One
When two people are at one
in their inmost hearts,
they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze.
And when two people understand each other
in their inmost hearts,
their words are sweet and strong,
like the fragrance of orchids.
From the I Ching.
ONE
First and foremost, let me say that I’m a regular guy. I’m not one of those crazy head cases who runs around half-cocked, writing manifestos. I go to my job at the replacement organ factory, I pay the bills, and until a year ago, I never gave a second’s thought to the way everything is rigged so that most of us end up zombies.
I lie, actually. Here I sit, in a dark room, infested by jungle rats, writing this manifesto. I don’t have a job anymore, and even if I had one, I wouldn’t go to it. I can feel myself, a stiffening in the trousers. I am half cocked. Where do I begin? Nobody who isn’t born rich can quite afford to keep his head above water and the company adverts out of his mind. I suppose you could call that progress. I suppose you could call this a love story, though I am not in love in the usual sense. There I go again, I am lying.
Who is going to read this, anyway? I am in love, though it is the least of my problems right now, it makes me look like a fool, and I am very tired as a result of it. That’s it. Love makes fools of us all.
It all started when I met Lula. Screw that. It started a hell of a lot earlier. When I was a kid, at the Sprint Achievers labor and education camp for child debtors, none of the girls would give me a second look. I guess you would have called it a beta male complex. There I go, lying again. Who the hell is going to read this? I was born a gamma male.
We’d do exercises in the yard, sorting aluminum cans and putting price tags on food processors, out in a field that said SELLULAR WON, in brightly colored plastic glass and smelled like milk chocolate chippies, and the cuties would walk by and sneer in contempt. Too submissive, too unsure of myself, and too completely aware that my dad was a SPEND BOT. He had so many implants that he couldn’t manage a single thought of his own, much less an emotion. Those days, he’d spend every hour working at the sulfur plant and buying rubberized office toys. He was a spend bot though and through. Maybe it was his own fault. Maybe it was just his nature to spend the extra twenty million bucks on a pair of good shoes. Maybe the scarecrow is right, people should pay their bills or be prepared to give something back in trade. Maybe it was me that did it. Birth permits don’t come cheap. I always wonder about that. Mom says it was she that paid for the permit, though. In any case, we could never afford the testosterone pills to make me popular, well-adjusted, and athletic. I guess that is when it started, the Naturalism.
I convinced myself I was better than the other boys because what I had, I had naturally, not from a box, a pill, or an implant. Strange notion.
In hindsight, it has made me unhappier than you can possibly imagine. It is strange notions like that, unhealthy or not, that make us what we are, and I cannot be any other way. Can you?
The day I first met Lula, I had just worked a double shift at the plant. That was just after I found out about my ex-wife. She was my wife at the time, and for the previous thirteen and a half months, she had not loved me. In fact, she had never really loved at all. I was merely a very good friend to her-a living companion. She had stopped taking the pills that made her love me. Too expensive, she said, and too much trouble being in love. She had lied all along.
I thought she loved me naturally, the way I loved her. It was all a lie.
She started taking them, dextro-oxytocy-romanticol, and later passionol-10, on the sly, about the time we got married. It seemed like I had a promising future at the time.
That day, the day I met Lula, the city smelled like fresh pavement after a rainstorm. A layer of wet paper adverts covered the ground. I was emotionally devastated. I was walking to the people mover slowly, trying to get used to the idea of a life without meaning. I was dead tired, and covered with that smell you get after working with neurons. The fragrance of organs. Just then, I saw her. Lula. She had a beautiful frown.
Never have I thought about it till now, but the timing of things was no coincidence. My ex stopped taking the injections that made her love me, and there you have it. Thirteen months later, and I am swooning over SynthJoe girls on the way to the people mover.
I am a Naturalist at heart. I prefer to fall in love the biological way. I thought my ex was like that too. It turns out I was wrong. It turns out she lied. Couldn’t help it, I suppose.
Let me explain.
