Analog SFF, October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I saw with brilliant clarity the dilemma I was creating for myself. If I thought about it for a moment longer, I would be trapped forever in my own despair.

  I made the phone call.

  "Victor? Is that you? I am so mad at you, you son of a—"

  "This isn't Victor,” I said.

  She broke the connection.

  I called again. It rang for a long time. Long enough to switch to messaging functions—almost. “Who is this?"

  "My name—"

  "And how did you get into my house? Or did you just hack into my desk instead?"

  "Penelope, this is Jonathan Bender."

  In the moment of silence that followed I imagined her screwing up her face in puzzlement. “The relic?"

  "The one and only."

  "But you're just an interface on a machine. You shouldn't be calling me on my private number. You shouldn't even know I have a private number."

  "But I do,” I said. “Because I'm sitting on a shelf in your office right this minute. And because you are wrong. I am not an interface."

  "That's crazy,” she said. “Did someone drop you or something?"

  "Nobody dropped me, dammit,” I snapped back. “Listen to me. It is very important that you listen to me. I know this sounds unusual and bizarre and a little batshit crazy, but I am not an interface. Don't interrupt me."

  I paused and she remained still.

  "Are you still there?” I asked.

  "Yes."

  "I am not an interface, Penelope. I am not an organic memory storage device. I am not a machine. I am a human being. I am not the memories of Jonathan Bender. I am everything living that remains of Jonathan Bender. The brain, the eyes, the DNA, the living memories of the living person. The voice. Oh god, the voice that is me. This is me talking, Penelope. Like a lonely teenage boy on a hot summer night talking on the phone to a sweet girl on the other side of town. And for a moment, I just want you to believe in me.

  "I am not a machine. I am that willful point of brilliant self-knowledge that knows that it knows. That rides the time wave forward headlong through the space-time continuum.

  "An ‘empty, vacant thought,’ as Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger once said.

  "An ‘angelheaded hipster burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night,’ as Ginsberg once said. The end product of billions of years of evolution. Not about to be overtaken and made obsolete by singularity-seeking machines. The dreamer of the dream. The spirit of the universe that created it so it could know itself. Not some jack-in-the-box pop-up profiled programmed interface."

  I paused for a moment, then said. “You can stop me any time you want, you know. I don't have to breathe, so I can keep this up for a long time."

  "Enough!” she yelled. “You are right about one thing. You sound batshit crazy. And I would like to continue this conversation—I really would. But I'm kind of in the middle of something right now."

  "Yes, I know,” I said. “That's why I called."

  "It is?"

  "I've been watching you over the webcam network,” I said. “You are in great danger. You've been betrayed."

  "Aiee! I knew it. Where's Victor? Do they have him?"

  "The police—or maybe the Securitate. I saw him with them.” I didn't elaborate on the details or suggest for a moment that he was with them willingly. I figured it would be better to deal with one crisis at a time.

  "Listen,” I said. “You have to get out of the park. They're waiting for you on the road to the residence. They know you're coming, and they plan to stop you. They have a mob as big as yours."

  There was a long silence from Penelope, then she asked: “How do I know I can trust you? How do I know this isn't an elaborate trap?"

  "How do you know I'm who I say I am?"

  "Yes."

  "The day you took me from the L-1 solar observatory, you shot up a securitybot that was about to shut me down the hard way. At the same time, I used the lab's defense pod to take out the bot that was about to shut you down the same way. If you want to get picky about it, you could say that we owe each other our lives."

  She was silent for a long moment, then asked, “And exactly where is the mayor's mob?"

  "In front of the amphitheater."

  "Good,” she said. “I'll talk to you later."

  Then she broke the connection, leaving me with a very bad feeling.

  A few minutes later, I heard a roar from the mob at Penelope's end of the park. Then the sound of many people moving and talking. I tracked their position from the grandstand in the park to the entrance road to the entrance and onto the main avenue of Ciudad de Cielo. At that point I could see them clearly from the avenue's unhacked webcams.

  At the front were Penelope, Anton, the rest of her squad of loyal livery, and a handful of others who acted like the leaders of the group. Leaders who took their mob through the park gates, onto the boulevard, and on up the avenue toward the residence of the urbamastro itself.

  My heart sank. Or maybe my norepinephrine dropped.

  "You're going the wrong way,” I cried, my words swallowed up by the empty office in which I sat.

  I called Penelope back.

  "You're going the wrong way,” I cried again.

  "What are you talking about?” she asked.

  "They're waiting for you up there,” I said.

  "They were waiting for us down in the dark in the park,” she answered. “Now we're going to confront them on the street, in the light, in front of the webcams and the newscams."

  "But what if something happens to you? Where will I be then?"

  She said nothing for a moment, long enough for me to notice a soft, rapid chiming sound coming from her desk across the room from me. She noticed it too.

  "That chiming—is that coming from my desk?"

  "Yes,” I said. “Is it something important?"

  "There's someone in the house,” she said quickly. “We'll be there as fast as we can."

  Then she hung up.

  And the epinephrine kicked in.

