Visions of the Future (35 page)
Read Visions of the Future Online
Authors: David Brin,Greg Bear,Joe Haldeman,Hugh Howey,Ben Bova,Robert Sawyer,Kevin J. Anderson,Ray Kurzweil,Martin Rees
Tags: #Science / Fiction
Getting her to the recycler would have been a problem if it had been a normal hour. She looked like nothing so much as a body in a laundry bag. Fortunately, the corridor was deserted.
The lock on the recycler room was child’s play. The furnace door was a problem, though; it was easy to unlock but its effective diameter was only 25 centimeters.
So I had to disassemble her. To save cleaning up, I did the job inside the laundry bag, which was clumsy, and made it difficult to see the fascinating process.
I was so absorbed in watching that I didn’t hear the door slide open. But the man who walked in made a slight gurgling sound, which somehow I did hear over the cracking of bones. I stepped over to him and killed him with one kick.
At this point I have to admit to a lapse in judgment. I relocked the door and went back to the chore at hand. After the woman was completely recycled, I repeated the process with the man—which was, incidentally, much easier. The female’s layer of subcutaneous fat made disassembly of the torso a more slippery business.
It really was wasted time (though I did spend part of the time thinking out the final touches of the plan I am now engaged upon). I might as well have left both bodies there on the floor. I had kicked the man with great force—enough to throw me to the ground in reaction and badly bruise my right hip—and had split him open from crotch to heart. This made a bad enough mess, even if he hadn’t compounded the problem by striking the ceiling. I would never be able to clean that up, and it’s not the sort of thing that would escape notice for long.
At any rate, it was only twenty minutes wasted, and I gained more time than that by disabling the recycler room lock. I cleaned up, changed clothes, stopped by the waldo lab for a few minutes, and then took the slidewalk to the Environmental Control Center.
There was only one young man on duty at the ECC at that hour. I exchanged a few pleasantries with him and then punched him in the heart, softly enough not to make a mess. I put his body where it wouldn’t distract me and then attended to the problem of the “door.”
There’s no actual door on the ECC, but there is an emergency wall that slides into place if there’s a drop in pressure. I typed up a test program simulating an emergency, and the wall obeyed. Then I walked over and twisted a few flanges around. Nobody would be able to get into the Center with anything short of a cutting torch.
Sitting was uncomfortable with the bruised hip, but I managed to ease into the console and spend an hour or so studying logic and wiring diagrams. Then I popped off an access plate and moved the micro-waldo down the corridors of electronic thought. The intercom began buzzing incessantly, but I didn’t let it interfere with my concentration.
Nearside is protected from meteorite strike or (far more likely) structural failure by a series of 128 bulkheads that, like the emergency wall here, can slide into place and isolate any area where there’s a pressure drop. It’s done automatically, of course, but can also be controlled from here.
What I did, in essence, was to tell each bulkhead that it was under repair, and should not close under any circumstance. Then I moved the waldo over to the circuits that controlled the city’s eight airlocks. With some rather elegant microsurgery, I transferred control of all eight solely to the pressure switch I now hold in my left hand.
It is a negative-pressure button, a dead-man switch taken from a power saw. So long as I hold it down, the inner doors of the airlock will remain locked. If I let go, they will all iris open. The outer doors are already open, as are the ones that connect the airlock chambers to the suiting-up rooms. No one will be able to make it to a spacesuit in time. Within thirty seconds, every corridor will be full of vacuum. People behind airtight doors may choose between slow asphyxiation and explosive decompression.
My initial plan had been to wire the dead-man switch to my pulse, which would free my good hand and allow me to sleep. That will have to wait. The wiring completed, I turned on the intercom and announced that I would speak to the Coordinator, and no one else.
When I finally got to talk to him, I told him what I had done and invited him to verify it. That didn’t take long. Then I presented my demands:
Surgery to replace the rest of my limbs, of course. The surgery would have to be done while I was conscious (a heartbeat dead-man switch could be subverted by a heart machine) and it would have to be done here, so that I could be assured that nobody fooled with my circuit changes.
