Year's Best SF 10, page 10
—Theodore Henry, textpost to
MediaNexus One: Discussion group:
World Parliament; Thread:
Convention Good/Convention Bad
Second watch is nearly over by the time Cruncher names our first suspect.
The system’s real designation is some unmemorable acronym, but everyone simply calls it Cruncher, because that’s what it does. A mass of neural nets bathed in liquid nitrogen, Cruncher has been eating vast databases for over half a century, sucking the marrow out of every legally available network and nexus, masticating unthinkable volumes of unconnected factlets, developing an acute taste for complex hidden relationships. Out of enormous volumes of dross, Cruncher digests a few surprisingly useful little sense-packets. Such as:
1) chemical taggants in the rocket-grenade’s residue identify the explosive as Pyrochem NanoIndustries “Detanit” 2083-A, specifically originating from a lot sold to Gaian Extraction Ltd;
2) this shipment was received at a Sudbury supply depot three years ago, and later apparently expended in normal mining operations; however,
3) certain anomalies in the company’s tracking records suggest that up to four kilos may subsequently have gone missing;
4) GaianEx was, for over a decade prior to the recent economic corrections, the contract employer of Richard Kindred, forty-two, a mining teleoperation technician and Metro resident; and
5) Mr. Kindred is a known supporter of the Humanist Front, and one of several individuals suspected of authoring synthephobe propaganda under the pseudonym “Theodore Henry.”
“Baby’s on fire!” exclaims Daniel. “You called it, Gene. Our perp used a friggin’ telebot.”
Moon pulls the optic lead from behind ser left ear. “Kindred was probably sitting safely at home the whole time, running that walking waldo remotely.”
I’m already downloading everything Cruncher can give me authored by “Theodore Henry.”
To make matters worse, we humans are all turning into cybrids. We get injured, or just get old, soon we get plastic eyes, myoelectric legs, mechine heart and lungs, eventually we’re all just jarbrains in bot bodies. Pathetic cogent-wannabes. Millions aren’t waiting until they get sick, they’re having themselves rebuilt now. Why wait? Throw away your humanity today and avoid the rush!
Meanwhile over in Africa, the cogs in the so-called Free Enclaves are doing “cephaline” implants: wiring cogbrains into animal bodies. Of course, they have to resect most of the animal’s brain to do it, bit by bit, while it’s still developing. The buggers have made cephaline cogents out of large dogs, a cheetah, even some chimps and gorillas.
If you’re lucky enough to live in a non-Con country like the U.S., you might think the authorities can keep the cogents out pretty easily. Think again. Even the animals wandering your eco-preserves might really be cephalines.
—Theodore Henry, textpost to:
Conspiracy Research News Nexus:
Feedback Group: New threats to consider; Thread: Everyone is wrong!
Night again. We’ve pulled a triple watch, and I’m feeling like burned toast. Moon could easily keep going for another two shifts, but sie orders everyone to get some dreamtime. Even cogents require sleep, if only an hour or two per twenty-four. A brain has to be unconscious while it does memory consolidation and other neural housekeeping chores.
Our long afternoon culminated in a large multi-Division meeting in the auditorium. Cruncher has identified half a dozen suspected members of Kindred’s cell of Humanistas. Supporting evidence is being collected, warrants obtained, surveillance begun. Six simultaneous raids have been laid out, scheduled for a few minutes after dawn.
The night air is warm and sluggish as Moon and I emerge from Central Ops via the loading docks behind the building.
I light up a cig, savoring the dark carbon taste. “I heard something about a new message?”
Summoned from the garage, Moon’s Volvo Ceptor pulls up, opens its doors for us.
“Yeah,” Moon replies. “Cogent Self-Defense Militia. They say they’ll be ‘forced to take retaliatory action against the synthephobes’ if the responsible parties are not rounded up swiftly.”
“Ah. Just the kind of help we need.”
In the car, sie begins to unwind, seeming to slough off all the accumulated pressures of the day along with ser jacket.
“A telebot. Damn.” Sie steals the cig from my lips and takes a long drag of nobacco smoke. “I was kinda hoping the perp would be some pathetic loser of a cybrid, just so I could laugh in Aramaki’s smarmy face.”
