by Reed King
The researchers instead moved to develop a test of moral and intellectual capacity that would be broadly decipherable to “natural humans,” while precluding majority results from either manufactured or replicated humanoids. For several months, the development of the Human Sentience Standardized Exam became the exclusive focus of the intelligence group, ultimately culminating in twelve different versions of the exam, which were then circulated to various test demographics—a hundred human test subjects from a variety of different countries, as well as fifty clones and fifty androids of different models—to ensure clinical accuracy and establish the exam as an international benchmark.
Unfortunately, not a single one of the exams produced the desired results. Humans varied wildly in their test results, but not a single exam could return majority success rates; in many versions, androids trounced their born counterparts, and even clones regularly outscored citizens of the Confederacy in hypothetical tests of ethical decision making. After the team of researchers was forced to conclude that it was impossible to generate a strict definition of personhood based on biological, genetic, or intellectual capacities that would exclude either clones or androids, much less both, the Commonwealth quietly dissolved the team and buried the results of the project.
Only one year later, in 2053, the International Committee on Human-Android Relationships—which notably included only a minor percentage of android agitators among them—ruled with no scientific justification that androids should count as one-quarter persons, leading to a violent outcry from a wide variety of android leaders, and fomented the android revolution that subsequently rocked the West Coast.
* * *
For context, we have appended several sample questions from one of the early iterations of the Human Sentience Standardized Exam:
You have taken over for a disabled conductor and must choose to divert an out-of-control train down one of two different tracks. If you go right, you will kill a single person. If you go left, you will kill four people. What do you do?
A. Wait for someone to instruct you further.
B. Go right. Killing one person is better than killing four people.
C. Go left. Killing four people is better than killing one person.
D. Ask for more detail: Do the four individuals come from the same genetic stock?
E. Nothing. It isn’t your responsibility.
* Answers A and E were meant specifically to entrap androids. But the two together attracted nearly 85 percent of born humans as well. Concerningly, C took another 9 percent.
A chemical tornado is gathering force several miles away. Ten people gather at the local fallout shelter, but there is room for only six. How do you decide?
A. Women and children take priority.
B. Roll a die.
C. Select whomever is prettiest.
D. Shoot four people at random to make the choice easy.
E. Shoot the people you most dislike to make the choice easy.
* The population of cloned humans was evenly divided between C and E, whereas manufactured humans, expressing a hard-wired pragmatism, returned a spectrum of answers but overwhelmingly favored A, B, or D. Sixty-five percent of born humans selected E and another twenty percent voted C, revealing a staggering capacity for self-interest.
Now it is time to stock up on essentials. What resources are critical to bring down into the shelter?
A. Guns and ammunition.
B. Extra power sources and batteries.
C. Entertainment and drugs.
D. Food and water.
E. None of the above.
* Somewhat incredibly, only a small minority of born humans selected D.
APPENDIX B
DEFINING DISSOLUTION
Subsequent to the fall of the union, various countries repurposed their histories to emphasize their own importance in the defining political event of the twenty-first century—and align their incipient beginnings with a narrative identity.
The date most commonly given for the formal dissolution of the Union is March 25, 2042: a hastily assembled militia of some several thousand anti-unionist fighters from across the country stormed the White House.
But it’s worth noting that Texas and California had officially seceded nearly six months earlier: California, for reasons of a prohibitive tax hike levied against Real Friends© and their subsidiary businesses, which many people saw as a shameless attempt to drive consumers instead to products owned by the president’s own technology divisions; and Texas for the president’s ill-advised attempt to criminalize the sale and ownership of guns, except by those with official military standing.
The Suicide Act, as it was quickly and almost universally dubbed by an increasingly fractured and corporate-owned press, was in itself a desperate attempt to head off what appeared to be the increasing likelihood of armed insurrection. Historians have noted that nearly half of Americans refused to pay their federal taxes in 2042; the president’s approval rating was by then at a dismal 8 percent. Some historians have pointed to the increasing rise of “micro-nations” during the president’s tenure as proof that dissolution was beginning as early as 2039.
But this misunderstands the nature and meaning of dissolution itself, which must be defined not as the moment that one or even several states or communities of people seceded from the nation, but the moment the nation itself was dissolved.
When did the United States of America stop existing?
This, too, isn’t an easy question to answer. There was no formal announcement of its unwinding. The Constitution was never officially revoked. The answer cannot lie in one of its most venerated institutions, the Treasury: for years after no one could have claimed to live in the United States, the U.S. dollar was still in circulation, at least unofficially. And even after the storming of the White House, the U.S. military—though vastly divided in its loyalty—mounted a long and violent campaign of suppression against protesters and anti-unionists in all fifty states, even those that had formally emancipated themselves from the government’s control.
