Transhuman (32 page)

Alessandro knew he was doomed. It had been a quixotic adventure from the beginning, and even though he didn't know it would lead to his own death, he would never have got into it if it hadn't been for Lyda's beautiful face, her enigmatic words.

And now they'd die together.

"Back up," Lyda said, and gestured with her knife. "Back up. To the part where the mountain is sheerer. The bigger ones' soles don't look as though they'll hold them on."

"And the smaller ones?" Alessandro asked.

"We can crush them with rocks. For that matter, we can throw rocks at the larger ones," Lyda said.

"And it will give us time."

"But time for what?" Alessandro asked. He started collecting small rocks from the mountain and putting them on the sling he'd tied from his tunic to allow him to keep pebbles and hit the birds fast enough. She shrugged and smiled. "I was hoping you would think of something. Why do they home in on us?

What are they sensing?"

"Heat," Alessandro said. As he spoke he was backing up with her. "Body heat." And on this, he thought that he could produce his own weather, for a while. He hadn't used the ability in very long. It was not needed with the adaptable suit. But now . . . He thought about it and concentrated, sending cold breezes to blow in a tight cone about him.

He was never sure how it worked, but remembered, long ago, reading that moisture and heat were pulled from the air in just such a way as to cause breezes to blow around the person.

"Lyda," he said, from within his very own storm that was causing him to shiver. "Can you do this?" The golden carpet of tiny robots—each of them looking like the result of an unfortunate meeting of a chopping machine and a cockroach—was very close now. He saw them veer from him and toward Lyda. And then Lyda nodded, once. "It helps keep the natives in superstitious awe," she said. And then the wind started around her too, creating a zone of extreme cool. The robots stopped.

They walked amid the hordes of mechanical warriors, but thanks to the wind of invisibility, they
were not seen. They climbed in great steps now, up the side of the mountain to the tower, and
there they stopped, staring at a wall as dark as night, as strong as diamond.

"We will need something that can pierce this," the god said. And with a smile, he stole the blade
from an immobilized mechanical warrior.

"They will have built them," he said, "to take on armored enemies."
In such a guise he spoke and took the blade, and with it he banged against the great wall, while
chips flew. And Lyda saw what he was doing and she too got a blade and helped him.
The wall broke under their attack and, suddenly, they saw the interior of the tower and two gods
standing there, holding the guns that make death at a distance trained on them.

"Charlie," the god said, his voice tired. "And Lynn."
And the maiden realized these were the undergods on whose help he had counted.

"Don't look so surprised," Charlie said and smiled, looking unpleasantly at Alessandro from behind the burner he held in his left hand. "Surely you are not so stupid as to think that someone running an illegal scheme wouldn't have done their best to insinuate themselves into your confidence and become as close to you as possible. That fool, Blaise, told us you were trying to get reconnected. We thought you might be stubborn enough to make it up the mountain, and we thought we'd come here and stop you." Alessandro thought about the suit he'd discarded at the base of the mountain. It would have helped stop laser rays now. But thinking that, he thought how the suit could give one a feeling of invincibility. How easy it was to take off. He reached into the sling in which he'd collected the small pebbles. He was glad to see that Charlie didn't even flinch or seem to notice the movement.

Technology, no matter how great, was only as strong as the mind controlling it. And Charlie's mind had never been that powerful. This was why he hadn't been allowed in as close as Blaise. Alessandro lamented for Blaise, whom he guessed must have been dropped as he had, and was probably right now the centerpiece in a banquet for Lyda's hospitable city men. But even as he thought it, he was using his enhancements and the same skill he'd used on the birds. One stone hit Charlie on the hand, making him drop the burner—another one took Lynn's burner and—before they could recover and use their own enhancements to move faster than the body would normally allow, three more stones went, one, two, three to each of the contact points on their suits. Their suits opened and started falling, even as they dived for the burners.

And Lyda had reached Lynn's dropped burner first, and was holding it on both of them.

"Do you know how to use that?" he asked.