“Loser?” Through swirls of smoke, I watch those ink-dark eyes reflect the passing streetlights. “Cybrids are all losers?”
Sie waves the cig, dismissive. “Cyburgers. Humans should repair themselves with human parts. They can clone ’em up, grow them in culture, or at least make them look biological. Why pretend to be mechinik? Cybrids are mimsies, really. They mimic cogents, the way biomimetic cogs ape humans. It’s undignified. Completely lacking in self-respect.” Moon’s voice carries a clear and dismaying note of contempt.
I take back the cig, suck it slowly down to ash, saying nothing.
We pass the audacious diamondoid arc that is Greater Metro City Hall. Looks like God’s own wedding band has been half-embedded in the ground at a radical forty-degree angle, expressing all the over-confidence of the early Nano Era. It embraces Bicentennial Park in its arms—knots of bored teens there by the fountains, hanging out, smoking up, necking under the trees. Most of the youths are sporting the latest fashion in biometallic skin mods.
“Ever thought about kids, Gene?”
I almost laugh, until I notice sie’s not joking. “What, you mean having my own?”
“Careful what you say,” sie warns, smiling. “I had this lover once, happened to mention sie had no interest in reproducing, ever. Now, I’d never even imagined comping with sem, understand. But suddenly, I lost all desire for the cog. Don’t know why. Just one of life’s mysteries…”
As the car swims into the traffic streams of the LunaBank Expressway, Moon’s mouth finds mine, hands at work between us, undoing my clothes. Sie tastes of smoke.
+At least blank the windows,+ I vox, unable to speak.
+Such a prude,+ sie replies, but the Ceptor’s windows opaque, the seatbacks lie flat, music comes on: Branca’s Ascension #1. Massed screaming guitars, perfect-tuned, crawling up a dissonant, Fibonacci-derived series, muted somewhat by Moon’s tongue in my left ear. We struggle out of our shirts, chests crushed together, my senskin flushing dark blue-violet against Moon’s suede-textured buttery gold. Ser mouth descends to my petite breasts—grown in the past hour just for this occasion, shivering exquisitely against ser lips and teeth. Pants sliding off, then a hardness against my thigh: sie has deployed a cock this time, or something like one. Not content to play the passive Ladytron, I send out an exploratory party of sensitive tendrils to meet the space invader. I feel it flex in a most unlikely manner. Preparing clefts and mouths with no human parallel, I am flooded with anticipation.
I awaken with a jolt. Moon’s bedroom, closet light on, the city glowing and feverish beyond the windows. Silhouette of ser fake Chinese rubber plant, with its green plastic watering can…
“Sorry, sweets,” sie says from the right of the bed. “Didn’t mean to wake you.” Sie finishes pulling on black pants, selects a shirt from the closet.
“You didn’t, I—” Shards of nightmare fall away as I grasp for them. “I had a strange dream.”
Screaming rockets. A chaos of exploding color: brilliant green, spiraling gold. Helpless paralysis, aching apparitions that once were limbs…
Moon sits on the bed and leans over to kiss me.
I slide my hand over ser nipples; they’re already fading back into Moon’s soft-bronze senskin. Until next time.
“It’s after midnight,” sie says. “I’m heading back in to Central Ops to see that things are shaping up nicely. You just go back to sleep.” Sie’s noticed I have an unusual need for sleep, over five hours per night. Sie thinks it’s weird, but tolerable. “Get lots of dreamtime. We all need to be sharp for the morning.”
I hear music from downstairs, melodious deep-thimba. The girls must still be up. Moon shares this revivalist brownstone with two human families, a parenting collective. I have a small apartment in West Hill, but these days I often don’t see it for a week at a time.
“Gondwanaland. Were you being serious, before, about wanting kids?”
“Well,” sie studies me with those coal-black eyes, “not this year, obviously. But, yeah. I want kids. We should do it some day. You and me, Officer Blue. Comp a pair of twins, maybe. We could all live here. I think the others would love to have some little cogs around the place…”
Ser voice fades out as sie notices my expression, uncertain and noncommittal, masking a growing sense of panic.
