“Mother’s heart and lungs. Right, these things. I remember those, they cost a fortune.”
“Frankly, Maker, everything in here costs a fortune.”
Hermes shrugged. “Good point. Wait, why is it breathing?”
“Because it’s alive, Maker.”
Hermes stopped for a moment. “Right. You know, last time I saw these proofs of concepts, they had a baby lamb growing inside of them.”
“The process is the same,” Melpomene nodded.
“Which one is Gregoris’ son?” Hermes asked.
Melpomene walked a couple of steps and presented the baby in the artificial womb. Just like the others, it looked like a weird piece of raw meat in a transparent bag. It breathed.
“Does he have a name?”
“That honour falls to you, Maker.”
“Hm… Dolios would be nice.”
“Agreed.” Melpomene tapped her tablet and inputted the baby’s name. “And how would you like to name this entire project?”
Hermes rubbed his chin. It barely had any stubble on it, even though he was twenty-six years old. “You know, Baxter and Pratchett came up with the concept of the Next, evolved humans that spoke in quicktalk. This the first of a new line of demigods, so let’s go with that term. The Next.”
“An excellent choice, my Maker.”
Chapter 55: Dolios - Brain operating @ 5.2 times normal human speed
Five years later:
Melpomene put little Dolios to sleep with a fairy tale. It was his favourite tale, a story about a prince who was locked at the top of a tower, cursed by a witch to speak too fast.
The prince had to work one night, and he didn’t have time to read all of the necessary books for his important meeting with a diplomat from another land. He complained about it out loud. “Oh, what I wouldn’t give so I could read faster!” So a witch suddenly appeared to him and said, “I can make you read faster.”
“How?” the prince asked.
“By magic, of course. Do you agree to it?”
The prince thought about it. He glanced at the pile of books beside him, then at the cuckoo clock on the wall, and said, “I agree.”
So the witch cursed the prince and he could now read very fast indeed.
The prince was delighted! He read all the books that night, and so he was prepared for the diplomat the next morning. Tired and very sleepy, but prepared.
So he welcomed the diplomat and as he spoke, his voice sounded funny. His voice was squeaky!
The diplomat laughed, and said, “What? I don’t understand, my dear prince.”
The prince spoke again, but his voice was swift once more. He tried coughing, drinking some wine, but his voice came out too swift to understand.
Nobody in the tower could understand the prince no more.
Angry and ashamed, he locked himself at the top of the tower, where he read his favourite books and studied the sciences to pass the time.
Years went by.
He was lonely. So he asked the witch to find him a princess. The witch brought him plenty of princesses to see, but none were the right one for him.
One day, he saw a normal girl from the village. He fell in love with the girl, but she couldn’t speak to the cursed prince. But the girl saw how the prince looked at her and realised that he loved her. So she asked the witch to curse her too.
And they were in love, living happily atop the tower. The girl became with child. But the girl kept worrying that her little boy would be born cursed too, and that he wouldn’t be able to live a normal life and have friends.
She worried and worried, until it finally killed her. But before her final breath, the witch appeared. So the girl asked for one wish. She wished that her son not be burdened with the curse. She would give the boy to the witch, with one condition: The witch would make the boy speak like normal people do. She made her promise thrice that the boy would never be cursed.
The witch agreed, cause she couldn’t pass on such a great offer. But after the mother died, she kept her word, by twisting her word. She cursed all of the people across all of the land and the seas and the islands, with a spell to speak slowly. That way, nothing changed in the world. They all woke up and they all spoke at the same, slow speed. Nobody realised that there was anything different.
That way, the boy was the only one in the world who spoke quickly.
And it was exactly what the girl had feared.
But the prince called for the best physician who managed to save the boy out of the bowels of his dying mother. The prince loved his son, but as soon as he stared into his eyes he cried. He thought of his wife, you see. And her worry, and their curse. So he sent the little boy away, far from the witch so that the boy wouldn’t be cursed when it finally learnt to speak.
How could he know that the devious witch had planned for this?
The prince never saw his son again. And he never left the tower. He just spent the rest of his time thinking about stuff that made the King a lot of money.
The End
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Beau
Beau needed to go faster. Usain Bolt had set the record too high, 9.58 seconds. That Jamaican superhuman remained unbeatable for years.
Beau wasn’t in the Olympics. But it didn’t matter. He had himself hooked up with the official Hermes timekeeper AI, in real time. It acted as a witness to any record-breaking attempts. Usually people used it for silly things like Guinness records of how many cucumbers they can stuff in their mouths or something, but Beau actually used it for the 100m race.
All he had to do was wear the tracking device on his ankle, and let the camera record him on the track.
