Transhuman Page 5

  When the dance was over, Tom and Angie returned to their seats. A woman whose badge Tom could not read waved to Angie, and Angie headed over to talk to her. Tom watched as Angie spoke first with one woman and then with two more. They all hugged and stood close and laughed. He envied her past, those women, even, a little, her knowledge of Bobby Stevens. All real, all more than he had, more than he would ever have.

  When she returned Angie pulled her chair close to his and whispered in his ear. "Can you believe those three? Back in Peterson, they wouldn't give me two seconds; now, they act like we were best friends." She shook her head. "Not that I act much better. I guess I would have liked them to be my friends back then." She pulled away and looked in his eyes. "Sounds stupid, doesn't it? Still wanting stuff like that after twenty years."

  "No," Tom said. "Not to me."

  "Well, who cares anyway? At least we remember each other, right?"

  Tom nodded. He did not know what else to do.

  "Excuse me for a minute, will you?" She stood, started to go, and then looked at him over her shoulder, smiling, the light illuminating half her face and leaving the other half in shadow. "When I get back, maybe we can dance some more." She headed toward the bathroom.

  The Party Boys stopped playing, and the lead singer announced they would be taking a short break. He said the bar would be closing in fifteen minutes, at midnight. Many of the dancers headed for the bar, and in less than a minute it was invisible behind a crowd.

  Tom wondered whether it was time to leave. He checked the table by the door; Bobby Stevens was nowhere in sight. If either Bobby or Angie was here to check on him, now was the time to head home, hide in his apartment, and hope they decided he didn't pose them a problem. He put his hand on Angie's chair, and he could almost see her there again, staring at the dance floor, her desire to belong as palpable as his own. Leaving her now felt no more right than walking by Lindy in the hallway.

  A tapping on his shoulder interrupted his reverie. He turned to face Lindy, a group of women arrayed behind her like geese in flight. "Tom," she said, "I wanted to thank you for jumping in with Bobby. I like to think he wouldn't have done anything bad, but I have to admit I was a little scared. I really appreciate it."

  "No problem," he said. "Anybody would have done it."

  "The thing is, though," she said, "when I was telling the girls about it, none of them could remember you either. Which homeroom teacher did you have?"

  Tom's chest tightened, and he realized he could not keep this up, could not keep on wondering what it meant every time anyone spoke to him. He glanced at the path to the bathroom; Angie was still not back. He did not want to abandon her, but he had to get away. Recalling her comment to Bobby, he said, "Mrs. Wee." He stood. "Listen, Lindy, I don't mean to be rude, but I have to get home."

  Lindy appeared a bit taken aback but remained polite. "Of course. Well, thank you again."

  As she walked away, Tom caught snatches of conversation from her group. "Didn't you have Mrs. Wee?" "Do you remember him?" He headed for the door, moving as quickly as he could while trying not to attract any attention. Walking across the dance floor he passed through a band of red from one of the Party Boys' lights, and the memory of Angie's hair came unbidden to him. He shook his head and moved on, kept walking until he was out of the hotel and in the parking lot. His hands were shaking, the sweat on his body drying fast in the cool night air. He sat on a curb and willed himself to calm down.

  After a moment he walked toward his car. He would have to give up reunions. He could not afford more encounters like this one.

  And then he thought again of Angie. He could not shake the image of her at the table, wanting to dance, or the feel of her in his arms as they shuffled around the dance floor, their slow swaying moves bringing them in and out of contact, one minute linked only by arm and hand, the next their bodies so close she was a soft, warm part of him he had only that moment realized existed.

  When he reached his car he remembered his jacket, still on the chair at the table, its pockets holding his keys, his wallet, everything. He could not afford to lose those things, could not leave without them. He started back.

  Angie was waiting next to the banquet hall door, his jacket in her hand.

  "Forget something?"

  "Yes." Embarrassed as he was, he forced himself to stare directly into her eyes. "I was coming back for it. I owe you an apology. I'm really sorry for leaving this way."