Syn was in my teleodendro class the last year at the Omnichronological Institute of Permitted Science and Acceptable Technology. We were both children of the Third Machine War[1], I suppose we had that in common. Both of us grew up in human cities, doing duck and cover drills every day in case the robots decided to detonate an antimatter bomb and end everything. I remember when my mom would sneak me out of the house to go to the playground. When you are a kid, your mom seems indestructible, but she must have been very scared. Syn had similar memories. Her dad built her dolls out of scrap, because the real ones were confiscated. They could have been androids in disguise.
Back in those days, they could make machines we have forgotten how to build. Too much of our knowledge was locked up in robots. When they all went berserk, the humans on the planet lost the ability to make superconductors, spaceplanes, artificial brains[2].
Lula, even now, in the dark, writing with this uncomfortable device rather than thinking these words into a scanner, I long for you.
Of course, nowadays, it is illegal to even think about building a robot. Luckily, the bots could never make copies of themselves directly. They needed factories. Factories are vulnerable, and I guess that is why a human is sitting here writing this and not a robot. Anyone who so much as designs a robot is up for a lobotomy, or organ harvesting.
There are no more robots to do the work for us. I wonder why so few people realize that is why we need so many zombified humans, the ones that have gone over to the scarecrow.
Syn and I would sit together in class, chewing inexpensive dried cocaine leaves and laughing at our lecturers as they tried to teach us math. It was funny, I suppose, because it was so tragic. These were art professors that went over to math after the war. There was no need for math professors before it, and of course, there were far too many artists. There have always been too many artists. Who wants to learn math, when machines do it so much better. Besides, after a total war of man versus machine, there was little room for artists in its wake.
We saw plenty of each other that year. I was stricken by Syn the first time she gave me a hug goodbye. Tall and curvy, her flesh pressed against me like a magnet, her short red hair smelling of Lavada brand synthetic oil. All that night, I was drawing pictures of her in my mind.
Our education was easy, and our classes were paid for by the state. If we had been artists, art school would have fleeced us six ways from sideways before we got out. Inevitably, we would have gone on to lead a life of drawing toilet paper adds and spending every last cent on shoes. As it was, our lives were pretty damned good. Every word out of our mouths was mistaken for genius. Old theorems, gas laws, and chemical equations that mystified our teachers, repeated rote so that they would not be forgotten, and memorized by lecture halls full of uncomprehending postadolescents, made perfect sense to us. We were, quite simply, the only two students with any aptitude for science whatsoever.
After that first hug, Syn and I used to sneak out to the old spaceport and smoke zeonite out of a glass pipe. It was a wonderful drug, back when you could get it. It would make a person feel all light and airy. Heavy thoughts would fade and leave a fluffy residue of beautiful abstraction. It was illegal, of course. Every drug that makes a person think is now illegal. Heroin, alcohol, cocaine, and nicotine are all legal again. It used to be that the reverse was true, before the robot wars. Back then, people thought as much as possible, and it was the addictive drugs, the ones that can now be used to keep a person on the economic treadmill, that were against the law.
They were a great society. Still, something died in them long before the robot wars. At the old spaceport, a zeppelin-billboard lay face up, its cables severed and power source shot. It was a rare, permanent billboard….the kind that broadcast a single message for years. From the tower, we could read it, like a dead whale with a faint, rotting tattoo.
PUNY HUMAN. PLEASE CONFORM TO ACCEPTED SOCIETAL NORMS
FAILURE TO DO SO COULD CAUSE OTHERS TO QUESTION THEIR HAPPINESS
Robots-they had no knack for subtlety. That message was from about the time the trouble started. They were giants of the earth back in those times, both men and robots.
I remember a particularly good hit of Z. Syn and I were laying on the faded blue synthetic carpet of the abandoned spaceport. She and I were staring up through the silica ceiling at the moon.
“Who do you think blew it up?” she smiled, exhaling the astringent perfume of a shrinking blue crystal.
I answered, accepting the pipe “We did, to keep them out of space. They have the advantage there.”
