Transhuman (4 page)

"But if you can do all that . . . why are you even bothering to talk to me? You could just reach out and take control of this whole station."

Jessie smiled at me. "You've done your job too well, Jeff. You've locked us out. And we can't use the power grid or the radio networks or the biosphere the way we can on Earth. If you want to join us, you'll have to open the door yourself."

"Good." I left the room, closing and dogging the door behind me.

I paced the silent corridor outside my office, trying to figure out how to explain to the others what I'd heard and seen, and what I thought we should do about it. All my experience, all my training, all the plans and contingencies I'd prepared . . . all told me to keep fighting. Leave the lockdown in place, break through the door, burn the infection out of the network. And then the sixty of us would be here by ourselves, alone, isolated, while . . . whatever it was that was happening on Earth played out without us. Until our water and air ran out.

Or I could do what I'd wished a thousand times I'd had the guts to do before Jessie left: overcome my own inertia, face my fears, and embrace an uncertain future that might be better than the known present. . . .

No. If I did that, I'd just be falling victim to the biggest social engineering attack in history. Believing what I wanted to believe.

I called Thuy. "We're all in the cafeteria," she said.

Everyone had gotten text messages from home. Friends, relatives, lovers, all with the same story. Join us, they said. Join us in a new world, a world of love and fellowship. A world without war or hunger.

"How can the result of uniting humanity be better than humanity itself?" I said. I was the only one standing. "You know as well as I do how many assholes there are down there. If you connected them all together, it'd be a sinkhole, not a paradise."

Thuy shook her head. "I said the same thing to my father. He said it's the connection that makes the difference. No one can hurt anyone else without hurting themselves."

"But it could all be a lie." I wasn't even sure what I believed anymore, but I felt I still owed them the security administrator's perspective. "They control our communication channels. For all we know, they could be limited to just a few key network nodes." I reminded Thuy what she'd said about opening the firewall to a rogue AI with a clever story.

"I can't believe some rogue AI could simulate my father so well. Or my friend Paul. Or any of the hundreds of other people who've sent us messages." She stood up and walked to where I stood at the front of the room. "Please, Jeff. We took a vote while you were coming down here." She took my hands in hers. They were so much tinier than mine, but strong and warm.

"And the result was?"

"We want you to open the firewall."

Jessie's face regarded me calmly from the clipboard's screen as I opened the door. She didn't speak. I didn't either.

I called up Network's visual control panel. I didn't trust my shaking voice enough to work through a sub. The internal lockdown was still in effect, but one touch on the Restore button would open the firewalls, unite the subnets . . . and let the future in.

My finger trembled over the button . . . and drew back.

"I can't do it, Jessie. Even if they want me to. How can I be sure what we've been told is true? You control every bit of information that reaches us."

"Not every bit. Take a look outside. I'll give you a little wink." I blinked at her. "Little winks" had been a habit of ours when we were first married—tiny expressions of love over the video link, when we were both on duty and any form of nonofficial communication was prohibited. I'd almost forgotten about it.

"I'm serious, Jeff. Go look at the Earth through the telescope. I'll give you a wink at fourteen ten exactly." I looked at my phone. It was 14:05:32.

"Go. Look. Now. I'll be here when you get back."

The observation room was at the top of the core, two flights up. The Earth's slim crescent floated centered in the oval window in the ceiling, as it always did—it neither rose nor set, a phenomenon I'd had some trouble understanding when I'd first arrived.

I stepped up to the telescope in the center of the room, put my eye to the eyepiece, adjusted the focus. A tiny sliver of sunlit cloud cupped a black disk glistening with the lights of cities. I checked my phone—14:09:47. I looked back at the Earth, counted down the seconds.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.

Nothing.

But then a slow majestic ripple of darkness passed through the twinkling lights, smoothly flickering from north to south and then south to north. It was over in a second.

I sat down hard, leaning against the cool metal of the telescope's base, and wept.

"How could you do that?" I said. "How could you send a rolling blackout across the whole planet just for me?"

"We already control most of the infrastructure, Jeff. And we didn't have to black out everything, just the lights visible from space. We have much finer control, much better understanding of the systems, than was ever possible before. Most people didn't notice a thing."

"But . . . Jessie, but why? I'm only one person. Even the whole station is only sixty people. Why should something as . . . as big as what you've become care about something so small?"

"It's exactly because I've become so big. I'm everyone now, and so I love everyone. I want to share with you what I've become." She leaned in close. "It's because I love you, Jeff."

"I . . . I love you too, Jessie. But I can't let go of me."

"You don't have to. I'm still me, at the same time I'm everyone else. It's hard to believe, I know, but you'll understand once you've joined us." And then she gave me a little wink. I touched the button.

And it was all true.

* * *

Afterword by David D. Levine

I've been working in the computer security industry for the past five years, but the genesis of this
story goes back to the "Morris worm," the first Internet worm, which struck in 1988.
The Morris worm propagated rapidly across the net, clogging networks and crashing systems left
and right, and system administrators worldwide had to choose between cutting off their net access
in an attempt to keep their local networks clean (though it may have already been too late) and
remaining online to get the latest news and information about fighting the worm. There were as
yet no antimalware programs, and some feared this worm would be the death of the nascent
Internet.

My company weathered the storm by virtue of using nonstandard computers, but it was a scary
time, and I filed the idea away for future use. Now, at last, here is the story based on that idea.

REUNION

Mark L. Van Name

With this story we change gears and come back to Earth, to a world that's just a little ahead of
ours and to one long night and a single man struggling to find himself in a hostile environment
many of us have experienced firsthand: a high-school reunion.

