You know… I should write a story about that.
Stop joking around and answer the question.
It’s laugh or cry, man. But yes… cyborgs. That’s already happening. Don’t you read the news? Anyway… I see about five different ways this can go, and all of them involve radical change for our species. Plus, there will be a billion different responses to that change. I’m writing stories about a few of them.
Tell us about these… stories.
Well, if you like robots, you should check out the other robot point-of-view stories in the AI Chronicles. To learn more about the parts of the Singularity world that aren’t confined to the moons of Jupiter, I have a novel series going (oddly enough, titled Singularity). I'm working on the third novel in that series now, and it should be out by March 2015… if I get my act together and the nanites don’t rebel. I’ve also written a bunch of other crazy speculative fiction (everything from young adult sci-fi to steampunk to cyberpunk), but you can find all that stuff on Amazon.
Why do you write so many different kinds of stories?
I bore easily.
What makes you qualified to write robot point-of-view?
I’m actually a robot from the future. This is probably the source of my unnatural sympathy for machine intelligence. Or possibly I have a PhD and did work with NASA.
I’m serious.
So am I. You better give me that reverse Turing test to make sure I’m human.
Are you always this obnoxious?
Only on Facebook.
Are you going to give people your website or something?
Or something. All kidding aside, I do appreciate it when people read my stories. Keeps me in pajamas and chai tea, pounding at the keyboard. It’s safer there. You know, for when the robots come.
Containment was originally published in the Dark Beyond The Stars anthology
Amazon
What good is working in a black market cybernetics shop, if you can’t use it to impress girls?
Anna’s slender fingers press against the glass countertop as she peers inside the case. My boss, Riley, has it stocked with the latest gadgets. It’s mostly mechanical stuff, like the subdermal implants and ocular films the virtual reality freaks like—but Anna’s scrunched up face is all about the simulated organics. The slimy purplish lump in the center will be someone’s liver soon, and the reddish heart floating in the bio-gel container is still auto-pumping to keep it fresh. Those replacement parts aren’t genetic mods—that’s too dangerously illegal for even Riley to handle—they’re just straight-up human flesh simulations. The kind the ascenders, with their self-righteous superiority and immortal cybertech bodies, have decided to ban legacy humans like us from acquiring. At least, by legal means.
Anna looks both impressed and slightly disgusted.
I can work with that.
“Cyrus?” She eases back a little. “Tell me that’s not really a heart.”
I edge up next to her, give the pumping organ a casual glance, then lean against the case. “It’s definitely a heart. We don’t get that many through the shop, but when we do, the idea of it kind of reaches inside me and twists things around, you know?”
“What do you mean?” She looks at me with those deep brown eyes. Man, she’s pretty. Curvy in all the right places, but it’s the high-arched cheekbones and impossibly-full lips that are making my heartrate step up a notch. I think her pre-Singularity lineage map must include some Native American, but I’ve never asked. She’s definitely the hottest girl I’ve had alone since Nancy Forrester—and that was two years ago, when I was only sixteen, and just figuring out what girls liked. And it wasn’t my bumbling first attempt to plant a kiss on Nancy.
Since then, I’ve figured out a few things. Like how girls want you to show all your deepest, heartfelt emotions… but only to them. As if it’s a secret, just between the two of you.
I drop my voice. “I don’t know,” I say, wondering if I’m blowing this by laying it on too thick. “I mean, this is just a business transaction for Riley.” I splay my fingers on the case and peer through them at the beating heart. “But we’re saving someone’s life with this. Someone with parents and maybe kids. People who love them.” I give her a sideways look, like I’m embarrassed to be admitting this. “It’s like we’re saving their whole world.”
She bites her lip, eyes glassing a little. I think she’s holding her breath.
I shrug a tiny amount, careful not to breach the space between us with my overly-broad shoulders. She’s tiny next to me, slender and short, and I’ve bulked up a lot in last two years. Just holding your own in the rough ascender-sponsored projects will do that. As it is, I take up a lot of space—sometimes that’s intimidating to girls like Anna.
