Supermen, p.43
Supermen, page 43
“Excuse me?” The bartender handed me another Jolt, this one nicely chilled. A large margarita slid across the bartop and somehow appeared in her hand.
“This!” She looked around vaguely. “Real time!”
I stared at her. Her pupils were wide. “Are you on anything I should know about?” I asked.
“Sensory deprivation. My suit’s powered down.” She shook her head. “I feel naked. I haven’t been offline in months; there are things happening that I don’t know about. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m not sure. Is it always like this?”
“How long have you been down?” I asked.
“I’m unsure. Since I saw you in the show? I wanted to get into your headspace and see what it was like, but it’s so cramped! Maybe half an hour; it’s a disciplinary offense, you know?”
“What, going offline?”
Her eyeballs flickered from side to side in the characteristic jitter of information-withdrawal nystagmus. “Being obsolete.”
I left Lynda in the safe custody of a hotel paramedic, who didn’t seem to think there’d be any permanent side effects once her clothing had rebooted. I headed back to the con, fervently glad that I’d stepped off the treadmill a couple of releases after Ashley, way before things got this bad.
<
Information withdrawal is an occupational hazard for the wellconnected, like diabetic hypoglycaemia; if the diabetic doesn’t get their sugar hit, or the executive their info-burn, they get woozy and stop working. On the other hand, you can only take it for so long …
Lynda is 26. At 16, she was cracking financial cryptosystems. At 17, she was designing nanotech assemblers. At 20 she was a professor, with a patent portfolio worth millions. Today she’s an executive vicepresident with a budget measured in the billions. She will be burned out completely by 30, out of rehab by 32 (give or take a case of tardive dyskinesia), with a gold-plated pension and the rest of her life ahead of her—just like the rest of us proto-transhumanists, washed up on the evolutionary beach.
<
Back in the con proper, I decided to take in a couple of talks. There’s a long and sometimes contradictory series of lectures and workshops at any Toast gathering, not to mention the speakers’ corners, where any crank can set up a soap-box and have their say.
First I sat through a rather odd monologue with only three other attendees (one of them deeply asleep in the front row): a construct shaped like a cross between a coatrack and a praying mantis was vigorously attacking the conceit of human consciousness, attempting to prove (by way of an updated version of Searle’s Chinese Room attack, lightly seasoned à la Penrose) that dumb neurons can’t possibly be intelligent in the same way as a, well, whatever the thing on the podium was. It was almost certainly a prank, given our proximity to MIT (not to mention the Gates Trust-endowed Department of Amplified Intelligence at Harvard), but it was still absorbing to listen to its endless spew of rolling, inspired oratory. Eventually the construct argued itself into a solipsistic corner, then asked the floor for questions; when nobody asked any, it stormed off in a huff.
I must confess that I was half-asleep by the time the robot philosopher denounced us as nonsapient automata, sparing only half my left eye to speedread Minsky’s Society of Mind for clues; in any event. I woke up in time for the next talk, a panel discussion. Someone had rounded up an original stalwart of the Free Software Foundation to talk about the rise and demise of Microsoft. There was, of course, a Microsoft spokesdroid present to defend the company’s historic record. It started with the obligatory three-minute AV presentation about how Our Great Leader and Teacher (Bill) had Saved the World from IBM, but before they could open their mouths and actually say anything, Bill’s head appeared on-screen and the audience went wild: it was like the Three Minute Hate in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
(I used to use the man’s software like everyone else, but after the debacle of Windows NT 6.2, and the ensuing grand jury investigation and lynchings, well—)
After the Microsoft talk I went back to my temporary apartment to estivate for a few hours. At my age, I need all the regeneration time I can get, even if I have to take it hanging upside down in a brightly colored cocoon woven to the side of a tower block’s support column. I run some quackware from India that claims to be a white-box clone of the Kaiser-Glaxo program the Pope uses; my tent and travel-equipment designs come courtesy of the Free Hardware Foundation. Having lost my main income stream years ago due to the usual causes, principally cumulative future shock and the letdown from the Y2K consultancy business, I’d be lost without the copylefted design schemata to feed to my assembler farm: I certainly can’t afford the latest commercial designs for anything much more exotic than a fountain pen. But life on a twenty-century income is still tolerable these days, thanks to the FHF. More about those angels in Birkenstocks later, if I can be bothered to write it.
