by Ian Douglas
“So why did you volunteer for FMF in the first place?” Dubois asked. “You coulda put in your four and gotten out.”
Four years was the minimum enlistment period for the Navy. To get FMF, I’d had to “ship for six,” as we say, extending my enlistment to ten years, total.
I shrugged. “I wanted to get rich, of course.”
No one joins the Navy to get rich, of course. You get room and board and some great opportunities to travel, sure, but base pay is about a twelfth what a good systems programmer gets on the outside, and maybe a quarter of the take-home pay of a ’bot director at an e-car manufactory. No one, unless you take the long view, and have a father who’s senior vice president of research and development for General Nanodynamics.
Lots of medical doctors get their start in the Hospital Corps. It offers a good, basic education in general medicine and applied nano, and universities with medical programs smile on ex-corpsmen looking for grants or scholarships. But the economic rewards can be even bigger when what you bring home is a cool and useful bit of xenotech.
That’s because, anymore, Navy Corpsmen aren’t just the enlisted medics for the Marines and Navy. Because of their technical training, and the fact that in the field and they’re already lugging around a fair amount of specialized gear, they’re also the science technicians for any military field op. Sampling the local atmosphere, studying the biosphere and reporting on what might bite, and even establishing first contact with the locals all fall into a Corpsman’s MOS, his military occupational specialty—his job description, if you like.
And that means that Corpsmen are perfectly placed to pick up alien technologies when they make first contact, or to bring home innovative ways of utilizing human nanotech. They even get to keep the military-issued CDF hardware that allows in-head linking, and that can provide a hell of a competitive advantage in the civilian world.
So when I finished the series on my basic education downloads, my father, Spencer Carlyle, suggested that I might want to join the Navy—specifically the Hospital Corps—in order to learn skills that would benefit both me and the family.
My grandfather went to work for General Nanodynamics sixty-three years ago when it was a data-mining start-up, wading through the Encyclopedia Galactica’s hundreds of millions of hours of data, finding the codes that would unlock its secrets and release untold alien secrets of science, technology, and art that we could apply here on Earth. Better, though, is to go straight to the source, to actually learn new methods of materials manufacturing or chemistry or medicine directly from a living xenoculture. It’s one thing to pull off the EG’s stats on the X’ghr and learn that they’re very good at biochemistry. It’s something quite else to visit the aliens in person and pick their brains.
In 2212, my father led the General Nanodynamics team that developed cybertelomeric engineering from the data brought back from direct contact with the X’ghr eight years earlier.
Telomeres are the end-caps that keep chromosomes from unraveling, but they grow shorter with each division of the cell. When the telomeres wear away after forty or fifty divisions, the cell dies and aging sets in. Cybertelomerics refers to various means of controlling or guiding telomere replication inside cells without generating the out-of-control cell growth and immortality known as a cancer. As a result, humans alive today can expect to live two or three hundred years or more, rejuve treatments can have an eighty-year-old looking like forty, and clinical immortality might be just around the corner. Whether or not human immortality is a good thing is beside the point; the biochemical data brought back from the X’ghr homeworld by the crew of the Hippocrates promises to utterly transform what it means to be human.
That one bit of xenotech should have made my family quite wealthy.
It didn’t. That was because the government stepped in and declared telomere therapy a national asset, with patents owned and controlled by the Commonwealth Institute of Health. Dad got a pat on the back and a nice bonus, but do you have any idea how much rich old people would pay for treatments that would keep them going for another couple of centuries? Or keep them looking and performing like VR sex stars?
But the government wants to maintain control of who gets rejuve treatments, at least for now. They say it’s to prevent runaway overpopulation; Dad was convinced that we’re going to have a lot of very young-looking senators, presidents, and wealthy campaign contributors over the next few centuries.
Cynical? Sure. And he managed to infect me with his bitterness as well. Government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich: it’s a system that’s been around for an obscenely long time, and one that’s very hard to fight. So Dad set out not to fight the system so much as to work with it. If we could nail down another big advance in medicine, materials processing, or chemistry from an untapped xenotech source, we might be able to exploit it off-world—at one of the free-market colonies, maybe—and do it in such a way that the Commonwealth couldn’t touch it.
That was the plan, at any rate. Nanotechnics is highly competitive, and new developments and techniques are coming along every day. The field is dominated by three or four big megacorporations and a dozen smaller ones, and the company that doesn’t keep up is going to find itself sidelined and forgotten in very short order. General Nanodynamics is about nine or ten in the hierarchy, but it’s well-placed to go multi-world and even give IBN and Raytheon-Mitsubishi a run for their e-creds.
My dad got into the field the old-fashioned way, going the route of AI development, but he thought having a Corpsman in the family might increase the chances of landing something big . . . a new technology, a new means of controlling or programming nanobots, a new approach to an old problem, like what the X’ghr did for telomere research.
And I was pretty excited about the idea myself. It wasn’t like I was letting my Dad do my thinking for me. I’d wanted to join the Navy anyway, the Hospital Corps in particular, because I had my eye on going to a school like Johns Hopkins or Bethesda University, one with a good medical download program, with an eye to becoming a doctor. I’d never been much interested in following in my father’s footsteps . . . or the footsteps of my grandfather and great grandfather. A century of Carlyles in General Nanodynamics, I thought, was quite enough.