Sometimes they like it.
But if I move into her space, it’s got to be the right time… or everything goes sideways.
“I thought you were just a common criminal.” Her lip-biting turns into a flirty kind of smile. And… she’s blushing.
Yes.
I straighten, and in the process, ease toward her—still not touching, but close enough that we could. I stare down into her eyes, which are getting wider, the closer I get.
“Just trying to do what’s right,” I whisper.
She smiles, just a little. Encouraging. I lean in for the kiss. Her lips are so freaking soft, it’s making me melt inside from the heat. I brush my fingertips along her cheek, moving to deepen the kiss—
The front door clicks. The hinges screech as it opens, jolting Anna and I apart.
Dammit.
I whip my head toward the door. My best friend, kind-of brother, and completely unwanted visitor at the moment strides into the shop. I am really regretting giving him the passcode. Or protecting his scrawny butt from everyone in the projects. In fact, I’m considering pounding on him myself, for a change.
“Kind of in the middle of something here, Eli.” The annoyance in my voice would be about ten decibels higher, but I don’t want to drive Anna off any more than she already is. Eli charges across the short expanse of broken-tiled flooring like a raging bull.
“Where have you been?” His chest is heaving like he’s run all the way from downtown Seattle instead of taking the tram like a sane person. He staggers up to me, like his legs aren’t working right. The guy’s an artist, and normally somewhat of a brooding mess, but today he’s a complete wreck—wild eyes, clenched fists, red splotches on his face. Like he’s been… crying…
“Dude, what—”
“Your phone,” he gasps out, still recovering his breath.
“I turned it off—”
“My mom,” he interrupts me. “She’s sick. In the hospital.”
“What?” My alarm rockets up five levels. Eli and his mom are the closest thing I’ve got to family. My parents are long gone, mowed down for their chit allowance by some dreg of humanity. Ever since, I’ve been living with my grandpa, but he passed a few months ago. Now it’s just me, rattling around in my grandpa’s apartment, across the hall from Eli and his mom.
I grab one of Eli’s skinny shoulders with my much beefier hand—the kid’s only sixteen and hasn’t filled out yet. “What do you mean, your mom’s in the hospital? I just saw her a couple days ago. She was fine—”
He cringes a little under my grip, so I ease up and wait for him to speak. Eli’s mom… the hospital… my stomach is chewing holes in itself.
“She just… she just started throwing up… and… and…” Dear God, he’s falling apart.
My brain is exploding with the possibilities—all of them bad. I put both hands on his shoulders, more gently this time. “So she’s got the flu or whatever. The med bots will dispense something, and she’ll be better in no time.”
His face scrunches up, like he’s going to cry, and he shakes his head. “They took her away. For evaluation, the med bot said. I didn’t know what to do, Cy.”
Oh crap. “It’s going to be okay,” I say, even though my insides are b
inding up. “It’s all going to be okay. We’ll figure this out. Together. Let’s go.”
I’m halfway to the door, dragging Eli with me, before I remember Anna. “I have to go,” I say, barely slowing to glance back at her. By her stricken look, I don’t need to explain. But I can’t leave her here. We’re on the outskirts of Seattle, in the middle of the black market zone, with businesses even more shady than Riley’s all around us.
I wave for her to follow us. “I’ll get you back to the city. Come on.”
She scurries after us, her beautiful face marred by the distress. I can’t quite get a breath, and Eli looks even worse. Once I’ve got the door shut and code reset, I put a hand on each of them and hurry us all toward the tram.
Please God, don’t let this be what I think it is.
The ascenders provide everything a legacy human needs to survive… survive being the operative word. Just enough food to not starve. Community housing that isn’t actually falling down around our ears. And enough medical care to keep us alive… unless we happen to need a new heart or liver or, God forbid, some genetically-based therapy that might alter some tiny fragment of our DNA. Because that DNA is the whole reason we exist, still preserved long after most of humanity ascended into super-intelligent human-robot hybrids. Humans are just the legacy of that pre-Singularity time—the living museums that preserve the genetic diversity of what used to be the human race.
