Existence (19 page)

Already, several neighbors had given up, abandoning their shoresteads to the jellies and rising waters. Just a week ago, Xiang Bin and Mei Ling joined a crowd of scavengers converging on one forsaken site, grabbing metlon poles and nanofiber webbing for use on their own stead, leaving little more than a stubble of rotting wood, concrete, and stucco. A brief boost to their prospects, benefiting from the misfortune of others—

—that is, until it’s our own turn to face the inevitable. Forsaking all our hard work and dreams of ownership. Returning to beg our old jobs back in that stifling hospice, wiping spittle from the chins of little emperors.
With each reproachful look from Mei Ling, Xiang Bin grew more desperate. Then, during his third trip to town, carrying samples from the trove, he saw something that gave him both a thrill and bone-deep chill.

He was passing along Boulevard of the Sky Martyrs and about to cross The Street of October Seventeenth, when the surrounding crowd seemed to halt, abruptly, all around him.

Well, not everyone, but enough people to bring the rhythmic bustle to a dead stall. Bin stumbled into the back of a well-padded pedestrian, who looked briefly as confused as he was. They both turned to see that about a third of those around them were suddenly staring, as if into space, murmuring to themselves, some of them with jaws agape, half open in some kind of surprise.

Swiftly he realized, these were people who had been linked-in with goggles, specs, tru-vus, or contact-zhones, each person moving through some virtual overlay—perhaps following guide arrows to a destination, or doing business as they walked, while others simply liked their city overlain with flowers, or jungle foliage, or fairy-tale colors. It also made them receptive to a high-priority news alert. Soon, half the people in sight were shuffling aside, half consciously moving toward the nearest wall in order to get away from traffic, while their minds soared far away.

Seeing so many others dive into a news-trance, the overweight gentleman muttered an oath and reached into his pocket to pull out some wraparound glasses. He, too, pressed close to the nearest building, emitting short grunts of interest while his aiware started filling him in.

Bin briefly wondered if he should be afraid. City life had many hazards, not all of them on the scale of Awfulday. But … the people clumping along the edges of the sidewalk didn’t seem worried, as much as engrossed. Surely that meant there was no immediate danger.

Meanwhile, many of those who lacked gear were pestering their companions, demanding verbal updates. He overheard a few snippets.

“The Artifact … the rumors … they gain increasing credence!” and “The aliens exist … leaked dataviews … credible for the first time, approaching fifty percent!”

Aliens. Artifact.
Of course those words had been foaming around for a week or so. Rumors were part of life’s background, just like the soapy tidal spume. It sounded like a silly thing, unworthy of the small amount of free time that he shared with Mei Ling, each exhausted evening. A fad, surely, or hoax, or marketing ploy. Or, at best, none of his concern. Only now Bin blinked in surprise over how many suddenly seemed to care.
Maybe we should scan for a free-access show about it, tonight.
Instead of the usual medieval romance stories that Mei Ling demanded.

Despite all the people who had stepped aside, into virtual newspace, that still left hundreds of pedestrians who didn’t care, or who felt they could wait. These took advantage of the cleared sidewalks to hurry about their business.
As should I,
he thought, stepping quickly across the street while ai-piloted vehicles worked their way past, evading those with human drivers who had pulled aside.

Aliens. From outer space. Could it possibly be true?
Bin had to admit, this was stirring his long-dormant imagination.

He turned onto the Avenue of Fragrant Hydroponics and suddenly came to a halt. People were beginning to stir from the mass news-trance, muttering to one another—in real life and across the Mesh—while stepping back into the sidewalk and resuming their journeys. Only, now it was
his
turn to be distracted, to stop and stare, to push unapologetically past others and press toward the nearest building, bringing his face close to the window of a store selling visualization tools.

One of the new SEF threevee displays sparkled within, offering that unique sense of ghostly semitransparency in a cube of open space—and it showed three demons.

That was how Bin first viewed them, as made-up characters in one of those cheap fantasy dramas that Mei Ling loved—one like an imp, with flamelike fur, one horselike with nostrils that flared like caves, and another whose tentacles evoked some monster of the sea. They jostled each other, each trying to step or shove in front of the others.

A disturbing trio, in their own right. Only, it wasn’t the creatures that had Bin transfixed. It was their home. The context. The object framing, containing, perhaps imprisoning them.

He recognized it, at once. Cleaner and more pristine—less pitted and scarred—and a bit longer. Nevertheless, it was clearly a cousin to the thing he had left behind this morning, in the surf-battered home that he shared with his wife and little son.

Bin swallowed hard.

I thought I was being careful, seeking information about that thing.

But careful was a relative word.

He left the bag of cheaper, Earthly stones lying there, like an offering, in front of the image in the threevee tank. It would only weigh him down now, as he ran for home.

ENTROPY

Way back at the start of the century, the Lifeboat Foundation assigned doom scenarios to four general categories:

Calamities
—Humanity and intelligence go extinct from Earth. Causes range from nuclear war or spoiling the ecosystem to voraciously unstoppable manmade black holes or ravenous nano-plagues.

Collapse
—Humanity survives, but we never reach our potential. For example, eco-decay and resource depletion might be slow enough for a few descendants to eke a threadbare niche. Or a world society might enforce hyperconformity, drab, relentless, and permanent.

Dominium
—Some narrow form of posthumanity is attained but limiting the range of what’s possible. Take every tale of domination by a super-ai or transcendent-intolerant uber-beings. Or the prescriptions offered by fanatic utopians from left to right, across five thousand years, each convinced of “the way” ahead. Suppose one of these plans actually delivered. We might “advance” in some cramped ways. Caricatures of sameness.