I awoke feeling refreshed and came down from my cocoon to find a new wardrobe waiting for me. I’d got my tent to run up conservative geek-chic before my nap—urban camo trousers, nine-inch nails T-shirt, combat boots, and a vest-of-pockets containing numerous artifacts—and it whispered to me reassuringly as I pulled it on, mentioning that the fuel cell in my left hip pocket was good for thirty hours of warmth and power if I had to venture out into the minus-ten wind chill of a Boston winter. I pumped my heels, then desisted, feeling silly: in this day of barely-visible turbogenerators, heel power makes about as much sense as a slide rule.
Outside my spacious dome tent, the floor of the hotel had sprouted a many-colored mushroom forest. Luggage and more obscure personal servants scurried about, seeing to their human owners’ requirements. Flying things buzzed back and forth like insects with vectored-thrust turbojets. A McDonald’s stall had opened up at the far side of the hall and was burning blocks of hashish to make the neighbors hungry; my vest discreetly reminded me that I had some nose plugs.
I had been asleep for three hours. While I had been asleep, Malaysian scientists had announced the discovery of an earth-sized planet with an oxidizing atmosphere less than forty light-years away; the Gates Trust, in their eternal pursuit of favorable propaganda, had announced that they were going to send a Starwhisp to colonize it.
«EDITORIAL»
Insert snide comment about clones, eyes of needles, possibility of passage through, at this juncture; the whole point of a Starwhisp is that it’s too small to carry any cargo much bigger than a bacillus. Probably the GT was just trying to tweak the American public’s guilt complex over the breakup of NASA.
«EDITORIAL»
The Pope had reversed her ruling of last week on personality uploads, but reasserted the indivisibility of the soul, much to the confusion of theologians and neuroscientists alike.
There had been riots in Afghanistan over the forcible withdrawal of the Playboy channel by the country’s current ruling clique of backwoods militiamen. (Ditto Zimbabwe and Arkansas.)
Further confirmation of the existence of the sixth so-called gravitoweak resonance force had been obtained by a team of posthumans somewhere in high orbit. The significance of this discovery was massive, but immediate impact remained obscure—no technological spin-offs were predicted in the next few weeks.
Nobody I knew had died, or been born, or undergone major life-revising events. I found this absence of change obscurely comforting; a worrying sign, so I punched up a really sharp dose of the latest cognitive enhancer and tried to drag my aging (not to say reeling) brain back into the hot core of futuresurfing that is the only context in which the antiquities of the silicon era (or modern everyday life, for that matter) can be decoded.
I got out into the exhibition hall only to discover that there was a costume show and disco scheduled for the rest of the night. This didn’t exactly fascinate me, but I went along and stared anyway while catching up on the past few hours’ news. The costume show was impressive—lots of fabric, and all of it dumb. They had realistic seventies’ hackers, eighties’ Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, nineties’ venture capitalists, and millennia resurrection men, complete with some bits of equipment too precious to put on public exhibition—things like priceless early wearable computer demos from the Media Lab, on loan for the evening: all badly glued Velcro, cell-phone battery compartments run up on a glue-gun renderer, and flickering monochrome head-up displays. Toward the end, one of the models shambled on stage in a recent (threemonth-old, hence barely obsolete) space suit: a closed-circuit life-support system capable of protecting its owner from any kind of hostile environment and recycling their waste for months or years. It probably qualified as an engineering miracle (closed-circuit life support is hard) but it left me with a lingering impression that a major cause of death among its users would be secondary consequences of sexual frustration.
The disco was, well, a disco. Or a rave. Or a waltz. These things don’t change: people dress up, eat, take intoxicants, and throw themselves around to music. Same old same old. I settled down with the drinks and the old crusties in the bar, intent on getting thoroughly wasted and exchanging tall stories with the other fogies.
