Transhuman (28 page)

Shanique slumped. "Yeah. It sounds stupid, I realize."

"Not at all, girl. I'm here for the same exact purpose. So's the professor, even if she doesn't know it yet."

"My curiosity is aroused," Englund admitted. "Assuming you kids haven't staged this whole thing to impress me. But how could you? I went to Paradisio on a whim."

Englund's coat was red wool, reaching well below the knee but leaving her calves and ankles bare. Her purse was black, tucked under her arm like a football. If she was trying to look elegant and sophisticated, she nearly made it, but to Steven she seemed more vulnerable than anything. What kind of teacher went, by herself, to the student bars on the Hill on a Saturday night? A young one, a lonely one. She unlocked the door for them, and held it open while they filed through. Inside it was warm.

"Thank you," Shanique chimed, rushing between the benches to snatch her hard copy, still waiting on the machine's cheap-ass printer. She held it up, examining it, then turned it around to show it off, then flipped it again and looked some more. Her eyes were shining, her lower lip thrust outward and trembling slightly. For the life of him Steven couldn't tell if she was happy or sad or angry or what. But seeing the picture now was clearly affecting her all over again. Not as strong this time, but nothing you could politely ignore.

"My goodness," said Englund. "May I see?" Then: "Oh. Stylistically interesting, Steven. Pointilist Cubism with an Impressionist veneer? The subject matter is . . ."

"Uncanny," said Shanique.

"I was going to say it's a break from the usual. Student erotica is typically cruder. It's a very attractive picture, Steven. It certainly has the desired effect."

Meaning what? Steven hadn't "desired" anything but a working gadget and a decent grade.

"Do mine," said Nicole. "Print mine." Her voice wasn't wheedling or jealous or needy, just slightly impatient.

"Okay."

Steven turned the machine's various components back on, located the file, and sent it to the printer.

"I'm not going to overreact this time," Nicole said, half to herself. But as the image rolled out, she groaned. "God! It's so ugly. So ugly it's beautiful." She shivered a little, without losing her smirk.

"Animal snuff porn without the usual political overtones," Englund said appreciatively. "Now that's a fresh choice."

Steven shook his head. "I don't choose these images, Professor. They're a collaborative effort between the computer and the test subject."

She smiled. "Mind reading? You're too modest, Steven. Machines don't produce art like this." She was taking her coat off, laying it over the back of a high swivel chair.

"You, uh, want to try it?"

Nicole and Shanique were holding out their crappy inkjet pictures like love letters, turning them this way and that, smiling and frowning. Synchronized swooning, oh brother.

Eyeing the two of them, Englund said, "I insist on it. I'm still not convinced this isn't a put-on. Although, even as performance art this has certainly gotten my attention."

She sat down, and held still while Steven squirted her with gel and lowered the cap down over her head.

"You have a lot of hair," he told her, tugging its edges down, brushing her cheek half deliberately with the side of his thumb. She was soft. "We won't get as good a fit. It may affect the sensor readings."

"Noted."

Well, she could act all official if she wanted, make noises like she was primly checking off grade boxes in her mind, but as the brain scan came alive Lydia Englund had no secrets from Steven. Like Nicole, she was enjoying the process and the attention that came with it. When Steven leaned in close to adjust the gains, her limbic system lit up like an appreciative little jack-o-lantern. Well, well.

He started up the reference images and sat back to watch.

"Prepare yourself," warned Shanique.

"Oh, don't worry. I've seen some art in my day."

But no matter how well she hid it, Steven could see she was nervous, wondering if something really could punch through her jaded academic façade.

Minutes later, a final picture began to take shape, and slowly settled into the off-focus that was, alas, the best the machine seemed able to do. Hard to tell what it meant to Englund, but to Steven it looked like a sailing ship going over a waterfall, with a white bird lifting off from the soon-to-be wreckage and flapping toward the distant moon.

"Oh, you bastard." Englund let out a gasp, and then a kind of muted sob. "Oh, my God, you little bastard. This thing sees right into the soul, doesn't it? I'm sorry, that was rude of me. But oh, my God." Well, apparently the machine was working.

"Can you tell me what we're looking at?" he asked, trying for a tone of clinical detachment.

