The Wellstone (33 page)
appendix C
the fax wars
The very first thing the Fax Wars revealed was the deep-seated desire of every human being to be larger. Not larger in the abstract, with respect to the environment, but larger in relative terms, with respect to his or her peers, on account of the latent genetic programming that equated height, and to a lesser extent muscle mass, with social status.
Simply scaling up the human form was quickly shown to be an unhealthy—and in some cases fatal—oversimplification. You couldn’t get more than about ten percent larger without major problems of bone diameter and systolic versus diastolic pressure coming into play. Not that this stopped everyone—among the eighty % of humanity who could afford fax access, average height increased overnight by about fifteen percent, and body mass by around thirty percent and we can only assume that each individual found a balance point between the pain and fatigue of gigantism, and the psychological distress of watching everyone else get larger.
The next wave began in the following year, with the first of many morphing filters that permitted intelligent, systemic changes to the human form under little more than voice command. The enormous mathematical complexity of these filters—which operated on the quantum waveforms themselves—are a testament to the cruel severity of the Old Moderns’ dysmorphic yearnings. Once again the change occurred abruptly, with some twenty percent of travelers exiting the system in body forms that could barely fit through the print plate, and most others opting for at least another ten to twenty percent height or mass increase.
The third wave followed close behind, with a series of conformal filters that bent the knees and elbows and neck
just so
, arranging the human body for optimal packing without major redesign of the ligature system. Soon, even larger giants were rolling out of the public faxes in a tight fetal crouch. And then of course came the ligature changes that allowed for tighter packing still.
At this point, regional and national governments (such as they were) applied pressure to the makers and operators of fax hardware, who were themselves greatly troubled by what they had wrought. Hard limits were imposed on the mass of a faxed human being, with no exceptions made even for the natural giants and willful corpulents who still existed here and there in the world. What followed was a brief but intense flurry of exotic body styles designed to circumvent the restrictions: bird-boned women towering over their stocky peers, and men with hollow sacs beneath their falsely bulging muscles.
This was solved with equally inflexible limits on height and volume, and later the ratio between them. As a result, some people refused to travel through the public networks at all, preferring to retain their ill-gotten glamour by traveling the long way around, in vehicles or on foot. However, the rapid disappearance of highways, airports, and other travel infrastructure—no doubt encouraged by the bribes of the early Fax Lords
6
—made such a lifestyle choice increasingly difficult and austere. And because it was also associated with religious extremism—the Murder-Me-Not crowd who believed their souls would be imperiled by the physical destruction of their original bodies—the practice was never particularly fashionable.
So for another couple of years, the complaint was that everyone in the world looked exactly the same: a bland uniformity of height and weight and physical type. And the world was too small for these half-giants anyway; what a bore it was to be constantly bumping your head, knocking your knees, fitting through spaces nobody had had the time to redesign for larger humans.
So the wheel of fashion turned, and soon the true individualists of the world were turning out in short or skinny or even midget forms, and everyone was cutting back at least a little. “Grow your home: shrink yourself!” became the battle cry, and eventually the maximum-height types found themselves the butt of good-natured humor and even, in some cases, less-than-good-natured suspicion. What good was a tall politician? A burly contract negotiator? Just what were they trying to pull?
Around this same time, it began to dawn on the general populace that they could make copies of themselves. This quickly resulted in “xeropollution,” with some individuals creating as many as ten thousand independent instantiations, literally overrunning certain urban areas— most notably Dallas, Texas, the home of the Plural Five. Governmental and corporate powers took a dim view of this practice and reacted with harsh measures, including a three-month, near-total moratorium on faxation, and the sanctioned mass murder of key individuals to reduce their numbers. This led—again, primarily in Dallas—to a number of armed skirmishes that represent the only “hot” conflict of the Wars, with a definite and easily measured death toll of 325 individuals. (The mortality rates for instantiations of these individuals is less well known.)
Fortunately, the rapid development of the Lodney Re-convergence Filter permitted human copies to be merged back into single individuals, with all memories and subjective experience intact. Strict limits were soon enthusiastically and bloodlessly enforced, first on total number of copies, and later, more fairly, on aggregate copy-hours over predefined periods of time.
These transient waves took a long time to settle out, and in some sense continued through the Queendom-era fashions of hair color, skin pigmentation, and self-plural cooperation. But for practical purposes, the Fax Wars were over a decade after they had begun, with the vast majority of human beings choosing modest plurality and the convenience of death and rebirth, over the theological virtues of singletonism and walking. And choosing, yes, to embrace their unique physical attributes as symbols of their heritage and identity.
