by David Brin
It’s in that suite of needs and aspirations—their qualms and dreams—that we’ll recognize our augmented descendants. Even if their burgeoning powers resemble those of gods.
—The Blackjack Generation
17.
MORE THAN ONE
The wooden box bore writing in French. Peng Xiang Bin learned that much by carefully cleaning its small brass plate, then copying each letter, laboriously, onto the touch-face of a simple tutor tablet.
“Unearthed in Harrapa, 1926,” glimmered the translation in Updated Pinyin. “Demon-infested. Keep in the dark.”
Of course that made no sense. The former owner of the opalescent relic had been a high-tech robotics tycoon, hardly the sort to believe in superstitions. Mei Ling reacted to the warning with nervous fear, wrapping the pitted egg in black cloth, but Bin figured it was just a case of bad translation.
The fault must lie in the tablet—one of the few tech-items they had brought along to their shorestead, just outside the seawall of New Shanghai. Originally mass produced for poor children, the dented unit later served senile patients for many years, at a Chunqing hospice—till Mei Ling took it with her, when she quit working there. Cheap and obsolete, it was never even reported stolen, so the two of them could still use it to tap the World Mesh, at a rudimentary, free-access level. It sufficed for a couple with little education, and few interests beyond the struggle to survive.
“I’m sure the state will issue us something better next year, when little Xiao-En is big enough to register,” she commented, whenever Bin complained about the slow connection and scratched screen. “They have to provide that much. A basic education. As part of the Big Deal.”
Xiang Bin felt less sure. Grand promises seemed made for the poor to remember, while the mighty forgot. Things had always been that way. You could tell, even from the censored histories that flickered across the little display, as he and his wife sagged into fatigued sleep every night, rocked by the rising tides. The same tides that kept eroding the old beach house, faster than they could reinforce it.
Would state officials even let Xiao-En register? The baby’s genetic samples had been filed when he was born. But would he get residency citizenship in New Shanghai? Or would the seawall keep out yet another kind of unwanted trash, along with a scum of plastic and resins that kept washing higher along the concrete barrier?
Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.
Even good luck, when it arrived, could prove hard to exploit. Bin had hoped for time to figure out what kind of treasure lay in that secret room, underneath the biggest drowned mansion, a chamber filled with beautiful, bizarre rocks and crystals, or specimens of strangely twisted metal. Bin tried to inquire, using the little Mesh tablet, only carefully. There were sniffer programs—billions of them—running loose across a million vir-levels. You had to be prudent when and what to speak, even on the gritty layer called Reality. If he inquired too blatantly, or offered the items openly for sale, somebody might just come and take it all. The former owner had been declared a public enemy, after all, his property forfeit to the state.
Plugging in crude goggles and using a cracked pair of interact-gloves, Xiang Bin wandered down low rent avenues of World Town and The Village and Big Bazaar, pretending to be idly interested in rock collecting, as a hobby. He dispersed his questions, made them casual-sounding. From those virtual markets, he learned enough to dare a physical trip into town, carrying just one bagful of nice—but unexceptional—specimens, unloading them for a quarter of their worth at a realshop in East Pudong, not far from the big amusement park. A place willing to deal in cash—no names or recordings.
After so long at sea, Xiang Bin found troubling the heavy rhythms of the street. The pavement seemed harsh and unyielding. Pulsating maglev trolleys somehow made him itch, all over, especially inside tight and sweaty shoes. The whole time, he pictured twenty million nearby residents as a pressing mass—felt no less intensely than the thousands who actually jostled past him on crowded sidewalks, many of them muttering and waggling their fingers, interacting with people who weren’t there and with things that had no physical substance, anywhere.
His profit from that first trip had been slim. Still, Bin thought he might venture to another shop soon, working his way up from mundane items to those that seemed more … unusual. Those kept in ornate boxes, on special shelves, in the old basement trove.
Though just one specimen glimmered, both in his dreams and daytime imaginings. Frustratingly, his careful online searches found nothing like the stone—a kind of mineral that glowed with its own light, after soaking in the sun. Its opal-like sheen featured starlike sparkles that seemed to recede into an inner distance, a depth that looked both brighter than day and deeper than night. That is, until Mei Ling insisted it be wrapped up and put away.
Worse yet, time was running out. Fish had grown sparse, ever since the night of the jellyfish, when half the life seemed to vanish out of Huangzhou Bay. Now, the nets were seldom full, and the stew pot was often empty.
Soon the small hoard of cash was gone again.
Luck is fickle. We try hard to control the flow of qi, by erecting our tent poles in symmetrical patterns and by facing our entrance toward the smiling south wind. But how can one strike a harmonious balance, down here at the shore, where the surf is so chaotic, where tides of air and water and stinging monsters rush however they choose?
No wonder the Chinese often turned their backs to the sea … and seemed to be doing so again.
