Transcendence (8 page)

He prayed that the Brain was simply fragmenting. He prayed that it wasn’t doing what all indicators seemed to show.

“
If it becomes sentient in some way we haven’t predicted,” the other seemed to shout in the dead silence, “we’re crashed.”

“
Start educating the reserve GenNets,” Technician 2 said. They should have done this long ago, if they wanted to maintain the Brain’s rule. It would have looked better for keeping his job, but he was willing to bear the cross of his actions. The entire world would endure drastic upheavals during the transition back to human control. But the world would be returned to its rightful masters.

The rule of the machines would fall.

He sat back into his chair, the old gel gurgling as it adjusted to his weight. “We might be able to have a new Brain ready to go before the current one crashes.”

When Technician 1 turned away, Technician 2 crossed himself three times.

Jonathan slams shut the shockplas door of his parents’ apartment and stands for a moment in the narrow entryway. During a rerun of one of last year’s shows, the Captain has to escape a gang of NKK thugs across the surface of the Moon. Once again, Feedcontrol’s hype led him to believe the live show was about to begin when they only planned to run pre-show programming a while longer. He doesn’t care. He can splice
Lone Ship Bounty
reruns for hours at a time, and often does, switching subscription point-of-view—pov—to experience the same scenes from fresh perspectives.

Only the corners of Jonathan’s eyes show the entryway’s stark white walls, while the center 30 degrees of his pov is alive with shifting lunar hills, vivid grey and smooth beneath a raging sun and a sky pure black. It’s almost enough to help overcome his fear of returning home.

“
Jonny, is that you?” Josephine, his sister, asks. Curiously, she’s speaking audio-only.

Jonathan gets a funny idea, that maybe she’s changed for the better. He decides to talk to her and flips on his 3VRD self image for her. “Yeah. I’m back from the headmed clinic.”

“
Jonny, honey,” his mother’s sudden 3VRD says. She’s middle-aged, smiling imbecilically, her rolls of brown hair neatly coiled around a youth-edited face. Her hands hang at her sides, motionless. She looks ludicrous overlaid atop the Captain’s adventure on the Moon, floating motionless as the lunar landscape whisks past. Father joins the party, another absurd, unprotected human standing in the vacuum as red and green laser-rifle bolts slice the pure black day.

“
My son,” Mr. Sombrio’s 3VRD says, nodding, his face calm and emotionless. For some reason Jonathan has never understood, the man’s image wears a crisply pressed military uniform. He never served anywhere. “Welcome home.”

“
Fuck off,” Jonathan responds.
Flick
, his father is gone, surely involved in something more important—like fucking one of the individs he keeps running continually, which Jonathan discovered once while eavesdropping via his blackcard. Of course, the man hadn’t been aware of his son’s intrusion, since blackcards are good at hiding themselves. Jonathan shudders at the memory of seeing his father whipping the little boy whose features were disturbingly like his own.

“
We were worried about you,” Ms. Sombrio says.

“
Yeah,” Jonathan says with a snarl. His stomach begins to knot. “If you were so worried, why didn’t you come pick me up?”

“
We sent the car,” she says, still smiling though her voice is making a heroic effort at portraying emotion. Stupid 3VRD program. “Oh, my, didn’t it go to the right place? We—”

“
The car got there,” Jonathan says. “Never mind.” He throws up an ID filter to shut her out of his head. She makes no effort to override or switch communications bandwidth and try again.
Just as well
, Jonathan thinks, his stomach tightening more, as if something in there is biting his guts.

His mind returns to his sister and her strange greeting. She had seemed almost welcoming.

Change, change
, he thinks. Everything so far has led in the wrong direction: the gang, érase, school, everything. He sees the world as something that beckons him, but he can’t understand what it wants him to do. He must do something. He feels he will die if he doesn’t do something.
Charity
—now there’s something. The memory of Charity’s offer, the memory of saving her from the beatcoat cops . . . these give him strength.

Jonathan decides to try something unusual in response to his sister—a conversation. Maybe here, with her, he can find a handhold to the world. Maybe that’ll make him feel less tossed and lost.

“
Josephine,” he says, “how are things?”

“
Come here, Jonny,” his sister says, audio-only again. “In the living room.”

A few steps down the hall and Jonathan stands in the rectangular entry to the living room. He projects his 3VRD; his sister still hasn’t done so, but he ignores the discomfort that causes.

“
What’s on?” he asks, using the familiar greeting.

“
Nothing,” she answers. “Let’s talk, you know, intheflesh.”

Jonathan falls still, stricken with terror at the perversion of her request. Not only because the request is so unusual, especially coming from her, but because of the added dimension of Jonathan’s being labeled a headfeed addict. A “rapthead,” in the slang of the street.

Rapthead
. For weeks, those nurses and techs tried to drive into his worldview that it was okay to use his headcard, that it would be an abnormal reaction driven by paranoia not to use it, while at the same time they droned on and on about the dangers of abusing feed. Like overeating, they said; you need food to survive but not so much you grow obese. He never quite understood the somewhere-in-between ground they stressed, but had recited the answers they wanted so they would let him out of the program. Walking the fine edge between normal feed-use and feedrapture is a bitch.

Josephine sits at the edges of his splice—part of her on each side, but he’s so used to viewing the world like this that he doesn’t see her as sliced in half—his sister, motionless, granting him her full intheflesh attention. She’s on the Variform couch, legs crossed, hands in her lap. Suddenly, he has no idea why he pursued this contact.

