The Boost

by Stephen Baker

  The chips were minuscule, about the size and weight of a single fly’s wing. But the casing around them produced a protrusion above the left temple. To cover these bulges, the workers wore blue caps. They became known as “capped,” and the word caught on. There were unconfirmed rumors that within days two of the capped workers had committed suicide. But the others appeared to thrive. They had the equivalent of supercomputers in their heads and the software performed much better than expected. After training each individual’s processor for several weeks, it could convert thoughts into streams of words, and commands. For many users—and especially the younger ones—it became easy to toggle between the two brains, the wet and the dry. Communication at the plant appeared seamless as the capped workers, according to their managers, operated as one, like a hive of bees.

  Back at Middlebury, a very pregnant Stella walked across campus with Francisco to a panel discussion featuring the college’s reigning experts in China, business, history, and computer science. The auditorium was packed. The professors, speaking at great length, seemed to agree that the Chinese would abandon the experiment. There were those two suicides, and even if the technology worked, creating millions of enhanced Chinese would threaten the aged leadership.

  Francisco jumped to his feet and shouted: “But what if they all get smarter? What happens then? Doesn’t it start an arms race, just like Esputnik?”

  The professors laughed uneasily, but Francisco insisted. “Won’t we be like—” He stopped and grasped for the English word, and failed to find it. “¿Los Neanderthales?” This drew more laughter from the crowd, and Francisco turned red. But the professors weren’t smiling anymore.

  Stella wasn’t either. She was thinking about the baby who was busy kicking her kidneys, and wondering what kind of world she was bringing him into.

  Francisco went on. The Chinese, he said, were carrying out experiments in their “ecosystem.” They could do this, he said, because they were “run by dictators.” This provoked hissing from a few globalists and China sympathizers in the crowd. Francisco turned around to confront them, and was soon making comparisons in his less-than-fluent English between the government of China and that of his native country, Paraguay. This led to groaning and more yelling in the audience.

  Professor Johnson leaned into his microphone and shouted, “What’s your point?”

  That quieted the crowd. Francisco, still on his feet, pursued his argument—one that Stella recognized from an anthropology paper she had edited for him over the weekend. The Chinese were willing to carry out experiments in their ecosystem, he said, and they were ready to accept failures and death. He paused for a moment, and looked down at Stella. “¿Como se dice ‘supervivencia del mas apto’?”

  “Survival of the fittest,” she whispered.

  “Because the Chinese are willing to experiment and suffer the costs of dangers, they have an ecosystem that will generate the survival of the fittest,” he said. Americans, by contrast, dwelt too much on the risks. “By the end of five years,” he predicted, “every Chinese will carry a … one of those things in his head. They will achieve the jump to Cro-Magnon. Dictators will use these tools to control them. And Americans…” He slumped his shoulders and hung his head forward, imitating a caveman. “You may be freer, but you will be Neanderthales.”

  Some in the audience laughed, and one voice cried out: “What about the Paraguayans?”

  But the professors on stage appeared to take Francisco’s argument seriously. If the Chinese took this leap, they would no doubt use their superior cognition to move the technology ahead even faster. This could lead to the same exponential growth of intelligence that the Singularity people had been predicting for decades. But it wasn’t happening in America.

  It was then that the expert in computer science delivered perhaps the most sobering news. The United States had no competing chip, and to come up with one would take at least five years. “By the time we get around to it, assuming we do,” he said, “the Chinese will be on their third or fourth generation.”

  * * *

  One Christmas Eve, it must have been ten years ago, when Ralf was in high school, Stella opened a bottle of champagne and shared it with him. It was just the two of them that Christmas in her mother’s big old house, the replica of an antebellum Southern mansion, complete with a portico and four white columns, in Montclair, New Jersey. Simon was working in St. Louis, and didn’t have the vacation days to fly home. Stella’s mother had died the previous year. And that evening, feeling sentimental and a little drunk, she told Ralf about the afternoon at Middlebury all those years before when his father stood up and predicted the future. Ralf had video of Stella’s story stored in his boost.

