Transhuman (22 page)

"It'll work," Gamer whispered reassuringly. "Once QC approves it, we're in the clear. And the doctored QC license virtually assures that. Don't worry; it's foolproof."

Nodding, I muttered, "It better be. If Creator wins, we lose. Permanently."

Creator started rushing the new G@vin45 face real-time, even as it was downloading, mere seconds after its release.

"Nice," he muttered to himself as the G@vin45 face kicked in and the initial sensations hit. He injected himself with a batch of highly customized rushbots, timereleased and self-burning, designed to accelerate the perception of time, extrapolating experiences along the way to fill in the blanks. A simple greeting between friends in reality could transform in the face under the influence of these rushbots into a several hours long, drawn-out philosophical discussion, possibly involving a trip to the beach, closing down several bars, a few rounds of sex and arguments, or whatever else the rushbots determined was appropriate to the discussion.

"Oho, what's this?" Creator said aloud when he found the new mode hidden deep in the command stack. "Blank Mode?"

Timer set for only a couple seconds, which in rushbot time would seem like an hour, Creator dropped into Blank Mode.

"Whoa! Intense," was all he said after it was over, and ignored his brainbots while they chewed over their analysis.

Creator smiled, and continued rushing G@vin45.

"Are you going blank today, Krusher?" the intern, Susan, asked me first thing Tuesday morning, her brown eyes sporting practiced innocence, a sharp contrast to her nervous tone. I got the impression she was fishing for an answer, but not to the question she asked.

"What?" Gamer broke in. "Asking the pariah for advice? Don't you know what happened yesterday?" Susan looked away, embarrassed, and lied, "I was away."

Gamer and I glanced at each other. He raised an eyebrow and smirked.

I sighed. "You're a nice kid, Susan. You know; just ask me." She looked back, her eyes full of shock. "It's true, then? You intentionally released a trojan?" It was my turn to look away, embarrassed. I hadn't thought of it that way when I put in the code, but Susan was right. "I did it, yes." Screwing up my courage, I looked her in the eyes and resisted glancing at Gamer when I said, "Nobody else knew about it until yesterday."

"Why?" she asked, betrayal flashing in her eyes.

I couldn't blame her. As the founder of the company, when I made the shocking decision to continue working in the trenches, I accepted a responsibility to uphold the image of the face designer I'd created. As an intern in my company, she looked up to that image—that face—as a role model. And I'd let her down.

Taking a deep breath, I continued, "I'm not going to sugarcoat my actions, or explain them, either. I will tell you that I took advantage of my position to do it, I had a good reason for doing it, and that you'll understand better tomorrow."

Susan's eyes softened, and she nodded before turning away.

"And Susan?" I called softly after her.

She stopped, but didn't turn around.

"You were right to question me, when you saw that I did something wrong. Nobody is above reproach, not even me. Thank you."

Susan nodded slightly, her back still turned, then rushed off.

"Nobody is above reproach, not even me," Gamer said, in a fair imitation of my voice. I couldn't face him, but my voice started shaking as I admonished him, "Should I have told her it's okay for her or someone else here to do what I did?"

Gamer softly padded back to his work area in the embarrassed silence.

* * *

One by one, they went blank. All through Blank Day they turned off their mods—most of them while facing G@vin45—just to see what it was like.

Most of them had forgotten the real world, and were glad when it was over. Some even tried it a second time, or a third.

Very few went blank for the entire day, at least intentionally. A handful of brave souls went blank without facing G@vin45 and without knowing how to restart their brain bots, or that it might take several attempts. If anyone did go crazy, it wasn't reported.

Blanks were out in droves all day, carrying slogan signs and aggressively demanding participation, oblivious of what was going on behind closed doors, singlemindedly pursuing their goal. Life is Blank—Fill It.

Better Blank Than Dead.

Respect Life.

Man 1, Machine 0.

A Day Without Bots Is A Human Day.

I left work early and decided to go blank on the way home. Facing G@vin45 on my way out the door, the Blank Mode timer set for the time it would take me to walk home at a brisk pace, I told myself I owed it to my dad.

