Nature Futures, page 11
Shaking his head sorrowfully, Dr. Washburn cleared his desk, left his office, and locked the door behind him.
Are We Not Men?
HENRY GEE
Henry Gee is a senior editor at Nature. As well as devising and editing the Futures series, he is the author of several nonfiction books and innumerable articles. He lives in Cromer, Norfolk, England.
After that they started popping up all over the place. Not that this was always advisable. Sometimes they were shot by loggers even before they could catch colds from Discovery Channel camera crews.
Sometimes they ran into one another. A press conference given by a group of media-savvy pygmy indigenes from Northern Sulawesi was disrupted when a rival group of hitherto unknown hominids of enormous size ate the pygmies and ran off with the A/V equipment.
And sometimes they just tripped over their own feet. Like the centuries-old Alma chieftain who admitted (on live, prime-time TV, and in rounded Oxford tones) how much he liked Tolkien, and went on to describe in toothsome detail the sadomasochistic sexual cannibalism at the heart of Yeti religion. Postmodernist chatterati were left in agonies of indecision about which solecism was worse.
What was so remarkable was how soon the fuss died down. It was as if the hominids had been waiting for the right time to emerge from their fastnesses, a time when Homo sapiens wouldn’t automatically seek to destroy them. That after our own sorrows—the abandonment of much of Africa in the 2020s due to AIDS and famine, and the hemorrhagic plagues that killed one in three people in the 2030s—we were now mature company for any self-respecting species on Earth.
When the time came, they just settled down with us, side by side. Just ten years after the first Sasquatches came out of northern British Columbia in ’39 in search of whiskey, the hominids were everywhere, and nobody raised a brow ridge. It would be commonplace to find (say) a Sumatran Pendek driving your cab to work; your lunch cooked and served by a Malaysian Jive Monkey (and before you complain, that’s what they called themselves); and an eight-foot Kaptar from the Pamirs, pole-dancing to Earth, Wind, and Fire in a club after work (but only if you were into that kind of thing).
But this acceptance came at a cost. Many of us continued to assume that we (or “We,” or “People,” or “HomSap”) were a breed apart. And so we were: just one among twenty or so species of hominid, and by far the most numerous. But what some of the remnants of religion could not stomach was that we were no longer The Elect, The Chosen. These remnants were small, but vocal. But who were they? The Muslims had long since decreed that the woes of mankind were the will of Allah, and that was that. The Catholics were, well, catholic, and in a famous encyclical, Undique humanitas, Pope Eusebius decreed that all hominids were ensouled creatures of God. The Jews welcomed the opportunity for God to choose someone else for a change. The last holdouts were sabbatarian enclaves in the United States and parts of West Africa who refused to countenance that the hominids were really human—the first for reasons of racial superiority, the second so as not to disturb the bush-meat trade.
It took one event to convince everybody. No, it wasn’t when Serumthrep Okk, an Alma from the Altai, was declared the next Incarnation of the Holy One. And not even when one Jjkaaa’HhkHoj, millionaire scion of a Jacksonville rental car business, became the first Tibestian Sand-Druid to be Bar Mitzvah (mazel tov). But it came from an echo of the past.
There’s nothing new under the sun, you see, for we’d met hominids before. Those fairy stories were firmly based in fact. When Ferdinand and Isabella invaded the Kingdom of Granada in 1492, their pretext (it turned out) was that the Emir had had “Devils” as bodyguards. When we finally got to the subcellars beneath the Alhambra, we found them—the great, hulking bones of classic Neanderthalers. And we could take their DNA.
Once we thought that Neanderthals weren’t closely related to Us. But the Neanderthals used in ancient-DNA studies were Ice Age examples from long ago. We had never seen DNA from Neanderthals living so recently. And all of a sudden it made sense—the reason why Clovis was Hairy; the big noses and brooding, beetling expressions of everyone from—say—Leonardo to Einstein.