  All those memories are gone, he thinks, looking out the window. Aside from that one night, Stella avoided the subject of what became known as the “chip wars,” and her role in them. Ralf kept files on them in his boost, always figuring he’d get to them later. Now, as he and Ellen cross from Oklahoma into New Mexico, he tries to assemble the pieces.

  For seven years, the Chinese appeared to shelve the experiment with the original capped workers. In fact, the government shut down the plant and the workers vanished from public view. Gradually the story settled, in the popular mind, into the realm of historical curiosity. Looking at it from Francisco’s Darwinian perspective, China’s capped workers appeared to be an evolutionary dead end, like most of the hominids from the Cenozoic Era that anthropologists dug up in Africa.

  After college, Stella and Francisco moved with little Simon to Washington. She landed a job on Capitol Hill. Francisco freelanced as a journalist. He said she worked too much. She complained he didn’t help enough with the baby. After a couple of months, he moved into an apartment in Adams Morgan with six other South Americans. More than once, police had to break up their raucous parties, known as the “pachangas” of Columbia Road. Stella soldiered on as a single mother—though Francisco continued to sleep over from time to time.

  It was in the fall of 2041, at the opening session of the General Assembly of the United Nations, that the Chinese dropped their bombshell. The premier disclosed that in the previous month, the government had implanted a more advanced chip into the heads of 200,000 workers in Shanghai. The productivity gains were “staggering.” He declared that the Chinese would soon produce enough chips to augment the thinking of all humanity.

  Within two years, the Chinese extended their enhancement to the entire population, including the political leadership. The whole country was capped. At global summits, U.S. and European diplomats fumbled with their laptops and phones—technology from the early part of the century—while the Chinese zapped messages back and forth just by thinking. They could model and simulate every conversation, mapping out the most likely course it would take, and choosing the optimal path. It was as if each person alone was a high-performance staff working with a supercomputer.

  Meanwhile, the United States, from its leaders in business and technology to the president himself, remained utterly wild. They compensated only by picking a handful of junior government staffers, including Stella, to test the boost. It seems astounding to Ralf that thirty-five years ago, only six years before his birth, the country was run by people as handicapped as he is now. How did they get anything done?

  From a historical perspective, they didn’t, at least during this crucial period when the Chinese carried out their cognitive colonization of the world. The Chinese extended heavily subsidized chips throughout Asia, capping in the first wave the populations of Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore. Negotiations commenced with Japan, Russia, Mexico, and Brazil.

  The Americans responded with a beta version of their own chip, launching it in a pilot program for fifty thousand people in Paraguay. This was perhaps the most important test for American technology since the Apollo program eighty years earlier.

  It was at this point that Francisco traveled down to Asunción. He said he was going just to visit his family. But Stella was co
nvinced that it had something to do with the chip project, which was a growing obsession of his.

  The Paraguay project ended in tragedy. Thousands died, either from defective chips or Chinese viruses. The South American chip wars followed, and China emerged on top. Stella never heard again from Francisco.

  Within two years, the United States accepted Chinese chips. The only concession the U.S. negotiators won from the Chinese was the proviso that the chips implanted in Americans, unlike the Chinese version, would not permit governments and companies to snoop on U.S. citizens. Those privacy gates were to remain closed.

  Four

  3/6/72 1:49 p.m. Mountain Standard Time

  They’re driving through White Sands, near an old missile-testing grounds, when Ellen pulls herself away from her work and looks around. The entire landscape is blinding white, not a sign of life anywhere.

  “Tell me again why your brother moved to El Paso,” she says.

  “I guess he likes the food,” Ralf says. “Like I said, we have roots there. He probably likes the weather, too. It’s sunny three hundred days of the year.”

  “The average is three hundred and ten,” Ellen says, after consulting her boost. “Kind of weird, though, being so close to Juárez, wouldn’t you say?”

  “We’ll see soon enough.”

  “I mean, surrounded by all those wild people…” She pauses a moment, and then adds, “No offense.”