A crowd of blanks chanted just outside my office building. "Blank, Blank, Blank, Blank," thundered through the air. I steeled my nerves and headed for the knot of swarming bodies. Hands grabbed at me as I pushed through. "Blank, Blank," boomed in my ears. Rough fabric scratched at my face and my exposed arms as I passed.
Blank, Blank
. Ripe human sweat overpowered my nose, and I longed for a smell mod to counteract the reek. A rough hand clamped on my arm and jerked me to a stop. I spun my head to face the assailant.

An old man about my father's age, with two days' growth of white stubble on his face and rheumy eyes barked, "Go blank, son, before it's too late." A hot blast of his medicine breath washed over me and made me wince.

"I am blank," I said evenly and wrenched free.

The old man smiled a little and nodded almost imperceptibly, but kept staring at me, even as I turned away. I could still feel his eerie stare two steps later when someone shoved a leaflet in my face. Snatching it away with one hand, I broke free of the crowd and ran.

Three blocks away, I paused to catch my breath. Wheezing, I leaned against a building wall and glanced over the leaflet. It contained a description of the dangers of nanobots in general, the supposed health benefits of a blank lifestyle, a personal plea from Creator warning of the dangers of this hybrid man-cum-machine life we were heading toward, and veiled references to us all going insane soon, all of which confirmed my theory about Creator's plan. Crumpling the leaflet, I tossed it aside. There was a shop district just ahead, one I'd passed hundreds of time, but it was different today. I remembered lots of neon above the movie theater, but there was none. Just a crumbling brick, mostly nondescript entrance and a simple placard over the door. No sign in the butcher's shop window, either, advertising the daily sausage special. In fact, it wasn't even a butcher's shop, but a meat market of a different sort, with a scantily clad transvestite, face caked with makeup, strutting outside the door, shilling for business.

My heart raced with fear as I realized this wasn't the safest area of town. The thought that I walked fearlessly through here on a regular basis scared me even more.

Two young men stumbled into a narrow alley, laughing, just ahead of me. As I passed the mouth of the grungy alley, I glanced in to see one of them drop to his knees in front of the other, while the standing man fumbled with his belt. In my recollection, I was sure this alley was clean and well-swept by a gnome of a Chinese woman, who operated a laundry on the far side. But the shop on the far side of this alley displayed the window bars and warnings of a pawn shop.

Not daring to look down the next alley as I stepped into its mouth, two gaudily dressed prostitutes beckoned me over to the curb with obscene promises. I tried to ignore them, but their taunts echoed in my head.

A muffled scream came from the alley, and a tattooed, teenaged boy with a shaved head ran out, knocking me sideways along the way, and dropping a bloody knife at my feet. Almost immediately, a siren yelped behind me, twice, and the hookers ran off down a side street. I scurried out of the alleyway, hopping over the knife. Heart exploding in my chest, I looked straight ahead and ran past the shops that were so much different from what I remembered.

In the haze of my unenhanced memory, I realized I had faced this area years ago. Now I knew why.

"They're calling it the Peculiarity," S0kr@teeZ snagged me as I came in the door. "I've been following the news all day."

"I hadn't heard," I said meekly, still shaking from my ordeal in the shop district. I'd been avoiding news throughout Blank Day, dreading the outcome. "I can't deal with this right now, Socs."

"Millions of people went blank today. Most used your new Gavin face; the word got around pretty quickly about this cool new feature, and the opportunity to try it out on Blank Day was just too much to resist for most of them. But you knew that, didn't you?"

"I was counting on it." Slipping off my shoes, I donned my house slippers and headed for the kitchen.

"Ah," said S0kr@teeZ, "I should have known. How long did you plan Blank Day?" Stopping dead, I jerked my head around. Socrates sat a few feet away, loudly purring, his tail lightly sweeping the floor, head cocked to the right, a pick me up expression in his eyes.

"I didn't. Why would you think that?" I held my breath.