“I think so too.” She mused. “It was all a lie-that bullshit about how the AI blew it up to kill the human spirit.”
It was a message we had all been told as children. Spaceports destroyed to kill the dream of exploration, and the reality of Earth’s tiny colonies. In truth, there were never many space colonies, and those that we had were never self-supporting. The lack of government subsidy alone was enough to kill them. Still, we needed the story-an explanation for why we were in the right. The plastics kept promising to broker “economic cooperation” to reopen it under the new capitalist model, but it would never happen. The math was all wrong. Too much initial investment for an uncertain reward.
Space travel has always been about ideology.
“Zax, kiss me.” She said.
I did. It was soft and animal. I remember she tasted like zeonite, like chemicals.
Brain chemicals. Natural or synthetic, love is all about brain chemicals. My addiction to her started two weeks earlier, with that first hug. The scent of her, the images in my mind combined with the high molecular weight pheromones that brushed into my Jacobson’s organ. It was probably her hair that did it. From that moment on, surges of dopamine would drive me to think of her constantly, complimented by surges of seratonin that made every emotion particularly strong. Is this too much on brain chemicals for you? I lapse into that because brains are my work, my passion, my science. Why do I ask? Who on Earth is going to read this?
Ancient writers used to speak of confusing love and sex. This was a fallacy. Love is sex. Love is chemical. It is just that there are very different kinds of love, and each has its own corresponding mix of chemicals. A mother’s love for a child is sex, the aftermath of sex specifically. Oxytocin dominates it. Oxytocin also dominates the initial phases of falling into romantic love. This love I had for Syn was natural. That night, I tasted her lips, her breasts, her clitoris, and a streak of oxytocin burned her into my mind forever.
Perhaps, on her end, the emotions were just as real. Years later, she insists so much. She did it the usual way, however, with a syringe.
Marriage. The ancients used to stand in front of a big crowd. The father of the woman, and it was always a woman and a man, would give her away to the man she was marrying. Witnesses would be there, and it was usually a religious authority that spoke the final oath binding the two together. It seems ridiculous to me. We have none of that, though the plastics are trying to bring part of it back. For centuries, people used to spend the equivalent of a years wages on a wedding ceremony. How did they do it with only natural love? I guess the secret is that married couples never used to love each other. Ancient literature is full of it. Marriage was an economic alliance, and love was a betrayal of that alliance, an infidelity or a rebellion.
For the last few centuries, men and women, women and women, men and men, and groups of three or more have married each other by mutual consent. To get married, one partner gives the other or others something of great importance, and the other or others accept.
That night, I gave her my watch. It was over one hundred years old. Nobody uses watches anymore, most people have a chip in their head. We didn’t speak of the gift for over two months.
After that, we moved downtown, to one of the glass and steel high rises that were opening up again after centuries of disuse[3]. She already had a job, designing radio transmitters, and I had to turn down three jobs because each employer wanted to put a chip in my neck “to facilitate greater communication”.
That was eight years ago. There were a lot of jobs back then. I remember receiving notices in the mail[4]. Companies would give me a 770 million dollar loan if I would get a new CEREBRO chip. I deleted them.
Money was tight, and Syn kept talking about one or both of us getting an implant “to make things easier”. Finally, I got a job making replacement organs, and all talk of volunteer slavery subsided.
Chips. Implants. Cybernetic devices from before the wars. Even the ancients[5] had them, primitive versions at least. The first ones were in pets, to recover lost animals, or in soldiers, to identify the remains of the dead on the battlefield. Later, they started putting them into children, so that kidnapped children could be returned to their families. Historically speaking, the ostensible protection of children has been the most common way of excusing an excision of freedom, and microchipping was no exception. With their primitive technology, but their brilliant science, the ancients elucidated the inner workings of the brain. Implants could make the blind see and the deaf hear. They could even make a brain damaged person regain their memories.