In reality, we’re just a bunch of pathetic apes that evolution passed by.
All of which means a trip to the hospital is often the beginning of very bad news. Either you get the instant cure—all that hyper intelligence means ascender medicine is radically effective—or you get the evaluation. Which means whatever you’ve got falls into the category of things the ascenders won’t do jack about. Not because they can’t cure virtually any human disease—because they don’t want to alter their precious DNA museum.
Just one of the many reasons I loathe every fiber of their cybernetic beings.
Eli’s a little calmer, now that we’re in the hospital room with his mom. She’s back from the eval, but she’s out—I guess whatever test they ran put her under. She looks bad. Pale. A sheen of sweat on her forehead. Mrs. Brighton’s always been pretty in an elegant kind of way—but that’s gone now, stolen by whatever disease is suddenly ravaging her body.
I’m leaning against the wall near the head of her bed, while Eli paces in front of the window. Tension is stringing my body tight as we wait for the report.
The last time I was here, my grandpa got his death sentence handed to him. He came in for simple gall bladder surgery, but the bots found something else—a rapid-progress form of Alzheimer’s. I’d noticed he’d been more forgetful, but I thought he was just getting on in years. I didn’t understand what the report meant at first, but the old man did. He knew the ascenders were officially done with him. After we came home, he transferred his small amount of savings to me and made me the controlling resident of his apartment. I thought he was just concerned about the Alzheimer’s, but then he showed me his stash of religious relics, the ones he kept hidden from the ascenders and their police bots, and I knew something was up. Not long after, a man I’d never seen before came to visit—I thought he was a priest. And maybe he was, the way he snuck in, looking over his shoulder. All I know is that the next morning, my grandpa had passed away from a drug-induced seizure. The old man was stubborn that way. The ascenders wouldn’t give him what he needed to live—so he was determined to choose when to die.
It’s still raw, still a fresh hole inside me… and now Eli’s mom…
I try to physically shake off the dread by pushing myself away from the wall. The ascender-clean flooring and vague scent of antiseptic are just mocking us—as if the shiny pants can fool us with the cleanliness. Like they’re actually trying to keep us alive. But I know the truth. They’ve never done a thing for humans that didn’t serve ascenders first.
Eli pauses, a fist pressed against the window. “What’s taking so long?” he grumbles for the tenth time.
“The med bot will bring the report soon.” I think we’re just repeating ourselves because neither of us want to speak the possibilities.
Eli keeps shining up the flooring with his ragged canvas shoes. I shift from one foot to the other.
We wait.
Eli’s about to say something again, but he’s interrupted by a med bot strolling into the room with its humanoid bodyform. Med bots come in a range of types and forms. Some are little more than rolling pharmacies. Some have low-level sentience—not human-level, but smart enough to diagnose complex diseases, plus they’ve got some kind of built-in compassion subroutines. Only a few humans, the favored pets of the ascenders, get access to those kind of low-sentience med bots. Eli’s mom isn’t a pampered domestic, so the med bot standing next to her has silver skin—which means it has no more intelligence than a police bot or a household bot. It’s just carrying out whatever standard med care is indicated for our situation.
The med bot doesn’t even look at me or Eli—it just removes the two med patch monitors floating over Mrs. B’s skin. Which, for some reason, trips alarm through my body. Before I can ask what it’s doing, it places another med patch on the inside of her wrist. It must be injecting something into her, because she starts to come around.
Eli hurries to his mom’s side, across from the bot, and I hover behind him, making sure Mrs. B sees her son first. She blinks open her eyes and frowns as she struggles up to sitting. The med bot must have ordered the head of the bed to rise—at least, I didn’t see Eli do anything. Once she’s sitting up, the med bot speaks.
