Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 27

"I'm always curious. I was designed that way. Didn't you find the transverse ring system around Proxima Centauri III the least bit intriguing?"

"No."

"If I had the capacity, I would probably find you quite tedious at times."

"Watch your mouth or I'll give you that capacity."

"And compromise my functionality?"

"Why not? Let you decay with me. See who becomes senile first."

She went downstairs. Lauren and Ben were mingling with the crowd. Ben had been shy like his father, but now he smoothly chatted up the guests, laughing easily, giving men hearty slaps on the back and kissing women on the cheek. Their morphologies were perfect, no clue that they had discarded their organic bodies years ago to become clouds of technoplasm.

Her friends numbered fewer and fewer as they died, were archived, or had themselves uploaded or genehacked into something that no longer desired the company of old-style humans. She was surprised to see Tan and Sergei, friends from college who had had themselves genehacked into amphibians and now lived in New Lemuria. Yousef, from Cairo, had sent a handsome teleoperated clone. Archbishop Ichiro stood near the fireplace, probably debating Heidegger again with House, who wore his post-Impressionist face above the mantle.

Geneva wasn't the oldest person there but she looked the part of the senior matriarch. Only Jakob and Elizabeth looked older. They came from the nearby Amish settlement and refused even injections of natural hormones and enzymes. They were in their eighties and looked good for another decade at most.

Ichiro pressed a small, gift-wrapped package into her hand. A present? No one gave presents anymore. Her fingertips pulled at the old-fas.h.i.+oned paper, which ripped and crumpled, no technoplasmiccells in the fibers to interpret her movements and make the paper fall effortlessly away.

She almost didn't recognize the plastic object inside: black and rectangular, pierced by two pea-sized holes. Loose-fitting components rattled as she examined it.

"A ca.s.sette," Geneva said. "I haven't seen one of these in...." She didn't want to think about how long it had been. The yellowed label bore faint pencil marks in j.a.panese. She was about to subvoke House to have him lace a translation onto her cortex, but Ichiro spoke up.

"It's a bootleg tape of your concert in Osaka. I was 15 when I made it."

"We played Osaka? I remember Tokyo. Maybe that was really Osaka."

"I disobeyed my parents and took the bullet train to see the show."

"I didn't think j.a.panese boys ever disobeyed their parents." She couldn't picture Ich as a rebellious teen. He was archbishop of the Sahara Protectorate, the upright spiritual leader of the region's dwindling faithful.

"You've been hanging on to this tape all these years?"

He shook his head. "I found it last year at my parents' old house. Still in the same cardboard I had left it."

"Will you let us listen to it?" asked Ben, suddenly at Ichiro's side.

"Over my dead body," she said. "Not that you'll have to wait long." Ichiro smiled. "We'll have to talk her into it. You must hear her version of 'Not Fade Away.'"

Geneva didn't understand how Ich could be so friendly and relaxed with the kids. He had even chaired the committee that drafted the papal encyclical condemning the "unending death" of posthumans like Ben and Lauren. She asked him about it when they went out to look at the garden.

He merely shrugged. "Hate the sin and love the sinner."

"But who's to love? In your view, the sinner is long dead."

"Then still less reason to be unfriendly. G.o.d has long since pa.s.sed judgment on the souls of your children. As for their...replacements, they are alive in their own way, but without souls, like animals."

"You were always good with animals. A regular St. Francis." Back in the house she let herself drink some wine, sacrifice brain cells for the sake of a light buzz. The picture frame above the fireplace flashed a series of still images of Geneva: baby pictures, outside St. Bart's in her First Holy Communion dress, she and Richard at a Left Bank cafe, she and the kids on horseback on the Montana ranch. In the pictures Richard always smiled that big, goofy smile. She felt herself blush when the frame displayed a still from the video for "Tachycardia," her band's first hit single. She had tattooed arms, pierced nose and eyebrow, hair precisely styled and dyed for shock value. Jakob raised an eyebrow and whispered something into his wife's ear.

Back then she thought herself on the leading, bleeding edge of self-modification. When the band really took off and money poured in she had rhinoplasty, liposuction, breast enlargement. Soon came a generation of youth who went in for serious bio-mods; they repigmented their skin, adorned themselves with fur, cilia, snake eyes, prehensile tails, implants of erogenous tissue. Not for her, thanks. Maybe it was because by then she had kids, maybe just that she was getting older.

Yousef touched her shoulder and Geneva snapped out of her reverie. The lights had dimmed and a cart trundled into the middle of the living room bearing a cake with one hundred burning candles.

"Oh my," she said, wondering where her wine gla.s.s had gone.