"My inner self, laid bare."

Huh. Okay then.

"Can, uh, can you be more specific?"

Englund pulled the cap off her sodden head and set it down. "Is that . . . can I take this thing off? The ship represents society, sailing over the edge of the world. The bird is—" She choked up for a moment, then continued. "The bird is me. I have the sense I've been feeling this image all my life, and never seeing it. But here it is, right out there for the world to gawk at, to trivialize. I'm at a loss, frankly—a kind of exquisite and humiliating despair. Your soul printer is dangerous, Steven." She looked out at the dark windows for a moment, then pressed on: "But. Art should be dangerous, right? It should shake us to the core. By God, it should shake us to the marrow." Nicole had found a towel somewhere. She tossed it into Englund's lap and said, "I think Steven's seen enough of other people's inner selves today. Personally I think he should try it." Shanique nodded vigorously. "Oh, definitely." She was standing by a shelf of ceramic turtles glazed in every color of the rainbow. Out of order; the purple was next to the red, not the blue. Didn't artists know the visible spectrum?

"It does seem like the fair thing," Englund agreed, lifting the towel to her hair while her other hand smoothed out her little black skirt.

Which is why, ten minutes later, they were all laughing at Steven's expense.

"Oh my," said Englund, around chest-seizing paroxysms of laughter.

"Oh, brother," said Shanique, more embarrassed than genuinely amused.

"Oh, right," chimed Nicole, laughing nearly as hard as Englund.

"That's not fair," he tried to tell them. "That's not what I'm thinking, that's not what I'm feeling."

"Beg to differ," Englund said, before splitting off into fresh, convulsive peals. And indeed, there was no point arguing about it. The picture sitting fresh on the inkjet was all the proof anyone needed.

The image—blurred and hazy, but unmistakable—looked, more than anything, like a page from the Kama Sutra. It had that same quality of stylized watercolor cartoon, that same sense of limbs articulating in not-quite-possible ways.

But the picture was of Steven himself, or an idealized version of himself. With bits and pieces of electronic gadgetry scattered around his feet. Sitting on a red velvet throne that combined all the worst elements of a love seat and a commode. With his pants around his ankles and a huge erection jutting up like a flagpole, and a big-ass smirk on his face. Surrounded by women who were not technically naked, but dressed in weird, angular lingerie that emphasized their own exaggerated goodies. Oh, God. That was bad enough, more than bad enough. But the women—three of them—were draped over the back and sides of the throne, in ultrafeminine postures that went well beyond the suggestive. They had knowing smirks of their own, but nevertheless conveyed a sense of adoring subservience. And that was bad enough, too, but the women could be identified as easily as Steven himself. They were, of course, Shanique Bentzen, Nicole Most, and Lydia Englund.

"My nipples aren't brown," Nicole teased, slapping him lightly across the top of the head.

"Mine aren't the size of radio knobs," said Shanique.

Englund was more philosophical. "Mine are . . . mine are . . . mine are just like that. You've captured my essence exactly!"

All three of them busted up at that, holding their sides and thumping the tables, struggling to breathe. God, the news would be all over campus by morning, and not in a good way. Was his soul so shallow?

His ambition so venal? They seemed to think so, and that was enough. Steven was never going to hear the end of this.

* * *

There exists, in the fair city of Boulder, a little fast-food joint with Taco Bell, KFC, and Pizza Hut signs hanging above the front entrance. To the students it's known as Kentaco Hut, but Steven is old enough to remember Kentucky Fried's "we do chicken right" ad campaign, which lampooned a mythical restaurant called "Super," with gray-suited workers sliding gray-wrapped "super chicken", "super beef," and "super tacos" down identical heat-lamped chutes. The idea being, you couldn't do all those things well, and a real fast-food restaurant should just stick to one narrow specialty.

Kentaco Hut basically is that Super restaurant, although the irony seems lost on everyone but Steven himself. Give me a super beef, yeah.

Anyway, that was where they ended up later on, when the women started feeling bad for him and offered a sodie pop to soothe his rumpled ego. And by the time they got there they'd all decided they were hungry, too, so now there was a veritable smorgasbord of Super snacks and entrees spread out before them on the brick-colored linoleum of the table.

