Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  The bands playing at The Overground that night had hastily cobbled together some new songs for the occasion. I remember one was “Slaves to the Metal Horde,” played to a bouncing dance tune and with silly lyrics about politicians and generals losing their jobs to automation and joining the vast ranks of the unemployed. “God 2.0” was another song; only a few vague and suggestive phrases for lyrics, but with a sly and sinister tune that made it a bonafide hit for a few months. It was during one of those songs that Lisa and I, both partnerless, eyed each other on the dance floor and fell into a face-to-face rhythm. She had a broad smile, a strong, graceful body, and a fondness for dancing with her hands behind her back. Her dancing consisted of lots of dips and hops and twisting her upper body to one side or the other. Often she would seem to be on the verge of throwing herself off-balance, but then she would smack a foot to the floor in flawless synchrony with the beat of the music, showing she had herself exactly where she meant to be. In height, her proportions were as close as my eye could measure to Polykleitos’ ideal, and she had lean breasts and a solid muscularity that suggested she had seriously applied herself to some sport in her student days.

  But the real story of her beauty was in her face. It wasn’t the beauty of clinical perfection, but of personhood. There was a whole human being written out in the length of her nose, the curve of her jaw, the hard straightness of her eyebrows. And of course her eyes. They were eyes that were full of knowing humor and incisive smarts and even more full of absolutely no bullshit. Usually when I see a face as beautiful and interesting as hers, I set about memorizing it so I can sketch it later. I look and then look away, rebuild the lines, curves, shapes and shadows of the face in my head, then look again to check my reconstruction against the original. Repeat and repeat until the person gets annoyed and asks what the fuck I’m doing. I didn’t do this with Lisa, and it took me a while to realize why: You only have to memorize a face when it’s a face you might not see again, and I didn’t want to think about not seeing this woman’s face again.

  After dancing for a while we had a couple of drinks, and after that we left the club together. The sudden quiet and fresh air of the street hit me like a splash of cold water, and I just stood there for a bit, breathing and looking up at the starry sky.

  “I hope it’s going to be something good,” Lisa said, the first words we’d spoken to each other without having to shout over music. “I hope to hell it’s going to be something good.”

  For an embarrassing, imbecilic moment, I thought she was talking about us, about the prospects of a relationship between us. That’s how I was thinking already. Something had me already thinking about “us” before there was anything remotely resembling an “us.” I said “Yeah, I hope so too,” but before the sentence was halfway out of my mouth I realized that wasn’t what she meant. She was talking about the subject that everyone was talking about—the AIs and what they were up to; what was happening to the world and what was going to happen to it. Then she grabbed my hand, yanked our bodies together and gave me a grinning kiss on the lips, and I went back to thinking maybe she was talking about us. We walked and talked for a while, and then she keyed her number into my phone, gave me another peck on the lips, and left.

  “Anyway, Shanghai is the place, man. That’s what I hear.” Ivan said, trying to pull my attention back to him. Then he added, “She ain’t up there, man.”

  I realized I was standing with my head tilted back, staring up as if I could see through the ceiling above me and the floor above that and into the apartment over Ivan’s. My apartment, where Lisa would be, if she were there. Ivan was eyeing me obliquely, neither pity nor ridicule in his expression. “She’s been gone a long time.”

  True, but she’d been gone before, and come back before. Three times, or was it four? A funny thing to lose track of.

  I started wandering around Ivan’s studio, looking at some of his recent work. As usual I liked his charcoal sketches and pencil drawings better than his paintings; maybe I only have a sculptor’s eye for color—which is to say, no eye at all. Maybe it’s all shades of gray with me. Or maybe my problem was that the color had gone out of my life, ha ha. One piece he’d clearly put a lot of work into was done up as an imitation of an old-style biological illustration. It was several images on one canvas, depicting the same creature from different angles and in different postures. Each image had a caption in precise calligraphy, short quotations from Genesis and the Rig Veda. But the creature wasn’t a creature. It had pinkish skin, no apparent head, only vague flippers for limbs. It looked something like a cross between a jellyfish and a rat. It was creepy as hell. “What the fuck is this?” I asked.