“Just think about it, okay?”
Sie gets up and finishes dressing.
I settle into the pillows. “Will you be there when we pick up Kindred?”
Jacket on and ready to go, sie looks back from the doorway. “Not in person. I’ll be running things from Central Ops. You and Aramaki can handle Kindred. But you be careful, eh, baby?”
What did we think we needed them for? Clearly it was the worst kind of desperation move, grasping at straws. A race drowning in its own effluents, destroying entire forests, wiping out other species without remorse. Praying for some kind of deliverance from ourselves.
When Mind Theory came along, the cogence-lab girls and boys thought they could make superbeings. Researchers had been scanning human brains for decades, tweezing out the wiring responsible for every human ability, every emotion, even romantic love (activation centers located in the anterior cingulate gyrus, the insula, the caudate nucleus and so on).
As soon as the brainmappers had abstracted out the human equivalent of a neurome, they started translating it into something that could run on fullerwire nets. They really believed the cogs would evolve straight up an exponential curve, quickly becoming godlike superintellects. Didn’t work, did it? Seems there are scaling problems. Mainly heat dissipation, systemic synchronization, emergent bottlenecks, all kinds of unexpected limiting factors. Self-aware systems just can’t bound up the evolutionary ladder so fast as they’d hoped. Lucky for us, eh?
Still, sixty-odd years on, we’re suffering the effects of their Promethean hubris. Cogent enclaves are proliferating across the planet, even under the oceans. A disease left unchecked for too long, metastasizing wildly, competing for resources. Inevitably the cancer will begin to kill off the parent organism, human civilization.
The patient’s condition is entirely iatrogenic.
—Theodore Henry, textpost: University of Terra at Belize City: Department of Anthropology: Open Forum: Culture of Science; Thread: Technology as Religion.
“Shitty-looking place,” says Dan, lowering his binoculars. “I thought mining was a decent-paying job.”
“Mining’s not what it used to be,” I point out. “No more risking your life down there underground.”
It’s not quite six in the morning, a pink sun just crawling above the rooftops. Daniel Aramaki and I are waiting in an unmarked gray Persina on Ash Crescent, about two hundred meters along a gentle uphill curve from Kindred’s suburban residence. He lives in an antique split-level under a mossy, swaybacked roof. Scrub grass has taken over the yard. A lawn jockey with silver-painted skin stands guard by the crumbling front walk.
“And Kindred’s taken some hits recently. GaianEx hasn’t had him on contract for over two years. His ex took the condo. At least he gets to see his kid on the weekends.”
“Definitely fits the profile.” Dan takes a swig from his coffee, twists his mouth in disgust. “What’s taking them so long?”
I mind’s-eye the status display. “Surveillance is having trouble determining whether he’s alone or not. He lives in the basement. Something in the foundation seems to be clouding their millimeter-wave imagers, and they’ve lost contact with the flybots they’ve sent in.”
“Probably built on old landfill,” says Dan. “Compacted aluminum cans, car batteries, plastic diapers…”
Moon’s voice hums clearly over the vox link, +SWAT teams, take up secondary positions.+
Short figures dash across the adjacent weedgrown lawns—armored, inhumanly agile, armed with shockstaves. I glimpse others leaping the fence into the backyard. Their asymmetric heads are agglomerations of lenses, scopes, detector vanes.
+Team One, Control. We’re in position.+
+All teams…+ A long pause, then: +Playtime.+
The SWATbots ignore the doors. They tear the security bars away from the ground-level casements and disappear, boots first, through the windowpanes.
+Room one, clear.+
The Persina makes its move, accelerating toward the residence. Daniel seals his armor vest. I’m lightly bulletproofed, but there’s no telling what kind of firepower these synthephobes may have stockpiled…
+Stairs, clear.+ The teleoperators calmly report in, one at a time, through crashing waves of static on the vox link.