Already, several neighbors had given up, abandoning their shoresteads to the jellies and rising waters. Just a week ago, Xiang Bin and Mei Ling joined a crowd of scavengers converging on one forsaken site, grabbing metlon poles and nanofiber webbing for use on their own stead, leaving little more than a stubble of rotting wood, concrete, and stucco. A brief boost to their prospects, benefiting from the misfortune of others—
—that is, until it’s our own turn to face the inevitable. Forsaking all our hard work and dreams of ownership. Returning to beg our old jobs back in that stifling hospice, wiping spittle from the chins of little emperors. With each reproachful look from Mei Ling, Xiang Bin grew more desperate. Then, during his third trip to town, carrying samples from the trove, he saw something that gave him both a thrill and bone-deep chill.
He was passing along Boulevard of the Sky Martyrs and about to cross The Street of October Seventeenth, when the surrounding crowd seemed to halt, abruptly, all around him.
Well, not everyone, but enough people to bring the rhythmic bustle to a dead stall. Bin stumbled into the back of a well-padded pedestrian, who looked briefly as confused as he was. They both turned to see that about a third of those around them were suddenly staring, as if into space, murmuring to themselves, some of them with jaws agape, half open in some kind of surprise.
Swiftly he realized, these were people who had been linked-in with goggles, specs, tru-vus, or contact-zhones, each person moving through some virtual overlay—perhaps following guide arrows to a destination, or doing business as they walked, while others simply liked their city overlain with flowers, or jungle foliage, or fairy-tale colors. It also made them receptive to a high-priority news alert. Soon, half the people in sight were shuffling aside, half consciously moving toward the nearest wall in order to get away from traffic, while their minds soared far away.
Seeing so many others dive into a news-trance, the overweight gentleman muttered an oath and reached into his pocket to pull out some wraparound glasses. He, too, pressed close to the nearest building, emitting short grunts of interest while his aiware started filling him in.
Bin briefly wondered if he should be afraid. City life had many hazards, not all of them on the scale of Awfulday. But … the people clumping along the edges of the sidewalk didn’t seem worried, as much as engrossed. Surely that meant there was no immediate danger.
Meanwhile, many of those who lacked gear were pestering their companions, demanding ver
bal updates. He overheard a few snippets.
“The Artifact … the rumors … they gain increasing credence!” and “The aliens exist … leaked dataviews … credible for the first time, approaching fifty percent!”
Aliens. Artifact. Of course those words had been foaming around for a week or so. Rumors were part of life’s background, just like the soapy tidal spume. It sounded like a silly thing, unworthy of the small amount of free time that he shared with Mei Ling, each exhausted evening. A fad, surely, or hoax, or marketing ploy. Or, at best, none of his concern. Only now Bin blinked in surprise over how many suddenly seemed to care. Maybe we should scan for a free-access show about it, tonight. Instead of the usual medieval romance stories that Mei Ling demanded.
Despite all the people who had stepped aside, into virtual newspace, that still left hundreds of pedestrians who didn’t care, or who felt they could wait. These took advantage of the cleared sidewalks to hurry about their business. As should I, he thought, stepping quickly across the street while ai-piloted vehicles worked their way past, evading those with human drivers who had pulled aside.
Aliens. From outer space. Could it possibly be true? Bin had to admit, this was stirring his long-dormant imagination.
He turned onto the Avenue of Fragrant Hydroponics and suddenly came to a halt. People were beginning to stir from the mass news-trance, muttering to one another—in real life and across the Mesh—while stepping back into the sidewalk and resuming their journeys. Only, now it was his turn to be distracted, to stop and stare, to push unapologetically past others and press toward the nearest building, bringing his face close to the window of a store selling visualization tools.
One of the new SEF threevee displays sparkled within, offering that unique sense of ghostly semitransparency in a cube of open space—and it showed three demons.
That was how Bin first viewed them, as made-up characters in one of those cheap fantasy dramas that Mei Ling loved—one like an imp, with flamelike fur, one horselike with nostrils that flared like caves, and another whose tentacles evoked some monster of the sea. They jostled each other, each trying to step or shove in front of the others.
A disturbing trio, in their own right. Only, it wasn’t the creatures that had Bin transfixed. It was their home. The context. The object framing, containing, perhaps imprisoning them.
He recognized it, at once. Cleaner and more pristine—less pitted and scarred—and a bit longer. Nevertheless, it was clearly a cousin to the thing he had left behind this morning, in the surf-battered home that he shared with his wife and little son.
Bin swallowed hard.
I thought I was being careful, seeking information about that thing.
But careful was a relative word.
He left the bag of cheaper, Earthly stones lying there, like an offering, in front of the image in the threevee tank. It would only weigh him down now, as he ran for home.
ENTROPY
Way back at the start of the century, the Lifeboat Foundation assigned doom scenarios to four general categories:
Calamities—Humanity and intelligence go extinct from Earth. Causes range from nuclear war or spoiling the ecosystem to voraciously unstoppable manmade black holes or ravenous nano-plagues.
Collapse—Humanity survives, but we never reach our potential. For example, eco-decay and resource depletion might be slow enough for a few descendants to eke a threadbare niche. Or a world society might enforce hyperconformity, drab, relentless, and permanent.