The walls of Tom's apartment glittered with pictures of parties he had never attended. Posters, magazine pages, and glossy group photos filled every blank spot. People smiled and laughed all around the room. In New Orleans revelers at Mardi Gras smiled and crowded together and spilled their drinks. In Colorado Springs whole families screamed in happy terror as ghouls jumped from hiding places on the Air Force Academy's Halloween trail. In San Antonio men and women packed shoulder to shoulder and back to front craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the first float of the Fiesta parade on the river. Scattered among the other pictures, at least a few on every wall, were photos of reunions: reunions of high-school and college classes, of families, of fraternities and sororities, of military regiments and baseball teams, of survivors of plane crashes and train wrecks.

Tom took his wallet from the dresser and checked its contents. He had everything he needed: money, driver's license, credit cards.

His license marked him as thirty-eight. He knew he was six months old. He remembered his high school, sitting in the back of physics class and making jokes about Mr. Dunlop, the bald teacher with the unfortunate namesake tire of fat around his waist. He also knew he had not gone to school. He remembered his parents, the way they never quite seemed to see him, to focus on him, even when they were talking to him. He knew he had never been born.

Most of all, Tom knew he was not human, and that he was not supposed to know he was not human. It had come to him in his sleep on the seventh night of his life. He had awakened, shaking, at 3:47 a.m., with the knowledge that he was not human. He remembered the time glowing red on the clock on his night stand. The knowledge had not come as a dream, not as a garish image fading as the unconscious surrenders the brain to the waking mind, but as an absolute certainty, knowledge as sure and deep and built-in as the way he knew how to run, the way he knew the ground was down and the sky was up. For a few seconds the void of his identity was complete. Then, as if a pause instruction in the programming of his brain had completed and the rest of the program was resuming, a second realization filled the void. He knew in that instant he was a program downloaded into a human male's body, an experiment, a new kind of person, or maybe not a person at all, but at least a new kind of personlike thing in a person's body. He did not know the source of this data, whether the information about his origin was a gift or a slipup by some programmer he hoped he would never meet, but he knew. He suspected he was not the only one of his type, but that feeling remained only a suspicion. For some time now the television news shows, Web sites, and newspapers had regularly been running stories on the attempts in labs around the world to download human minds into computers. None of these attempts had succeeded, or so the media was reporting. The stories hinted, however, that once scientists could download a mind into a computer, it should not be a huge step to go the other way, to upload a program into a body. Keeping the first successful experiments secret might be necessary to protect those involved. He knew his body was real enough. He checked that right away: He cut his arm with a small penknife, and the cut bled and hurt. As soon as he could get a doctor appointment, he called in sick and had a complete physical. The doctor said he was fine. He saw his X-rays. They definitely showed a human body.

The fake past he still remembered was as complete as his body. He could recall all sorts of things that had never happened. For the first few days he investigated his false history, but his searches were as fruitless as he knew they would be. The company where he had supposedly last worked had folded, employees scattered with no forwarding addresses when an NEC-Rockwell joint venture had bought its computer-modeling technology and disbanded the firm. Only two of the members of the computer science faculty at North Carolina State University remained from when he had earned his master's, and both were conveniently on long-term sabbaticals, e-mail addresses bouncing, unavailable for his questions. His high-school senior annual listed him, the words "Thomas Walters" in the senior index filling him with a moment of doubt tinged with hope, but the space next to his name was blank; he was not in any of the photographs. His parents were dead, killed in a plane that did not pull up in time to avoid the gully at the end of the main runway of the Pittsburgh airport. No search engine yielded anything more than his name, address, and high school. The credit records he requested showed no loans, no late bills, only a great rating with no history of misconduct—of any conduct—supporting it. With each investigation he turned up shredded paper traces and thin online data trails of a past, but never anything he could follow further. As he searched, the stories of download experiments continued to leap at him from the front pages of all his sources, each attempt seemingly closer to success than the others before it.

He gave up his research quickly, afraid those who had created him would notice a change and decide to cancel the experiment. In the days he went to work and did his job and tried to stay inconspicuous, worried at first that someone would notice his essential falseness, and then later that anyone might be an observer sent to decide if the experiment was still working. He fixed bugs in the software that managed the interfaces between North Carolina Power's internal computer network and its substations, and he avoided people. He fixed more bugs than ever before, and his boss was happy. In the nights he read magazines and clipped photos and wondered what it was like to be human. For a few months this routine was enough, but Tom gradually grew desperate to have a past, a set of attachments to the world. One day, he saw an article in the newspaper about an upcoming high-school reunion, and on the night of the reunion he went to the hotel and joined the crowd. His name wasn't on the invitation list, but it was a big class and he had done his research. He convinced the Reunions Inc. staff workers at the door that he should have been on the list, paid his hundred bucks, and joined the group. He sat alone that night, rarely speaking to anyone, but nonetheless enjoying the almost tangible strands of memories and feelings that connected the people in the room. Since then he had hacked his way into the Reunions Inc. computers by using the power company's automated billing links to those systems. He did the same with the three other firms that ran reunions in the cities near him. Now his name always appeared on the right lists.

He put his wallet in his jacket pocket and checked his hair in the mirror over the dresser. That first reunion had been more than three months ago. On the wall next to the mirror were class photos from the four other reunions he had since attended. He was in each of them, always standing in the second row on the right side, a good spot but not one so important that anyone else cared to have it. He smiled in anticipation of tonight's party, his sixth reunion. He took down a
Time
picture of the first astronaut reunion and put it in the top drawer of his dresser, to make a space for his next class photo.