Jerking, blurry pix tile across my display, half-obscured by interference noise: rooms full of junk; mote-filled sunbeams in a dismal wreck of a kitchen; a startled look on Kindred’s pillow-creased face, eyes opening to his worst nightmare—cornered by faceless implacable robots—
+Police! Down! Down on the floor!+
By the time Daniel and I are out of the car and sprinting up the front walk, it’s all over. A SWATbot casually opens the door for us. +All secure, Detectives. No booby traps. Come on down.+
In the basement, there’s a smell of moldy carpets. Slivers of glass crunch underfoot. Flags hang in the doorways: “HF” in white on blood red and forest green. Blank screens wrap around the teleop workstation in one corner, the waldo controls under an accumulation of dust. I note a variety of handguns and rifles, some locked into cases, others just sitting out on cluttered tables.
In the bedroom, Richard Kindred lies on his face, in rapidly yellowing underwear, wrists gathered in plastic restraints behind his back. He is breathing heavily, but still unable to move, aside from the occasional twitch.
I turn around in wonder. Tacked up across the low ceiling and covering every wall: layer upon layer of silvery pie-tins, aluminum foil, and chickenwire.
From his seat in the back of the car, Kindred watches me with a look of resolute fury. He’s very pale, balding, immobile as a showroom dummy. Hasn’t said a word since the stun wore off. Not even to thank us for letting him get cleaned up and dressed. Sweat is beading across his porcelain forehead.
“I don’t think he likes you, Gene-machine.” Dan puts his shades on and drops into his seat. “What’s the matter, Dick?” he says, swiveling to grin at the suspect. “Got a problem with the help? Just be glad you don’t have to work with this uppity fucker. I gotta listen to Detective Love Doll here, yak about how he fought against your kind in North Africa. He’s a real pain in the ass, in fact.”
Kindred’s seething gaze never strays from me.
The Persina’s doors begin to shut, but I override them. “I’ll be just a few moments, Aramaki.” I climb out again.
“Where you going?”
“Something’s bugging me…” I head back toward that abject house. “Need to take another look.”
Two steps from the car, I’m suddenly thrown to the ground in a blast of heat. Trembling, I try to rise on pavement-scraped hands and knees, but my left arm gives way. Through sheets of pain, I see a million tiny chunks of crystallized safety glass, bouncing and refracting brilliant orange. I have the sense to start rolling, away from the car, or what’s left of it. Small and large pieces are hailing out of the air all around me. My roll puts out the flames I’ve only just noticed: the back of my neck and my clothes were on fire.
Sitting up, I see the Persina’s smoking remains.
Crazy bastard blew himself up.
+A thoracic implant,+ says Moon, framed in my mind’s-eye, pixing from downtown. +About thirty grams of Detanit, wrapped in some sort of incendiary compound. Kelly’s people are trying to identify the incendiary.+
And where, I wonder, did Kindred find someone to put a thing like that inside him?
Unclothed, immobilized from the neck down, I’m cradled in the gentle grip of an operating room couch at Dragonfly Penumbra Reparatory. It’s a class four clean-room in here, so no face-to-face visitors for me just yet. Moon has assured me sie’ll come down as soon as sie can get away.
A legless white telebot is attaching fullerwire bundles to my left shoulder terminals, where my arm used to be. I wish the tech would hurry it up: the continuous phantom pain from the missing limb is going to drive me mad in a few more minutes, besides evoking well-buried memories I would much rather leave safely undisturbed.
+What’s Dan’s status?+
+I just spoke with the hospital,+ says Moon. +They’re cooling him down for nanosurgery. His lungs are damaged, but not too badly. His chances look good. But the burns, Gene…+ For a moment ser confidence seems to falter. +They’re going to have to replace all of his skin, his limbs, his face and eyes…In a few weeks, he’ll be a full-body cybrid.+
But Danny wasn’t the target; I was. When I got out of the car, Kindred must have thought he was going to miss his chance…
+Dennet’s about ready to have kittens,+ Moon continues, +threatening to fire everyone in Surveillance, the SWAT unit, even me. Wants to know how we failed to detect Kindred’s implant.+
+As the arresting officer,+ I point out, +it was my responsibility—+
Moon waves both palms in front of ser face. +Oh, don’t be so fucking noble, Gene. I don’t want to hear it. And you weren’t the A/O, Danny was.+
