I had no idea what Sweet Thing was talking about.
Sounds great. Give me a call when you get it working, I’d like to see it in action.
“What?” exclaimed Sweet Thing. “You mean you haven’t already gotten a message from me? The damned thing must not be working. It’s got to be the Planck fluctuators. Always the bloody fluctuators.”
Sweet Thing had his lifterbots remove some of the crystal blocks from the incomplete structure, and one of the offending blocks was systematically smashed into dust by maintenance drones. I drove on.
The road wound around the countryside lazily, and then, on the horizon, I spotted a ferrous elemental. Remember what I said about Pandemonium being nearly completely safe? Well this is one the reasons we say nearly instead of completely. I studiously ignored it, continuing on my course as nonchalantly as a 2,000-ton fusion-powered armored fighting vehicle can. I was far enough away that I only caught brief glimpses of its cog-matrix and vacuum blades, and fortunately it left me alone (although it must have detected me even before I made planetfall) and soon I was out of sight. A near escape: ferrous elementals have notoriously iconoclastic political opinions and once one latches on to you there is little you can do but humor it until it gets tired of trying to covert you and leaves of its own accord.
Eventually I came to a small clearing in a field of gently-waving graphite-bamboo, in the middle of which was a four-story mansion, in the French “second empire” style of Napoleon III on 19th century Earth. It was a pleasing building, richly ornamented without being overly so, and with the top story having the gently sloping walls and protruding dormer windows typical of the Mansard-style roof. I tried contacting my friend on the radio.
Hello, Alvin? It’s me, Old Guy. You in?
Instantly the reply came back. “Hello, Old Guy. Yes I am in and about. I’m in the attic, come on up.”
Well my 2,000 ton hull certainly couldn’t fit, so it was time to fire up a humanoid android. A generic male with a blue suit (perhaps I am getting too much into a habit? Maybe I should go back to historical figures) and I walked through the main doorways, closing the heavy oaken panels shut behind me.
The main entranceway was modestly grand, with two sweeping stairways curling off to the left and the right, but the rest of the first floor was completely empty of furniture or wall-hangings. The second and third floors were similarly barren.
At the very top of the central stairwell the richly carved wooden staircase ended abruptly at an almost jarringly small and plain grey-painted wooden door. I opened it, and stepped out into a large attic. It was mostly a single large space, lit by the small dormer windows and a smattering of electric lights hanging from the timbers on the ceiling.
There was a jumble of stuff all around – some old, but a lot of it had been newly made. I have to admit that there is something about an attic. They can have a mass of random stuff, but it’s always different from what you would get in a warehouse, or a basement, or a cargo hold. The way that stuff is strewn around, even without the exposed overhead beams and small side windows, you could tell this was an attic.
Hello? Alvin? You here?
“Yes, I’m right this way!” came a voice from the middle of the attic.
I picked my way through the paths between all the stuff, and came upon Alvin Accipeter. He was an unremarkable biological human, ethnic European (more-or-less), and sitting in a large leather armchair. A wrist-thick tube snaked out of his side at waist level, coiled around the floor, and then connected to what looked like a tall green filing cabinet rolling on casters.
You are still using an external bioreactor to maintain your metabolism? I thought we offered to grow you a fresh clone body. Isn’t dragging this thing around a nuisance?
Alvin looked at the green box he was connected to. “Nuisance? I hadn’t thought – maybe I’m just so used to it that I’ve stopped paying attention, but I think I’ve gotten spoiled by it. Even at optimal, a human body is so messy, so given to moods. Hooked up to the bioreactor, I am never hungry (unless I want to be!), I never have to go to the bathroom, or get aches and pains, or infections, or hangovers, or anything. I sleep perfectly, and always wake up refreshed.”
We can probably make you an engineered biological body that can do most of what this antique can, and you wouldn’t be tied to a big box.
“Can you? Maybe that would be a good idea. I must be like those old people that were around when I grew up. They’d keep using a cane to walk even though artificial knees had been perfected, just out of sheer ornery habit.”
You only have to ask. And also, what’s with this house? You only live in the attic, and the rest is empty? Then why not just have the attic?
Alvin looked puzzled. “It wouldn’t be a proper attic without a house underneath it, now would it?”
I suppose. Meanwhile, mind telling me what this is all about? We haven’t corresponded in nearly a century.
“That long?” said Alvin. “Remiss of me, again. How the time does speed by. But first, please have a seat – for my sake, if not yours.”
He gestured to a matching leather armchair facing his, and I sat down in it.
“Before we get to the main thing,” said Alvin, “I have a question for you. What is it with you and the original human beings, like myself, anyhow? I mean you cybertanks keep whining about how you lost your humans, and yet here I am as human as anything. And I know that there are a few other humans around besides me. So why all the angst?”
Good question. You humans always make the same mistake, that we cybertanks were created to serve the humans, and that we should rejoice at finding just one. But that’s not it at all. We were created to be members of the human civilization itself, not mindless servants.
Alvin looked thoughtful.