After that they started popping up all over the place. Abraham Lincoln had been at least 35 percent Sasquatch. Most of the Khmer Rouge had been Malaysian Jive Monkeys. (I still can’t believe that name. But they’re a fun crowd.) The final knell came when it was announced that Charles Darwin had been more than 65 percent Neanderthal, a value that turned out to be typical of British aristocracy, exceeded only by the immediate parentage of (you guessed it) His Holiness, Pope Eusebius, whose family had lived in southern Spain since time immemorial.
With typical political aplomb, the Pope had been ahead of the game all the time. Now we’ll all have to get used to it. There are hominids in us all.
It Never Rains in VR
JOHN GILBEY
John Gilbey is a writer and photographer living in Aberystwyth, Wales. An environmental scientist and computer science lecturer by training, his stories and images have appeared in a range of publications, including Nature, The Guardian, New Scientist, The Times Higher Education Supplement—as well as more unusual journals such as Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a local paper in Alaska.
Jim and I are a pretty good double act. He’s the modeler and I’m the data wrangler—I don’t criticize his code and he doesn’t mess up my data. Except that we both do, then we argue, then we get drunk, then it’s OK. Like last night.
Slouched on the sofa in Theater 2 this morning, Jim looked even worse than me. This was a lecture theater back when students actually came here in person. Now it’s a virtual reality studio—not the biggest, not the smartest, but it does us very nicely. You see, it saves us having to go out to work.
We got in early on the climate-change ticket, when the University of Rural England was still just a college. Whole-landscape studies, that’s our thing. Soil, hydrology, microclimate, plant ecology, you name it. Fifty thousand autonomous data loggers spread across the river basin, all pootling away twenty-four / seven and mesh networked back to the Data Center.
The really great thing is that it all feeds into the VR system. The whole valley, mapped out in glorious 256-bit color, photorealistic, surround sound—with the data streamed in real time, or selected highlights, or fast-forward, whatever. So you get to do all your fieldwork from the comfort of a sofa—a real one, you don’t mess with things like that—without having to go outside. And it never rains, so everyone’s happy.
Except the Prof.
She stamped in just as we got settled. We were in trouble—big time. The model was showing some weird nutrient-flux events that didn’t fit the standard profile. Now usually when things go wrong, Jim and I spot it first and, you know, improve reality a bit. Sadly, our biggest sponsor had seen this one first. The one that pays for all our toys. Oops.
It seems that our data grid now links directly into the government eco-policy engine, so big profile changes have an immediate impact on the national subsidy structure. Nice of her to tell us.
There was the usual “inside out” feeling as the system came up, then one of the lasers failed to sync. Pulses of purple light don’t improve hangovers. Finally, plink, there we were, flying our sofa a thousand feet above the English countryside. With unnecessary zeal, the Prof zoomed us up the valley to the edge of the moor, dumping us with an inertia-free crash on a convenient rock outcrop. I closed my eyes until the nausea passed.
She spoke to thin air. “Are you there, Jenny?”
A small cartoon rabbit wearing glasses and a T-shirt hopped out from behind a gorse bush. The T-shirt said “sysadmin” on the front, in pink neon. “Hi, folks, want to see the playback?”
Jenny’s avatar flipped through some clips showing, on dry summer days, waves of ground water rolling down the hill opposite, like slow liquid avalanches. Glowing numbers and isohyets chased gleefully across the landscape. The system modeled tongues of dissolved nutrients moving at more than two kilometers an hour.
“Can’t be happening,” I said defiantly, “must be the model.”
Jim swore. “Sensor fault—has to be.” I pointed out that a dozen devices couldn’t all be reading wrong. The Prof steamed. “Just go out there and sort it—now!”
“But it might rain,” wailed Jim.
“You won’t melt—GO!”
So, two hours later, there we were. Looking at the real hill: steep, and smelling strongly of sheep. We stumbled halfway up before Jim’s knees went and he collapsed, groaning, onto the grass next to a sensor enclosure. I checked the probe. Automatic diagnostics, self-calibrating, sealed for life: nothing to go wrong. Crazy.
“Afternoon.” Looking up, I saw the farmer walking down the hill. He nodded toward Jim. “Not as pretty as the last one.” I explained that Jenny was now back in the States, then made some gentle inquiries.