Besides, to make money, real money, we needed to break free of the pack. As an employee of General Nanodynamics, with all of his ideas becoming the intellectual property of the corporation, my dad could manage a living that was comfortable enough, sure, but there is well-off rich, and there is filthy rich with a private Earth-to-orbit shuttle, your own synchorbital private mansion, and maybe a shot at some telomeric genengineering.
If I found myself in a position to bring back some exploitable xenotech, something Dad and his contacts could turn into a few hundred billion creds and a high-living lifestyle . . . hey, why not? I was in.
But I needed to go Fleet Marine Force to make it Out There, to give myself even a chance of being on a first contact team or encountering a new technic species not described in the EG.
And after my encounter with Private Howell that morning, I thought that my chances of that were becoming somewhat bleak. If I got dropped from FMF, I was looking at six more years of routine duty—working on the wards of a naval hospital somewhere, or serving as staff at a research station in Outer God-knows-where.
I was wondering if I’d just managed to deep-six my entire future.
“You joined the fucking Navy to get rich?” Machine said, laughing. “My God, man, what planet are you from?”
“My man,” Doob added, “we need to run an EG xenospecies profile on you, stat! Lessee . . . ‘e-Car: civilization type zero-point-zero-weird. Biological code: really weird.’ ”
“Weird squared,” Machine suggested.
The plan to score on xenotech was something I never talked about with anyone, of course. I shrugged off the teasing. “Hey, I’m tracking to become a med doctor, oka
y? Doctors can bring in the creds same as nanoware specialists.”
“Sure, and they work their asses off getting there,” Doob said.
Machine tossed off the rest of his drink—something called a “weightless slam,” and nodded. “Shit, you know how much ghost-mass doctors carry with them all the time? Ghost in the machine, dude. Ghost in the machine.”
Most doctors are connected on a semi-permanent basis to expert AI systems running on the local Net, often with ten or twelve load-links going at a time. That’s because no one person can possibly keep all of the data necessary in his memory—even in their plug-in cerebral RAM—to maintain a smoothly working knowledge of the pharmacology, anatomy, pathology, biochemistry, nanotechnic programming, holistics, cybernetics, and psychology needed to treat patients, and that’s just to name just a few. Doctors aren’t necessarily running all of those channels all the time, but it is, I’d been told, like having ten other people with you all the time, whispering, guiding, making suggestions, kibitzing, whether you are performing surgery or simply sitting down to dinner.
Some, like Dr. Francis, seemed to handle it pretty well. Sometimes, he would get a faraway look in his eyes, like he was listening to someone else while he’s talking to you, but usually you knew it was him behind that fresh-out-of-med-school face. In some cases, though, it became a kind of high-tech multiple-personality syndrome, where your original self tended to fade into the background as one or another of your resident AIs took over for you. I was thinking of Dr. Burchalter, on board the Puller, who often didn’t seem to be there when you talked to him. You knew you were taking orders from an expert AI who was running the show.
Ghost in the machine indeed. The term was invented a few centuries ago by a British philosopher named Gilbert Ryle to describe conceptual problems with Descarte’s ideas of mind as distinct from body. Later, it described the neuro-evolutionary idea that human brains are grown atop mammalian brains grown atop reptilian brains, and that destructive impulses like hate, anger, or fear arise from those deeper, more primitive systems we still carry with us.
Nowadays, however, it means losing yourself in a multiple-AI system, and your “ghost-mass” refers to the number of active AIs you have resident on your in-head CDF hardware at any given time.
“I know, I know,” I told him. “But I can handle it. I don’t think . . .”
I broke off what I was going to say. Machine was getting into the music.
It was deeper now, more insistent, more sex-heavy sensuous. The touch-sensie sidebands were creating the feeling of a naked woman giving me a lap dance—I could feel her weight, feel her squirming against my thighs, feel her hands stroking my chest and face, all in time to the throb of the music. I had the vid bands turned way down, so the dancer’s image overlying my vision was ghosted to nearly nothing, a barely sensed shadow, but with three trajectories still burning in my gut it was getting a little hard to focus on the conversation and the lap-dancing distraction as well.
It looked like Machine had blissed out completely to the entertainment channel. His head was back, with a silly half smile on his face, and his hands were in front of his chest, running up and down across something we couldn’t see.
I glanced at Doob. “I think we just lost Machine,” I told him.
“Yeah, looks like he’s got a ghost in his machine!”
“You look like you’re getting into it, too.” He had the same silly grin as McKean, and his eyes were starting to go glassy.
“Oh, yeah, baby!” At that point, I couldn’t tell if Doob was talking to me or to the ViR-gal invisibly grinding on his lap.
