Twiceborn

by C. L. Kagmi

  An object of human manufacture? How? And why? Were the handmaids only helping the Divine?

  No. That is not what her memories tell her, what they show her. And that means her memories are false. All of them.

  Sheanna crumples to her knees. And thinks of Marcus.

  Marcus. Marcus. She can only think of Marcus.

  Not more than a woman, some part of her mind thinks, piecing together a puzzle her conscious mind cannot yet comprehend. Less. Less than an animal. A machine made by animals. To serve them.

  She remembers Creation with absolute clarity. Under the weight of such contradictory information, her mind threatens to fracture.

  How much is true?

  “Sheanna?”

  It is Rachel’s soft voice.

  Sheanna opens her mouth but finds she cannot speak. It is not rage or shock that renders her mute. Something is going wrong inside her head, a clouding and a slowly-spreading paralysis.

  “Oh, Sheanna.” The small woman gathers her goddess in her arms, lays her stiffening form on the cold metal floor.

  “Let her understand,” Anna says, walking in from behind Rachel. “She deserves that.”

  “She won’t remember this tomorrow.” Crystal tears fall from Rachel’s eyes.

  Anna crouches to lean over Sheanna’s face and tells her:

  “We have always needed gods. When we found none in the Void, we made our own. Only the godmakers know. The others can’t, or they will be deprived of that which they need.”

  The part of her that remembers creation cannot believe this. She sees that part separating from her finite mind, her self.

  “We tried to make you better than ourselves.” Rachel tells her. Looks away from her goddess with red-rimmed eyes.

  And then there is a third brown form kneeling over her, slanted violet eyes staring down at her. She knows the wonder that a worshipper must feel as a long-fingered hand reaches out and lays atop Sheanna’s hair.

  “You will not remember this,” Anna promises, as though this is a comfort, as the new and uncorrupted goddess begins to copy memories from the old. The humans will edit out the broken ones, somehow, Sheanna is sure. How many of her memories, even of this lifetime, are her own?

  How many times? she wonders, and wonders if Marcus will notice that she’s gone. Changed. Replaced. Will he ever know?

  A thousand other questions swarm within her mind, but there is no time for answers.

  The walls that separate Sheanna from the Void fall like crumbling stone.

  After the Upload

  Content Warning: This story deals with implications of disturbing, albeit consensual, violence.

  * * *

  “After the Upload” appears here for the first time following my stubborn refusal to cut 4,000 words off of it to fit into a professional magazine. I hope my stubbornness has been well worth it.

  I remember how the Project began. Most everyone has forgotten, you know. They were all there for it, all except the netborn, but nobody paid much attention at the time and the myth they’ve painted is prettier. They like to think that they were all in on it, you see—participants in a conscious and concerted drive toward utopia, supported by the vast and unanimous network of humans around the globe.

  The truth is that almost no one gave a damn about our work and those who did mostly didn’t understand it. We were financed by a jury-rigged combination of defense and medical grants, scraping the bottom of the funding barrel and sleeping on the floors of our office when grant submission season came.

  In those days I never believed we’d accomplish anything approaching our end goal in my lifetime—but I did not complain about funding.

  One year, somebody read my application and saw fit to move me from an ancient little lab in the back room of a state college to an enormous facility near Washington, D.C., and put a lot of money at my disposal. With funds came overseers—from among both the military and the rich, many of them the same people who would support us while wearing, sometimes literally, different hats.

  This is how a typical sponsor’s visit to our laboratory went:

  “How is the project going today, Remy?” One of the few dozen white-haired politicians who I could not tell apart, even then, would ask me. (The “P” in “Project” had not yet become capital, because we had not yet succeeded.)

  At that point, mostly, we’d given some pretty good entertainment to about a dozen monkeys who were the precursors to human subjects. They seemed to quite enjoy playing with little balls that only existed in the computer matrix, and being rewarded for completing their tasks with little squirts of fruit juice. Peach juice was their favorite.

  “We’re making progress!” I’d enthuse, even if we weren’t. Funding for pure research was scarce, scarce, scarce in those days, so you never let the sponsors doubt the inevitability of a return on their investment. You told them that they would get it in such great spades that they would invest more, and then be forced to conclude that they had gotten something back out of pure cognitive dissonance.

  I’d show our visiting financier some neat little computer representation of a monkey and tell them things we weren’t really sure of, about how the Bio monkey in the next room was controlling the computer-monkey, about how you could see by the way it batted its tiny hands that it could really feel the virtual ball being mapped onto the sensory cortex of its brain by the electrodes, about how if we pressed this button then the monkey would feel cold and wet for a moment (people liked to press that button and watch the monkey shiver, and feel like they had done something complicated and important).

  The financiers’ eyes would glitter. “How long until it’s ready for people?” they would ask.

  And I would always joke: “Well, you could be one of our first test subjects.”

  We managed not to kill anyone during the first tests, I think. So much is fuzzy now, blurred and indistinct, but I think I would remember that. I was always pathologically conscientious, from an early age—a genetic thing, probably.