Betrayal
—A posthuman civilization heads in some direction that cancels many of the values or things we cherish. Isn’t this the nightmare fretting conservatives? That our children—biological or cybernetic—will leave us far behind and forget to write? That they’ll neglect to visit and share a joke or two? That they’ll stop caring about the old songs, the old gods? The old race?

Worse, might they head off to the stars in ways that we (today) abhor? As predators, perhaps. Or all-consuming reproducers, or as meddlers, hot with righteous malice, or else cool and unsympathetic. Not the eager-greeters that we envision as our starfaring destiny, in recent, high-minded fables. But, instead, the sort of callous descendants we’d disown … as if such beings would care what we think.

Any of these general categories might contain the Great Filter. Whatever trap—or host of traps—winnows the number of confident, gregarious, star-traveling species, down to the skimpy near nothing we observe, keeping empty what should have been a crowded sky.

—Pandora’s Cornucopia

18.

POVLOVERS

Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.

It had become a litany, as MediaCorp kept asking Tor to “drop in” on eccentric envelope-pushers while making her way across the continent. At last, she felt she understood the real purpose of this journey. What the execs were hoping to teach their up-and-coming young point-of-view star.

There isn’t one America anymore. If there ever had been.

Take her brief visit to the State of Panhandle, for example, fifty-sixth star on the flag, where she met with members of the ruling party, who planned to ratchet up their secession bid next year, and to stop even nominally flying the Stars ’n’ Stripes. Even if that meant another aiware embargo. Meanwhile, next door, in cosmopolitan Oklahoma, there was renewed talk of a bid to join the EU …

… rousing bitter anger in Unionist Missouri, where bluecoat militia membership was rising fast and several casinos had burned to the ground.

A cynic would attribute all this fury to economics. A spreading dustbowl. The cornahol collapse. Across what had been the heartland, Tor felt the same anxious note of helplessness and letdown, after the bubble prosperity of the twenties and thirties. A renewed need for someone to blame.

And, yet, all through the last week, Tor’s hand kept drifting into her bag, to Dr. Sato’s little relic, still unable to believe that the Atkins director had given it to her. A Neolithic tool-core, thirty thousand years old. One of many, to be sure—anthropologists had found thousands, all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Yet, the specimen was surely worth something—several hundred newbucks on a bidding site.

An attempted bribe for good coverage? Somehow, she doubted that. Anyway, it didn’t affect her report. The Atkins Center treatments seemed promising, but hardly a panacea cure for the worldwide Autism Plague. Their approach only worked for “high-functioning” patients, who could already interact with others in fairly rational conversation. For millions of acute victims—fixated on minutiae, evading eye contact, prickly toward any distraction, or else lost down corridors of bizarre virtual reality that few normal minds could follow—for them, Sato offered only hope for desperate loved ones.

Still, her encounter with that strange man gave Tor an excuse to add one more stop, before proceeding to her new job in Rebuilt Washington. The semiannual Godmakers’ Conference, held this very week in Nashville, city of tolerance and hospitality.

It had better be tolerant,
she thought, stepping past vigilant doorway sniffers, into the expansive Metro Convention Center.
These people are wearing a great big target on their backs. And proud of it, too.

A real-cloth banner, just inside the entrance, proclaimed
—

TOMORROW WELCOMES THE BOLD!

To which, a tagger had attached, in lurid vraiffiti, visible to anyone wearing specs—

And Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!

Beyond, for aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations, and selforg clubs touted “transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augmented by garish VR. Tor found her specs bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow repair kits.

From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.

From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.

Yes,
robots.
The quaint term was back again, as memory of the Yokohama Yankhend slowly faded, along with a promise that
this
generation of humanoid automatons would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too cute, or dangerous. Or all three at once.

“Every year, they solve some problem or obstacle, in machine-walking, talking, vision, navigation, or common sense,”
she subvocalized for her report, allowing the specs to absorb it all, watching as one aindroid from a Korean chaebol showed off eastasian dance moves and a winning smile. The demonstration was impressive. But demonstrations always were.

“Then, they always wind up bollixed by some simple task. An uneven flight of stairs. A muddled foreground or background. A semantic paradox. Something that wouldn’t bother a five-year-old kid. And every year, the lesson is the same.

“We are already marvels. A three-kilo human brain still combines more amazing things than any computer model can yet emulate.

“It’s been seventy years that ai-builders have promised to surge beyond human ken. Their list of tricks keeps growing. Ai can sift and correlate across all of human knowledge, in seconds. Yet, each decade reveals more layers of unexpected subtlety, that lay hidden in our own packed neuron-clusters all along. Skills we simply took for granted.”

There it was, again. A theme, planted in her mind by Sato. The notion that something strangely spectacular had been wrought—by God or evolution or both—inside the Homo sapiens brain. About the same time as that chert core in her bag was the technological acme.

“If anything, today’s Tower of Babel is flat but incredibly wide. This generation of godmakers isn’t thwarted by language—that barrier is gone forever—but the bewildering complexity of the thing they hope to copy. Our minds.”

Of course, some of the products and services here had more modest goals. One body-sculpting booth offered the latest fat-dissolving technology, using targeted microwaves to melt lipids exactly
where-u-want
. Their slogan—from Nietzsche—

“The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a deity.”

She wondered what Sato would make of that.
Well, one more humility-reminder bites the dust. When everyone can look good in spandex, will conceit know any bounds?

Speaking of the abdomen … dozens of men and women were lined up at a booth for the McCaffrey Foundation, signing waivers in order to join a test study of
e-calculi
—gut bacteria transformed to function as tiny computers, powered by excess food. Have a problem? Unleash trillions of tiny, parallel processors occupying your own intestine! Speed them up by eating more! And they produce Vitamin C!

At first, Tor thought this
must
be a hoax. It sounded like a comedy routine from Monty Phytoplankton. She wondered how the computed output finally emerged.