I brought the vid up on my implant for a look. She was a virtual-reality genie—the image of a genetically enhanced young woman with impossibly long, silky white hair and an overdeveloped upper chassis. I didn’t care much for that phenotype myself; they always looked so damned top-heavy that I kept thinking they were going to fall over. This one was well done, though. The program had her looking deep into my eyes and not blankly staring off into space somewhere. Her eyes were too large for an unmodified human, revealing her look’s descent from the conventions of an old Japanese artform called anime, but she seemed to be focused totally on me. I could even smell her perfume.
Of course, if I wanted things to get even more personal, I would have to let them deduct ten creds from my eccount. I was kind of hoping for a real-world encounter with a woman tonight, though, and, after a moment or two, I thoughtclicked a refusal to the offer.
But what the music was giving me was just crotch-teasing, and I found the sensation annoying. So I switched off the vid and the genie’s eyes and other oversized assets vanished. I switched off the tactile and olfactory sensations as well, and was left with the music coming over my audio channels alone. Funny. The music seemed a lot flatter and less interesting without the accompaniment of those other rhythmic, layered sensations.
Machine gave a strangled groan, and his hips started to jerk suggestively on the chair, his arms held tightly around the emptiness in front of him. It looked like he’d decided to pay the extra ten creds.
The sight bothered me, somehow. How, I wondered, was what he was doing any different from Private Howell’s o-looping? I mean, obviously Howell had been risking serious physical injury with his stunt, and he’d taken things to the point of cataleptic rigidity. He’d lost control on several levels, in fact. The compulsion that led him to risk medical intervention, court martial, and an end to his military career—to say nothing of death from a stroke or a heart attack—suggested that he was addicted.
But addicted to what, exactly? The dopamine and the feel-good endorphins associated with sex, obviously, but the technologies being used to generate those feelings were different in Howell than in Dubois and McKean. Howell had used nanobots programmed to manipulate dopamine levels directly in order to trigger a succession of closely looped orgasms. My two companions were letting music sidebands feed their in-head hardware with the virtual reality illusion of a gene-altered woman having sex with them.
Howell’s experience had been more intense, sure, and thanks to the aspirin he’d managed to get his switch stuck in the on position, but in terms of the outcome it was damned hard to see the line between one set of behaviors and the other.
“Hey, sailor,” a sultry voice said behind me. “You switched off your sensies. Don’t you like the music?”
I turned to face one of the Earthview’s waitresses. She was short and cute and her upper chassis didn’t look like it was going to pull her over. She wore a sweet smile and a wispy nimbus of blue-white light that didn’t do a whole lot to cover what was underneath. The ID projected by her personal circuitry said “Masha,” but there wasn’t any other information in the broadcast.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I was kind of hoping for some real action, maybe later.”
She laughed, an entrancing sound, and moved just a little closer. “You seen anything around here that you like?”
I gave her a stereotypically lecherous up and down. “Absolutely. What time do you get off?”
She leaned even closer. “Me getting off kind of depends on you, doesn’t it?”
“I’m Elliot,” I told her. I thoughtclicked my personal ID, which broadcast my name, where I was from, the fact that I was U.S. Navy, all the basic, introductory stuff.
“Hi, Elliot. I’m Masha.”
She didn’t transmit anything from her ID except her name. “Masha” suggested that she likely was from Russia, Ukraine, or the Yakutsk Republic. Her English was perfect, though, so for all I knew she could have been North American, maybe from a Russian immigrant family. It was hard to know these days, with basic language downloads as good as they were.
So why didn’t I ask her? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe the fact that she hadn’t sent more of her own personal data was putting me off. It suggested that she was keeping this on a strictly waitress-customer bas
is, and I felt as though asking her where she was from would come across as a really lame attempt to chat her up. I was feeling awkward and embarrassed and somewhat torn. Part of me wanted to talk her into bed, but as we bantered more, a larger part of me became convinced that she was more interested in my e-cred balance than in me.
And what was so wrong with that? The flesh-and-blood waitstaff in places like the Earthview aren’t paid all that well, even when you add in their tips, and the cost of workers’ quarters at Starport can eat up your e-cred balance real fast. What they do with their off hours is their business, so why not?
I was tempted, I really was. Masha looked like fun, and I certainly wasn’t in the market for a long-term relationship. After Paula? Hell, no. I was through with long-term hearts-and-flowers, long romantic interludes, and deeply intimate relationships.
But the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that what I wanted was something more than the clinical workings of a commercial transaction.
We talked a few more moments, and then she left to get me another drink—a zero-G floater this time. The trajectory had blasted me pretty heavily; was that why I suddenly wasn’t interested in sex? Anyway, I was pretty sure another trajectory was going to set me hard on my ass. The floater was milder, would be easier on my system, with a lower percentage of C2H6O and less of a kick.
I looked across at Doob and Machine. They both were totally off planet—approaching the inevitable climax of their links in perfect time with the ménage up on the furry stage.
Masha returned with my drink a moment later, then wandered off to check on her other customers. I looked past the writhing ménage on stage at the image of Earth suspended against the stars. Maybe a part of my inability to join in had to do with how unsettled I was feeling just then. Until recently, I’d thought I’d known exactly what I was and where I was going. If I didn’t make FMF, though, all of that was called into question.