  Following the chip wars, the United States and Mexico both capped their populations. But authorities from both countries were powerless to impose the new technology in the border region of northern Chihuahua, long run by drug lords. As a result, Juárez and its environs were left as the largest concentration of the wild west of Mogadishu. Its ranks grew, as wild refugees from the rest of Mexico and beyond migrated to the city. If the wild were a separate breed of animal—and many felt they were—Juárez amounted to the hemisphere’s largest wilderness preserve.

  There are rumors, Ralf knows, that a small neighborhood in Juárez houses a population of wild Americans. He finds this hard to believe. Juárez, by all accounts, remains primitive and violent. Wouldn’t it be easier for Americans, and far safer, to move in with the largest extant wild population in the United States, the Amish cluster around Lancaster, Pennsylvania? He supposes that certain religious issues might discourage some would-be wild immigrants—but enough to send them into the inferno of Ciudad Juárez?

  He looks at Ellen, still immersed in her work, moving her perfect lips. So far on this trip, she’s spent more time inside her boost than out of it, at least during his waking hours. She stores endless archives in there, decades of news stories, libraries of literature, reference databases in multiple languages—way more than she needs when all of it is easily found on the network. Ralf tells her this on a regular basis. But she likes to rummage around in her own cluttered space. When she emerges from her boost, he thinks, she’s confronted by what has to be an unsettling fact: I’m driving to the border with an animal.

  Ralf nods off. The car drives on. He’s roused as it crosses El Paso’s city limit and slows down to 55 miles per hour. Its speaker announces that they’re in El Paso and asks where it should go. He doesn’t answer. Ellen will provide his brother’s address. The orange Sheng-li exits the highway and falls into a slower caravan. The trail of cars, each one separated from the next by about a foot, winds its way past Mexican restaurants, cut-rate dentists, hydrogen stations. It climbs a road called Mesa and skirts the west side of the Franklin Mountains.

  Ralf is in no hurry. He has to come up with an agenda, a list. But how do you make a list when you’re wild? He touches Ellen’s hand and leads her back into the world. “Hey.”

  She looks at him, smiles, and then looks out the windows. “We’re here?”

  “Yeah. I need you to take down a list for me.”

  She nods. “I’ll have to do all kinds of stuff for you until you get something back in your head.”

  * * *

  Like most couples, Ralf and Ellen first met as avatars. It was on a dating site where couples could meet, talk, stroll or have drinks, and then share adventures and intimate moments anywhere: they could visit Picasso’s Paris, Costa Rican rain forests, Egypt in the time of the Pharaohs, even outer space. Each world, no matter how remote, was equipped with bedrooms, many of them decked out in the fashion of the time. In the biblical Bethlehem site, avatar couples could relax on beds of hay in modest barns, like the one Jesus was born in, surrounded by goats, cows, and lambs.

  Ralf and Ellen’s first date was to the Amalthea, Jupiter’s largest moon. They climbed red hills together, dug for Amalthean ice and minerals, and when they tired of that, they sat on the edge of a crater and talked. Ellen found it strange that they had to stay in space suits the whole time, with clear bubbles over their heads. Ralf, though, found it easier to talk on a first date through a couple layers of thick plastic. “It’s more realistic,” he pointed out. They ended the date chastely, exchanging pats on the shoulder of each other’s space suit. But they agreed to meet again the next day.

  Ellen’s avatar looked nothing like the woman who would eventually be traveling to El Paso with Ralf in the burnt orange Sheng-li. Her avatar had dark hair, wide blue eyes, and a gap between her front teeth. On her forehead were the traces of childhood acne. Her body, while not fat, was thick around the waist and shoulders. In a world of idealized avatars, Ellen’s appeared surprisingly real, to the point of including what most would consider defects.

  There was a reason for this. Ellen, whose mother pushed her to accept the Artemis package at age twelve, always wondered what she would have looked like if she had kept her original genes. So using the skills she developed as an artist, she took an image of her childhood self and morphed it into a twenty-five-year-old adult. Then, eager to see how the “real” Ellen would fare, she circulated in virtual worlds.

