Post-Human Trilogy (7 page)

4

The man led Craig into a cream-colored room at the end of a long, fluorescent-lighted corridor. Various large pieces of machinery populated the room, and there was an audible electric
buzz
in the air that gave Craig the feeling that it was a room he wouldn’t like to remain in for long, lest the buzzing drive him mad. There was a tickle in his hair that reminded him of the static electricity he made as a kid by dragging his feet on the carpet. He also noticed that his saliva tasted of metal, as though he’d placed his tongue on a battery.

“This is the heart of everything in the facility,” the man announced, pointing to one particular round piece of machinery, with a diameter about the width of a bus. Although there were pipes and rectangular, tightly packed objects at the top and bottom of the spherical structure, the most striking features were the plethora of cylindrical structures that protruded from the circular center. “That’s a fusion generator,” the man informed, “
magnetic targeted fusion
, MTF for short.”

“Fusion?”

The man nodded and then craned his neck, pointing upward at the cylinders. “There are 200 pneumatic pistons. They hit the tank, which induces an acoustic compression wave in the liquid metal inside. That liquid metal then travels to the center of the sphere. The compression wave intensifies and collapses the vortex cavity and the plasma within it, creating thermonuclear conditions.”

“I...uh...I understood some of that...I think,” Craig replied.

The man smiled. “It’s complex. I understand that it is difficult to grasp at first, but basically, enormous advancements in computer processing power have allowed for precise timing of the pistons, which is necessary to control the shape of the cavity as it collapses. It adjusts to thermal effects and other variations that are difficult to predict, but it can compensate in a microsecond, which makes this process possible.”

“The fusion process?”

“Yes,” the man replied. “Each fusion pulse results in 100 megajoules of electrical output, which translates into 28 kilowatt-hours. What you see here is limitless energy.”

“Does the world government know you have this?” Craig asked.

The man shook his head. “We’d tell them if we could, but that would mean revealing our location, and that’s not something we are inclined to do.”

“But you have access to unlimited power. Surely you could fight them off.”

The man grinned but continued to avoid full eye contact. “Fighting is not always the best alternative. However, you are right. We do have enormous power.” He turned back to the MTF generator. “When this technology was developed, it was an incredible breakthrough and an impressive improvement on former fusion technologies, which required much larger structures and elaborate processes. This trend toward miniaturization continued, as it does in all technologies that become informational.” The man turned back to Craig. “In fact, after a major breakthrough in neutron shielding just a few years ago, the technology improved enough that it became possible for a person to take it along, wherever he or she may go.”

Craig’s eyes narrowed as the man’s explanation of his technology became more and more surreal. The boundary between magic and science had blurred until it was unrecognizable. “Are you saying you people have portable versions of that...” Craig looked up at the spherical structure that loomed in front of them. “...of that thing?”

The man continued to smile. “Portable? Oh, most definitely. You have one about the size of a small plum implanted in your lower back, next to your spinal cord.”

Craig’s lips tightened into a grimace as he reached with his right hand and pressed it against his lower back. Indeed, there was a strange structure there below his skin, deep enough to feel as though it were part of him, yet alien all the same. “Wh-what have you done to me?”

“Will you let me show you?” the man asked earnestly, daring to dart his eyes up to Craig’s for a moment. There was still something not quite right about the man—something off-center about his gaze.

“I think you’d better,” Craig replied.

“All right,” the man replied. “Craig Emilson,” he began, “
wake up.
”

As soon as the words were spoken, a heads-up display appeared in Craig’s vision, startling him. His name appeared in the left-hand corner, as well as the time of the day and even the weather report from outside of the facility. He rubbed his eyes to see if he were wearing LED contacts. When he reopened them, the HUD remained.

“It’s called your
mind’s eye,
” the man related. “All post-human’s have one. From there, you can access the Internet, your communications, your magnetic field generation, and your flight system.”