About four or five drinks later; an advertisement crawled through my spam filter and started spraying hotly luminous colors across my left retina. I was busy swapping yarns with an old Cobol monkey called Solipsist Nation and I didn’t notice it at first. “Is something wrong, my friend?” he asked.
“S’spam. Nothing,” I said.
Solly pulled out a huge old revolver—a Colt, I think—and looked around. Squinting, he pointed it at the floor and pulled the trigger. There was no bang, but a cloud of smoke squirted out and settled rapidly to the ground, clustering densely around a small buglike object. The visuals stopped.
“It’s nothing now,” he agreed, putting his gun away. “There was a time when things were different.”
“When they didn’t hide behind microbots. Just hijacked mail seryers.”
He grinned, disquietingly. “Then they went away.”
I nodded. “Let’s drink a toast. To whatever made the mail spammers go away.”
He raised his glass with me, but I didn’t see him drink.
«EDITORIAL»
Something the junk advertisers don’t seem to understand: we live in an information-supersaturated world. If I don’t want to buy something, no amount of shouting or propagandizing will budge me; all it will do is get me annoyed. On the other hand, if I have a need for your product, I can seek it out in an eyeblink.
«EDITORIAL»
We now return you to your regular scheduled programming …
There was an art show. Fractals blossomed in intricate, fragile beauty on wall-sized screens of fabulously expensive liquid crystal, driven by the entropygenerating logic-chopping of discrete microprocessors. You could borrow some contact lenses and slip between two wall-sized panels and you’re on Europa’s seabed, gray ooze and timelessness shared with the moluscoids clustered around the hydrothermal vents. Endless tape loops played cheesy Intel adverts from the tail end of the 20th, human chip-fab workers in clean-room suits boogying or rocking to some ancient synthesizer beat. A performance-art group, the Anderoids, identically dressed in blue three-piece suits, hung around accosting visitors with annoyingly impenetrable PHB marketroid jargon in an apparent attempt to get them to buy some proprietary but horizontally-scalable vertical-market mission-critical business solution. The subculture of the nerd was omnipresent: an attack of the fifty-foot Dilbert loomed over walls, partitions and cubicle hell, glasses smudged and necktie perpetually upturned in a quizzical fin-de-siècle loop.
I took in some more of the panels. Grizzled hackers chewed over the ancient jousts of Silicon Valley in interminable detail: Apple versus IBM, IBM versus DEC, RISC versus CISC/SIMD, Sun versus Intel. I’ve heard it all before and it’s comforting for all its boring familiarity: dead fights, exhumed by retired generals and refought across tabletop boards without the need for any deaths or downsizings.
There was an alternate-history panel, too. Someone came up with a beauty: a one-line change in the 1971 antitrust ruling against AT&T that leaves them the right to sell software. UNIX dead by 1978, strangled by expensive licenses and no source code for universities; C and C++ nonstarters: the future as VMS. Another change left me shaking my head: five times per hour on a cross-wind. Gary Kildall didn’t go flying that crucial day, was at the office when IBM came calling in 1982 and sold them CP/M for their PCs. By Y2K, Microsoft had a reputation for technical excellence, selling their commercial UNIX-95 system as a high-end server system. (In this one, Bill Gates still lives in the USA.) What startled me most was the inconsequentiality of these points of departure: trillion-dollar industries that grew from a sentence or a breeze in the space of twenty years.
«EDITORIAL»
This is the season of nerds, the flat tail at the end of the sigmoid curve. Some time in the 1940s, the steam locomotive peaked; great fourhundred-ton twin-engined monsters burning heavy fuel oil, pulling mileslong train sets that weighed as much as freight ships. Twenty years later, the last of these great workhorses were toys for boys who’d grown up with cinders and steam in their eyes. Some time in the 2010s, the microprocessor peaked: twenty years later our magi and witches invoke self-programming demons that constantly enhance their own power, sucking vacuum energy from the vasty deeps, while the last supercomputers draw fractals for the amusement of gray-haired kids who had sand kicked in their eyes. Sometime in the 2020s, nanotechnology began the long burn up the curve: the nostalgics who play with their gray goo haven’t been decanted from their placentories yet, and the field is still hot and crackling with the buzz of new ideas. It’s a cold heat that burns as it expands your mind, and I find less and less inclination to subject myself to it these days. I’m in my seventies; I used to work with computers for real before I lost touch with the bleeding edge and slipped into fandom, back when civilization ran on bits and bytes and the machineries of industry needed a human touch at the mouse.