The doctors were called in, and they objected that such profound surgery couldn’t be done under local anesthetic. I knew they were lying, of course; amputation was a fairly routine procedure even before anesthetics were invented. Yes, but I would faint, they said. I told them that I would not, and at any rate I was willing to take the chance, and no one else had any choice in the matter.
(I have not yet mentioned that the ultimate totality of my plan involves replacing all my internal organs as well as all of the limbs—or at least those organs whose failure could cause untimely death. I will be a true cyborg then, a human brain in an “artificial” body, with the prospect of thousands of years of life. With a few decades—or centuries!—of research, I could even do something about the brain’s shortcomings. I would wind up interfaced to EarthNet, with all of human knowledge at my disposal, and with my faculties for logic and memory no longer fettered by the slow pace of electrochemical synapse.)
A psychiatrist, talking from Earth, tried to convince me of the error of my ways. He said that the dreadful trauma had “obviously” unhinged me, and the cyborg augmentation, far from affecting a cure, had made my mental derangement worse. He demonstrated, at least to his own satisfaction, that my behavior followed some classical pattern of madness. All this had been taken into consideration, he said, and if I were to give myself up, I would be forgiven my crimes and manumitted into the loving arms of the psychiatric establishment.
I did take time to explain the fundamental errors in his way of thinking. He felt that I had quite literally lost my identity by losing my face and genitalia, and that I was at bottom a “good” person whose essential humanity had been perverted by physical and existential estrangement. Totally wrong. By his terms, what I actually am is an “evil” person whose true nature was revealed to himself by the lucky accident that released him from existential propinquity with the common herd.
And “evil” is the accurate word, not maladjusted or amoral or even criminal. I am as evil by human standards as a human is evil by the standards of an animal raised for food, and the analogy is accurate. I will sacrifice humans not only for any survival but for comfort, curiosity, or entertainment. I will allow to live anyone who doesn’t bother me, and reward generously those who help.
Now they have only forty minutes. They know I am
—end of recording—
25 September 2058
Excerpt from Summary Report
I am Dr. Henry Janovski, head of the surgical team that worked on the ill-fated cyborg augmentation of Dr. Wilson Cheetham.
We were fortunate that Dr. Cheetham’s insanity did interfere with his normally painstaking, precise nature. If he had spent more time in preparation, I have no doubt that he would have put us in a very difficult fix.
He should have realized that the protecting wall that shut him off from the rest of Nearside was made of steel, an excellent conductor of electricity. If he had insulated himself behind a good dielectric, he could have escaped his fate.
Cheetham’s waldo was a marvelous instrument, but basically it was only a pseudo-intelligent servomechanism that obeyed well-defined radio-frequency commands. All we had to do was override the signals that were coming from his own nervous system.
We hooked a powerful amplifier up to the steel wall, making it in effect a huge radio transmitter. To generate the signal we wanted amplified, I had a technician put on a waldo sleeve that was holding a box similar to Cheetham’s dead-man switch. We wired the hand closed, turned up the power, and had the technician strike himself on the chin as hard as he could.
The technician struck himself so hard he blacked out for a few seconds. Cheetham’s resonant action, perhaps a hundred times more powerful, drove the bones of his chin up through the top of his skull.
Fortunately, the expensive arm itself was not damaged. It is not evil or insane by itself, of course. Which I shall prove.
The experiments will continue, though of course we will be more selective as to subjects. It seems obvious in retrospect that we should not use as subjects people who have gone through the kind of trauma that Cheetham suffered. We must use willing volunteers. Such as myself.
I am not young, and weakness and an occasional tremor in my hands limit the amount of surgery I can do—much less than my knowledge would allow, or my nature desire. My failing left arm I shall have replaced with Cheetham’s mechanical marvel, and I will go through training similar to his—but for the good of humanity, not for ill.
What miracles I will perform with a knife!
LAZARUS RISING
gregory benford
Gregory is a Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial award winner and the author of many top-selling novels, including
Jupiter Project, Artifact, Against Infinity, Eater,
and
Timescape
. He is that unusual creative combination of scientist scholar and talented artist. His stories capture readers—hearts and minds—with imaginative leaps into the future of science and of us.