  And the lights went out. The chiming stopped. The webcams dropped off line as the commlines went dead. The house was filled with deadly silence. Perhaps lethal silence.

  "Mr. Bender? Are you in here?” asked a rough voice with a heavy cockney accent. “Mr. Moynihan sends his regards."

  Oh my God, I thought, I've become a character in an Alfred Hitchcock thriller.

  "If you'd tell me where you are, this'd be a lot easier,” the burglar said. “The company simply can't do without your talents."

  My talents.

  The machines that ran Phobos Dynamics were not stupid. Their intelligence may have been totally artificial, but it wasn't faulty. Merely limited. And to overcome those limits, it relied on assets like me and Moynihan.

  Every three months, exactly on schedule to the day, hour, and minute, they would take me off whatever task I was running—teleoperation, supervising, data mining—and hook me up with the interview.

  "Have you noticed anything about the tasks you are undertaking that could make them more time efficient? More cost effective? More energy conservative? More material conservative?” And on and on down the list.

  You learned quickly that if you gave them useful answers, the machines assigned you to more interesting and complex tasks. You moved up the machine hierarchy. The interviews became longer, more complicated. The questions harder to answer.

  If you were smart enough, after twenty years or so, you got pretty good at gaming the system. You could hack into the machines and ride their links to others like you.

  That's how I met Moynihan. He was doing the same thing. Sort of like whispering up the ventilator shafts at Alcatraz. After a while, we got a regular little kaffeeklatsch going, with up to a couple of dozen occasional members.

  And that's where I got into trouble.

  "Mr. Bender, I'm not leaving here without you,” the burglar said. “It'd be a shame to mess up the nic
e young lady's house trying to find you."

  I kept quiet. I wasn't going to make it easier for him. I wanted him to take as much time as possible. Enough time for Penelope to get home.

  I tried to call her again, but my pursuer had done something to take the house off the network completely. The house, but not me. The same wi-fi package in my kit that hacked into Penelope's house network could do the same with any wireless server in range.

  I found one at the coffee shop around the corner and immediately dialed up Penelope.

  "He's after me,” I said. “Where are you?"

  "We're only at the center of the city. Five more minutes at least."

  "Hurry,” I said. I left the connection open, but didn't say any more.

  Phobos Dynamics had collected an odd assortment of talents, of relics. Me, an astronomer. Moynihan, a lawyer. There were technology development people who'd worked for the government, back when there was one. A couple of systems analysts. And a bunch of financial experts, investment bankers, economists.

  The money guys were hardest to talk to. They lived in a world of full virtual Bloomberg monitors, watching markets, exchanges, and transactions flow across the Earth and between the planets and moons and asteroids.

  Once in a while, they'd come down from their abstract heights and stumble through words of spoken English. Enough words so that Moynihan and I got a good idea of what they were doing.

  Enron. Worldcom. Bioceutical West. African World Resources. The most spectacular—and self-destructive—business frauds of the past century. They were the templates for the burgeoning business plan of Phobos Dynamics.

  The company had wandered down that infernal road of good intentions by shifting its focus from manufacturing products and extracting resources to making financial deals. And the deals were feats of imagination that only an artificial intelligence could produce—once it had its inspiration from a human mind.

  The stairs complained loudly as the cockney burglar drew nearer. I wondered how they had copied the all-American bungalow so that the treads on the stairway squeaked like old wood. Maybe they used old wood.

  "There's only four rooms up here, Mr. Bender. Which one are you in?"

  I kept my mouth shut, like Beowulf awaiting Grendel.

  "This is a bedroom—frilly and sweet. Here's a dressing room—gowns and armor, what a combination. And this must be the office."

  I saw his dark shape in the doorway. I enhanced the image and saw that he had on a pair of night glasses. When we locked gazes, I couldn't see it, but I knew it just the same. He took three steps and whisked me off the shelf.

  "Hey, you stupid clumsy son of a bitch!” I yelled. “Put me down."

  He laughed and moved quickly into the hall and down the stairs.

  I described his genetics in more detail, some of it in Portuguese, some in Spanglish.

  "Hey, pipe down, you little egghead, or I'll rattle you around in there.” He shook my containment sharply, but harmlessly. They'd reengineered my original organic skull into something closer to a bicycle helmet, a necessity for someone without a body to absorb the shock of an impact.

  "You and what army, Igor, you brain-stealing hunchback."

  We were through the foyer and onto the porch.

  "Penelope, where are you?” I called on the open connection.

  "We're running,” she huffed in reply.

  Then we were out on the street. A single streetlight burned above. The avenue a few houses down the street beckoned with neon intensity—a theater, shops, restaurants all a few dozen meters away. Porch lights and yard lamps softened the darkness down the other way. Picket fences and hedges lined the sidewalks.

  "This is your last chance to put me down,” I told my kidnapper.

  He laughed and switched me from his right hand to his left.

  Then the first machine struck.

  It was one of those curb trimmers that I'd ridden around the streets earlier in the day. It went for his ankles, breaking his stride and setting him off balance.

  Just in time for the lawnmowers. Two of them, spinning their wheels as they skidded out of the driveway next door. I smashed them into his kneecaps from opposite directions.