  Ralf was among the first to pay attention to her. He found it easier to approach a woman who looked like something less than a goddess. Also, she attracted fewer suitors, which statistically—as Ralf tended to view life—gave him a greater chance of success. Ralf’s avatar looked exactly like himself, the same deep violet eyes and curly hair, the same lithe body and shy smile. His avatar wasn’t quite as shy as the real Ralf, but it still carried his personality. It was impossible for Ralf Alvare, no matter what world he was in, to be outgoing or talkative.

  They continued to date, and eventually they became lovers in their virtual worlds. They first slept together in a tree house, modeled after the Swiss Family Robinson. Later they had sex in a bungalow on the coast of South India, Greenwich Village in the time of Bob Dylan, the Chateau of Versailles (which Ralf found tacky), and for old time’s sake, on the lip of the same crater in Amalthea—but this time without space suits. Once, following Ralf’s suggestion, they even visited a rustic ranch in Paraguay.

  As they dated, they talked about their lives in the real world. Ralf told Ellen about his work in the Update Division. He singled out applications in their virtual love life that he had fine-tuned. Once he kissed Ellen’s lips so lightly that it caused her whole body to tingle. That, he said, was his own “feathery” variation in the kiss package, which was introduced in the previous year’s update. Before that, he said, even the gentlest virtual kisses were more forceful.

  Ellen nodded and kissed him, this time forcefully. She was far more interested in the kisses than the software behind them.

  She told him about her own life, growing up in Paterson and going to art school down the road, in Hoboken.

  “Paterson?” he said. “That’s right near my mother’s place, in Montclair.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly. “I think that’s right.”

  This reference to the physical world gave them both pause. It introduced the idea that neither had dared to bring up: a meeting of their physical selves. These encounters, often so awkward, were known as “reckonings.” Many avoided them altogether. But for young men and women who wanted o
ne day to have families, there was no getting around it. If they were to have children, molecules would have to meet and mingle. The reckoning signaled a major commitment for Ralf and Ellen. It was close to a declaration that they wanted to have babies together.

  On one Saturday morning in October of that year, Ralf caught an air taxi from Washington to Montclair. He looked down at the trees below, glimmering in shades of red, yellow, and orange, and he thought about his life. What he had with Ellen seemed ideal in the virtual world. Wasn’t the reckoning bound to disappoint? He pictured the scars of pimples on her forehead, and those extra pounds around her middle. Those had to be warnings, he thought, about the reality he would soon encounter.

  As the taxi landed at the strip near Watchung Plaza, Ralf kicked himself for coming. Why did he need to meet her, anyway? Was he so sure that he wanted to have a family? A baby created a staggering responsibility—a body to care for. Its needs could not be shifted in time or place, much less into virtual realms. Babies chained their parents to the here and now, which was precisely the world Ralf spent most of his life avoiding.

  As he walked down Christopher Street, he saw a blond-haired woman making her way in his direction on the opposite sidewalk. She wore a glimmering blue dress that clung to her body. The color matched the eyes on her radiant face. Ralf couldn’t help but stare. He felt he’d seen women like her before, but none so beautiful. What was he doing hunting down the physical version of Ellen, with her pimples, split teeth, and extra pounds, when virtual worlds teemed with avatars created in the image of the woman walking toward him? The woman stopped and looked across the street, right at him. She smiled timidly and asked, “Is that you, Ralf?”

  Ralf’s heart leapt. But as he crossed the street toward Ellen, he felt a mixture of emotions. There was happiness, blended with a huge dose of relief. But he also felt embarrassed that he so clearly found Ellen more beautiful than her avatar. His shyness—which never strayed far—also weighed in. Would a woman this beautiful find him worthy? It seemed that in a matter of seconds, the entire balance of the relationship had shifted. In the virtual world, Ralf was by far the more attractive of the two, and Ellen, in a sense, was in his debt. Now their roles had flipped.