A University of California faculty member since 1971, he has conducted research in plasma turbulence and in astrophysics. His published scientific articles include well over a hundred papers in the fields of condensed matter, particle physics, plasmas, mathematical physics, and biological conservation.
Gregory coauthored
Shipstar
(with Larry Niven) available at
http://amzn.to/1zSmCoV
.
When he woke up, he was dead.
Utter blackness, total silence. Nothing. Nothing but black when he opened his eyes—or thought he had.
No smells. There should be the clean, antiseptic, efficient scent of the Medical Extension Center.
No background rustle or steps. No drone of air conditioning, no distant murmur of conversations, no jangle of a telephone.
He could not feel any press of his own weight. No cold table or starched sheets rubbed his skin.
They had disconnected all his external nerves.
He felt a rush of fear. Total loss of control. He was a slab of meat waiting for extinction.
To do that required finding the major nerves as they wound up through the spine. Plus the many other pathways from the rest of the body. Then a medical tech had to electrically splice them out of the tangled knot at the back of the neck. Delicate work. He had heard about it, of course, wondered what it was like—but this…
A sharp slap of fear ran through him. What did it mean? Why—?
He fought his rising confusion. He had to explore. To think.
He pushed the emotions away. First he had to know more. Was he fully dead? He waited, letting the adrenaline of his fear wash away.
Concentrate. Think of quietness, stillness. You’re on a beach, maybe, surf rumbling in the distance… let it go…
Yes, there. He felt a weak, regular thump that might be his heart. Behind that, as though far away, was a slow, faint fluttering of… lungs?
That was all. He knew that the body’s internal nerves were thinly spread. They gave only vague, blunt senses. But there was enough dull sensation, in the background, to tell him that the basic functions were still plodding on.
Still… Paralysis encased him like concrete. He sent signals to push out his tongue, purse his lips, shrug his shoulders, open his eyes—and got nothing back, no sense if any of these motions had happened.
There was a dim pressure that might be his bladder. Snap his fingers, even? He could pick up nothing specific from legs or arms.
He tried to move his head. Nothing. No feedback.
Open an eye? Only blackness.
Legs—he turned both, hoping that only the sensations were gone. He might be able to detect a leg moving by the change in pressure somewhere in his body,
No response. But if he could sense his bladder, he should have gotten something back from the shifting weight of a leg.
That meant his lower motor control was shut off.
Panic rose in him—a cold, blind sensation. Normally this strong an emotion would bring deeper breathing, a heavier heartbeat, flexing muscles, a tingling urgency. He felt none of that.
There was only a swirl of conflicting thoughts, a jittery forking in his mind like summer lightning. A halfway house on the road to death.
He forced himself to think.
His name was Carlos Farenza, and he was 87 years old. Born in LA in 1998. His own father had died at 62 of hypertension, but 87 was no great achievement these days. With enough organ replacements, blood scrubbing, neuroengineering, the nutrigenomic supplements and anti-aging treatments, anybody who didn’t have stupid bad habits could make it to a hundred. It was just a matter of looking both ways before you stepped out into traffic.
The only limitation was cost. Nearly everybody was on Universal Medical, but society couldn’t afford to go on overhauling each eroding body. It was like keeping an old car running for sentimental reasons. Eventually, you were spending more money on parts and repairs than a new car would cost. The same way, society judged when people had run up too great a tab, so kicked the problem forward in time, through the sleepslots. For “society” substitute the eternal bands of arguing lawyers, who had nothing but their fees at stake. But some measure had to emerge.
So there was a test. For Carlos it came every three years, and that’s what he was here for. You came in and they poked you, prodded, pried you open and ran a whole-body diagnostic. If your mental and physio indices were up to par, you got three more years of free service on Universal Medical. Like getting your driver’s license renewed.
If you flunked… Even then, it didn’t necessarily mean death. Not unless you had already elected for that, of course. There was a hundred thousand kilobuck reward, passed on to whomever you stipulated.
If you checked out, there were other rewards for your inheritors, family, even friends. Reasonable, really—the government had to encourage elective suicides, to keep costs down.
