by Stanley Bing
“There’s a possible solution to that problem, but I’m afraid it might be worse than the problem itself.”
“What would that be?” Bronwyn asked. She took him by the hand and went in the direction of the vacant cabins.
“One thing at a time,” said Bob. “Let’s get his head right first.”
“Here we go,” she said, opening the door to an empty cottage. “I hope there are no bats in here,” she murmured, peering carefully inside the dark and dusty enclosure.
“Bee, honey,” said Bob, pausing with her on the doorstep. “I’m really tired. I hope you’re not expecting miracles.”
“You’re the miracle worker,” said Bronwyn. She patted him sweetly on the butt. “But I bet I can work some of my own if I really put my mind to it.”
“Well,” said Bob hopefully, “I won’t object too strenuously if you’d like to try.”
They went into the cabin. The giant trees loomed above them, bathed in fog and the light of the moon. The Skells came out of the kitchen, each with a box of Froot Loops cereal. “I wonder how old these fucking things are,” said Steve.
“They never go bad, because they’re not actually food,” said Stevie, collapsing onto an aged leather couch.
“I’ll take the first shift.” Steve sat on an available table and began to examine the Froot Loops in earnest.
Four hours later, the sun rose. Somewhere in the world beyond the forest, a rooster greeted the new day.
“Here you go, Ginerino,” said Bob, staring down at Liv and Gene as they lay entwined in the tiny camp bed. “Drink this before you turn into Chairman Hyde again.”
“Man,” said Gene, taking in about an eighth of the bottle of sixty-year-old Glenlivet scotch Bob had offered him. “What I wouldn’t give to be sober for just an hour or two.”
Liv sat up, her hair forming an impressive nimbus around her elfin head. “I’ll get us together, and we’ll meet you on the deck in five minutes.”
“Five minutes,” said Bob. “I want to get this over with.”
They emerged on schedule. The Skells were now draped in a couple of large, comfy armchairs, each with family-sized boxes of Cap’n Crunch. “You hungry?” asked Steve. “They got good stuff in the kitchen. Kind of chewy. But tasty!”
“Yeah,” said Liv. “I guess so. I don’t think I can watch this anyhow.” She went to the door of the kitchen. “I hope there are no mice in here,” she said. She grabbed a broom that was leaning against the wall and tiptoed in.
“Sit here, Gene,” said Bob, who had pulled out a straight-backed chair next to a table and was arranging a variety of implements on it. Bronwyn assisted. “Good morning, Gene,” she said, smiling.
“What up?” said Gene. He sat.
“Put your head back,” instructed Bob, all business. He was in a lab coat, a rather shabby one, Gene thought. He appeared to be readying some kind of long, thin apparatus.
“Hey, wait a minute!” Gene squeaked.
Without any indication that he was about to do so, Bob plunged the probe with one swift, smooth thrust straight into the side of Gene’s implant directly above and behind his right ear. An enormous chasm of blackness opened to the left, right, above, and below him and invaded all available space inside his head. He screamed. Then he was falling, falling. After a while, he dozed. “Now let the motherfuckers try to track us” was the last thing he heard before he fell away.
He awoke to find a hot toddy in his hand. Around him were his friends, who looked at him with great concern.
“I’m okay,” said Gene.
“Now you are,” said Bob.
“Drink, Gene,” said Liv. Then she added, “Drink it all, babe.”
“I have just disabled your implant mechanism,” explained Bob. “As of right now, your global positioning can’t be followed. Your life functions are offline and unknown to the Corporation. You are on your own, bud. On your own. Disconnected from the Cloud and from every other implant. Congratulations, and welcome to the way things used to be.”
Bronwyn added with piety, “And the way they may yet be again, God willing.”
“Amen,” said Livia, placing her hand on Gene’s shoulder. There was a moment of reverential silence. Bob rose to his feet and paced a bit more. He seemed agitated.