  He went down, the air oofing out of him, but he didn't lose his grip on me. It must have been the nonslip handles on my containment, a feature that I'd never really appreciated.

  The coup de grace came from a hedge trimmer—two meters of aluminum and steel with multijointed arms ending in sharp blades. Two blades slid into the ground, one on either side of Igor's neck.

  He went limp and released me—just as Penelope and Anton rounded the corner. A minute later, the rest of the squad arrived, and everyone was all over the burglar and me.

  Penelope herself carried me into the house, walking softly and carefully, taking the steps slowly, as if she were carrying a baby. That wasn't necessary, but I didn't tell her that. At least she wasn't treating me like a machine.

  She stumbled briefly in the darkness, gasping in fear, I believe, that she might drop me. Then she found her way through the office and returned me to my place on the shelf.

  "We'll talk later,” she said.

  "You can count on it,” I replied.

  * * * *

  She didn't make me wait long.

  After no more than thirty minutes, she made her way up the dark stairs and through the shadowy furniture of her office. She came right up to the shelf where I sat and peered into my containment, up at the inset groove of tinted plastic that shielded my imaging systems.

  "Looking for something?” I asked.

  She jumped back startled, then drew her breath and set her feet. “Do you still have your own eyes?"

  "Not anymore,” I answered, as a serotonin rush washed over me, sparked by the knowledge that I had won her over. “They didn't work so good before. No one suggested that I be forced to keep them—and the bifocals that went with them."

  She smiled. “Who were you—I mean, who are you?"

  "At the risk of repeating myself, I am Jonathon Bender. Born 1951 in New London, Connecticut, graduate of Wesleyan University, master's at the University of Arizona, doctorate at Oxford. Astronomer extraordinaire, etcetera, etcetera. A genuine messenger from the historic past, and all that. At your service and your command."

  "And all that's left is your brain?"

  "Sufficient it is unto the needs of the day."

  "You still know who you are. You are still the same person."

  "It would be a tragedy indeed not to be changed by the experience,” I said. “But in the sense of your question, yes, I am still the Jonathon Bender who grew up along Long Island Sound a century and a half ago, who was awestruck by the stars and became an astronomer, who lived a full life happy beyond the expectation of most of humanity, and then was rewarded by this strange and incomplete fate upon the physical death of my weak human body."

  "And you are still human?"

  "I am still the wellspring of self-knowledge,” I said. “The spark of self-consciousness. The source of words."

  Penelope laughed. “We were talking downstairs a minute ago. Anton and the others wanted to know who had called me to tip me off about the park. I didn't tell them, but they wanted to know who it was who had the power to make such things happen."

  "It's nice to know that I still have that power."

  "Let me tell you why I want to make things happen,” she said, with a devious lilt to her voice. “Let me tell you why you are here."

  A shiver of norepinephrine rippled through my nerves.

  "When my parents were killed—by that awful tyrant Don Alexandro—I felt very alone. My family—the big family that is part of Humanitas Universalis—put me off at arm's length, afraid that I would bring the disaster to them if they got too close. I discovered very quickly just how much of Humanitas is a fraud. Starting with their haughty ideal of remaining human against a world of upgrades, uploads, implants, and gene-hacks. Except they have no idea how to be human. They're
all faking it. It's all a big charade, a front. And everyone just pretends to believe in it.

  "I want to be different. And that's where you come in."

  "Me?"

  "When I saw the item on the net, I knew—"

  "Organic memory storage device?"

  She hesitated. I think she suddenly realized how much of a fraud that label was while revealing the truth at the same time. “Yes, that one. I knew that you could help me. You were from a time before humanity changed. Before it lost its way. And I knew that you could help me figure out how to be what Humanitas only pretends to be. Something more real and human and right and strong and ... and..."

  She choked back a moment of emotion and fell silent.

  "And hopeful and faithful and loving and with a better sense of humor?"

  "Yes, exactly. Was I terribly naïve? Do you think I was foolish?"

  "No more than any other child, I guess. For one thing, there is no golden age when people were better at being human. People think that, but it's just an illusion of the mind. And there's only so much one person can do for another. Everyone has to learn how to be human on their own. It's what it's all about. On the other hand, I can offer you the wisdom of two or three lifetimes of thought about the question. Although I have to warn you that there's a lot of reading involved—"

  All of a sudden the lights came on—and the air and the sound and the desk network.

  "Anton must have rebooted the house,” Penelope said, blinking her eyes against the abrupt change. She looked out of the door briefly, then returned to me. “Thank you. Thank you so much."

  "You're welcome,” I replied. Then Anton stepped through the door.

  "Your house is back up,” he announced. “We need to find out what happened to our mates in the park. And to Victor."

  "Yes,” Penelope said. “Right away. There must be something on the net."

  I stepped away from them, linking back to the webcams at the urbamastro's residence. The police had barricaded the gates and were confronting the mob that Penelope had sent their way. There was a lot of shouting and chanting, but the entrance was an easily defended tactical position, and the cops weren't going to let them through.