Transhuman (7 page)

Alienation is one of the themes in many of my works, but in this story I give it perhaps the most
direct examination I've ever made of the subject.

THE GUARDIAN

Paul Chafe

Some popular magazines in the sixties predicted that the age of leisure was almost upon us, that
the biggest challenge many of us would face in the future was what to do with all our free time.
They got that one wrong: most of us take it for granted that we have to work to support ourselves
and that we will have to continue to do so well into old age. If machine intelligences arise, will
they also have jobs? The following tale examines a very special being performing a very
important one.

START RUN

Am I Mark Astale? That's a question I don't have time for. Mitch Cohan was a runner, wanted for murder on a case long cold. A camera told me he was getting on a train at the Western L station, so I checked out the image. In Chicago the average surveillance camera captures ten thousand faces a day, that's over a billion freeze-frames citywide. From those the recognition systems flag a hundred thousand suspect citizens, ten each second at peak times. The problem is, ninety nine point nine nine percent of the electronically accused are guilty of nothing more than sharing a facial profile with a fugitive. My job is to search that digital hurricane for the handful that might be real; no mere human could ever do it fast enough. Sometimes it's easy to make the determination. The cameras aren't that smart. They search out faces, apply a few rules of thumb to the always-imperfect images, and sometimes their opinion is almost comically wrong. Sometimes it's more difficult, but making those calls is my job. I work hard to do it right. Letting criminals walk is bad, arresting the innocent is worse. With maybe-Mitch Cohen it was a coin flip.

The L station camera showed me his face in the crowd, framed in a square target indicator. He was a tall, lean man with dark hair cropped short, wearing a gray trench coat streaked with the morning's rain. He carried a briefcase, and blended nondescriptly with the morning commuter crowd, just one of a million identical others, fighting to get downtown to spend the day fighting to get promoted at work. The frame sequence caught him as he came onto the platform, followed him through the throng to trackside, watched him get onto the train, and ended when the doors slid shut. Cohan's image in the Chicago Police Department's files looked close enough, but everyone has their double, you learn that fast in my line of work. Judgment is what I bring to the table, a knowledge of human nature beyond that of any mere machine. Why would Mitch Cohan be heading for the Loop at rush hour? The man's face was flat, caught between boredom and the tension of forced social contact with a herd of strangers. The cameras already had another hit for me, flashing at the edge of my awareness. Time spent on one image is time I don't spend on another, and there are too many cameras and only one of me. Time is the only currency I have, and time wasted musing on its own scarcity means felons who go free. Introspection is a luxury I can't afford, not during the morning rush.

And this hit was just another commuter with an unlucky face. I dismissed the camera and queued the next image, and then something struck me. Fortunately I got an easy discard, an external camera at O'Hare airport, too blurred with raindrops to even consider flagging as a positive ID. I went back to the station camera freeze-frames and ran the sequence again. Just as the man stepped onto the train he turned his head, looking back toward the entrance of the station. Why was that? I considered that last frame, zoomed on his face, tried to read his eyes. There was nothing definite there. I called up the other cameras in the station, trying to see what it was that he was looking at. There was no audio, but it hadn't been a sudden sound that caught his attention because no one else had looked at the same time he had. The guilty flee when none pursue. He was looking, reflexively, instinctively, to see who might be following him. My career is built around such subtle nuances of human behavior. The cameras pick up crimes as well as faces, seeking out the characteristic motions of muggings, rapes, and bank robberies, but those frames go to other, lesser watchers. I only hunt for fugitives, the most elusive prey on the planet. Three more camera hits queued for my attention while I dawdled to contemplate a stranger's face. I dismissed the frames and took an instant to flag hits from the downtown Loop stations for high priority. He would get off the train somewhere and another camera would see him, and then I would consider again if he might be who I was looking for.