“I created you, Gene,” he suddenly blurted. “So you know, in a way, I’m your dad.” Gene tried to not laugh but failed. “No, but seriously,” said Bob, a bit wounded. “I want you to understand.” He leaned over Gene and stared down at him with tremendous intensity and a slobby sort of affection. “I didn’t realize that when I made you, son, I was creating a genuine life. I don’t know why I didn’t. But I didn’t.”
“Well, Bob,” said Gene, annoyed. “What did you think you were doing?”
“Filling a market niche. Listen. Please.”
“Sure! Why not?” Gene took a sip of the whiskey. His head was clearing. Bob was being quite entertaining. The woods smelled like heaven. Life was good.
“You know how many superold, rich-as-fuck guys are reaching the end of what we can do for them?!” Bob perambulated around the deck, driven by the force of his emotion. “Look at the board of directors! There’s nothing more we can do with the bodies they got. They hit a wall when they reach a hundred twenty years of age, tops. You can add another ten or fifteen years of decay and pathetic senescence to that if you want to. But ugh. I’ve seen it. Horrible. Repulsive morphies indistinguishable from one another. Grotesques. The stuff of nightmare. And still, they live, looking for a way to put themselves into a whole new infrastructure—one that’s better than the one they got. That is a significant market. Small, but able to pay incalculable fortunes for the product, right?” Bob snared the last dregs of Steve’s old box of Froot Loops from the nearby table and took a mouthful. “Blaugh!” He spat out the stale cereal in nobody’s direction and then pressed on.
“The breakthrough was when we figured out how to take an individual’s entire personality and migrate it into the Cloud. Digital immortality! And guess what? Now we have a whole bunch of fully functioning virtual people up there in the mainframe! More than two hundred fifty! The very richest of the superrich! And a couple of decent guys, too, pro bono, for the good of the world. The Dalai Lama, for instance, and his friend dhe wanted along to keep him company, that actor, what’s his name? Steve something . . .”
“Seagal?!” inquired Steve excitedly.
“Yeah!” Bob took another handful of Froot Loops, apparently having forgotten how horrible they were. This time they stayed in his mouth. “But, of course, it turns out it’s no fun to live as a bunch of disembodied engrams. So the question has been, how do we take the next step? Make them, you know, fully human? We had to try it out. There were no volunteers and very little time. An entire generation of the original seed geniuses are in their high 120s. The problem is, the process seems to be a lot more difficult than we expected, due to body-mind issues.”
“No shit,” said Gene.
“We don’t seem to be able to create an organism that has no consciousness,” Bob went on philosophically. “Take your brain, Gene.”
“My brain!” Gene drank to that.
“It’s a basic protosubstrate beneath a complex superstructure in communication with the central cortex, which I provided. I’m sure you are wondering how you know all the useless stuff you do? That’s me, Gino. And now, that’s you. And now that we have you, now that I see you not as a host but as a person, I find that I want you to live.”
“Well, thanks, Bob.”
“You, Gene! You! Not the other guy!”
“Seriously. I’m very relieved and flattered that you like me, man.”
“Except,” Bob continued, “now we have the problem presented by the other guy. I know that. It’s my fault. I accept that. I’m sorry about it, Gene, I am. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you, Dad. I’m glad to be here.” Gene seemed to draw on an internal database of potential responses and added, “In fact, at my age
I’m glad to be anywhere.”
“Yeah,” said Bob appreciatively. “George Burns, right?”
“You know,” Gene observed as if he were about to utter something very important, “I might want to start the day with something lighter, like vodka or silver tequila, and then move to the brown stuff later on. It’s a thought, anyway.” He hiccupped.
“Anyway,” said Bob. “We’re going to have to think of something. As long as the old fuck is in there, we’re all in danger, Gene most of all.”
“Fuck ’em!” said Gene, who had achieved the wonderful plateau of bonhomie one can attain through serious drinking first thing in the morning.
“Dudes,” said one of the Steves. They both arose.