But death was seldom the right answer. Most people chose the sleepslots. The medical techs laid you away in a near-freezing slot, electronically modulated, and stored you until something could be done about your condition. That might take ten years, and it might take a thousand.
So they had laid Carlos out on a diagnostic slab, hooked him up, said the usual soothing words. He had been jittery. Everybody was nervous when going through diagnostics. He’d had a cancer diagnosis before, but they’d muted it, maybe cured the damned creeping thing. These diseases were tricky these days, though; cancers seemed to know how to hide.
Still, it wasn’t exactly a life-or-death thing. It was merely life versus suspended life. But you never knew how you would do, no matter how well you felt. Tricky.
But he damn well knew which he wanted. He had good friends, good times, his job—everybody worked, or how else to support the truly old?—was a pretty humdrum office position. But he still enjoyed it. Divorced at the moment, but that could change. He had places he wanted to see, relatives, a neighborhood. He was anchored in his time. He didn’t want to wake up in some distant future with outdated skills, a lonely stranger.
If you failed the test, there was no reprieve. You didn’t get a vote; you were shut down neurologically. The techs would methodically prepare you for the sleepslots. If they had discovered a deteriorating condition, something that might even malfunction, under the strain of bringing you back to full consciousness… well, then the law said they could stack you in the sleepslot without waking you up. For your own good, of course. Just shut you down.
Like this.
They weren’t finished, or else he’d never have come awake again. Some technician had screwed up. Shut off a nerve center somewhere, using pinpoint interrupters, but maybe a tech pinched one filament too many. They worked at the big junction between brain and spinal cord, down at the base of the skull. It was like a big cable back there, and the techs found their way by feedback analysis. Some small fraction of the time, microscopic nerve fibers got mixed up, if the tech was working fast, Carlos knew. Maybe a gal looking forward to coffee break, she could reactivate the conscious cerebral functions and not notice it on the scope until later.
Had that happened to him? Maybe he had come to partway through his down-run into the slots.
He had to do something.
The strange, cold panic seized him again. Adrenaline, left over from some earlier, deep physiological response. He was afraid now, jittery, but there was no answering chemical symphony of the body. His gland subsystems were shut down.
An analytical rage built in him. He had never been cut off like this. Then a new idea:
Maybe this was what the slots are like. A kind of living death.
There was no way to tell how rapidly time passed. He counted heartbeats, a minute five—but his pulse rate depended on so many factors…
Okay, then, how long did he have? He knew it took many working hours to shut down a nervous system, damp the neuro systems, drain lymphatic points, leech the blood of residues. Hours. Routine never encourages alertness. The technicians would leave a lot of the job to the automatic machines, go get coffee, gossip…
He noticed the chill as a faint background sensation. It seemed to spread as he paid attention to it, filling his body, bringing a pleasant, mild quiet… a drifting, slow slide toward sleep…
Deep within him, something said no.
He willed himself to focus, in the utter blackness and creeping cold. They said the technicians always left a pathway to the outside, so if something went wrong, the patient could signal. He had read about that, somewhere. It was a precaution to take care of situations like this. But what would it be, what pathway?
Eyebrows? He tried them/felt nothing. Mouth? The same.
He made himself think of the steps necessary to form a word. Squeeze in the lungs. Constrict the throat. Force air out at a faster rate. Pluck the vocal cords just so. Move the tongue and lips. Throughout life you did it without thinking, but when you did, it seemed impossibly complicated.
Nothing. No faint hum echoing in his sinus cavities to tell him that muscles worked, that breath strummed his vocal cords.
He had read about this in a magazine article somewhere. The easiest way to slide people into the slots was just to shut down a whole section of the body. Okay. His head was out, obviously dead. Legs out. Feet gone, too. And genitals weren’t under conscious control even at the best of times.
Arms, then? He tried the left. No answering shift of internal pressures. But how big would the effect be? He might be waving his hand straight up in the air and never know it.
Try the right. Again, no way to tell if—
No, wait. A diffuse sense of something. Try to remember which muscles to move. He had gone through life with instant feedback from every fiber, anchoring him in his body, every gesture suggesting the next. Muscle memory. Now he had to analyze precisely. How did he make his arm rise? Muscles contracted to pull on one side of the arm and shoulder. Others relaxed to let the arm swing. He tried it.