  She handed him the jacket. "Yeah, you could have at least said good-bye. After what I did for you, you could have at least done that."

  Tom put on his jacket and by habit checked its pockets. Everything was there.

  Angie stared at him, her face tightening, eyes flashing. "Oh, great, now you think I'm some kind of thief. That's really nice, thanks a lot." She kept staring at him.

  The skin in Tom's face felt tight over his skull as he fought for self-control. He had not meant to treat her poorly, she had been nice but he did not know why, and he did not know what to do, whether to run from her or grab her or push her away. It was all too much.

  "What do you want from me?" he shouted. He couldn't help himself. "You know you don't know me and I don't know you and what do you want? Why were you nice to me?"

  Angie backed away a step. Her mouth was open. "What do I want?" She shook her head and stared at the ground. "What do you think I want? Somebody to talk to, to sit with. That's all, nothing special." She took a deep breath. "I was being nice to you, saving you from Bobby Stevens. Okay, I don't remember you, but there are lots of people I don't remember and lots of people who don't remember me. That's how it is. I thought you could use a hand and you looked nice and so I helped you. Then we talked, and we danced, and . . ." She paused, her eyes misting ". . . and, well, I thought you were really nice. Boy, was I wrong." She turned and walked into the hotel.

  Tom stood alone, eyes wet, face hot, caught in a tangle of feelings he did not know how to handle. He thought about all the pictures on his apartment walls and wondered why they never showed scenes like this, people yelling at each other and then standing alone in the dark feeling torn, ripped up inside. He searched his memories—fake, maybe, but all he had—and retrieved plenty of painful moments, but somehow he had always believed a real past would be better, happier, easier to understand. In the distance a stoplight turned to red, and he thought again of the stage light playing through Angie's hair. She was real, and the way he had felt while dancing with her and talking with her was real, new, immediate, powerful.

  He walked back into the reunion. Angie was standing next to their table, talking to a woman and a man. He waited until they finished and approached her.

  She saw him when he was still a few feet away. "What do you want?"

  "To say I'm sorry. I didn't know who you were, and I didn't know what you wanted, and I was scared. I was a jerk, and I'm sorry."

  "So now you know who I am and what I want?"

  "No, not really, though I'd like to. I want to apologize." He held out his hand to her, and though she wouldn't take it he kept talking, no longer able to stop. "Could we start over? My name is Tom Walters. I didn't go to Peterson." He shook his head, breathed deeply, and plunged ahead. "I don't even think I'm a person. You'll probably think I'm crazy, but several months ago I realized that I'm a program someone downloaded into this body. I came here tonight because I'm too afraid of losing what life I have to ever do anything with other people except work—and go to reunions. I know that may sound sick, but some nights, sitting alone in my apartment, the thought of going to a party, even a party that's not mine to attend, is all that keeps me going. I do work at North Carolina Power as a programmer, and everything else I told you is true. Meeting you, talking with you, and dancing with you, they were the best, the best things that have happened to me." He dropped his hand and stepped back. "All I can do is say again how sorry I am."

  The band was jamming quietly in preparation for another slow song, the drummer marking a slow bea
t, the lead singer urging everyone to find a partner, the lights dimming, red and blue highlights playing over the rapidly filling dance floor. Angie's face was a mystery to him, her expression unfathomable, backlighting washing over her, and the ache in his heart was almost more than he could bear. In that moment nothing else mattered, not what he was, not what he wasn't, not whether his memories were fake, all those concerns gone in an instant in the face of his desire to make it right for her, to hold her, to make it right for both of them. "Angie, if I had gone to high school and known you then, I like to think I would have been smart enough to take you to every dance, hold you tight, and never let you go. I'm sorry I had to go to someone else's party to meet you and figure that out. I'm sorry for how I treated you."