  Ivan only glanced at the painting, as if he didn’t like looking at it himself. “That’s a squirmer. That particular one was picked up somewhere in Costa Rica; some scientists posted an article about it, about what it does and how it works, with a bunch of pictures and videos.” When I gave him a blank stare Ivan went on. “You know, food! Manufactured food for animals that will only eat live prey. Not all the predator animals in the world are happy eating the piles of synthetic puppy chow that our AI friends leave lying around, so they also make these things—blobs of protein that act alive, that squirm around on the ground. Nice, eh?” He took another quick look at the canvas, then turned it to face the wall.

  “They think of everything, huh?” I said. And of course they do. That’s what you do when you have an IQ in the millions or billions: You think of everything. All the infinite details that go into remaking a world, dismantling every minutest bit of the old world that doesn’t fit your idea of how things should be and replacing it with a corresponding bit that suits you better.

  Ivan and I sat facing each other across a neat little table a woodworker friend of his had made, the bottle of Scotch on the table between us. Over what was left of the night we got as drunk as the faux booze—or maybe it was the nanoes in our blood— would allow, which turned out to be pretty drunk.

  After his third refill, Ivan started holding his glass close to his chest and staring sullenly at an empty spot in the air about four feet in front of him.

  “Tell me about Shanghai,” I said.

  “Fuck Shanghai. It’s all bullshit. Things are as dead there as they are here, or New York, or Palookaville, or anywhere.”

  “You really think things are all that dead?”

  “Agh, you know...” He paused, rolling the ice around inside his glass. “They aren’t alive. Not like they used to be.” He raised his eyes to meet mine. “You were at the Carver Club tonight?”

  I nodded.

  “How was it?”

  “Good,” I said, tilting my head to the right.

  “Yeah. Exactly. You remember the early days? The Fizzle War and all that, when it was all starting? You remember—” He started tossing out the names of bands and of songs, and I started throwing back some of my own favorites, and for a while we may as well have been two geezer-farts, grinding our rocking chairs into the ground as we reminisced about The Good Old Days.

  “Anyway,” Ivan said, “things were alive then. The bands were trying to be different, trying to do something new. And it wasn’t just the music. It was right around then that Johansson started writing her crazy Extinction poems, and the contra-perspectivist painters sprang up in L.A., and the New Minimalist writers in the U.S. and India... New stuff, man. Great stuff. Back then there really was a renaissance going on. It didn’t last, but it was sure as hell something real.”

  I got caught up in Ivan’s enthusiasm. “It was, wasn’t it?” I said. “That’s how a renaissance happens. One schmoe sees another schmoe doing something amazing, and he gets pumped up. Even if he works in a totally different field, he gets inspired. He starts thinking about trying to do something amazing himself. And before you know it you’ve got Italy in the fifteenth century, or Harlem in the 1920s. You’ve got Duke Ellington and Aaron Douglas and Fats Waller and Josephine Baker, all rubbing shoulders, lighting each other up, d
riving each other to greatness.”

  I knew the Scotch was making me blather, and I shut up. But I went on thinking about those days of a few years ago, when the world felt a lot more alive , as Ivan put it. I thought about spending night after night running from one club to the next, trying to catch every one of the dozens of new bands that were springing up, trying to take it all in, feeling awed by the energy, the newness, the vitality. And more than that, feeling a burn, an absolute burn to go back to my studio and create something, make something, even though I doubted I would ever, in a hundred lifetimes, be able to sculpt anything half as good as all the examples of genius that seemed to be roaring to life all around me... Of course, my relationship with Lisa was gleaming and new back then, and that added its own brand of creative fire to my life.