“We gotta go,” said the other. “We hear a drone.” And sure enough, once they listened for it, there it was in the distance.
“Let’s go, Bean.” Liv grabbed Gene’s hand. “We’ll be back in a minute,” she told the group. “After we get our stuff.”
They were in the cabin before Gene realized that he had no stuff. He had the clothes on his back and that was all. But Liv was gazing into his eyes.
“Genie,” she said, taking his hands. “I want to say something. I knew you when you were new, because, well, Bee thought it would be good for you to have a friend, and she was right. But after a while, we were together. And then you went away, and I realized I love you. Maybe it’s because everything is constantly new to you all the time. Maybe it’s just your cuteness. But I love you, Gene. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I love you so. And I hope you love me, too.”
“I do.” Gene looked at her dear little face. “I love you, too, Liv,” he said. “I love you, too, and so.”
“Too and so.”
“I never want to be anywhere you’re not, ever again. When we’re together, nothing else matters. I feel real.”
“In your case,” she said, smiling at him tenderly, “that’s saying something.”
She kissed him then, and he kissed her back, and they were alone together for a brief moment or two, which was more than enough time to settle a whole bunch of things for the both of them, forever.
The cabin door opened. “Excuse me, you two,” said Bob, “but we gotta go. I think I’ve got an idea we can try out in the car.”
It was full day when they left the camp. The sun was blasting through the trees, and the forest loomed as large as it had the night before, but it was still empty of all human life except theirs, and when they were gone, the birds sang and the bees buzzed and the squirrels and chipmunks chattered only to one another.
21
North to George, Washington
It required a little more than twelve hours to make the drive from the outskirts of Eureka, California, to George, Washington, 667 miles north as the crow flies. The Chevy Suburban sped past the aptly named town of Weed, and through the Modoc National Forest just south of Dorris, at the California-Oregon border. By then, they were on US 97, and there wasn’t another car in sight. A few self-driving trucks had rumbled by now and then, at their top speed of forty-five. At midnight, they hit the Winema National Forest, zipping through Chiloquin, where there wasn’t a soul stirring. Oregon went by, through Bend and all the little, underpopulated towns, past a few bars with swastikas in the windows. Then it was into Washington State, where the neo-Nazis thinned out, barreling through Yakima, where they were almost forced off the road by a pack of what appeared to be hippies on motorcycles, but they weren’t a match for the souped-up Chevy Suburban, and on into George, and just outside of George, there they went, down a small, unmarked dirt road that was barely more than a path, to the Peaceable Kingdom.
They had left around ten in the morning. The Northern California forests around them were lush and green and undisturbed by evidence of the current century. The sky above the ribbon of highway was a tremendous cartoon blue, and a few gigantic puffy white clouds passed in a leisurely fashion across the sun, casting lovely shadows on the road.
“Nice here, huh,” said Bob, a couple hours into the ride. He was sitting in the middle of the front seat, next to Bronwyn, who sat as far as possible from Stevie, who was driving. Big Steve was in the rumble seat way in back, leaving the entire middle of the cabin to Liv and Gene.
“This whole part of the country is outside the approved habitable zone now,” said Bob, looking out the windshield, “but people still live here and there. The corporation owns all this land, even though we admittedly have limited control over it now. It represents mostly upside, in the sense that it’s relatively unexploited, but it’s not too safe to stop here. We’ve considered unloading it, but given the concentration of capital in the coastal and major urban regions, there are really no buyers to speak of. So it languishes in seminatural form for the time being, as you see.”
“We own it?” Gene inquired, eyes closed, from the back seat.
“Well,” said Bob, “you do now. In at least one of your incarnations.”
