconcilable
differences on just a handful of subjects, but on those few issues, we'll never see eye-to-eye. One
of them is if humans have choices or if all actions are pre-determined. (I side on having choices.
My husband can work me into a froth with his arguments for predetermination.) Another is the
fate of mankind at the time of the singularity. We disagree so wildly that he merely has to murmur

"singularity" and I growl in annoyance.

I jumped at the chance to state my opinion on the subject in a short story. But I found trying to
clarify what I so strongly felt in a work of fiction, or even this essay, not an easy task.
I find that my main annoyance with the singularity is that it clings to the image that humanity will
instantly transform, a la
Childhood's End
by Arthur C. Clarke. One moment we're ourselves as we
are now, and a moment later we're all hip twentysomething cyberpunks. In Clarke's novel,
though, there was the entire adult population, overlooked by evolution and swept neatly off to one
side by aliens. In our future, there probably won't be kindly aliens to get rid those annoying
has-beens. (I say probably because the science fiction writer in me wonders from time to time if
our race to a singularity hasn't been engineered by aliens . . . but I digress.)
If we do transform in one blinding moment of digital transcendence, there will be messy bits.
There will be my mother who thought that because diskettes got a rigid cover when they shrunk to
three and a half inches that they were now "hard" drives. There will be myself, who despite a
bachelor of science degree in information science can get any software program to crash in
inexplicable ways. There will be my autistic son who only uses the computer to look up classical
cars. So far, we've got my husband outnumbered three to one.