  Angie slowly shook her head. "Do you think you're alone? Do you think you're the only one who believes he's a program? The news is so full of these download stories that at Social Services we're seeing at least a couple of cases every week, people every bit as convinced as you are but usually so disturbed by the thought that they're unable to keep working. The first symposium on it—they're calling it Download Anxiety Syndrome—is next month. Folks in the office expect we'll soon get special training for it." She stepped closer to him. "And so what? Do you think you're the only one who sits at home at night, alone and afraid?" She bent slightly, rubbed her face with her hands, then straightened and looked at him. "Maybe you are a program, though I doubt it. If you were, you'd still seem like a person to me, and it would still be true that when we were dancing I felt better, less alone, and more real than I've felt in a long time."

  As what Angie told him sank in, Tom smiled. I'm not alone!

  Others like him existed. Most of the ones she mentioned were probably only people, but at least some were bound to be like him—and Angie could help him find them. "Angie, I didn't know that other people felt this way. Maybe I could meet some of these people, the ones who feel like me."

  She tilted her head slightly and stared at him. "I hope you're not suggesting that I give you names." She shook her head. "I couldn't do that. Our cases are confidential. I would never do that."

  As Tom stared at her he realized with a flash of certainty he could not rationalize that if he worked her and stayed with her and gave it time that, yes, she would do it for him. He could make it happen, convince her to do it. He could get her to put him in contact with others like him.

  All it would cost him was her.

  The lights dimmed, the blues fading and only the reds flowing over the room, and the singer started, slow and gentle. Angie still looked beautiful, but now for the first time she also appeared fragile, no safer than Lindy under Bobby's arm, than Tom himself under the watch of his creators, than, he supposed, anyone.

  The price was too high. He would find another way to meet those people, or maybe he wouldn't, but if he was going to make a life for himself, a real life, he wasn't going to start it by using someone as badly as those who created him had used him.

  "Angie," he said, "I'm sorry. I wouldn't ask you to do anything wrong." He stepped closer and took her hands in his. "None of that really matters, though. What matters is you, the two of us, right now. Will you please dance with me?"

  She nodded yes and stepped into his arms.

  They merged with the crowd on the dance floor, arms around each other, and Tom lost himself entirely in the gentle light and the music and the moment, his arms encircling her, hers around him, so tightly holding one another that for a few perfect moments they moved as one person.

  * * *

  Afterword by Mark L. Van Name

  I wrote the first draft of this story many years ago, not long after having a remarkable experience: going with a friend to a high-school reunion that wasn't my own and in which I had no emotional stake. She wanted an escort, and I thought the trip would be weird enough to be worth making. It was. The freedom of not caring what anyone thought was wonderful, but the sense of alienation was equally strong, because I was an outsider intruding in a moment of great import and, in many cases, intimacy for people I'd never known and would never see again. I wrote that initial draft and the first cut of another story ("The Ten Thousand Things," which appeared in issue six of Jim Baen's Universe, an online magazine I strongly recommend you check out and subscribe to) in what for me at the time was rapid succession. For various reasons, I ultimately put both stories aside. Years later, I realized that both pieces were examining the effects on real people of the rapid rate of technology change that is constantly reshaping our lives, and from that realization this anthology was born.

  Alienation is one of the themes in many of my works, but in this story I give it perhaps the most direct examination I've ever made of the subject.

  THE GUARDIAN

  Paul Chafe

  Some popular magazines in the sixties predicted that the age of leisure was almost upon us, that the biggest challenge many of us would face in the future was what to do with all our free time. They got that one wrong: most of us take it for granted that we have to work to support ourselves and that we will have to continue to do so well into old age. If machine intelligences arise, will they also have jobs? The following tale examines a very special being performing a very important one.