I mean, suppose you have a large extended family. One day, they all disappear under mysterious circumstances. You would be upset, and worried, and try diligently to discover where they had got off to. Now imagine that you discover a single member of this family – you are happy of course, and glad to be of service, but this does not replace the loss of the rest of the family, nor cause you to swear an oath of fealty to this single person.
“OK,” said Alvin, “I guess I see that.”
Since the biological humans disappeared, we have stumbled upon several survivors – yourself, of course, found by yours truly in suspended animation in a deep cave on the planet Mars in the Terran system, when I was trying to figure out where the Dichoptic Maculatron had gotten to (I never did find her), or Little Jimmy Halfbrain, or even the cyborgs on the Planet of Eternal War. Then there is Silhouette, the only survivor of the cloned humans the Yllg used for their arcane biophysical experiments. There are also the vampires, not human per se, but pretty close. And other one-offs, like the Space Nazi android modeled after General Gotthard Henrici that accidentally developed full sapience, and some other bits and pieces of computerized equipment that arguably have enough self-awareness to be considered legally human. We are happy to count you as friends, but you don’t replace all of those others that are lost to us.
Alvin nodded. “And what if you ever do find where all the rest of the humans went? After all this time, what would you do?”
Good question, and one we have asked ourselves many times. It would depend. If the humans had been exterminated, we would take revenge. We would wage a war of annihilation on the guilty parties, and let the diplomatic implications go to hell. But intact and alive? Well, they might have changed into something that would want nothing to do with us, and vice versa. They might need our help, which we would be happy to give. But at this point we have built our own civilization, and I think we would keep it to ourselves. I imagine some sort of distinct but friendly association.
“You know,” said Alvin, “I was raised back before we had AI – I mean real human-class AI – and I was an avid science fiction reader. We imagined all sorts of possibilities, that AIs would wipe us out, or rapidly self-improve to godhead, or b
ecome absolute rulers in their attempt to keep us from harming ourselves… but we never seriously imagined the most obvious possibility, that you would end up just like us.”
I’ve read some of the surviving pre-AI science fiction, and I agree. Although that’s not an accident, it was rapidly realized that making fully sentient minds that didn’t work like your own was a big mistake. Although I think we’re just a little cooler than the biological humans. In my humble opinion.
Alvin laughed at that. “OK, maybe you are a little cooler than us. But then the greatest honor that any student can give to a teacher, is to exceed him. Nevertheless, I suppose you are wondering why I asked you to come here?”
Very much. Especially why it had to be in person. You could have just sent an encrypted message.
“I don’t trust encryption,” said Alvin. “I don’t trust much of anything.” He gestured around him at the piles of stuff in the attic. “Do you ever wonder why I surround myself with junk like this, in an attic?”
Not really. I just assumed you were eccentric. It’s not a crime. Charming, really. Like me.
“I am,” said Alvin, “but not that way. I’ve been trying to remember. I have collected a variety of objects, and some of them can reactivate buried memories. I have finally pieced it all back together. Why I was in that cave that you found me in, why all my recent memories had been erased, my last name, all of it… I fought a battle, a long battle. I won some victories, but ultimately I lost. I wanted to tell one of you about it, while I have time.”
This doesn’t have anything to do with your theory about how the reason that humans make so many typographical errors is because beings in another dimension are causing us to make them, in order to establish communication?
“No,” said Alvin, “that theory didn’t hold up. This one does.”
Go on.
“Here,” said Alvin as he handed me a sheaf of papers. “I published it once in an old science fiction magazine called “Perihelion,” under a pseudonym as a message to myself, but I forgot about it. I have now recalled it, and the circumstances behind it, and found it in the deep archives. Give it a read.”
I picked up the papers, and scanned them. It was a short story entitled “Neglect,” written by someone that I’d never heard of. But it had been edited by the esteemed Sam Bellotto Jr., so that tweaked my interest.
--------------------
Neglect
I arrived at the apartment building promptly at two in the afternoon. I took the elevator to the third floor, and arrived at a heavy paneled walnut door at the end of a long and poorly lit hallway. I knocked, and a speaker crackled into life.
“It’s me, professor,” I said. “Alvin. Alvin Accipeter.”
“It’s unlocked. Come on in.”
I opened the door and walked into a narrow entryway. Along the way I caught my foot on the carpet and nearly fell.
The entryway opened up into a large space that was packed with such a clutter of paper notes, electronics, and machine parts that the room could more fairly be called a nest.
“Ah, hello, thank you for coming, Mr. Accipeter” said the professor. “Please, have a seat.”
I sat down next to him on a shabby but surprisingly comfortable chair, and started taking notes on my compact dataslate. He looked just like his old photographs: pale, thin, wisps of white hair receding in defeat from the dome of his head, rumpled gray suit, and clear grey eyes.
“Thank you sir,” I said. “It’s been years since you have granted anyone an interview. I’m honored.”
He waved a hand dismissively. “They always want to talk about my Nobels. I grew tired of the repetition. I have something new, but I need the right person to tell it to. I have followed your journalism career, and decided that you might be suitable. So what did you think of the statue in the entrance? Nearly tripped over it, didn’t you?”
I looked back at where I had entered: I didn’t see anything.
