“Yeah,” Craig nodded, James’s smile infectiously spreading to him. “I’m up for it.”
POST-HUMAN
PART 1
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
1
WAKING UP was not something one had to work very hard to accomplish these days; like most things, it was done for you. The nanobots, also known as nans, were set to awaken their host at whatever time he or she desired. They would always, however, awaken their host just before the end of the most recent REM sleep so that the host would arise alert and feeling well rested. It was usually easy to remember one’s dreams, too, and recounting dreams to friends, loved ones, and co-workers had become a universal pre-noon activity; after noon was a different story, as by that point, it was considered a faux pas to continue discussing a dream—best just to let it go and focus on the real world. Sleep was hardly “death’s counterfeit” any longer, as Shakespeare had suggested, but rather, an important source of entertainment. Early-morning remembrances of fantastic dreams, in addition to one’s high level of alertness, made it difficult to wake up feeling anything other than optimistic—difficult, but not impossible.
James Keats opened his eyes and sat up in bed. He turned to his right, looked out his window, and saw that the sun had risen, yet the summer sky was blotted out by low-hanging gray clouds hovering like a dull blanket just above the skyline of the city. He turned to his left and saw his wife Katherine, still fast asleep. She wouldn’t awaken for another hour, just after he would’ve already left for work. She could’ve set herself to wake up with him. This was her plan—deafening silence. He wondered when his punishment would end, but part of him knew it never would. Their love was over.
James turned from her and sighed as he lifted the heated blanket from his legs and stepped out onto the heated carpet of his bedroom. Just a few short steps away were his bathroom and the promise of his morning shower. He opened his mind’s eye and selected a soft spray at a comfortable forty-five degrees Celsius. When he stepped into the shower, the spray hit him from four directions, and he relaxed against the kneading fingers of the water.
People in the industrialized world had been enjoying their morning showers for two centuries now, though there were more efficient ways of cleaning oneself; on Mars, James had used a microwave shower that detected foreign substances in a matter of a few seconds and removed them from the body. The process of removing dirt and oil was over just as quickly as it began, but James hated it. The technology had been available for years, but it had never caught on with the general population. A traditional shower was a luxury too valuable to give up. Even if it took a few extra minutes in the morning, the hot water and massaging jets were like an old friend to humanity.
People were funny that way—the way they would resist the future and cling to the past. It was like how the concept of a god had never left the species. Very few people alive believed in a god—there was no longer a need to—yet the phrases, “oh my God” or “dear God,” were still commonly used. It was as if people needed those phrases, those concepts from the past, to help them understand the future.
As James shampooed his hair, he reactivated his mind’s eye and checked his phone messages; there were none. He quickly checked his e-mail, but there was nothing interesting. His older brother had sent him some pornographic holoprograms to keep him company, but he didn’t open them—maybe later. At the moment, he wasn’t in the mood. He set the shower to end in five seconds and selected a towel-off of forty degrees Celsius, to begin the moment the shower stopped.
As warm air replaced the water, blowing through the vents and quickly drying him, his thoughts drifted back to Katherine. Why wouldn’t she listen? He’d done nothing wrong—at least, nothing physically wrong.
It’s what you wanted to do that hurts me, James, she said.
But I can’t control what I want to do—I can only control what I actually do, he told her.
And we both know why you didn’t ‘actually’ do anything, don’t we? Don’t we?
She had a point.
After he finished in the shower, James dressed quickly in his standard-issue black uniform. He pulled on the t-shirt and flight pants, then slipped into his flight jacket with the NASA emblem emblazoned on the right shoulder. He walked out of the bedroom, casting one last look at the back of his wife’s head, her blonde hair the only evidence of an actual person in the room with him.
He floated down to the first floor gently and hovered into the kitchen, making a soft landing on the linoleum floor. He opened his mind’s eye once again and activated his food replicator. From the breakfast menu, he selected a poached egg on a bagel, served hot, and a large orange juice, served cold. The food was ready in an instant, and he gulped down his orange juice, deciding to eat the bagel on the way.
He slipped on his flight boots and selected the door open icon in his mind’s eye. Then he stepped on his front lawn and gazed across the water at the downtown core of Vancouver. It was rush hour, and thousands of bodies buzzed above the city. On a good day, he would look at that sight and think of honeybees working on the comb. Today, however, the sight reminded him of flies buzzing around a pile of excrement or a rotting corpse. The sky was brown above the massive skyscrapers and all across the horizon, as though a painter had soiled his thumb and rubbed it across the expanse of what could have been a masterpiece.
James took two quick bites of his bagel and placed the rest in the pocket of his jacket. He pulled on his helmet and looked skyward as he lifted off from his lawn and slowly approached the low-hanging clouds. He liked to take a moment or two before activating his magnetic field. He enjoyed the way the wind felt as he picked up speed on his ascent. As he entered the clouds and began to feel the temperature dropping, he activated the protective field; it produced a greenish light that encapsulated his body. Once the magnetic field was in place, he was free to bolt upward, unhindered by friction, air pressure, temperature, or anything else. In seconds, he was above the stratosphere, using his mind’s eye to plot an automatic course for Venus.
The trip there usually took just under an hour—still one of the longest daily commutes of anyone in the solar system. People regularly commuted between hemispheres on Earth, and some even commuted between the Earth and the moon, but very few commuted interplanetarily. After plotting his course, he bolted forward once again, this time at an even faster rate than before.
As he passed by the moon and breathed the compressed air released by his flight suit, he surfed the Net, as was his customary commuting routine. First, he would check sports. The Vancouver Canucks had lost to an expansion team on Mars; the players blamed the difference in gravity and promised a better performance back on Earth. “Damn. Lost that bet,” James cursed to himself.
Next, he checked the mainstream news. NBC was interviewing James’s boss, Inua Colbe, executive assistant to the president of A.I. governance. The interviewer was sitting across from Colbe, dangling her pointed dress shoe from her foot and smiling as she asked him questions in front of a welcoming fireplace.
“There have been a lot of questions about the delay between upgrades, Dr. Colbe. Can you tell us why it has taken over five years for this latest upgrade to be approved?”