It was dark at the track, nothing like the usual ‘light the place up like it’s midday’ thing you see during athletic events. He was the only one using the track so they only lit up the one spotlight on his side. And half of that as well. It was fine, Beau could see well enough. It just gave the track an eerie feeling, nothing like letting yourself daydream that you’re in the Olympics.
Nevermind that. Beau assumed the starting position. An ARO referee, a digital construct, held the starting pistol in the air.
Bang.
He ran.
He had trained his mind to process information at faster speeds. Like seeing in more framerates per second, effectively experiencing the world in slow motion. He was a Next. The trigger was the starting pistol. As soon as it fired, his mind went into overdrive, consuming calories like crazy and pumping his heart like no tomorrow.
He could experience each second dilated into ten. He could take his time, weigh each step, follow his breathing, balance himself properly.
Even the wind hitting his face felt slow.
It was almost like cheating. But the Next were only capable of mental feats. None of the rest had ever attempted to apply their sped up mental processes on physical activities. They were like an evolution of nerds, only worrying about stuff of the mind.
Even as fast as they were, Beau could see that their minds were small.
He struck the track with his feet. Each step perfect, balanced, calm.
It was like running through the woods. Anybody can run through the woods, but it takes care and patience to avoid hitting a tree or breaking your ankle. A Next could run through the woods at slow speed, minding each step, then the whole thing would be sped up for real-time and it would seem miraculous, a perfect run with no errors or missteps at all.
Almost a cheat.
But Beau couldn’t feel bad for being the next step in human evolution.
Transhumanism was one thing. Melding your body with machines or tinkering with your genes. This
was pure, natural evolution.
The Next.
The timer showed the milliseconds slowly scroll by in his augmented reality vision. He was almost there. He could make it. He could break the record, and it would be official.
The seconds ticked down. Five. Four.
Oh, no. He felt a pain in his chest. He took a misplaced step. This was all going to hell, really-really fast, or really-really slow, depending on who you asked.
He fell back to the old mantra. The second generation of Next had absconded these silly rituals, but there he was, moments away from making his dream come true, a misstep he could see happening from a mile away, and he found himself praying.
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
It is by will alone… He grunted.
I set my mind in motion.
I set my mind in motion.
The timer seemed to freeze. No, it was still ticking away. Where was his heartbeat? Was he dead?
No, there was his heart, happily ready to pump the next cycle, squirt oxygenated blood into his body.
Dlup.
That was one chamber. The right ventricle. He couldn’t wait around for the next one to cycle.
He had work to do.
He glanced at the track on his feet. His foot was at a bad angle. Buuut… If he shifted his weight just right, he could adjust on the next step and lose a tiny portion of momentum, instead of the half-second trip he was initially heading towards.
Beau felt his heart thudding again, and the milliseconds ticked away.
Thud. His foot fell on the track.
Shift weight, adjust torso.
Thud. The other foot.
Excellent.
Beau ran the final seconds.
His vision tunnelled. All he could see was the finish line. His brain starved for oxygen, his muscles were blaring alarms at him to stop or risk permanent damage.
He didn’t care.
He had to win this. He had to see if he could.
Nothing mattered but that.
He threw himself at the finish line, chest first, just because the Olympians did it.
He fell on the track, collapsing, his vision blurring and wobbling. Stop wobbling, everybody! He could almost hear the cheering of the crowd. It wasn’t there, but he could hear it. He was certain of it.
Blood.
Oh, what about it?
A single thought came to his mind, the words ‘collapsed lung.’ He didn’t know why, it’s not like he was a doctor or anything. But sometimes things popped up in Beau’s mind that he hadn’t consciously considered, that was how swift the Next mind was.
He was choking on his own blood. His back on the track, his muscles unable to move.
He saw a light in the sky.
That was it. Coming to get him.
The light was bright, triangular. The airlifter medical drone picked him up with his mechanical tentacles. It was the Apollo Tripod, reserved for VIPs only. The Tripod broke the sound barrier and the stadium’s spotlights shattered. The stadium went completely dark except the shaft of light coming from the sky.
Wait. Wait. What was his track time?
He couldn’t see clearly, the veil reading was right at the edge of his eye, but it was blurry and wobbly.
He coughed blood. His legs didn’t hurt anymore. That might not have been a good thing.
What was his track time.
The Tripod injected him with five needles all over his body.
What was his track time. Somebody should tell him.
9.576 seconds.
Yes.
Suck it, Bolt.
Beau surrendered into the sweet night.
The End
The Whale on the Veil
Elliot Tuckerberg grew up admiring the promises and imagining the possibilities of Magic Leap. He knew from his uncle that the headset would be something expensive, so he saved up for three years so he could afford it. He didn’t get a bike, got lunch from home, didn’t waste cash on chocolates and snacks and music. He was mesmerised by that dreamy ad with a life-sized whale in front of a bunch of kids, staring in amazement.