  Yes, that kind of thing was originally genetic. Hard-coded, too. You couldn’t edit it at all until CRISPR came along. Sounds odd, doesn’t it, not being able to rewrite your own source code?

  At any rate, I don’t remember any of the crippling fear or guilt that would have come from killing somebody. Don’t look at me like that. I like to forget that you people find the concepts of guilt and fear unpleasant.

  I do remember the first person we saved. It was Amelia Langley—yes, that Amelia Langley.

  She was a young girl when I met her, fifteen years old and dying of leukemia (now there’s a scourge I don’t miss). She was cognitively sharp as a tack, neuroplastic as anything, and had nothing left to lose.

  And she was also some defense contractor’s daughter, which meant she got to talk to us, while the thousands of other children dying of leukemia did not.

  Don’t look at me like that. None of that was my doing. It’s not my fault if I remember it, or if I won’t let the rest of you forget.

  I’m sure you’ve seen her. She is little different now than she was then. Older, of course, in both brain state and appearance. But she always had red hair and green eyes (though she’d lost all her hair when I met her—I’ll explain later). She always had a curious face and an even curiouser resistance to terror. And there were many things to be terrified of, in those days.

  It was less hope and more curiosity that lit up her face when I spoke to her the first time. I was shaking in my boots at this new thing, this dying human who had been entrusted to me. She seemed at peace, the adult in the room between the two of us. I’d been told to reassure her, I remember, but it went more the other way.

  We put the crown on her head, punched a hundred tiny holes into her skull and extruded a dozen tiny probes into each hole. And then we put her under—yes, the brain was in the head, remember? You know that. You’d just forgotten the implications of it. At any rate, the head was the access point for Upload—the only body part that real
ly counted.

  Amelia said that the sensations were funny. That was probably an understatement, judging by her bewildered expression when we bought her back up. But afterwards she smiled at the wire leads trailing out of her skull and caressed them, and I knew we had something, and it frightened me.

  Amelia was the first complete Upload, error rate 0.6%. Unacceptably high today (philosophically speaking, maybe always?), but damned incredible for mid-21st century tech.

  The program in the computer was Amelia, give or take 0.6%. It was missing part of her sense of humor, maybe, or her bitterness over her first boyfriend breaking up with her a year ago, or a few memories of the little spotted dog that used to come with her to the clinic as a comfort animal. It’s hard to say what was missing, but what was there in the computer was beyond incredible—

  99.4% of Amelia!

  The principle of the thing is as basic to you now as the first words a toddler speaks, as why-wouldn’t-that-work as gravity. But to us then, it was new.

  It is impossible, I have discovered, to explain to a netborn what life was like Before. That humans could only exist within a big, squishy pile of waterlogged chemicals, cells and chromatin and ions, and that the slightest perturbation could destroy a brain—resulting in the irretrievable loss of consciousness and personality—in a matter of minutes.

  The trouble is, of course, that you all have forgotten death. “Irretrievable” isn’t a word we use around here much. It’s certainly not something that happens to people. Except—

  We’ll talk about that later.

  I used to see stroke patients when I was on medical rotation in my youth. Those were people who lost memories and abilities due to chemical disruptions of the brain. Some only limped a little. Others couldn’t walk or speak. Yes, permanently. They couldn’t just Upload then—not yet.

  I remember watching them. Wondering, as seconds passed, just how badly their blood flow was compromised, how many neurons would die and explode, scattering their information into a senseless chemical stew that could not be reconstructed.

  I’d wonder how many tiny parts of what had once been the person—memory, emotion, ability—would be lost before we could get blood flow re-established to supply the precious oxygen that allowed those superbly fragile bio-computers to continue to exist. If something was lost in those days, it was lost forever. Not intentionally, not carefully, but accidentally and all the time.

  That wasn’t how I thought about it then, of course. Computers were still devices for entertainment, not medicine. Doctors didn’t even yet understand the delicate interplay that neurons depended on to stay alive. Certainly nobody could conceive of a day when the two would integrate and we would look back and ask ‘what the hell was that?’ about both of them, primitive flesh and metal alike.

  Today we can understand those things, and we can ask that, but I’m not entirely sure it’s a net gain.

  Hypocritical, I know. I accepted the Upload’s gift of immortality myself, and have not yet relinquished it. But I bear some responsibility for this reality; and so, some I have responsibility to be concerned.

  There is a great deal you’ve forgotten, all of you.

  Let me begin to explain why I am not always glad that we succeeded—and how I came to be where I am today.

  Saving Amelia was a good thing. It was a great, unprecedented victory. The little girl’s body expired but the contents of her nervous system remained alive and lively, controlling a pretty little computer simulation that had her green eyes and her round face until she decided, a few months in, that a more mature look suited her.

  Dozens more sick children followed—children of the wealthy, all of them. Then it was sick adults, and then finally seniors. The first included not a few of our funders who had been counting down the days to human trials and hoping that their pacemakers didn’t give out in the interim.