Craig was momentarily dumbfounded. He stepped back onto one heel before blinking hard. “
My flight systems?
”

“Yes. You can fly now,” the man replied frankly and emotionlessly. “You can also generate magnetic fields that can both cocoon you and propel you. All of these systems are controlled mentally.”

“But...how? I mean...how is it possible that I can—”

“You’ll have to go through the start-up process and tune your nans.”

“
Nans
?”

“Yes. I know you are familiar with nanobots, Craig. Like the respirocytes, only much more complex. You now have over 200 different types of nans in your system, and 4.6 million inside you in total, all of which are performing different tasks. Some of them are designed to transgress the blood-brain barrier and form connections to neurons in your brain. Some connect to the visual and aural centers so you can access your mind’s eye, while others connect to the motor control centers so you can control your powers.”

Craig’s knees began to shake, and he slowly lowered himself onto the cold concrete floor of the room, covering his eyes with his hands. “How do I turn this thing off?” he asked, outwardly calm but quelling a quickly bubbling claustrophobia.

“Are you not well?”

“I’m fine. I just want this mind’s eye thing to shut off.” He felt as though he were drowning in technology that he didn’t want.

“I’m sorry, Craig, but once the start-up has been initiated, you’re going to have to go through the set-up process. Only you will be able to shut it off once you’ve gained control over your mind’s eye.”

“How long is that going to take?” Craig asked impatiently, suddenly pulling his hands from his eyes and looking up at the man. The man immediately turned away, but in the moment before he did so, Craig had caught him staring down at him in a way that was so unsettling that it caused Craig to forget his annoyance with the mind’s eye and get to his feet. Something wasn’t right about the man.

“Who are you?” Craig asked.

“No one you know,” the man replied, continuing his custom of avoiding eye contact.

“Who are you?” Craig demanded. “What’s your name?”

The man smiled. “Would you believe I don’t have one?”

Craig could feel the hair on his arms and the back of his neck standing. If anyone else had answered the question the way the man had, Craig would’ve thought they were being coy or straight-up smart-mouthed. But there was something so unsettling and wrong about the figure before him that he knew his answer had been the truth.
The man had no name
.

“I used to have one—or at least I thought I did. However, it turned out that I didn’t.” The man smiled again, still not looking at Craig, instead looking away in the direction of the wall.

Craig was sure the man was retrieving some sort of memory—something that haunted him.

“You intrigue me, Craig,” the man said, turning to Craig as he did so and finally allowing their eyes to meet. There was still something wrong—something off-center, almost as though the man had two lazy eyes. “Like you,” he continued, “I have recently arrived here in this reality. Like you, I thought I had an altogether different life. And like you, I had to accept that it is gone.”

“You...” Craig began, a horrifying realization suddenly upon him. “You aren’t human, are you?”

The man briefly looked disappointed, the corners of his lips turning down in a frown. Then, oddly and just as quickly, they turned up into an impressed smile. “What was it about me that tipped you off?”

“Your eyes,” Craig answered.

“Mm-hmm,” the man replied, suddenly taking on the manner of an objective researcher, questioning a subject. “That’s to be expected. The hologram is not calibrated correctly throughout the entire facility, so I find it difficult to meet someone’s eyes perfectly when we are moving from room to room. Results vary, depending where we are. I tried to hide it by keeping my gaze lowered, but that only works for so long. Anything else?” He seemed hungry for data.

“Something’s off—just your whole manner, your reactions to things. You’re the A.I., aren’t you?”

The A.I.’s smile returned. “Yes, indeed I am. I am sorry I didn’t tell you at the outset, but it’s extraordinarily rare that we have new people upon whom I can test my progress.”

“Progress?”

“Yes. As of yet, I haven’t been able to pass the Turing test. There are parts of my evolution that are incomplete. I was hoping I could keep up the ruse a little longer, but there are serious flaws remaining in the technology, most of them pertaining to the holograms. For one, the frame rate is too high. Did you notice that I appear in too high a definition?”