"You are giving him an A, right?" Nicole asked, around a mouthful of crispy-sweet Cinna Stix.

"At least," answered Lydia, around a greasy wand of garlic bread. "I'll also put his name in for a fellowship, and encourage the biology department to do the same. But the press is going to catch hold of this. There'll be a shit storm, mark my words. Lawyers, acrobats, the works. Our boy's going to need some shelter. Are you there for him, really?"

"As much as he'll let me," Nicole answered, favoring Steven with a doting, long-suffering look that wasn't entirely ironic. Oh, yeah. She loved him. And he was pretty sure he loved her back, for some damn reason. Oh well.

Lydia nodded, evidently satisfied with that. "I can keep the university off his back. Give him space to work. How about you, Shanique?"

"Hell, I barely know the man. What am I supposed to, bake him cookies?"

"You could. I wouldn't discourage it. I was thinking more along the lines of modeling, though. You come off pretty well in the pictures, and if you like I could get the department to pay you scale for each sitting—"

"Whoa, girl. Professor. I'm not agreeing to any damn thing right now. I'm eating chicken." She turned to Steven. "You eat something, too. Fatten up for the coming winter. You want a biscuit? With some honey and butter? It's good."

"I'm not five years old," he complained.

That, of course, made them all laugh again, though less cruelly than before. He sighed. "All right, you ladies have your little gigglefest. I'm going to use the restroom, all by myself." He got up, went through the glass airlocky thing they called an entrance, past the exterior door to the men's room. But one of the Kentaco Hut employees was there already, using the left urinal, and as Steven stepped up, the guy actually leaned over for a look at his wang.

"Excuse me," Steven said, annoyed. Boulder was the kind of town where queers would sometimes hit on you, and he tried not to mind it. He tried to take it for the compliment it was, and not get all creeped out. But what the hell was this?

"You rich or something?" the Kentaco Hut guy wanted to know. Tattooed and burly, he smelled of cigarettes and didn't look particularly queer, except insofar as he might've been in prison recently. He also didn't look like he was trying to be an asshole; there was a kind of sincerity to him. He just seemed curious.

"No one has ever asked me that question," Steven said. It's not polite, he added mentally, sending it out over the psychic airwaves.

"Sorry," the guy shot back, with honesty but no real embarrassment. "It's just you walk in here at midnight with three women hanging all over you. I can't tell which one's your girlfriend, so I'm thinking maybe they all are. Or they want to be. So what's the secret? I haven't seen you in the movies or anything, I figure you must be rich."

Not in the way you think, Steven thought. I could give it all away tomorrow, and never miss a dime.

"It isn't like that," he told the guy. "It's my . . . my work. I see right past their pretty façades, right into their secret hearts. They seem to like that."

A frown. "Shrink? Priest?"

"No, sir. I'm an artist."

He'd never said the word before, or anyway never attached it to his own self. It was a presumption and a half—what had he really done?—but he liked the sound of it. He liked what it implied.

"Shit, man," the guy muttered, angrier than if Steven had been rich. "Lucky you; I'd give my left nut. Can you teach me?"

Years later, thinking fondly back on the days when he'd only had three women and eighteen million dollars to worry about, Steven would mark this moment as the great turning point of his life. For better, for worse, definitely not for poorer. He zipped up and moved to the sink. "I can do better than that. I can offer you talent's whore cousin: a soul printer hot off the line. But brother, it's going to cost you." And so it did.

* * *

Afterword by Wil McCarthy

Neurobiologists have recently gotten their arms around aesthetic experience—the shivery feeling
of
Wow
you get from certain combinations of sight and sound. The actual mechanism turns out to
be rather simplistic, attaching emotional tags to images that suggest qualities of flavor, fertility,
comfort, protectiveness, et cetera. The survival value is obvious—we all need to know a good
mate, or a good dinner, when we see one! But the implications are profound: art may be nothing
more than a side effect—a primitive hack people have invented to masturbate this system for
nonsurvival purposes. And the system can clearly be hacked in more invasive ways—a prospect I
find thrilling, horrifying, and also kind of funny. Hence this story.