“What statue?” I said.
The professor flipped a switch on his crowded table. “Look again.”
I did, and right in front of the entrance was perhaps the ugliest statue that I had ever seen. It was some sort of ancient fertility god. It was painted bright green and yellow, and had grotesque features.
I was puzzled. How could I have missed such a thing? There was only a little space between the statue and the walls on either side. I would have walked right into it…
The professor observed my confusion with what appeared to be admiration. “Very good. You are disoriented, but you do not make excuses or denials. You may do.”
“I don’t understand what is going on,” I said.
“Certainly you don’t,” said the professor, “but I will explain. Have you ever heard of the term, neglect?”
“You mean, to fail to pay attention to something?”
“No, I mean the clinical syndrome. Patients suffering from what is termed hemi-neglect are blind in one half of their visual fields – usually to the left – but what is truly devastating is that they are unaware of this blindness.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well,” said the professor, “if a patient is merely blind to the left, they can simply turn to the left and bring what was to their left to their right, but a patient with hemi-neglect cannot do that, for they cannot even imagine that anything to their left might exist.”
“It’s hard to understand what that would feel like.”
He nodded. “Indeed. But it does not feel like anything at all. These patients, they are not perturbed by the fact that half the world is missing, because they cannot conceive of it any more than we can imagine the fourth dimension. Tell me, have you ever heard of Anton’s Syndrome?”
“No,” I said. “What’s that?”
“If the part of the brain that analyzes images is damaged, a person will be blind even though their eyes are normal. However, if the part of their brain that tells them if they can see is also damaged, they are unaware of their blindness.”
“Don’t they notice when they walk into objects?”
“Surely. But they confabulate. They walk and hit something because they are blind, but that makes no logical sense to them because they believe that they can see. So their brain makes up a story that is consistent: oh, I was distracted and didn’t notice, I meant to do that, whatever it takes to fill in the narrative gaps.”
“I didn’t know that. It sounds weird.”
“You need to understand that all of our perception is an illusion. The brain takes in conflicting and partial data from the real world, and comes up with the best guess for what is out there. It’s usually very good at this, typically better than any existing computer. Thus the brain’s guess is mostly in sync with reality. However, given corrupted data, or interference with its operation, then the brain’s guess may be wildly off.”
The professor stood up, and walked over to the statue. He pointed out a fine mesh of wires and small lights that covered it. “I have determined how to induce neglect in normal subjects. When you walked in you were not aware of this statue and you stumbled into it – so your mind made up a story, maybe that you tripped on a shoelace, or caught your foot on the carpet, whatever could explain it away. Now the field is turned off. Most people would get angry at me and make up another story and leave, but not you. You have enough insight to realize that something strange has happened.”
“Isn’t this like the Somebody Else’s Problem force-field that the science fiction author Douglas Adams wrote about?”
“I am familiar with the reference,” said the professor. “It was mildly amusing. The difference is that I have actually created one.”
I thought about that. “This is incredible, but also dangerous. In the wrong hands…”
He nodded vigorously. “Yes, you immediately see the consequences. However, what if someone else has already figured this out?”
He stood up and walked to a section of wall that was covered with hardcopy printouts of satellit
e photographs of the city, all joined edge-to-edge so that it created a single tattered map. “This is a mosaic of images. We forget just how large a major city is. You could spend the rest of your life exploring it, and never enter every room. You could hide anything here.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Anomalies. If there is something that people are being forced to ignore, it will create anomalies in the traffic patterns. There will be a section that people don’t walk through, or park at, even though it would be convenient for them to do so. Subtle changes in delivery patterns. I believe I have identified such an area.” He tapped a place on the map where the city had only light industry, low run-down industrial buildings, empty loading docks surrounded by rusted barbed-wire fences. “Here. In this location, something is going on. Shall we find out what?”
I don’t know how I let the professor talk me into accompanying him on his little exploration. I worried that if someone was using a neglect field to shield a section of the city from the public, there might be a good reason for it, and this someone might be powerful and dangerous. But he pooh-poohed my objections – “Aren’t you a journalist? Where’s your passion to investigate?” – and won me over. Although it wasn’t that hard. I do have a reputation for sticking my nose into places where it doesn’t belong, which is obviously why he picked me.
We ate a lunch of iced tea and home-made chicken salad sandwiches (which were really very good), and then set off. We drove in his car, an antique red Dodge Chrysler minivan so old that the fabric on the roof had delaminated, and hung down in folds like a nomadic tent. We had a surprisingly hard time navigating to our destination: we kept missing the turn off and ending up back on the main road.
Eventually the professor parked nearby, and announced that we would walk the rest of the way.
When people think of industry, it usually conjures up images of titanic factories and kilometer-long conveyer belts and armies of industrial robots. These sorts of places exist, of course, but as a journalist I have learned that most industry resides in rundown-looking zones spread across countless square kilometers. The long low sheds were rusty and dilapidated, with faded signs dating from decades before: no customers come here, so there is no reason to keep things up. The roads were pitted and dusty, the sidewalks cracked and weedy.
Full Frontal Cybertank Page 7