  “I think it’s because we were scared in those days,” Ivan said. “A lot of the creative types were making a joke of it, but that was just whistling past the graveyard. We didn’t know what the AIs were going to do, and we were scared. Maybe it was that fear that made people more creative. Nowadays nobody’s really afraid about anything. The worst thing anyone feels now is bored and cranky.” He caught my eye as soon as he said this, then looked down at the floorboards. “Sorry, man. Stupid thing for me to say.”

  I grunted and waved a hand to dismiss the subject, and we went on talking. We talked about the old world, the new world, about Scotch, about art-world gossip, and not Lisa. I spent a lot of time not talking about Lisa.

  The first time Lisa came home with me to my studio, she went straight to the shelves that held my sculptures. She looked at each one slowly and carefully, taking it in from different angles. I was working small in those days, figures eighteen inches tall at most, and she leaned in close to squint at all the fine details I’d sweated over in anticipation of just such a squint. “Hmm,” she said now and then, and “Ah” once or twice. These little vocalizations were hardly more than a breath, and when she was done looking she summarized with a quiet “Okay” and a smile. I suppose it was just me being silly, but those few syllables felt like all the praise in the world; like a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur grant and a hearty handshake from Rodin, all rolled into one.

  She spent the night, and the next morning we went to her place so she could make us breakfast, and later that day we went back to my place so I could make us lunch, and some time after that we went to her place for supper and to see if the sex was as good in her bed as it had been in mine. After a few weeks of this, the back and forth was getting kind of tiresome, so we packed up her stuff and moved it to my place. And that was that; there was officially an “us.”

  I suppose—one has to suppose—that to the AIs, love is just one more quantifiable entity in a universe of quantifiable entities. Probably it’s as basic to them as a bit of clockwork; the right neurons firing, a few chemicals in the right combination. But then again, the same can be said of life itself. The sweet, living Earth, with all its countless green fronds and numberless beating hearts, is all just clockwork and chemistry, all eminently quantifiable and understandable. That doesn’t stop it from being something amazing and magical, measureless and infinite.

  After some impassioned entreaties, Lisa agreed to model for me. I had just started working on Geckos then; a pair of female figures climbing up a smooth vertical wall, their bodies somewhere between lizard and human, and also abstracted and simplified à la Constantin Brancusi. It was a design that could easily slump into kitschy faux-Deco drivel, but I was hopeful I could hopscotch my way across that minefield. When Lisa saw how abstract the piece was going to be she laughed. “Are you sure you need a naked woman to model for this?”

  “Oh absolutely. It’s all in there, even if I don’t do a straight copy of it; the muscles, the bones, the skin and hair, all the lines and curves, all the, um... details... And it can’t be just any naked woman. It has to be you. It’s all about capturing the inner essence, don’cha know, and if there’s anyone whose inner essence I want to capture, it’s yours.”

  “I can think of six or seven dirty jokes about that,” she said, “but they’re all really lame.”

  I answered her grin with one of my own, but I wasn’t kidding. I had visions of this woman being my lifelong inspiration. My muse, I would have said, if that word weren’t too worn out and clichéd to speak without gagging. She would be the Rose Beuret to my Rodin, the Jeanne Hébuterne to my Modigliani, the Wally Neuzil to my Schiele. That’s the sort of thing that runs through your mind when you’re young and in love and have enough naïve ego to insert your own name into a sentence alongside some of the world’s greatest artists. As it turned out, I would work on that sculpture throughout all the time Lisa and I were together.

  Meanwhile, the world outside our lust-fogged windows was continuing on its way. After stopping all mechanized war, the AIs set about rebuilding slums and refugee camps. Beginning with the worst of them, these wretched huddling places of tents and corrugated iron shacks were suddenly—by seeming magic—replaced with rows of cute little cottages, neatly trimmed out with comfortable furniture and curtains in the windows. Sewer systems and running water appeared where there had only been open ditches and hand pumps. The shiny kiosk buildings started to spring up like oversized mushrooms, first in the poorest parts of the world, but soon to expand globally. Aisle after aisle of shelves filled with the necessities of life, all of it free for the taking and constantly restocked by the endlessly roving supply-bots. Clearly the AIs had solved the riddle of nano-assembly. They could put together matter of any size and complexity from base molecules, base atoms, and for all we knew, maybe even base protons and electrons. However they did it, the bottom line was that they seemed capable of making anything, anywhere, of any size, in any quantity.