Was there an answering weight? Faint, too faint. Maybe his imagination.
The right arm could be responding and he wouldn’t know it. The attendants would see it, though, and patch into him, ask what was going on… unless they weren’t around. Unless they had gone off for coffee, leaving the sagging old body to stage down gradually into long-term stasis, with the medical monitor checking, to be sure nothing failed in the ancient carcass.
Suppose the arm worked. Even if somebody saw it, was that what he wanted? If they turned his head back on, what would he do?
Demand his rights? He didn’t have any. He had already signed the required documents, read through the contracts, stared at the legalese,
I, Carlos Farenza, being of sound mind and body…
All taken care of. The attendants certainly had dealt before with people who protested, demanded to see their lawyer, bright minds trapped inside failed machinery. They would ignore his momentary lapse, slide him into a slot, no matter what he said.
For his own good y’know.
Despairing, he stopped his concentration. He had been trying to lift the arm and now gave up. He let the muscles go suddenly slack.
And was rewarded with an answering thump.
It had hit the table. Something damned well worked.
He waited. Nothing came to him in the blackness. No attendant came rapping in to correct his mistake.
So he was probably alone. Where?
Carlos found his memories strangely dim and diffuse. He could see the street this morning: an orange sun behind clouds, taking the bus… the chill winter breeze blowing trash down the sidewalk, numbing his ears… being surprised at how rundown this part of town was nowadays… walking down Wilshire past the new Conway building, first big one put up since the earthquake. Down side streets, the look of a gray, dusty city starved for water, not lively the way it had been in the 2060s. He had wondered about finally moving away from the city, panting as he shuffled toward the usual irritating wait at the Center. The staff always thought the old ones had plenty of time to waste. Then the ritual papers, always more stuff to e-sign, never time to read them. The pretty nurse who took his clothes away. Settling into the diagnostic sheath. Looking up at the ceramic glow, the little snick and strum, sharp bites of the incisions…
He must still be there. Not already in a slot, or else he wouldn’t be able to think at all. The literature they handed out described this process and he had read it all. On a slab, then, the electronics tapped deeply into him. He tried to remember what they looked like. The access terminals were on both sides, mirroring the body. So maybe, if he stretched, the right hand could reach half the input switches.
He concentrated and gave the commands that brought his arm up. Again, no answering signals to tell him if it worked. This was what it was like to be disembodied. The hand probably worked; it would have been too much trouble to disconnect it while the arm stayed live. Remembering carefully, he lowered the arm, rotating it—
A thump. Someone approaching? No, too close. The arm had fallen. Good. Balance was going to be hard. He practiced rotating the arm without raising it. No way to know if he was successful, but the moves seemed correct, familiar, while others did not. He worked without feedback, trying to summon up the exact sensation of turning the arm.
Dipping it to the side, over the edge. Working the fingers.
He stopped. If he hit the wrong control, he could turn off the arm. Without external feedback there was no way to tell if he was doing the right thing.
Pure gamble. If he had been able to, Carlos would have shrugged.
What the hell. You only die once.
He stabbed with straightened fingers. Nothing. He fumbled and somehow knew through dull patterns that the fingers were striking the side of the slab. The knowledge came from below, some kind of holistic sensation from the deep inside him. His body, then, could not be wholly out of action. Information spread, and the mute kidneys and liver and intestines knew in some dim way what went on outside.
A wan answering pressure told him that his fingers had closed on something. He squeezed it. He made the fingers turn, carefully…
Nothing happened. Not a knob, then. A button?
He stabbed down. In his head he felt slight jolts. Sinus cavities? Like blowing his nose? He must be smacking some control to do that. With no feedback there was no way to judge force. He stabbed; a jolt. Again. Again.
A cold tremor ran up his right calf. Pain flooded in. His leg was in spasm. It jerked on the slab, striking hard—he could feel it. The sudden rush of sensations startled him. In the heady surge he could hardly tell if the heady wash was pain or something else. Just to feel at all was a pleasure.