They rode in silence for a little while. Every now and then, Gene took another short pull on his bottle, which kept Arthur effectively at bay. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, but he was getting pretty sick of intoxication as a state of being. He wondered what it was like to be sober and aware of himself, and who he might be when he was in full possession of his faculties and not loaded. It would be a first. He had been born, if you could call it that, and his mind was an empty shell, with some knowledge of a rudimentary sort, but in the center just a gooey blob waiting for something. Now something was there, curled like a carnivorous flower waiting to bloom and eat all the soft gray food around it. He shivered.
“Give me a pull on that,” said Livia. She was nestled into him, napping on and off. They had been up most of the night doing things that lovers do, and right now neither of them seemed up for talking. Liv was one of those born well into this century. When she had turned off her implant for the first time the night before, a vast chasm of silence had opened all around her, and only now was she becoming aware that there was a mind somewhere inside her head that could function without external stimulation. Since she was a child, even when she was asleep, the implant had hummed behind her ear, comforting, like a white noise machine that smoothed out things. Last night, after an insanely convoluted process known only to Bob, it had been shut down. “Good thing you have one of the entry levels,” Bob had observed while messing around with the mechanism, executing a variety of clicks and switches in a certain mysterious order. “Or I would have had to poke you the way I did your boyfriend here.”
Right now Livia was busy listening to the silence. It was terrifying, but if you looked into it, it became more interesting and less frightening. There were things in it. It wasn’t all nothingness. She drank a little. The road went by.
“Yeah,” said Bob, apropos of nothing. He put his arm around Bronwyn, who leaned into him, and put his feet up on the dashboard.
“Dude,” said Stevie, glaring at Bob’s shoes.
Bob checked for crud on his soles, saw none, and put them back up. There was silence for a while. The only sound was Steve, snoring from the far back seat of the vehicle. Suddenly Stevie, who had said virtually nothing since the successful rescue in Nobu, spoke, in that smug, hyperknowledgeable voice affected by those who have a grievance against the system.
“About thirty years ago,” he or she said informationally, “the government could no longer maintain public services or guarantee the safety of people’s lives and property, and entire sections of the globe were made available for public/private partnerships that eventually evolved into total corporate ownership and then, eventually, into ownership by one gargantuan organization you guys are willing members of. Now everything is privatized for profit. Schools, cops, medical, farms, whatever the fuck. All under your control.”
“Believe me, Stevie, people like us control nothing,” said Gene, who didn’t like being cast in the role of corporate warlord. All he had felt like up to this point was a tool.
“Now whate
ver governments the world has left report to a central organizing entity that has no physical location whatsoever; it exists only in cyberspace,” Stevie continued, with that same offended tone. “None of the masters of war ever even see each other.”
“Nonsense,” said Bob. “We still get together at Davos every year.”
“And it all runs through the Cloud,” Stevie went on, his or her jaw clamped tight. “That’s your civilization. But it’s not civilization. It’s tyranny.”
“Well, don’t blame us,” said Gene. “We just work here.”
“If you guys weren’t important to Master Tim, I’d shoot you right here and leave you by the side of the road.” He or she said it mildly, but it had the ring of truth. Gene realized that there was nothing approaching the law up here. They were on their own. And only some of them had guns.
“Stevie,” said a drowsy voice from the back of the cab. “You can shut up now probably.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Stevie said, and was silent again. But he or she sped up a little.
“So what are you guys?” Gene asked. “Beyond being a couple of scary creeps.”
“We’re nobody individually,” said Stevie. “But together we are large, we contain multitudes.” Then he or she was silent.
Bob said, “That’s a quote from something.” He was rummaging around in his backpack, which was at his feet. Bronwyn, who had been sleeping, sitting with her legs crossed between Bob and the androgynous terrorist to her left, lifted her head and watched Bob for a bit. “You gonna try it?” she inquired softly.
“I think so,” said Bob. “What’s the worst that can happen? We’re in a contained space. There’s nobody around for miles.”
“You guys saw to that, didn’t ya?” said Stevie bitterly.
“Stevie. Dude.” It was Steve, from the far back seat. “You’re starting to annoy even me.”