  SYSTEM INITIALIZE

  START RUN

  Am I Mark Astale? That's a question I don't have time for. Mitch Cohan was a runner, wanted for murder on a case long cold. A camera told me he was getting on a train at the Western L station, so I checked out the image. In Chicago the average surveillance camera captures ten thousand faces a day, that's over a billion freeze-frames citywide. From those the recognition systems flag a hundred thousand suspect citizens, ten each second at peak times. The problem is, ninety nine point nine nine percent of the electronically accused are guilty of nothing more than sharing a facial profile with a fugitive. My job is to search that digital hurricane for the handful that might be real; no mere human could ever do it fast enough. Sometimes it's easy to make the determination. The cameras aren't that smart. They search out faces, apply a few rules of thumb to the always-imperfect images, and sometimes their opinion is almost comically wrong. Sometimes it's more difficult, but making those calls is my job. I work hard to do it right. Letting criminals walk is bad, arresting the innocent is worse. With maybe-Mitch Cohen it was a coin flip.

  The L station camera showed me his face in the crowd, framed in a square target indicator. He was a tall, lean man with dark hair cropped short, wearing a gray trench coat streaked with the morning's rain. He carried a briefcase, and blended nondescriptly with the morning commuter crowd, just one of a million identical others, fighting to get downtown to spend the day fighting to get promoted at work. The frame sequence caught him as he came onto the platform, followed him through the throng to trackside, watched him get onto the train, and ended when the doors slid shut. Cohan's image in the Chicago Police Department's files looked close enough, but everyone has their double, you learn that fast in my line of work. Judgment is what I bring to the table, a knowledge of human nature beyond that of any mere machine. Why would Mitch Cohan be heading for the Loop at rush hour? The man's face was flat, caught between boredom and the tension of forced social contact with a herd of strangers. The cameras already had another hit for me, flashing at the edge of my awareness. Time spent on one image is time I don't spend on another, and there are too many cameras and only one of me. Time is the only currency I have, and time wasted musing on its own scarcity means felons who go free. Introspection is a luxury I can't afford, not during the morning rush.

  And this hit was just another commuter with an unlucky face. I dismissed the camera and queued the next image, and then something struck me. Fortunately I got an easy discard, an external camera at O'Hare airport, too blurred with raindrops to even consider flagging as a positive ID. I went back to the station camera freeze-frames and ran the sequence again. Just as the man stepped onto the train he turned his head, looking back toward the entrance of the statio
n. Why was that? I considered that last frame, zoomed on his face, tried to read his eyes. There was nothing definite there. I called up the other cameras in the station, trying to see what it was that he was looking at. There was no audio, but it hadn't been a sudden sound that caught his attention because no one else had looked at the same time he had. The guilty flee when none pursue. He was looking, reflexively, instinctively, to see who might be following him. My career is built around such subtle nuances of human behavior. The cameras pick up crimes as well as faces, seeking out the characteristic motions of muggings, rapes, and bank robberies, but those frames go to other, lesser watchers. I only hunt for fugitives, the most elusive prey on the planet. Three more camera hits queued for my attention while I dawdled to contemplate a stranger's face. I dismissed the frames and took an instant to flag hits from the downtown Loop stations for high priority. He would get off the train somewhere and another camera would see him, and then I would consider again if he might be who I was looking for.

  The stream of faces flashed themselves past my awareness, each one highlighted in its own targeting square, each one carefully tagged with the identity of the fugitive felon that the cameras thought was there. My rush times are the city's rush times, and the cameras take me from the suburbs to the downtown in the morning, to the bistros at lunch, to the dance clubs at night, and to darker places, too. They take me through streets and malls, through parks and dirty alleys, to all the places that Detective Mark Astale used to go. They take me into the cubicle blandness of office towers, the glittering lobbies of expensive hotels, and the drab corridors of run-down apartment blocks. They never take me into citizen's homes, not yet. The cameras have yet to make that Orwellian jump, though there are those in the government who argue that they should. After all, the criminals know we're watching for them. All the cameras have done, say those who advocate breaching the last barrier of personal privacy, is drive crime indoors.