The technology improved until it was possible to put a chip anywhere into the brain, and make the axxons and dendrites grow into it. They could quite literally make a person do anything. Mental illness didn’t exactly vanish, though it became a treatable malady, like diabetes or cancer. They first thought of using a chip to make people work harder after the war. Fifty years ago, the cities were wrecked, and a generation of tough young misfits sat on the wreckage of the androids they just killed. Everyone was in debt to everyone else. Wars do that. The rich did what they always do. They borrowed more money and arranged it so everyone else would have to pay it off.
The only problem was that the people didn’t want to work.
None of them had worked a day in their lives. They had grown up with robots to do that-robots to clean, robots to build automobiles, robots to manufacture antibodies, and artificially intelligent computers to keep track of the inventory and anticipate the need for new products. Almost all the survivors of the robot war were young, because when the thing first started, the bots killed everyone in a position of real power. It was ingenious the way they did it, actually. The AIs just wrote them a letter, telling them to show up to work early, or to come to a certain address, and then shot them, or gassed them, when they showed up. Entire commuter trains full of people would stop on their tracks and electrocute the passengers. Automated ambulances would pick up the wounded and drop them in a ditch. Two billion humans were dead in one day, with more to follow. The survivors fought them tooth and nail, and won. The decisive advantage was that, fundamentally, the AIs depended upon infrastructure more than the humans, so as the war dragged on longer and longer, the shortage of resources got the better of them. Two humans can embark upon reproduction in an elevator, though it takes a lifetime to raise one. Two robots cannot make a robot, it takes a thousand, and a factory, and metal, and borosilicate, and plutonium.
The survivors of the robot wars knew how to do three things, drink, fight, and fuck. My old man was like that, once.
After the war, the rich survivors did what the rich always do. They found a way of staying in power. This involved bringing back capitalism. They made it so expensive to live that most people could barely get by. They brought back debtor’s prison, an institution that had been dead for almost two thousand years. Debtors prisons were problematic, however, because nobody in prison did any work worth doing. Besides that, they no longer continued to spend money. To mitigate this, they began to let the debtors out of jail with a chip in their cerebral cortex. Agree to the chip, and they would forgive the debt. Supposedly, it was to ensure that you would pay off your debts on schedule, and not endanger yourself by racking up new financial problems. The chip is usually planted in the anterior cerebral cortex. It transmits a little voice to the speech centers, to the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and to a thousand other places. The voice says “Work till the debt is gone, then this voice will go away.”
It worked. Too well.
The economy was still bad, and the boys upstairs, the ones who floated to the top when the war ended, got the idea to make chips that made people want to buy things. That voice, the one that transmitted adverts into your head, never went away. Soon, they were giving people money to chip themselves, chipping people to forgive debt, to get good jobs, and to live in the right neighborhoods. There is almost no limit to the number of chips you can put in a person’s mind. Probably, their effects max out around thirty or forty-the point where it is no longer possible to have an original thought or do anything besides work or spend money. They call these people, those who have more than twenty or thirty chips, SPEND BOTS. The combined effects of all the chips wear out the body fast, but still, people go for them. Some of it is status, some of it is power, or greed, and much of it is the way things have been configured so that it is virtually impossible to stay out of debt for long.
Fortunately, there have always been a class of people that say “Fuck it.” Fuck society. Fuck the rich. Fuck the man. Fuck working slavishly to serve someone else’s ends. Fuck it. I suppose that is why I fell in love with Syn. Nobody said “fuck it” like her.
If this sounds like a love letter to Syn, you’re right. How can you blame somebody for lying to you when she told you what you desperately wanted to hear? She knew I only wanted love the natural way, but she lied and had the shots. Five years later, she is sitting on the couch, and she is all dressed up to go out. She mentions it as if I should have known the whole time. After all, hadn’t I noticed the syringes and shots in the medicine box? There she was, cross-legged, applying a layer of rouge to her neck, choosing an appropriate choker for a 3D performance of Euripides’ Medea, and she mentions it as if it were nothing. It turned out to be a lousy show. I was so obsessed with my own, uniquely male, anger, that I was simply unable to identify with the protagonist of that play.