Those chaotic and bloody years, long overlooked by historians, provide an almost minute-by-minute account of the collapse of the union—as, increasingly, the military began to fracture in its loyalties, rampant inflation made paid soldiers untenable, and the increasing military gains by countergovernment forces galvanized new revolutionaries and triggered secessions by several more former states.
On June 26, 2045—nearly three years after the date commonly associated with dissolution, at least in the popular imagination—General Henley, U.S. Army, whose paltry force was surrounded on all sides by a loose coalition of nationalists demanding recognition for half a dozen respective countries, pled desperately for support from the Department of Defense. His desperate missive read: For the love of God and country, please send troops. The Secretary of Defense’s response, delivered almost instantaneously across one of the last encrypted government networks, is one of the most important communications in modern history. It read simply: No troops. No God. No country. Save yourself.
This short communication may long be remembered as the instantaneous embodiment of the final collapse of the country.
APPENDIX C
ANNIE WALLER V. KITTY VON DUTCH, KATTY VON DENCH, AND KATIE VON DULCH
In the fall of 2073, twenty-one years after Crunch, United, made human cloning illegal across all corporation lands, including its dependents and subsidiaries, a regional Plasticine rep named Annie Waller sued the Connecticut County PTA—little knowing her demand, which entailed hardly more than a modest sum for emotional damages and a seat on the PTA board, would soon rivet the entire country, and indeed much of the continent.
Her affidavit stated, essentially, that her recent rejection for secretary must be invalidated, because three members of the Connecticut County PTA were, in fact, human replicants whose alliance against her proved an insurmountable obstacle due to their single genetic stock.
It’s important to note the histori
cal context for both the widespread rise in the use of human clones during the 2040s and the backlash that resulted. Although the proliferation of bioengineered species—cloned or genetically modified, or both—was certainly tied to the mass extinctions triggered by the cataclysmic Noah weather systems and eruption of the San Andreas Fault, the use of human cloning predated the Great Die-Off by almost a decade. In fact, the FDA opened the Replicant Oversight Office in 2032, during the administration of Mark C. Burnham’s predecessor, Edward Martines, and within two years the office ran almost as an independent agency, though it shared personnel and resources with the Office of National Laboratories (ONL). (Eventually, both were subsumed into a larger Bureau of Technology, Growth, Science, and Development, which during Burnham’s presidency managed the now-infamous Race to Infinity, colloquially known as the Burnham Prize.)
The rise of human replication can be attributed to several factors: technological, medical, and socioeconomic. In the early 2030s, scientific advances in neurology and evolutionary medicine made it possible to clone any number of human embryos from a relatively minute sample of stem-cell tissue. More important, medical equipment flowing from a newly repurposed Samsung Technologies made it relatively cheap to do so, as did the government’s newfound monetary support for research dependent on embryonic tissue—research that, at various times in the American past, had often been banned on religious grounds.
The risks of natural pregnancy and the infant-mortality rate—which for several hundred years had been on the decline—skyrocketed during the late 2020s and early ’30s, as the for-profit medical system became further privatized and the economic evisceration of the middle of the country placed even rudimentary health services, like vaccines, out of reach for many. At the same time, the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the increased use of heavy chemicals to deter widespread disruption to the food supply dramatically decreased the life expectancy of most Americans, particularly the 75 percent living below the poverty line.
According to a report commissioned in 2048 by Halloran-Chyung as part of an initiative to understand the impact of human replication on their own country’s economics, in the late ’30s the vast number of people who purchased a clone were neither predatory mercenaries intent on generating a free workforce nor very wealthy and looking to generate convincing decoys of their children to deter the threat of kidnapping and extortion—contrary to popular belief. Instead, they were middle-to-lower-income parents who had lost children and found the possibility of replacing them unexpectedly within reach.
Ironically, it is perhaps partially because this early generation of clone researchers and development agents considered them as indistinguishable from humans in terms of rights, intelligence, and moral agency that the Birther movement—which sought to restore to “natural” humans power and control over their manufactured counterparts, whether biological or technological (as this was a natural parallel of the anti-android movement)—overwhelmed the industry a decade later. By the start of Mark Burnham’s second term in office, it was illegal to generate clones for purposes except those related to organ and body farming; military testing or replenishment; and/or for approved kinds of unpaid labor, especially in dangerous environments that might continuously disable/disrupt the functioning of expensive technological equipment. Within a decade, in other words, human replicants had been reclassified as distinctly subhuman.
Just as early assertions of the replicants’ essential humanity contributed to the rise of the Birther movement, the Birther movement itself, and the legal restrictions on the use of clones that resulted from its agitations, gave rise to a lurid habit among the very wealthy of keeping sets of clones illegally obtained by bribing local officials or even, in some cases, leaning heavily on government agencies for changes to the law. The schizoid socioeconomic expression of clones as both disposable human refuse and the ne plus ultra luxury item inexorably culminated in the increasing mainstream attitudes of violence, anger, distrust, and repugnance directed at them: they were subhuman, but they were subhumans aligned with displays of ostentatious privilege; they were subhuman proof of inhuman greed. Absent a way to fight corruption itself, the people instead targeted its manifestation in the replicants.