Dominium—Some narrow form of posthumanity is attained but limiting the range of what’s possible. Take every tale of domination by a super-ai or transcendent-intolerant uber-beings. Or the prescriptions offered by fanatic utopians from left to right, across five thousand years, each convinced of “the way” ahead. Suppose one of these plans actually delivered. We might “advance” in some cramped ways. Caricatures of sameness.
Betrayal—A posthuman civilization heads in some direction that cancels many of the values or things we cherish. Isn’t this the nightmare fretting conservatives? That our children—biological or cybernetic—will leave us far behind and forget to write? That they’ll neglect to visit and share a joke or two? That they’ll stop caring about the old songs, the old gods? The old race?
Worse, might they head off to the stars in ways that we (today) abhor? As predators, perhaps. Or all-consuming reproducers, or as meddlers, hot with righteous malice, or else cool and unsympathetic. Not the eager-greeters that we envision as our starfaring destiny, in recent, high-minded fables. But, instead, the sort of callous descendants we’d disown … as if such beings would care what we think.
Any of these general categories might contain the Great Filter. Whatever trap—or host of traps—winnows the number of confident, gregarious, star-traveling species, down to the skimpy near nothing we observe, keeping empty what should have been a crowded sky.
—Pandora’s Cornucopia
18.
POVLOVERS
Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.
It had become a litany, as MediaCorp kept asking Tor to “drop in” on eccentric envelope-pushers while making her way across the continent. At last, she felt she understood the real purpose of this journey. What the execs were hoping to teach their up-and-coming young point-of-view star.
There isn’t one America anymore. If there ever had been.
Take her brief visit to the State of Panhandle, for example, fifty-sixth star on the flag, where she met with members of the ruling party, who planned to ratchet up their secession bid next year, and to stop even nominally flying the Stars ’n’ Stripes. Even if that meant another aiware embargo. Meanwhile, next door, in cosmopolitan Oklahoma, there was renewed talk of a bid to join the EU …
… rousing bitter anger in Unionist Missouri, where bluecoat militia membership was rising fast and several casinos had burned to the ground.
A cynic would attribute all this fury to economics. A spreading dustbowl. The cornahol collapse. Across what had been the heartland, Tor felt the same anxious note of helplessness and letdown, after the bubble prosperity of the twenties and thirties. A renewed need for someone to blame.
And, yet, all through the last week, Tor’s hand kept drifting into her bag, to Dr. Sato’s little relic, still unable to believe that the Atkins director had given it to her. A Neolithic tool-core, thirty thousand years old. One of many, to be sure—anthropologists had found thousands, all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Yet, the specimen was surely worth something—several hundred newbucks on a bidding site.
An attempted bribe for good coverage? Somehow, she doubted that. Anyway, it didn’t affect her report. The Atkins Center treatments seemed promising, but hardly a panacea cure for the worldwide Autism Plague. Their approach only worked for “high-functioning” patients, who could already interact with others in fairly rational conversation. For millions of acute victims—fixated on minutiae, evading eye contact, prickly toward any distraction, or else lost down corridors of bizarre virtual reality that few normal minds could follow—for them, Sato offered only hope for desperate loved ones.
Still, her encounter with that strange man gave Tor an excuse to add one more stop, before proceeding to her new job in Rebuilt Washington. The semiannual Godmakers’ Conference, held this very week in Nashville, city of tolerance and hospitality.
It had better be tolerant, she thought, stepping past vigilant doorway sniffers, into the expansive Metro Convention Center. These people are wearing a great big target on their backs. And proud of it, too.
A real-cloth banner, just inside the entrance, proclaimed—
TOMORROW WELCOMES THE BOLD!
To which, a tagger had attached, in lurid vraiffiti, visible to anyone wearing specs—
And Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!
Beyond, for aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations, and selforg clubs touted “transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augment
ed by garish VR. Tor found her specs bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow repair kits.
From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.
From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.
Yes, robots. The quaint term was back again, as memory of the Yokohama Yankhend slowly faded, along with a promise that this generation of humanoid automatons would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too cute, or dangerous. Or all three at once.
“Every year, they solve some problem or obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,” she subvocalized for her report, allowing the specs to absorb it all, watching as one aindroid from a Korean chaebol showed off eastasian dance moves and a winning smile. The demonstration was impressive. But demonstrations always were.
“Then, they always wind up bollixed by some simple task. An uneven flight of stairs. A muddled foreground or background. A semantic paradox. Something that wouldn’t bother a five-year-old kid. And every year, the lesson is the same.
“We are already marvels. A three-kilo human brain still combines more amazing things than any computer model can yet emulate.
“It’s been seventy years that ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps growing. Ai can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds. Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took for granted.”
There it was, again. A theme, planted in her mind by Sato. The notion that something strangely spectacular had been wrought—by God or evolution or both—inside the Homo sapiens brain. About the same time as that chert core in her bag was the technological acme.
“If anything, today’s Tower of Babel is flat but incredibly wide. This generation of godmakers isn’t thwarted by language—that barrier is gone forever—but the bewildering complexity of the thing they hope to copy. Our minds.”