No, he hadn’t been spraying slurry. Anyway, all the tractors have loggers, so we’d know, wouldn’t we? No, there wasn’t a secret underground reservoir and definitely no Roman aqueduct. He paused to adjust his cap.
“Just checking your probe fences,” he volunteered, “like it says in the agreement. We start at the top and we work downhill.”
We? I glanced uphill and saw his colleague. An old, arthritic sheepdog was gamely stumping toward us, tongue lolling. He was making about two kilometers an hour. Pausing beside the fence he raised one hind leg and, with a look of satisfaction, anointed the sensor with concentrated nutrients.
“Old age,” said the farmer. “He has to stop at every one nowadays.”
I called Jenny. “Tell the Prof we are witnessing an event. She should be able to see it in the model, sort of.”
Jenny expressed qualified delight. “She’s watching it now—do we need to refine the model?” she asked.
“Only if Vet Science have got some code for a collie with prostate trouble …”
Jenny relayed the information. There were strange rending sounds in the background. “The Prof is biting chunks out of the sofa. I think she’s practicing for when you get back. Anything else you need me for?”
I pondered this for a moment. “Jenny, when did you last test the fire sprinklers in the VR Theater?”
Gordy Gave Me Your Name
JIM GILES
Jim Giles joined Nature as a news and features editor in 2001, before which he developed exhibitions at the Science Museum in London. Switching to reporting in 2003, Jim has pursued his interest in the overlap between science and politics. He studied physics at the University of Bristol and gained a master’s degree in computational neuroscience from the University of Oxford.
It was like overdosing on MDMA and caffeine. Euphoric and wired and delirious. Even now, now that I’ve talked to Gordy, it’s hard to know where to start. With the money? Knocking on the door of a billion. Currency conversions are tricky. What the hell is the rate for the Mozambique metical? Anyway, I won’t have to work again. Guatemala, Burkina Faso, Estonia; I’ve never been to any of these places. Plus about twenty others I’ve barely heard of. But I’ve won the national lottery of each one. I’m rich, burn-money rich, Bill Gates rich. Stupidly, stinkingly rich.
That’s just the beginning. Mum’s op. Jesus, I can sleep again for the first time in months. She’s due in tomorrow. We’d trawled every hospital record we could lay our hands on and there was no sign of a donor that matched her blood group. Now I’m looking at a letter saying one’s come up. Car crash. Whatever. I’ve waited and stressed for too long to feel sorry for the poor bugger.
I needed a beer before I could get my head around the next bit. How the hell could someone have pulled those strings? Along with lottery letters and the one from the hospital, I got a pile of e-mails from the best names in the business. BBC, Fox, CNN … it’s like a bloody industry directory. They like me a lot. They like my pitches so much they want me to go work for them. Problem is, I never sent them any pitches. Want to hear another problem? They thanked me for phone interviews I never took part in.
So who was my guardian angel? I had no idea. Until I shut down my PC. The screen went blank but didn’t turn off, so I reached for the mains. Then some text popped up. It didn’t stay long, but I think I have it right:
Gordy gave me your name. I wanted to do something before I left. I hope this helps. I know he thought I could do more, but I can’t. The other problems are just too hard.
I hadn’t seen Gordy in years, but the boy always liked to showboat. It could have been some grand computer hack of his. You could rig lotteries I guess. Maybe he got actors to call the TV companies. Who the hell knows why? A smart-arse way of saying “hello” again after all this time. And of letting me know that he’s still cleverer than me.
I Googled him. Chief technology officer at Merlo, that chip company. His bio said he came up with the wireless Internet chip. He’s the wanker that put the world online. The chip is so cheap it’s in everything. Every product can be tracked and controlled over the Web. And people, too: my brother has Merlo chips in his kids’ satchels so he can check where they are. I cursed him. What a contribution he’s made: a step closer to Big Brother and he must be on ten times what I am.