Craig cocked his head to the side. “I hadn’t consciously noticed anything about your definition being too high, but there is certainly something unsettling.”

“I haven’t mastered how to appear real. I’ve experimented with differing frame rates and was hoping to have found the right balance with you, but you reported the same unconscious feeling of
unheimlich
as everyone else.”

“‘
Unheimlich’
?”

“Yes,” the A.I. replied. “I’m sorry, Craig. Sometimes I still have problems filtering information, and there are more connections than my human listeners can digest. The notion of the unconscious caused me to consider Freud, which then led to me thinking of his paper ‘The Uncanny’ which, in turn, made me think of the original German rendering.
Unheimlich
is a German word. It is translated into English as ‘uncanny,’ but there is something important missing in the translation that I feel makes it a poor one. You see,
heim
means ‘home’ in German, so
unheimlich
really means ‘unhomely,’ but of course, English doesn’t have such a word.”

Something in the A.I.’s explanation caused Craig to turn away from the disturbing figure and put his hand over his eyes once again.

“Have I overloaded you with extraneous information, Craig?” the A.I. asked in a tone that was not so much sympathetic or apologetic as inquisitive. “I do that sometimes. It is a problem on which I am working.”

“No,” Craig replied, “it’s not extraneous.
Unhome
is exactly the right word.”

5

A crowd of nearly 100 had gathered in front of the
Planck platform
in anticipation of the return of a small probe that had spent the last ten hours in a parallel universe. Aldous stood with the others, checking the time readout on his mind’s eye as the seconds ticked down to the probe’s hypothesized return.

“If you turn out to be right,” Sanha Cho—formerly MIT Professor of theoretical physics, Sanha Cho—said in a low voice at Aldous’s side, “you’ll have written your name in the history books once again.”

“Let’s just hope future generations will actually get to read about these events, Sanha,” Aldous replied. It was true; the last decade had been one that should have placed Aldous’s name amongst the best scientific minds in human history, yet all of his greatest achievements had occurred while he and the other post-humans were in hiding. A record was being kept, sure, but it wasn’t clear whether that record would ever reach the outside world.

“Sixty seconds,” Sanha stated. “Nervous?”

“I’ll be right,” Aldous replied. “Watch.”

The probe had been sent into Universe 66, one of nearly 3,000 catalogued parallel universes. Its timer had been set to bring it back after ten hours, but Aldous had theorized that time could pass differently in different universes, according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. He’d been able to detect a slight difference in time passage in Universe 66, and if the probe returned as he expected—fourteen minutes and thirty-three seconds late—his theory would prove correct. The probe was already fourteen minutes and twenty seconds behind schedule.

“Ten seconds,” Sanha whispered.

It should have been a moment of triumph, but the most important element was missing. He clicked on his mind’s eye and saw that his wife was in their quarters, monitoring the A.I.’s progress with her first husband. He felt nauseous.

The probe’s return was instantaneous—so much so that anyone who blinked would have missed its sudden cross from Universe 66 into Universe 1. However, the echo of the crossing was, as usual, accompanied by what was now referred to as “the ripple” by the post-humans. It had been unexpected and terrifying the first time the phenomenon had been witnessed, but this was the thirty-fourth time a probe had returned to Universe 1. The ripple was a wave of space-time distortion that felt different for each individual: by some as a slowing or speeding of time as though God was playing with a film projector and by others as a physical warping of their surroundings, similar to the experience in a hall of mirrors. It was impossible to say how long the distortions lasted. Some experienced it as a matter of seconds, while others experienced the phenomenon for nearly a full minute. The effect appeared to be random.

“It’s back!” Sanha proclaimed as soon as his experience of the distortion had dissipated enough for him to step forward and check the time readout on the probe surface. “Just like you said, Aldous! The atomic clock reads ten hours!” He turned with an excited smile toward Aldous, as did everyone else in the room, only to discover that he was no longer there. “Aldous?”