  One of the men who had given us generous sums after learning about the Project through a defense department friend was 103 years old when we Uploaded him. Which I suppose means nothing to anybody, now, since most of you have been around for a couple of centuries, but in those days living past 100 was a rare feat.

  I suppose I’m not making my case for the Bio world very well.

  Had you heard of Erik Chiyari before—well, you know? That’s probably good—you’re far too young for his work. He was an artist, they say. And I won’t deny that what he did could be called art, although it’s the kind of art that would have gotten you a few centuries’ worth of prison time back in the old days.

  Yes I know I just said that people didn’t live that long back then—it was a point the court systems would make, back then, to state intent to punish someone for longer than they could possibly live—

  Never mind.

  Suffice to say that if Erik Chiyari had come to me as a biological human living outside the Net, I would not have Uploaded him. Not if I had known about his work, his “art” and the impact it would have.

  His work is considered perfectly harmless now, while I am not—there’s a perspective change for you. Well, for me. And for those who remember.

  Erik painted with blood, you see. Actual blood. Not Bio, physical stuff, of course. But he built his subjects simulated Bio skins, right down to the cell structures and the DNA. They were as perfect replicas of living matter as have ever existed in here, not the usual avatars coded only for aesthetics. You could probably have built a real person out of those skins, back in Bio space, if you had a printer good enough. In a way he was doing precisely the reverse of what I’d done.

  He’d build those skins, as close as I’ve seen in centuries to real human bodies. And then he’d destroy them.

  The ultimate homage, the critics said, to a biological past where anatomy and chemistry sustained life. The ultimate expression of humanity’s triumph over death. His victims experienced violent death, but they did not die. They’d make public appearances with him a few days after the event, smiling, but somehow changed.

  He sold copies of everything. In his own suite of programs, his experience and his victims’ were both recorded. Audios and visuals and tactile reproductions were available. Are available, I suppose. Do you know anyone who has one?

  ‘An homage,’ they said. ‘A celebration,’ they said. But this is the kind of man Chiyari was: I visited his house once. He had about half a dozen human skins hanging on the walls of his house. And he sold replicas of those too.

  And nobody dies of cancer anymore. But now people like Erik Chiyari cut people up for a living and hang their skins on his walls, and art critics praise his commentary on the human condition.

  I’m not sure it’s a net gain.

  I remember the day Amelia invited me to her home. I was not prepared for what she wanted to tell me.

  The sesquicentennial—our sesquicentennial, was approaching. Amelia was one-hundred and sixty-six years old, but had been choosing to appear around forty for the past century and a half. The age seemed to suit her—she’d had enough suffering in her brief Bio life to age most people fifty, but she had retained her youthful spirit.

  By now, I had known her for a very, very long time as a woman ripening toward middle age. She was red-haired, green-eyed, round-faced with a mother’s smile. I always wondered about that, as she’d never had any children in either the “new” or natural ways.

  She greeted me with the warmest of those smiles as her front door opened, revealing Amelia and the scents of home.

  It was one of those moments where, for me, awareness becomes boggled. I could not believe that the rough-grained oak of the door beneath her fingers was simulated, that the sunlight refracting off of it was not real, that the salt smell of the air and the faint dampness of the sea breeze was an illusion—

  No wonder so many people forget. If my first memories of Amelia had not been so stark, would I still remember how things once had been? Would I understand with real immediacy, if my first life’s work had not been to rage against the worst the Bio w
orld had to offer?

  “Come in.”

  For a moment I was overwhelmed by the memory of my own Welcoming, when I had been Uploaded with perhaps months left on my biological clock. Amelia’s was the first face I saw here. Most of the others present were my patients from the previous half-century. It was enough to make an old man cry, back then, that they were healthy and alive.

  And I realized, as I followed her into the entranceway of her home, the reason for my deja vu. Many parts of her home’s design were de novo, concocted from some of the infinite array of settings and items available to any who should want them. But others, like the door and the hardwood floor that now made harsh tap-tap-tap noises beneath my feet, were taken from her father’s house.

  Her family had invited me for dinner almost weekly as our project neared its end. Amelia’s Upload was poised to be, for them, as much a goodbye as a possible salvation. At the time, she was going where they could not follow; and we were not entirely sure the path we’d made for her was safe.

  Then, suddenly, I knew who Amelia was modeled after. Why her form was so familiar. She looked like her mother—acted like her too.

  And as we rounded a corner into the kitchen, I half-expected to see emaciated Amelia in her wheelchair with the little spotted dog wagging his tail beside her.

  “Can I take your coat?”

  I smiled and gave it to her, felt a certain emptiness as I did so. I’d spent almost a century of life taking pains to hide the actions of an anxious body—racing pulses, cold sweats, nervous twitches. Some part of me still expected that it should be difficult to hide my thoughts. But my programmed body bent to my will more easily than my Bio one would have. The vertigo from my trip down memory lane had vanished, simply because I wanted it to. I wasn’t sure I liked that.

  Amelia is a therapist now, dealing with problems I can’t imagine. She works with patients’ personality code directly, rewriting to achieve the effects they desire.