"I've seen and felt them used in virtus," she said, with a smile. "While I was lurking, trying to figure out who could help us."

Alessandro tied them up. They didn't resist. He wondered if they had other accomplices to whom they were even now sending messages. "I must get on the virtus," he said. The room they were in was mostly empty and must normally be a storage room of some sort. At the far end there was the shimmer in the air, the hole in the ceiling that betrayed a grav well. If Alessandro knew how these buildings were constructed, the controls would be at the top. He ran toward the grav well, flicked the controls so it pulled him up, and stepped in it. There were seven floors and then a narrow room and . . . He'd brought Charlie's burner with him and he almost fired before he realized that the man sitting on one of the chairs was Blaise and that he was fast asleep. A sleep drug. Like what they must have given Alessandro himself. Near him was another, empty chair. And on the wall, tiny, the portal for the Lifenet. Alessandro was studying the portal when Lyda came in. She too pointed the burner at Blaise, but dropped it when she realized the man was no danger.

"Will that allow us to get on the virtus?" she asked.

He nodded. "Yes. There are controls to allow whoever is within reach to tune his chip to it. Here. Let it sense your chip and then mine."

"And then?"

"And then we'll go to my virtus space, and summon to me those people who are used to working with me to pursue criminal offenses. And we'll tell them all. Quickly. It is possible at this very moment there are accomplices of the conspirators headed here to stop us. We need as many people to know of this as possible. Most won't care. They won't. But if they are even now calling for help . . ."

"They aren't."

"You didn't kill them?" Alessandro asked, in horror. Oh, it had occurred to him, but in a world where death was rare even killing your enemies had become unthinkable. And then, it would be far more cruel to remove their access to the virtus and drop them somewhere in the middle of nowhere. If they lived through a few years, perhaps they'd understand what they'd done to the innocents they'd dropped in the wilderness and hurt to vampirize their feelings and sensations.

Lyda shook her head. "No," she said. "But I hit them hard enough with the back of the burner to make them unconscious. If they can't think, they can't access the virtus."

And so the maid and the god walked into the halls of the gods and cried out, "I tell you of great
evil done to men by gods. These gods created this people to torment, and put them in many
different cities, and their cities they set upon each other. And tormented the people further with
plagues and illnesses. And their suffering the gods inhaled like incense."
The gods who knew the god of justice yet thought he lied, for you can't—you couldn't—be so cruel
and evil. But other gods said, yes, it could have happened. And they used their far eyes and they
saw that the god of justice spoke the truth.

And the evil gods, who'd tormented humans, were caught, in the middle of their actions and their
evil, inciting Lyda's people to attack the tower where the god and the maiden had taken refuge.
They were stripped of all their powers and made mere humans. And sent to live as humans in the
raw earth that they might be purified and become worthy to be gods again.

"Created people?" Blaise said. "And put them in the world with no resources and without affording them a choice of how to live?" Perhaps because he'd just woken up, he looked confused. "And that fellow, Lars Anglome, you were asking about . . ." He leaned in the reclining chair of a flycar, programmed to fly Alessandro home. "He's her grandfather? And he died of old age?" He looked at Lyda, who reclined on one of the other seats and seemed half amused at his confusion.

"He could replicate his health nanos," she said. "But he couldn't stop their decay. They replicated at increasing levels of decay. Until they weren't effective to stop his aging anymore . . . And so he died." She looked at Alessandro, "Thank you," she said. "For freeing my people of the cruel overlords who tormented them. Now they can progress."

Alessandro sighed. "I didn't want to tell you," he said. "Didn't know if you'd understand. But you see, they are people and they'll be given a chance to choose to come fully into civilization, to be integrated in the Lifenet, to use the virtus."

"If you told them that, they wouldn't understand," Lyda said. "It is so far out of everything they understand."

"Yes," Alessandro said. "And so you see, it rests with you. If you will, can you come back to my home and live in the modern world a while, in and out of the virtus? And then maybe you can think of how to relate it to your people."