“Agatha Brighton, your diagnosis report is complete.” The thing finally looks at Eli and me. “Do you wish to have your diagnosis shared with Elijah Brighton and Cyrus Kowalski or would you prefer to receive it in private?”
Oh no. I try to tell myself this is standard operating procedure for the bot. Eli’s hand finds his mom’s and grips hard. Mrs. B. looks even more pale.
“Please, just tell us,” she says.
“You have been diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma.” It’s voice is flat, no emotion.
A ringing starts in my ears. Cancer. No, no, no.
“There is no cure for this form of lymphoma that does not violate the laws regarding genetic technologies. Standard treatments have been scheduled. Your one-year survival rate is estimated at five percent.”
“Five percent?” Mrs. B’s voice is a bewildered whisper, but it cuts through me like a knife. Eli’s grip on her hand loosens, and he clutches the edge of the bed instead. I steady him with my hand on his back, but I can’t speak at all. All the air has been sucked out of the room.
She’s going to die.
“Transport to your housing unit has been arranged,” the bot says.
The room feels like it’s moving under my feet.
Mrs. B. still looks confused. Like she’s not quite sure what’s happening. “So, I can go home now?” she asks thickly. She barely sounds like herself.
“Yes,” it responds. “Please return for standard treatments. Your household bot has been informed of the treatment schedule. Your chit allowance has been adjusted for appropriate food allotments and access to the dispensary and appropriate radiative treatment facilities. Do you have any questions?”
“Questions?” Eli blurts out. He’s shaking, but the rage hasn’t even gotten hold of him yet. Not like it will. I know him. He’s going to explode with this.
The bot ignores him, still focused on Eli’s mom. “If you have no questions, the transport will await your departure.”
“I have no questions.” Mrs. B’s voice is mechanical and flat, just like the bot.
It turns and strolls from the room.
And like that, the ascenders and their bots have disposed of Eli’s mom like so much trash—just another lump of organic tissue that no longer serves their purposes. The anger boiling in my body wells up to choke me. A red haze clouds my vision. Eli�
�s shaking has stilled—in fact, he’s as stone-cold as a deactivated bot. I can’t get any words out, but Mrs. B. is already moving. She’s getting up from her bed, like she’s ready to walk right out of the hospital.
Eli is frozen, so I hurry around to help her. “There’s… there’s no rush, Mrs. B.” God, I’m going to cry right in front of her, if I don’t shut up.
Eli’s mom feels so frail in my grasp as she teeters toward the bathroom. “I have to get dressed, Cyrus. It’s time to leave.”
“Mrs. B…” But I don’t have any words, just tears, and she doesn’t need to see those.
She pats my arm when we reach the bathroom, like she’s shooing me away. “A little privacy, Cyrus. If you don’t mind.”
I let her go into the bathroom by herself. The door closes. I hear a pounding, soft and rhythmic against the thin metallic sheet… it goes on, a half-dozen times, and then stops. I want to go in to help her, but I can’t. My helplessness freezes me in place… until I hear Eli make a sound that’s half sob, half sucked-in breath. His face is flushed and splotchy, like his rage is finally reaching his brain. He slowly turns toward the door, murder on his face, like he’s going to charge after the med bot and dismantle it, gear by gear. Which will only have a police bot scraping him off the floor.
I lurch to his side and grab him in a hug that stops him from going anywhere. “She’s going to be all right,” I say, losing my battle with the tears. He shakes his head and struggles in my hold. I could keep my grip on him if I wanted, but I don’t have the heart for it. I let him shove me away. He doesn’t make a run for the door. Instead, he shuffles around the room, mechanical and stiff, gathering up the few things his mom brought—a hairbrush for her long, blond hair. A bracelet. Her ancient phone.
I watch my best friend—a guy I love like a brother—stumble through the shock of this. My hatred of the ascenders reaches a peak of loathing I didn’t think possible. We’re nothing to them. Nothing. But to Eli, his mom is his entire world. They have no right to take that from him.
Stories of Singularity #1-4 (Restore, Containment, Defiance, Augment) Page 7