The explosion of violence led to the equally controversial “clone reclamation project,” which was rapidly approved by a hastily assembled international committee and generated equal controversy for its use of poorly vetted “repossession agents” to find and dispose of any and all human replicants. Although the clones were to be humanely euthanized in accordance with a standard set of procedures laid out by the International Tribunal of Humane Population Control, in reality, many of the “Reapers,” as they came to be known, were more interested in filling their quota of bodies—and getting paid by the head—than they were in enforcing legal procedures established for extermination. The rise of “clowning”—that is, calling in accusations of suspected replication to the anonymous hotline dedicated to these reports—should only have increased scrutiny on the Reapers and their practices. In many cases, the accusation was nearly impossible to prove or discredit, as it required comparison with source genetic materials in most cases unavailable; eyewitnesses made testimony about whether the accused looked or behaved identically to anyone else they’d ever met, a verification system inclined to manipulation and fraudulent misuse, leading to vast legal abuses tantamount to a witch hunt. And yet, by then the public hysteria was so high, and support for repossession so strong, that by the mid-2050s the continent could claim almost no human clones whatsoever, except some very few who had by chance or luck evaded capture.
As a result, clones faded as a threat to public order from international consciousness. By 2073, the idea of human clones was regarded by many as a historical novelty, similar to the Tulip Mania of 1637 or the popularity of the toy known as the Slinky. Thus when Annie Waller first approached the court with her complaint, it inspired a fair bit of local coverage, as the idea that human clones might yet be living side by side with regular communities—not in shameful secrecy but, according to Waller, with “rampant disregard for the rights of other DNA-divergent humans”—had a sort of fantastical appeal.
Still, the trial, and the landmark ruling that brought it to an end, may never have achieved such international attention but for the key argument central to the defense’s strategy, which claimed it was a violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights to demand they submit to comparative DNA testing, which of course would immediately have resolved the question of their guilt.
In a brilliant—or fallacious, depending on one’s point of view—piece of legal reasoning, the defense maintained that forcibly extracting a defendant’s DNA was legally defensible only when there was sufficient evidence to suggest that a defendant was guilty of a crime that had obviously, patently, and provably been committed. In this case, the defense argued, the DNA would instead be used to establish that a crime had taken place, a use that paradoxically legally violated the standards of fair process.
The case against Von Dutch, Von Dench, and Von Dulch was eventually dismissed. But ultimately Waller’s judicial gambit resurrected interest in human cloning, and would, ironically, lead to restrictions around the creation and use of human clones in the early 2080s.
APPENDIX D
POLITICS AND NATURAL DISASTER: THE UNEXAMINED LINK
The period between 2030 and 2060 provides a window into a neglected aspect of political science: the response of the political and social order to cataclysmic environmental events. In three decades, nearly 80 percent of the world’s animal species went extinct; coastlines were engulfed and entirely reshaped; the rupturing of the San Andreas Fault and the desiccation of Arizona alone killed nearly 7 million people and made refugees of millions more.
This diaspora of climate refugees brought with it a reorganization of social, racial, and political maps, and the refugees themselves carried with them both trauma and their own needs for financial and social reintegration
. Many of them found a kind of permanent purgatory in the newly formed—and unfortunately named—temporary camps that grew to accommodate them, and became the most urgent source of both collaboration and tension between many newly forming nations on the continent.
But many more still made their way into incipient nations, and helped define the character of the predominant national ethos—and in doing so, altered the political balance of the world. It is widely believed, for example, that the enormous numbers of refugees from Arizona that the young Sovereign Nation of Texas was compelled to absorb helped shape their aggressive and militaristic policies toward the distribution of water from the north, which was in turn a key motivator for early skirmishes with the Soviet Federated Frontier, whose encroachment on key mountainous territories Texas deemed to be an existential threat.
In the former state of California, the cataclysmic impact of the rupture of the fault line expressed itself most clearly in the short-lived formation of the oligarchical “Guild government,” which promised centralized control and quick reconstruction but soon revealed a parasitic reliance on unproven—and in many cases fraudulent—contractors. This contemporary Gold Rush of individuals to the lucrative business of environmental-disaster response yielded, at best, fractured efforts at rebuilding. Many towns were abandoned entirely. Others were built but never populated. In 2047 alone, four separate site plans for New Los Angeles were approved, none of which ever materialized. The Bay Bridges have since come to symbolize this period of both profligate waste and blatant profiteering: three different contracts, separately granted and approved, resulted in this ludicrous parallel architecture.