  It was a fun time when this age of abundance came home to the First World. Mysterious online catalogs started appearing; you could order a pair of shoes or a dozen eggs or new dining room furniture, with no mention of the awkward little detail of payment. Needless to say, this was seen as a threat to the economy—to the whole idea of there even being anything worth calling an “economy,” and this scared a lot of people. It scared some people even more than the fact that mankind’s God-given right to wage war had been taken away. A lot of people were scared, and a wealth of imminent dooms were predicted, but there was nothing much anyone could do. The AIs had seen to it that there was nothing anyone could do. They’d thought of everything.

  Fewer people found any reason to object when disease stopped happening. This one began with hospitals noting a slump in new admissions, and with doctors finding nano-sized foreign bodies of unknown origin in the blood of some patients. But soon it was everyone’s blood, and everyone, everywhere, stopped getting sick. At all, ever.

  It’s funny how people adjust. The world was going through changes that, before they happened, would have been thought of as mind-boggling, world-shattering, unfathomable. And yet life just went on, the way it does. In years past, people had adjusted to the notion that humanity might be wiped out by a couple of psychotic button-presses. People had adjusted to living in the midst of bubonic plague, to having their cities bombed every night, to being ruled by lunatic, murderous despots. If people could adjust to those things, they could adjust to a life of no war, no disease, and unearned abundance.

  It was right around the time Lisa moved in with me that the zaps were added to the catalog of revolutions being wrought upon the world. They started out as just one more among thousands of not-too-believable rumors flitting around the web, but in a matter of days the reports became a flood. The zaps were real.

  For Lisa and me, that reality was visited on us late one night as we were walking through one of the less-affluent neighborhoods of Cambridge, on a residential side street off of Mass Ave. In the middle of a quiet, poorly lit block, a man was suddenly standing in front of us. He was big, broad, and pretty rough-looking, with a dried road-rash scab on one cheek, torn and dirty clothes, and hair that might have
been neatly combed earlier in the day but was now a crazed mop. “Hey, man,” he said, apparently to both of us, “you gotta see this.”

  I tightened my grip on Lisa’s hand and tried to side-step around the guy, but he side-stepped with me, putting a hand on my chest. “No. You got to see this!” His eyes roved over the empty air around him, somewhere above head level. “It’s like they’re here. Watching. They know what I’m going to do, before I even do it!”

  I figured him for crazy and/or drunk, and tried to convince myself that crazies and drunks usually aren’t dangerous. “It’s okay,” I said. “They won’t hurt you. They haven’t hurt anyone.”

  He widened his eyes at me, smiling like he knew something hugely funny that I didn’t know. “It kinda hurts, actually,” he said, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “But it’s wild... Wild. Just watch. Just watch this!” His hand was on my chest again, this time grabbing my jacket. He wrenched me around, shoving me up against a parked car. Lisa yelled something, grabbing at his free arm. He shook her off and grinned wildly at her. “Just watch!” he said again, turning back to me and bringing his right arm up with his fist clenched and his elbow cocked in a classic I-am-goingto-punch-your-face pose. Lisa screamed.

  When you’ve played a memory over and over in your head a few hundred times, it becomes difficult to know what you actually saw at the time and what details your mind has edited in after the fact. Since those early days, everyone’s seen slow-motion videos of zappings, heard people describing the sensation with all brands of colorful language, seen scientists expounding on the probable mechanism of their function. But reliably or not, I remember the electric buzz-pop, a flash of light with no apparent source, and then our unpleasant companion going into shuddering rigidity for less than a second before slumping to the ground like an abandoned marionette. Lisa and I stood looking blankly at each other for a moment, and then she bent over the man, reaching out to touch him. There was an acrid, bleach-like smell in the air, which I later learned was the smell of ozone.