“Clothe thyself in beauty if thou must,” the playwright Wenders Rodenbeck instructs us in his satirical classic, Uncle Lisa’s Neutron. “ ’Tis charm we find in dreadful short supply.”
Once, a generation of children wished to become adults. Now their wish has been granted. With the starship
Newhope
at their command, the worlds around Barnard’s Star to settle, and a thousand years of exile before them, can the children of Sol found a glorious new future? Or will this latest attempt at independence ultimately be as disastrous as their last?
Don’t miss the answers in
LOST IN TRANSMISSION
the next exciting novel from
Wil McCarthy
“Ah,” Bascal said, his eyes lighting on the hologram. “Planet Two. Now there’s a site for naive eyes, who’ve never caught glimpse of a thing undoable. Plotting its takeover, are we? Scheming its subjugation to the fist of Man? Or are we making friends, filling out a shopping list to surprise it with the gift of ourselves? I was going to name the place—such is my privilege, I’m told—but I figure we should wait for the formal introductions. Find out what she’s like, how she treats us.”
“You need a shave,” Conrad observed. It was just an expression; what Bascal really needed was to reprogram the cells in his face to stop producing unsightly hair. Either that, or simply step through a fax machine, commanding it to give him a real beard.
“Do I? Who says?”
“What, are you growing a beard?
Growing
one?”
“The old-fashioned way,” Bascal agreed. “It seems more proper than just printing one, or printing myself attached to one. I’m not dressing up, Conrad, I’m growing into a role.”
“It’s a lucky thing everybody’s in storage.” Conrad prodded. “You look like you’re growing into a pirate again. Or a hobo.”
“Ha, Ha. You slay me, sir. A king does need a beard, though, don’t you think? It provides a certain sense of gravitas.”
Conrad smirked. “Even a king in exile?’
“Especially a king in exile, boyo. I have no real duties here. I command the expedition, but your darling Xmary here commands the ship. My citizens are in a state of quantum slumber, and even when they awaken, they’ll be much too busy to look to me for anything more than emotional support. Unlike my parents, I really am a figurehead. I rule myself and nothing more.”
Xmary smiled, without much warmth. “It takes more than a beard, Your Majesty.”
The smile Bascal returned was equally polite. “I never said otherwise, Captain. It’s a grave responsibility, to look good doing nothing. Eternally, no less, for we shall never die! But give me time and I’ll do nothing better than anyone has ever done it. I’ll be the King of Nothing, and Nothing will bow down before me in admiration.”
Coming from Bantam Spectra in spring 2004
1
In point of fact, Bascal Edward lived primarily on Tongatapu at this time. However, it is not clear that these statements are ironic, since the young prince, with many examples visible in the sea outside his bedroom window, may not have considered his home an “island” in the sense of the poem. A drawing accompanies the original text. —ed.
2
During a year in Catalonia, Bascal Edward is known to have ridden several times to the Girona School of Mathematics and Literature on an antique, alcohol-powered scooter. The extent of other vehicular traffic at the time is not known. —ed.
3
Note: Alfred Nobel invented dynamite, smokeless powder, and the blasting cap, but not TNT. —ed.
4
Probably
Hala Fakatu’i
, the Royal Road. —ed.
5
This poem, which appeared in
Letter Review
magazine three weeks after it was written, is the last document Prince Bascal is known to have submitted for publication. All sources agree he was wildly despondent at the time.
6
De Towaji himself, supreme among the Fax Lords, is not known to have engaged in this practice, although several attorneys in his employ certainly did.
about the author
Wil McCarthy, after ten years of rocket science with Lockheed Martin, traded the hectic limelight of the space program for the peace and quiet (ha!) of commercial robotics at Omnitech, where he works as a research and development hack.
He writes a monthly column for the SciFi Channel’s news magazine (
www.scifi.com/sfw
), and his less truthful writings have appeared in
Aboriginal SF, Analog, Interzone, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age,
and various anthologies. His most recent novel,
Bloom,
was selected as a
New York Times
Notable Book. Further biographical and bibliographic information is available at:
By Wil McCarthy
Aggressor Six
Flies from the Amber
The Fall of Sirius
Murder in the Solid State
Bloom
The Collapsium
THE WELLSTONE
A Bantam Spectra Book / March 2003
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved
Copyright © 2003 by Wil McCarthy
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address: Bantam Books, New York, New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-41862-3
v3.0