Jonathan concentrates on the Captain for a moment, watching him through the eyes of the Captain’s Bombardier as they fight off thugs, and feels terrified to shut off the program. Although he knows this episode will run at least another two hours before the live feed begins, he is hesitant to shut down, as if cutting these brave EConauts—EarthCo astronauts—out of his life even momentarily will be the same as killing them, chopping off a source of his own personality, his only true source of strength.

But his sister is waiting, patiently, with a soft look on her face that Jonathan can’t remember seeing before. So he shuts down the show. The splice closes before his eyes like curtains being drawn, curtains upon which is projected another program, one entitled, “Life.” He realizes the revmetal music still rages in his brain’s audio receptors, and hesitates for only another second before shutting that down, as well. Finally, he cuts off his 3VRD projection and faces her.

“
So,” he says, overwhelmingly intheflesh. Flesh, that word; he feels naked, and that makes him nervous. He can smell himself now, slightly sharp and sour, and Josephine, perfumed and crisp.

“
You walked all the way home, across Downtown?” she asks. Her face wears a mask of concern, oddly realistic.

“
Yeah. I’ve done it before.”

“
I was watching newsfeed. There’s a Zone down there.” She stresses “Zone” as if saying “bacterial bomb.”

“
I’ve been through them before.”

A moment of silence. Intheflesh conversation is so awkward. No assists, no distractions, nothing interesting to concentrate on during lulls.

“
I wanted to let you know I missed you,” she says.

Jonathan laughs once, not out of humor, but stops himself before the sound turns ugly. “Why?” he asks.

At that moment, unexpectedly, hearing the answer becomes a desperate need, the most important thing in the universe.

“
I don’t know,” she begins, “I guess your going off to treatment made me, well, think about things.”

Jonathan looks at her, struck by the vividness and concreteness of intheflesh reality for the second or third time in one day.
She missed me?
This is more intimacy than he intended.
What had I intended?
he wonders.
Who am I to change anything?

He distracts himself by focusing on things other than his sister. He studies the room. Josephine is framed by a new, pastel-pink couch that stretches along the entire wall—which, he notices, is stained in several places, even though he remembers that the white wallcoverings were guaranteed stainproof.

Other objects leap out at him. To the left of the couch stands a wall-sized interactive-hologram projector, dull grey now. To the right, several shelves loaded with dusty treasures as well as half a dozen tiny interactives, each of them servers in their own right. Three giant 3VRD projectors hang blankly on the walls. Josephine’s left calf rests against the home entertainment center, a featureless black rhomboid which houses the apartment’s massive server, an all-bandwidth-capable unit which won’t be paid off for decades to come—or, more accurately, will serve only as trade-in on the next hot unit and keep them in debt indefinitely. Otherwise, the room seems surprisingly empty without the colors, scents and sounds projected by the servers and overlays, without the critically acclaimed art his parents subscribe to. Jonathan doesn’t miss the art.

“
I thought a lot about you,” Josephine says. She’s eighteen, two years older than Jonathan, old enough to subscribe to college channels, but her attention is clearly on him instead of class. So she’s skipping just to speak to him intheflesh, when she could just as easily do so while 3VRDing.
He
could, anyway.

Jonathan shifts his weight to his other foot, his boots, purposely shredded, creaking.

“
Yeah?” he says, looking away when he realizes her eyes are on his. He remembers the big sis who had snubbed him at every opportunity, every time he made an effort to have real contact with her, until finally he overcompensated and fed back exactly the kind of treatment she had given him: distant, cold and hard, contact through computer feed only. He has learned relationships are safer that way, when digital walls shield people from one another.

“
Yeah,” she answers, and for a moment seems to grope for words.

So now she acts as if she wants a different relationship. Anger begings to bubble within a knot at his center; he feels violated by her stare, that brown-eyed, gentle, intense stare. He wanted to be the one to change things; now she has taken even that from him. What right does she have to alter their interaction? It’s obscene how real she seems, the scent of her skin, those eyes burning into his retinas. An unrequested blackcard program automatically recalls them and replays—

“
How was it for you, in Corrections?” she finally asks.

Jonathan consciously shuts down the program, his hands starting to shake. “All right, I guess,” he says. He rubs damp palms on the thighs of his pantlegs. “I made it out. Got out of a lot of school.”

“
No, I mean how was it? How did you . . . feel?”

“
I don’t know,” he answers, honestly, still rubbing his palms.

“
What did you do?”

“
We talked a lot. Every morning, they made us eat breakfast together, intheflesh, in a cafeteria. There were twelve of us in my group, twelve raptheads—”

“
Don’t say that, Jonny,” Josephine says sharply.

Jonathan suppresses a smile, more comfortable in these familiar roles of agitator and agitatee. Still, he suppresses it—
I want a different relationship. Don’t I want a different relationship?
Even so, he relaxes a bit.

“
They kept the adults in another wing where they couldn’t corrupt our cards. We talked, and ate, and listened to an edufeed subscription taught by some expert at treating young raptheads—”

“
Jonny!” she says, sharply.

“
What do you care?” he asks, remembering her fierce fivesen stabs before he left for treatment. He had to ignore them for fear of revealing his blackcard, even though Josephine knew about that card—otherwise she couldn’t have assaulted him in that way. Stabs across the spectrum of senses following particularly bad encounters with Ms. Sombrio, following Jonathan-didn’t-know-what in his mother’s life, following an even murkier chain of causation. . . .