The stream of faces flashed themselves past my awareness, each one highlighted in its own targeting square, each one carefully tagged with the identity of the fugitive felon that the cameras thought was there. My rush times are the city's rush times, and the cameras take me from the suburbs to the downtown in the morning, to the bistros at lunch, to the dance clubs at night, and to darker places, too. They take me through streets and malls, through parks and dirty alleys, to all the places that Detective Mark Astale used to go. They take me into the cubicle blandness of office towers, the glittering lobbies of expensive hotels, and the drab corridors of run-down apartment blocks. They never take me into citizen's homes, not yet. The cameras have yet to make that Orwellian jump, though there are those in the government who argue that they should. After all, the criminals know we're watching for them. All the cameras have done, say those who advocate breaching the last barrier of personal privacy, is drive crime indoors. The questions raised in this debate hold no interest for me. I have time to think, while the city sleeps and the cameras stare at emptiness, but I devote that time to larger questions. Am I Mark Astale? That's a question worth asking. I know all his secrets, I dream his dreams, I love his wife as intimately as he. I remember tiny details of his childhood, small and treasured moments that only he could know. By these measures I must be Mark Astale, and I think of myself as him, but it may be that I'm deluding myself. Mark Astale died chasing down a fugitive, and I woke up with his memories. His dreams are destroyed, his childhood gone, and I will never know the touch of his pretty, loyal, loving Allison. I will never know the touch of any woman, of any person, of anything ever again. Mark Astale signed his organ donor card, as all good cops do, and the organ he wound up donating was his mind.

The lights in the laboratory come on, and the door opens as I transfer my attention from the citywide image stream to the stereo-mounted cameras that look into my birthplace.

"Good morning, Mark." Gennifer smiles at me, as she always does in the morning. Her own morning commute started an hour ago. I have no cameras on the quiet street in Arlington Heights where she lives in a rambling house with an untended garden and two calico cats, but I saw her dark blue sports car, license plate "GENNI," as it pulled onto the Northwest highway at 7:17 a.m. I see it every morning at just that time, though it isn't tagged for identification by the plate-watchers. I see it because I watch for it myself, exactly as you'd watch out the window for the arrival of an expected friend.

"Good morning, Gennifer." I feel that I smile back, but of course I don't. There's a somatic software subroutine that makes me feel I have a body, sort of. It's a curiously disembodied body, unable to touch anything except itself, unable to walk anywhere or pick anything up. Still, it provides necessary feedback and makes me feel more human. Dr. Gennifer Quentin is one of the few things that make me smile.

"Anything on the Blackburn case?" Gennifer has a cup of coffee and I wish I could smell it, better yet taste it, feel its warm energy flow through my system.

"Nothing yet." Mark Astale was faithful to his wife, for no other reason than that he loved her, but Mark Astale is dead and grieving Allison has moved on. I don't examine the emotions that knowledge brings; I have no interest in feeling them. "I'm tracking a potential Mitch Cohan on the L," I say. For some reason I don't avoid the emotions that Gennifer engenders in me, don't avoid the desire for her touch, for her attention, for her intimacy. Gennifer is beautiful, and brilliant, and as unavailable to me in my present incarnation as she would be if she were on Mars.

"Who's Mitch Cohan?"

I go back to my fugitive file and read the information there. One advantage of an awareness that exists entirely within a digital network is that I can read, process, think much faster than any merely flesh-and-blood mind. Through the intermediary of the network, the collected brilliance and stupidity of humanity is available on a whim. The distilled essence of the criminal's life is laid bare in fractions of a second. "He's a class-one runner, wanted on a federal warrant. Murder, embezzlement, and stock fraud." Gennifer pursed her lips, a small but incredibly seductive gesture, made more so by being unconscious.

"That seems like an unusual combination. What's his history?" The file tells a story and I summarize. "He was a player in junk bonds, rode high on the corporate merger wave at the turn of the decade. He cut things a little close to the edge, lost a lot of money for a lot of people, not least of all himself. He made his own fortune back by pumping money from worthless stock sales into his own accounts. His chief accounting officer started an audit. Auditor's body turned up in a shallow grave a week later. Mitch Cohan vanished with the money. He's living in Cuba now."

"What's he doing in Chicago?"