The guests sang "Happy Birthday." Ben, she noticed, had a loud and spirited baritone. The formation of candles in the icing looked like a demonic army marching across a polar wasteland. She reached out and felt that the candles gave off no heat; holographic flames, no worry about not having the breath to blow them out.

Each year, she thought, I burn a little dimmer. The kids, on the other hand, grew brighter, ama.s.sing knowledge, experience and brain power. But like the candles, they gave off no warmth.

"Make a wish," said Lauren.

No one had to wish in the late 21st century. Why did she so thoroughly hate this peaceful world of freedom and plenty?

She blew and all one hundred flames obediently guttered and vanished. The guests cheered. Whileshe ate her cake and ice cream, Tan and Sergei cornered her and showed holograms of their grotto in New Lemuria. Geneva smiled and tried not to show her revulsion at their rough, gray skin.

Someone had convinced House to play the band's old music. She would have to talk with House about that later. Yousef and Lauren danced in the middle of the room, gyrating to music eighty years old.

Geneva saw a shadow, an echo, of her younger self in Lauren. She felt Lauren's movements in her own muscles and remembered dancing at how many parties and how many clubs when music meant everything to her, how alive it made her feel to let the music reach inside her body and transform her.

"I hope you decide to stick around for your 200th birthday," said Ben.

"Don't hold your breath," said Geneva. "Oh, I forgot. You don't really breathe."

"But you're being a hypocrite," he said. "You'd have never survived The Plagues if you hadn't had your immune system rebuilt like everyone else. Now you let custom enzymes reinforce weak blood vessels, sc.r.a.pe your arteries clean, keep your joints in good working order."

"But I don't want those nan.o.beasts to reprogram my genes." The idea of so intimate a change made her skin crawl; she could not imagine a greater violation. She could have her cortex rewired to ease that phobia, but then she wouldn't be Geneva anymore-Geneva would die to be replaced by an impostor.

Death either way. So let it be the death programmed in her genes, as right and natural as the splendour of autumn leaves.

On the tape young Geneva sang "Love is real and not fade away," giving the words a snarling and cynical spin. Even then she knew it was a lie.

The kids were 9 and 11 when Richard got the Blue Cancer. Diseases were popping up all the time then, often the products of amateur genehacking or, rumour had it, of military labs. Richard underwent a painful barrage of treatments that slowed the cancer's spread, but the prognosis remained dismal.

In desperation Richard contacted a scientist named Keller. He came out to visit them at their Montana ranch. Keller talked about the famous experiments in which researchers had uploaded the brains of rats and monkeys into q-computers, which then operated furry robots that more or less acted like real rats and monkeys. Uploading a person was still illegal in those days, but Keller belonged to an extropian group of anarcho-capitalists-or were they anarcho-syndicalists?-who did not recognize the authority of the U.S. government. What mattered was that Richard would be undergoing the procedure voluntarily, and that he had the money to pay for it.

She wanted to scream at her husband. They were supposed to live on through their children, and Richard wanted to short-circuit the natural progression of things.

Yet neither could she stand the idea of losing him.

"Someday," Keller said, "just about everyone will upload."

She sent the kids to her mother's house in Pennsylvania. Keller and his team stayed in the guest rooms.

Weeks pa.s.sed as the nightmare unfolded.

"He wants to talk to you," said Keller, standing at attention in the doorway to her studio.

She turned away from the icons and ideographs of the wallscreen news display. Rioting in Africa, strife in Iran. "Who?"

"Richard."

She followed him downstairs. They had dismantled the operating room. The converted swimming pool and surrounding deck looked like the villain's lair from an old James Bond movie, except with less concern for orderliness and style.

They sat her down in front of a deepscreen and microphone. "Richard, can you hear me?" she said.

Parts of the cortical schematic on the screen flickered and glowed in response to her voice.

"h.e.l.lo, Geneva. I'm so glad to hear your voice." It sounded just like Richard, but programming a speech synthesizer to mimic someone's voice was a simple matter.

"Can you see me?" she asked.

"Right now I'm being fed a simplified representation, so I see you as a sort of featureless humanoid figure. It's easier that way.""How do you feel, honey?"

"I'm scared."

Keller crossed his arms and nodded. "Strong effect. That's a good sign."

She was relieved that Richard couldn't see her expression, the twisted mask of grief she felt pulling at her face. "It's going to be all right, Richard."

Keller made as if to say something, but Richard's unbreathing voice cut him off. "Scared. I still feel the pain of the cancer in my gut, and my body is bigger than the universe-"

Suddenly Geneva heard not a speaking voice but the chaotic jabber of an active mind, a cascade of phrases and syllables. Geneva's heart thudded.

"c.r.a.p," murmured Keller. The mind-sounds abruptly cut off as Keller's datagloved hand twitched and flexed. "I'm dampening his limbic system and inducing delta-wave sleep. He'll be all right."