Lyda nodded and Alessandro felt unexpectedly buoyant. It had been a long, long time since he'd shared his living quarters with a woman. Perhaps, he thought, as he remembered holding her tight against himself, a man shouldn't spend all his time on Lifenet. A balance. That was what was needed between the virtus and the real world. If only the real world could be made interesting enough. He smiled at Lyda.

And so the golden-haired maiden has returned from the halls of the gods. From them she has
earned this boon for her people, that they, who are kin to the gods, be considered worthy to
become gods themselves, to live fully in spirit and body, in both worlds, and know hunger, disease,
and poverty no more.

But it is each generation's choice. Each one must choose. Will he go on living like a man on the
face of the raw Earth and earning his living with the sweat of his brow? Or will he step forth into
paradise recovered and become a god?

* * *

Afterword by Sarah Hoyt

Years ago, while reading Heinlein, I came across the truism that any sufficiently advanced society
will be like magic to the uninitiated. This thought ran through my mind again, when I got the
invitation for the transhuman anthology.

Here is a technology that, if true, will make men like gods, who never age, can change their
aspect, and know good from evil.

And yet, any ideas of all of humanity stepping forward united into this apotheosis seem to me like
a fairy tale. Humanity has never stepped into anything all at the same time. Even now, in our
world today, there are people living in highly advanced societies and using tools that allow them
to travel across the world in a few hours or to communicate with people halfway across the globe.
On the other hand, there are people living in the jungles whose lifestyle is very similar to that of
our stone-age ancestors and who are either unaware of the more advanced world or can't
comprehend it.

Given the type of technology involved in transhumanism, the most advanced humans would look
like gods to the more primitive. In fact—I realized—the contact between the two civilizations
could have furnished the material or at least the setting for a lot of mankind's mythologies.
And in that type of setting, what do the more advanced humans owe the more primitive? Can the
more primitive humans choose for themselves? Should they be brought to the "future" forcibly or
given their choice? Or alternately, should they be kept in quaint backwardness as a form of
entertainment?

I normally write when I'm trying to process difficult moral questions. These were the questions I
tried to understand in this short story. Where the moral boundary lies, and where more than
human becomes less.

WETWARE 2.0

David Freer

Good scotch and dogs. Global computer systems and a man doing his best to stay away from
them. An unlikely alliance. The next story mixes all of these ingredients, shakes them well, and
creates a cocktail we think you'll find quite tasty.

Jacinth Bristov, the head of Compcor technical, looked down her nose at me. "You are evolutionarily so yesterday."

"Ugh," I said with a nod and a smile. That was a pretty good speech from a throwback, I thought. Especially a throwback facing a woman with perfect biosculpt features. What a triumph of evolution she was!

"I mean it," she said, severely. I was plainly supposed to be offended. I was always a dismal failure at living up to expectations, especially those of my boss. "Among the males to hit the extinction curve post-Singularity, you'll be first, George." She knew my first name, of course. The implants would tell her all that sort of thing.

I shrugged. "A little anachronism, and you're condemning me to burial in a tar pit for future paleontologists to marvel over the primitiveness of my implants," I said, reaching for the source of her ire. I like Scotch.

She wrinkled her nose in disapproval. She wasn't actually there and couldn't really smell the peat smoke on the nose of the Laphroig. That was her loss. Sure, the new generation implants might be giving her a VR simulation of the bouquet, terabytes of data she didn't need or want, but I liked the feel of the glass, the weight of it, and the way the small chip on the edge of the crystal caught the light. If I hadn't followed yesteryear thinking, I'd have settled for healthy isotonised drinking fluid and a hygienic edgeless disposable plastic cup, which the implants would have translated into a perfect neural input of the full gamut of Scotch flavors from their database. Fortunately for me, I'm antediluvian, and can just avoid the tiny chip. It's an old, old glass and with luck has a few germs to keep the nanos busy, and the good old-fashioned antibodies at play too.