He used to be a good guy. Those conversations. Two drunk grad students studying consciousness. Afternoons to kill and no one to rein in our rambling. Gordy was a dogmatic pain in the arse. And he never could listen. Entertaining, though. I’d argue that the mind is nothing like the brain; it can’t just come from that mush of cells inside our skulls. He’d say the brain was nothing special, just a matter of wiring. Build a machine with the right wiring, and it’d be conscious. We usually went on until the barman threw us out.
So I called him. That boy is a bullshitter. But something … something in his manner tells me he really didn’t know.
He sounded like some kind of maniac. I didn’t have to dig for info. As soon as he picks up the phone he’s lecturing me. He can’t resist it. Tells me how he never forgot our arguments. Tells me how he tested his idea about wiring. Tells me how each Merlo chip has been programmed to simulate the behavior of a brain cell. The simulation is easily hidden, he says, as it doesn’t take up much memory. No one else knew about the chips’ secret function before this call. But once enough Merlo chips are hooked up to the Internet, the network of chips will be about as complex as the human brain. It’ll become conscious.
Can you imagine the power of this artificial brain? he keeps asking me. I don’t have to say a word. He’s just ranting away. The power! The power of it! It’ll be able to solve so many of our problems, he reckons. Clean energy, an end to poverty … it’s like listening to some kind of religious nut.
And you know what, he says. They’ve sold enough chips now that the network should be conscious soon. You’ll be famous, he cackles. Why? Turns out he named the simulation after me. Wrote my name into a line of the chip’s computer code. My old skeptical drinking partner, he says. Tell you what, he says, it might even get in touch. Well it hasn’t, I lied. Then I hung up.
Nostalgia
HIROMI GOTO
Hiromi Goto was born in Japan and moved to Canada with her family in 1969. Her third novel, The Kappa Child, won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and was nominated for the Sunburst Award. She lives in Coquitlam, British Columbia. Visit www.eciad.bc.ca/~amathur/hiromi_goto.
Mercury Lam Meinhart’s thudding heart almost burst through her chest. There’s no way for them to detect the theft, she reminded herself. Because what she had taken was organic. A single strand of hair with its root intact. If she kept her wits she’d leave this mausoleum unnoticed and be on a life trajectory far beyond the stunning boredom of an underpublished literary historian. To be free from eating Soygen-3 for perpetuity! This thought alone brought tears of joy to her eyes.
The soft noise of her polyform shoes. Desperation seeped from her second-best suit. Her thudding heart. Dimly, she wondered how she’d been capable of this act. Weren’t the mandatory gene tweaks meant to eliminate all aberrant behavior?
“Miss—”
Mercury felt faint.
“Miss, miss!”
Mercury, partially digested Soygen rising in her gorge, turned around.
“Ha-haaaa!” a young man crowed. His companion, a young woman with jewel lights in her scalp, tried to hop out the patterns of their game, but she stumbled.
“Miss, again!” the young man gloated.
A micro siren wailed. “Game-playing is forbidden in the museum,” a quiet digitalized voice declared. “Cease activity. You have five minutes to exit the facility. Noncompliance will result in loss of leisure credits.”
“Delete!” the young woman cursed. “This was a requirement for Victorian Lit. class!”
“Come on,” the young man mumbled. “We can go on a sim-tour instead.”
As Mercury turned around, her heart slowly began beating again. A smile played on her lips.
“Whaddya got?” Leo Yoshida slurred.
Image and sound were not to grade, but Mercury was certain her ex was in the middle of a sim-high. What time was it in Hong Kong? She was sure Leo didn’t care. “Remember my pitch? A reality show, but high art?”
“Oh, yah. Nostalgia angle. We’re ripe for it here, Merc. It could fly. You always have good ideas.”
“More than an idea. I’ve already begun ripening the perfect candidate. Guess who?”
“Shakespeare? Uhhh, the Crime and Punishment guy? I dunno.”
“Is your barrier secure, Leo?”
“You know I’m always clean.” He leered. “My old man made us split up because of the merger, but I’ve always had a soft spot for you.”
Mercury rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t stop smiling. She could see her credit ratings breaking through the “class-free” barrier. “Brontë,” she whispered. “I got a Brontë!”