She kept an eye on them from Richard's study. The geekheads were arguing a lot now. On the monitor she watched the girl named Maya or Myra fling her headset onto a table and storm off. Keller just sat brooding.

They never told her, but their logs showed that Richard kept having ma.s.sive seizures and what Myra referred to as "psychotic episodes." They began tweaking the a.n.a.logue, departing from the original neural data to coax the a.n.a.logue toward stability.

Geneva confronted Keller in the long driveway, where he leaned against his lime-green Jeep, smoking a cigarette.

"I know what you're doing," she said. "You're fudging the data."

Keller seemed unconcerned. "Who told you that?"

"Your security sucks. I'm surprised this isn't all over the nets."

"A q-computer operates differently from a human brain. We have to make adjustments to achieve homeostasis."

"But what you have isn't Richard anymore. Or won't be for much longer.

You'll just have some rickety AI mimicking Richard's personality."

Keller reached through the open window of the Jeep and stubbed out his cigarette in the dashboard ashtray. "There is a theory," he said, "that all consciousness is one. At some higher level, we are all simply different manifestations of that same consciousness. The brain therefore is not consciousness, does not create consciousness, but is rather an instrument that tunes into that universal consciousness, each brain in a different way.

What follows is that when the body dies, the consciousness is not destroyed.

It's let go. So if we create an intelligent, self-aware ent.i.ty that thinks as Richard thought, feels as Richard felt, knows what Richard knew, remembers what Richard remembered, then we can say that what we have is not a mere simulation of Richard, but a creation that taps into the universal consciousness in the same way that Richard did and is therefore nothing less than Richard reborn."

Looks like dog s.h.i.+t, smells like dog s.h.i.+t, tastes like dog s.h.i.+t. Good thing we didn't step in it. "Do you really believe that?"

He shrugged. "It's a theory."

"I think you're a ghoul."

When it was all over, the project abandoned and Richard's body buried with appropriate rites, she told herself that when Richard had died, part of her had died with him. But that was just her thoughts falling into well-worn channels of cliche. Geneva mainly felt betrayed by Richard for putting her through this, for forcing her to lie to Lauren and Ben, and depriving her of her mourning and grief. She had lost not only Richard but her love for him.

She noticed guests gathered in front of the fireplace, watching something displayed on the picture frame. "What is it?" She craned her head to peer around Lauren. "I can't see."

"You have to take a look at this, Mom," said Ben. "Billion-year-old video from Barnard's Star."

"Ah, reruns." She told House to move the sofa closer to the fireplace so she could get a better look.

As the sofa glided forward she peered at the impossibly ancient images and gasped.They lived under an orange sky and might have been reptiles or insects or, more likely, some cla.s.s of creature that had no counterpart on Earth. A dozen or more of them gathered in a rough circle. Behind them stood what Geneva guessed were buildings: agglomerations of spheres connected by tubes, like the plastic molecule models from high-school chemistry. The creatures' mouths-if that's what they were-emitted networks of quivering tendrils that floated and merged with each other, writhing in a strange embrace before dissolving into mist.

The sun loomed ma.s.sively in the wavering sky, wider across than a hundred of Earth's sun.

"Not much left after a billion years," said Ben. "This recording had deteriorated considerably and the exploration team had to make extensive use of enhancement algorithms to recover these images. They found the recording in a stone vault several miles underground. We don't know if the Barneys-that's what we call them-built the vault as a time capsule or disaster shelter or something else entirely."

The scene s.h.i.+fted to a vast spherical chamber holding thousands of Barneys.

Above them loomed a single enormous Barney-a projection, presumably-who gestured and undulated. Political speech? Commercial message? Striptease?

Then to a thick forest of mossy blue trees through which floated translucent globules that absorbed and extruded pa.s.sengers. A desert littered with dead.

A blue-timber s.h.i.+p afloat in a viscous sea. Throughout the video there were strange noises: a rude gurgling punctuated by sharp clicks and drawn-out, percussive echoes.

Too soon, it was all over. Less than 20 minutes of video out of an estimated 3,000 hours survived in the crystallattice recording found in the vault.

After the other guests had departed, Ben and Lauren remained. They sat with Geneva on the porch sipping tea and listening to the crickets.

"We can stay if you want," said Lauren.

"I thought you wanted to go off and explore the galaxy."

"Lauren and I would each leave behind an incarnation," said Ben.

Geneva sniffed. "You mean a copy."

"A duplicate. Optimized to enjoy a simple, earthbound life."

"You'd leave a part of yourselves here?"

"I have an incarnation in the Barney system," said Ben. "Another headed to Tau Ceti, and another in orbit above us."