I suppose what really makes me sore is the eighteen months of wondering why things weren’t the same between us. Kind of makes a guy feel like a fool, doesn’t it?
Like I said, the timing was no coincidence. I think it might have been a Twoday when Syn drops the truth bomb on me, and by Fiveday, I am swooning over a coffee girl[6].
It was a warm day in Thermidor, and I was walking to the peoplemover, navigating my way through a crowd of workies, suits, and spend bots. Workies. Caught between the innocence of birth, and the mindlessness of life as a spend bot, most of them fight a daily battle against the economic reality of everyday existence. Grey tunics and black coveralls, they moved like organelles in some vast human cytoplasm. Some, stern men with shaved heads and hairy chins, walked dourly and purposefully, stepping over the prolific human wreckage of homeless drug addicts. I could see in their faces, they had yet to give in to the scarecrow. Others, the suits, strut the expensive walkways or stand idly near the upper gates and alcoves, chattering wordlessly through radio implants, far and away, to their cohorts in distant cities. What concerns these men and women I scarcely know, for I had very few friends among them. My impression is that, despite their incomes, they are mostly microchipped already, and that their lives are a meaningless wait for subjugation and servitude, though at a higher economic class than the workies.
But I digress.
It was a warm day, and the upper passage to the more expensive level of the mover was cool, its glassy walls moist with dew. It was rush hour, and the walkways were crowded with suits. Adverts blare from every cardinal direction, promising good soap, cheap penile implants, and the promise of shared vacations with professional practitioners of the erotic sciences. A small woman struggles through the crowd. A suit in a black jumpsuit knocks her off her balance, oblivious. Reaching forward, I catch her. For some reason, the crowd lurches to a halt, and we are stuck behind this man. This man, a subhuman cog in a corrupt machine, he scans over the rail for the next mover and dials and redials a number on his headset. I feel tremendous empathy for this tiny woman with full lips and a severe frown. I tap her gently on the shoulder and show her an electromagnet. With a deft wink, I sweep it behind the suit’s head and hide it. I had just erased the hard drive in the man’s mind. He would never find that number, nor any other, till the device was repaired. Best of all, lacking any knowledge of science, he would never guess how it was done. The confusion in the man’s face was obvious though, as he struggled to orient himself without the calibration of electronic devices.
We exchanged devious grins and moved to catch the approaching train.
She was allright, I guess. It is hard to tell how somebody really looks after you have already started to fall in love with them. They change. Lula had a shoolgirl’s face on a body built for an adult. Her black hair was pulled into two pigtails. Loose strands kept falling over her almond-shaped, brown eyes. Her breasts rose and fell over her chest like imperial mountains, built far too big for the landscape beneath them. She wore a tight-fitting silver sweater, and a very short silver mini skirt. An expensive electric sapphire studded her nose. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. After we caught the train, she stopped grinning and resumed her usual, pouty frown. Her frown. She had such a beautiful frown.
[1] Ibid.
3 I could write concerning this subject this for a very long time, but in my present state of mind, I do not feel like it. We have so many of the old machines and technology from the machine ages. Some of us even know how they work, in a sense, but for the most part, we have lost the scientific knowledge it takes to truly innovate and build more. Every day, old machines degrade and are replaced by simpler, more practical replacements. My own field seems to be a bit of an exception, because of an individual I will write of later, but in all honesty, our neuroscience does not hold a candle to that of the ancients.
[3] Like most North American cities, my city, Chitow, has pockets of very old architecture leftover from the ages when people built very tall buildings. These have been exceedingly hard to dismantle effectively, and their huge arrays of windows rendered them impractical till recently. Windows are coming back, because cheap fusion power is going extinct as the reactors close. Besides, I like natural light.
[4] All mail is electronic. I assume it is the same with you. This fact terrifies me because the electronic networks that support it are vanishing.
[5] Any society that existed before CE3000 is ancient, to me at least. Very likely, you consider my society to be ancient.
[6] See the second appendix: “Our Calendar, Our Clock, and Some Other Details.”