"Unknown. The identification isn't clear." Even as I said it, facts from his file pushed their way to the front of my awareness. "Interesting. His mother lives in Lincoln Square, let me check the background." I start with CPD police files, but Elizabeth Smith Cohan, 67 years old, doesn't appear in them. The FBI has a thin record, containing only two brief interviews. The first occurred when her son was first charged, the second after he disappeared. In both she said she knew nothing of what he had done or where he had gone, and her FBI interviewers believed her. Bank records show a paid-off mortgage on a modest older house, a small pension, payments to local grocers and businesses, the usual bills, and little else. Government archives show no passport, a military service record some 40 years old with an honorable discharge. Telephone and network records show no contact with her fugitive son. There's nothing unusual here, nothing to raise suspicion, and yet the coincidence of a man with Mitch Cohan's face getting on the L three blocks from her home address is too much to ignore. Of course he would have to know the risks. Why would he go there?

The last purchase on her bank account is from a pharmacy, labeled simply "prescription." I go to the pharmacy's files and find out it was for something called ticlopidine. The pharmacy doesn't list her physician's name, though it should. I call up a list of doctors in the area, then visit their patient files, one by one by one until I find what I'm looking for. Mrs. Cohan was admitted to hospital with a suspected stroke. She was there three days, experiencing some fluent aphasia which subsided after treatment with . . . I skip the details of her hospital stay. Released home in stable condition, diagnosis: minor stroke to the posterior superior temporal gyrus on the left side. I reference ticlopidine, find out it's a stroke medication, a blood thinner. Even so, blood remains thicker than water. Mitch Cohan had gone home to visit his ailing mother.

"It seems he was visiting," I tell Gennifer. "I've got high-priority tags on the L station cameras. We'll pick him up when he gets off the train.

"Well done." Gennifer smiles, which makes me happy. My stereoscopic cameras swivel and focus the way human eyes do, set on a mount that moves like a human head. I feel most like myself when I'm looking at the world through them, but choose to use the security camera up in the corner of the lab to watch her instead. It lets me see all of her as she sits at her lab bench.

"I'm waiting for him to show up at a station, and then I'll bring the police in."

"How long has he been running?"

"Eleven years."

"He's good at it."

"They're all good at it." It was true. The sophistication and extent of the national surveillance network are such that very few fugitives stay at large for very long. Those that do know what they're doing, know how to fool the recognition systems, know how to move through the economy without leaving a transaction trail, know how to trick the databases into coming to the wrong conclusions. None of these are difficult skills to master, but there are a lot of them and they require ceaseless vigilance. A single mistake is all it takes to bring a runner into custody. My job is to find those mistakes. I am the latest weapon in the law enforcement arsenal, able, in my digital form, to handle far more channels of information than any flesh-and-blood investigator, able to sort through that information far faster than any human could. I am an experiment, a pilot project, a required enabling technology for those who want to extend the security state into every nook and cranny of private life. I have no interest in the politics of that decision, no opinion on its ethical balance. Nevertheless, the truth is that without my success the question is moot. The problem is not the installation of cameras in every bedroom; that requires only sufficient cameras. The problem is people. Software systems can listen for keywords, can recognize the gross acts of violent crime, but people are far more subtle than keyword lists and mo-cap profiles. Ultimately it is people who must watch, must listen, must make a judgment as to what is occurring. There are already more cameras in this nation than citizens, every last one recording all day, every day. Of necessity most of what they record goes unseen. There are simply not enough people to do all the watching the surveillance advocates would like to see done.

And so I came into being, the Frankensteinian result of a fusion of computer science and medicine and a dozen other disciplines, spearheaded by Dr. Gennifer Quentin. My success will end the problem posed by too many cameras and not enough watchers. If I am successful I can be duplicated as many times as are necessary. I can exist as a virtual army, unsleeping, unblinking, standing guard in the darkness to ensure the safety of our nation. My soul, such as it is, resides on a dedicated distributed processor network in the basement of the Quinlan Center on the Loyola University campus, but my awareness is citywide. The technology to scan a living brain at the subcellular level has existed for a decade, though the X-ray dose required to resolve such detail is lethal to the subject. The computing capacity required to house a fully functional brain image built from such a scan is now commonplace. What was lacking for many years was ethics committee approval for the experiment, a mad scientist dream that raised nightmares in the common folk. It was only when Gennifer proposed that a digital mind might be used to enhance surveillance systems that approval was finally forthcoming, forced upon the ethics committee from a very great height indeed. There were protests, and resignations, and then there was me. Loyola was founded a Jesuit school, a century and a half ago, and I doubt those old priests ever dreamed that their efforts would one day give life to the dead.