Socrates blinked, unconcerned, but said nothing through the tunnel for a few seconds. "Sorry, my mistake," he said, finally. "It just seemed awfully convenient, and you said you were counting on it. I thought you meant that you designed Blank Day to push people over the edge, to show them that the enhanced life is better than the blank life. That's what happened, you know. That's why they're calling it the Peculiarity. The day when everyone went blank, experienced the real world and found it peculiar, different than they expected."

"It's true. I went blank for a while myself. I was shocked to realize how much of the real world I'd faced permanently. It made me wonder how many layers of faces I use—I mean, we all use—without realizing it. How much of the real world remains?"

"What will they do now?" Socs asked.

Realization dawned on me. "They'll commit to their botbrains," I muttered aloud. To S0kr@teeZ, I continued, "They'll reject the real world. Face everything and never look back." Instinctively, I'd come to the same conclusion on the blank walk home, as evidenced by the moment I wished I could smell mod the crowd of protestors. Wasn't that the whole point of facing? To mod the experience to fit another, more desirable pattern?

Creator knew this.

I'd unwittingly played right into Creator's hands.

"Socs, you're a genius," I said.

"I've been trying to tell you that for years, Simon."

"The past few years, I've been feeling like something has been holding me back. I understand it now. Creator understood it first, and he designed Blank Day to do exactly what it did: make us realize that we're ready for the next step. And you figured it out yourself."

"Full modding?" S0kr@teeZ asked.

"Yes. The next phase of our evolution, just like Kurzweil said years ago. We didn't realize we could never take the next step until we discarded our outdated concept of humanity. We've spent years talking about the coming Singularity, preparing for it, without realizing exactly what it is, except this vague idea about being the point when we would transcend our limitations and become something new. But to transcend our biology, and our minds, we have to transcend our ideas of what makes us human, too."

"To prepare for the Singularity?"

"No, Socs. Don't you understand? This is the Singularity. Now. Not later. Now. When people start to realize they can never be blank again, the whole blank concept will fade away. The shared reality we call the real world will be irrelevant. Everyone's individual realities, their faces, will become the real world. Freed from the shackles of our outdated preconceptions of what it means to be human, we'll become something else. Something different, more powerful than we ever imagined." Ironically, my father, a blank, staunch critic of modding, would be responsible for ushering in the Age of the Transhuman.

"The Singularity," S0kr@teeZ said, and purred in real life. Or was it the S0kr@teeZ face I'd given him?

I couldn't tell anymore.

It didn't matter. It would never matter again.

* * *

Afterword by Dan Hoyt

When the opportunity to write this story arose, it was an offer I couldn't refuse. Much of my
working years have been spent as a technology architect, and my love of technology is evident in
my writing—the first short story I completed involved quantum theory, the first story I sold
featured holograms and artificial intelligence, the first novel I started was steeped in virtual
reality. How could I pass up an opportunity to explore transhumanism (aka H+), which crams
together most of the technologies I'd been exploring for years?

What fascinated me most was that—unlike technology subjects such as home computers, which
attract both pundits and technophobes and every shade in between—there doesn't seem to be a
middle ground with H+. People either worship the idea or cringe away from it—and it was this
polarization that posed an irresistible challenge: How could I approach H+ in a way that would
be satisfying to both camps? I leave it to my readers to decide if I succeeded.
Ray Kurzweil asserts that a transhumanist Singularity is likely within our lifetime. As part of my
past technology architecture duties included forecasting, and most of the technology predictions
I've made in the last decade have happened, or are in the process of happening now, I can
understand his optimism. Ten years ago, I subscribed to several newspapers, magazines, and
technical journals; today, I read news and research subjects almost exclusively online. Instant
messaging and voice over IP telephony have transformed communications in ways that surprised
most of my technology peers over the last decade. The ubiquitous PDAs of the 1990's are all but
abandoned, their functionality deemed too limited, integrated now into smarter devices. Through
all of these changes, though, I found myself continually surprised at when my predictions came
about. It was nearly impossible to pinpoint a paradigm shift until after it had already
occurred—an idea which naturally insinuated itself into my story.