He was only fifteen when the billion-dollar company unveiled their first product, and it was a huge disappointment.
He imagined everybody using Augmented Reality technology to interact on a sort of an overlay of the digital world over the physical one, a world where you could flip through the pictures on your digital gallery as easily as you could through a pocket dossier of printed photographs. He imagined AR pets, educational aids, people connected through wondrous technology.
All he got was some goofy glasses.
Sure, they were cutting-edge at the time. But the gap between the company’s promises and what it could actually do was bigger than the Grand Canyon.
He bought the beta pack, of course. It was more than he had squirrelled away, but his uncle chipped in for the rest. He was the only one who understood Elliot’s obsession with AR. He was an entrepreneur with plenty of failed startups and crazy ideas under his belt, until he settled on a winning micro-import company and finally achieved the success he needed. He’d say, ‘It took me fifteen years to succeed. I started at my mid-twenties, so now I’m forty years old. If someone had prodded me to start my businesses earlier on, it would still have taken me fifteen years. But I would have succeeded earlier, I’m sure.’
Elliot’s parents disagreed and didn’t want him spoiling the kid, but the uncle was adamant that they should shove their opinions up their behinds. It was easy to be heard when you were finally successful, Elliot noticed. Perhaps that lesson was the one he treasured the most. He kept watching them for years as his parents ignored his uncle’s crazy theories and aphorisms about life and success. ‘Keep reading your self-help books,’ they’d tease him. He was after all, a failed entrepreneur with crushing debt leftover from his silly startups.
But, once he got his first million, everybody’s attitude changed. Suddenly everyone shut their mouth when he spoke. They wanted to take selfies with him. They huddled up in family dinners to chat him up.
Success is what makes people listen to you, is what Elliot learnt from that.
He’d settle for just a girl, for now. “Mindy,” he said as she ignored him and kept walking while texting on her phone. He caught up with her, “Hey, I wanted to ask…”
“Mmm?” she said dreamily, her attention still on her phone. It glinged, then again, then made a bloop sound.
God, he hated technology sometimes. “Mindy, wanna go out with me sometime?” he blurted out before his brain would get in the way and made him think things.
Mindy froze for a second, staring at him. She opened her lovely mouth to speak. “What? Me and you?”
Then she laughed in his face.
Elliot played around with the Magic Leap goggles. They were quirky and round, made you look like Willy Wonka. They were well-made and again, truly a cutting edge of tech, but something was lacking. Elliot knew it.
He stayed up nights trying to figure it out. He had this vision of everything in the world being mapped in real-time. He knew that would require immense amounts of processing power, but that didn’t bother him for now. It was an engineering problem, and there were people who could figure it out. That was another one of his uncle’s aphorisms. Then he’d quote things from Ford or Musk, people who actually knew what they were talking about, but who ignored their engineers when they protested that what they were asking for was impossible, like the V engine or the reusable rocket.
Elliot toiled away for an entire year, stealing hours from his nights, taking naps whenever he could in the day classes, skipping going to cinemas and hanging out. It wasn’t like he didn’t wanna go do those fun things, but every time he actually did go out, he ended up writing down things on his notepad, or sketching AROs and coming up with various applications and experiences.
The cinema, for example. Imagine an experience, where each viewer customises his own overlay as he watches. A girl might want a la
yer where she gets information about the costumes and the clothes people are wearing, available with links and prices. A guy who is a cinephile might want tidbits on the movie, like trivia, comments, where that b role had played before, or even the Mr. Skin listings for that sexy actress.
The possibilities were endless, really. As he went through the world in his city of New York, the ideas kept coming at him.
All he needed was a format for all this, some sort of a baseline so that others could build upon it.
“Oh, you need an API,” his friend Becker said when he explained the problem.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a programming thing, where you can build something that gets external commands from somewhere else, like another website. So, you build your own engine, and then make an API where others can use it to call data from your own, and make their own applications or adapt their current ones to support theirs.” Becker finished the rest of his ice cream.
“Really?” Elliot said, getting lost in thought again. Guess he needed to learn these things. He wasn’t very good at programming, but how hard could it be? There were books and courses to take. Oh, they were doing programming at school, but it was so basic that even Elliot knew those lessons were useless.
No, he needed to study by himself.
Another one of his uncle’s aphorisms, ‘An entrepreneur keeps on learning.’
He lugged those heavy programming books around. Then he started making room in his schoolbag for them by leaving the others back home. His teachers weren’t pleased, and neither were his parents when they got called about it.
“I guess we can’t really be mad at him, since he isn’t goofing off but rather learning new things. Just not the things he’s supposed to learn in school,” his mother said, resigned.
“Computer programming is not the lucrative profession it was in our day, honey. That was then. Nowadays, they’re little more than menial labour,” his father said, shaking his head.
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