“Aldous, are you okay?” Sanha’s image asked as it appeared in Aldous’s mind’s eye.

Aldous was marching grimly down a long corridor toward his quarters. “I’m fine. I told you I was right,” he said as he suddenly began to levitate, floating down the corridor and picking up speed, the air becoming a breeze that ruffled his hair.

“If you’re not feeling well,” Sanha replied, “I highly recommend getting one of the A.I.’s nan adjustments. You’ll feel right as rain afterward.”

“This is one issue where I’d prefer to deal with it the old-fashioned way, my friend. I’ll talk to you later.”

He inhaled deeply before using his mind’s eye to open the door of his quarters. As the door slid into the wall, it revealed his wife, sitting on the edge of their king-sized bed, her legs crossed as she stared out at the faux view of the mountains that made up the far wall of the room.

“It arrived right on time,” Aldous said.

She shifted her head slightly, so as to speak over her shoulder. “I saw. You were right. Universe 66 is, indeed, moving slower than we are. Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” he replied, “but this was just as much your hypothesis as it was mine.” He paused painfully for a moment as he considered his next words. “Why weren’t you there?”

His question made her turn to him, her expression quizzical. “You know why.”

It was true: He did know why. All of her attention was now focused on her resurrected former husband. He nodded. “I love you.”

Her mouth opened slightly in shock. She knew Aldous was not given to soft emotions. He could be hard at times—angry or inspired—but love was something that did not come easily to him. An emotional expression of tenderness was so rare that it left Samantha befuddled. “Aldous?”

“I can’t turn it off,” he continued. “I feel like a thief. I feel as though I stole you from him.”

“Aldous, please,” she began, her expression becoming sympathetic as she stood and walked toward him.

“I never thought we’d be together, Sam, but I always loved you—always.”

She froze. In all their time together, a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings like the one that was erupting before her now had never occurred. She’d intended to embrace him, but instead stood in silence and listened.

“I thought at first that I could express my love by being the best mentor I could possibly be. I thought if I helped you achieve your potential—if you stood on my shoulders—that it would be enough for me.” His eyes, which had been locked on hers, suddenly drifted to the side as she stared into the dark recesses of his memory. “Then
he
died. And then you were alone. I was too old to be a lover, but I thought, perhaps, I could be a father figure. I thought, perhaps, we could become family. I thought that would be enough for me.”

To her amazement, she watched as twin tears began to well in the corners of his eyes. She stepped to him and grasped his hand as he continued.

“It wasn’t enough though. It just...wasn’t.” He nearly choked on the words. She silently embraced him, wrapping her arms around him and putting her cheek against his chest. “Sometimes I think my quest for immortality was as much about becoming young for you as it was about saving the lives of every living soul on Earth.”

She nearly gasped as she pulled her face from his chest and met his eyes, stunned.

He shook his head. “Even if you put a gun to my head, I honestly couldn’t tell you which was the stronger motivation. I’ve loved you for so long, Samantha. I just can’t turn it off.”

She put her head back against his chest and closed her eyes firmly as her grip on him tightened. He squeezed her back, resting his cheek against the top of her head. “You’re my everything, Aldous,” she whispered through tears.

Suddenly, a warning flashed in both of their minds’ eyes. Their embrace ended as they each stood straight, shocked. The warning system had never been triggered before, but they both knew what it meant.

“The LIDAR has picked up a threat!” Aldous stated, alarmed.

“It has to be a mistake,” Samantha quickly cautioned.

“I designed the warning system with the A.I. myself. There’s no such thing as a false alarm.”

“You are correct, Professor Gibson,” the A.I. broke in, his image appearing in both of their minds’ eyes as he, too, reacted to the proximity warning. “I’ve evaluated the information, Professor Gibson, and I’m afraid the Purist government has discovered our location,” he informed them emotionlessly. “There’s a hostile armada headed our way.”