«EDITORIAL»
Eventually I returned to the bar. Ashley was still more or less where I’d left him the day before, slumped half under a table with his ankles plugged into something that looked like a claymation filing cabinet. He waved as I went past, so after I picked up my drink at the bar, I joined him. “How’re you feeling today?”
“Been worse,” he said cheerfully. Three or four empty bottles stood in front of him. “Couldn’t fetch me one, could you? I’m on the Kriek geuse.”
I glanced under the table. “Uh, okay.”
I took another look under the table as I handed him the bottle. The multicolored cuboid had engulfed his legs to ankle-height before; now it was sending pseudopods up toward his knees. “Your health. Seen much of the show?”
“Naah.” He raised the bottle to me, then drank from the neck. “I’m busy here.”
“Doing what, if I can ask?”
“I’ve decided to emigrate to Tau Ceti.” He gestured under the table. “So I’m mind-mapping.”
“Mind-map—” I blinked. I do not think that word means what I think it means drifted through my head. “What for?”
He sighed. “I’m sick of dolls, Richard. I need a change, but I’m not as flexible as I used to be. What do you think I’m doing?”
I spared a glance under the table again. The thing was definitely getting larger, creeping up to his knees. “Don’t be silly,” I said. “You don’t need to do this, do you?”
“Afraid I do.” He drank some more beer. “Don’t worry, I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I’m not a spring chicken, you know. And it’s not as if I’ll be dead, or even much different. Just smarter, more flexible. More me, the way I was. Able to work on the cutting edge.”
“The cutting edge is not amenable to humans, Ash. Even the weakly superhuman can’t keep up anymore.”
He smiled, the ghost of an old devil-may-care grin. “So I won’t be weakly superhuman, will I?”
I drew my legs back, away from the Moravec larva below the table. It was eating him slowly, converting his entire nervous system into a simulation map inside whatever passed for its sensorium: when it finished, it would pupate, and something that wasn’t Ashley anymore would hatch. Something which maintained conscious continuity with the half-drunken idiot sitting in front of me, but that resembled him the way a seventy-year-old professor resembles a baby.
“Did you tell your ex-wife?” I asked.
He flinched slightly. “She can’t hurt me anymore.” I shook my head. “Another drink?” he asked.
“Just one for the road,” I said gently. He nodded and snapped his fingers for the bar. I made sure the drink lasted; I had a feeling this was the last time I’d see him, continuity of consciousness or no.
«EDITORIAL»
And that, dear reader, is why I’m writing this con report. The Your Antiques! audience want to know all about the history of Cray Y-MP-48 s/n 4002, hi-res walkthroughs and a sidebar describing the life and death of old man Seymour. All of which is, well, train-spotting. And you can’t learn the soul of an old machine by counting serial numbers; for that, you have to stand on the footplate, squinting into the wind of its passage and shovelling coal into the furnace, feel the rush of its inexorable progress up the accelerating curve of history. In this day and age, if you want to learn what the buzz of the computer industry was like, you’d have to stop being human. Transcendence is an occupational hazard, the cliff at the edge of the singularity; try climbing too fast and you’ll fall over, stop being yourself. It’s a big improvement over suicide, but it’s still not something I’d welcome just now, and certainly not as casually as Ashley took to it. Eventually it will catch up with me, too, and I’ll have to stop being human: but I like my childhood, thank you very much, and the idea of becoming part of some vast, cool intelligence working the quantum foam at the bottom of the M-theory soup still lies around the final bend of my track.
