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Transforming Humanity

A Fount of Ordinaries

Picture of John O'Connor

John O'Connor

American
Writing from USA

Don’t ever use the vest except for what we say. The static generator had come off a carked sim years before – as in carcassed – and passed to me by the gang. They say that one of the sims had made it to elude detection. For a nameless sim with an autocomplete bot driving its thinking this was a Leonardo level invention. Back before sims were banned the gang had made sport of hunting them down. It was not murder but vandalism: the destruction of corporate property. But it felt like murder.

The handmade vest could generate a field of static to disrupt electricity – thus video, thus sensors, all the things one might want to disrupt if one smuggled stolen goods through the city. This was my role. I did it well. I was someone that no one would notice. But when they turned off the phone network I screwed up.

To be fair it should not have been a surprise, but what could I do? I wasn’t going to get the Chip.

Here is how I screwed up. It was at a food market, a typical bass and strobe place. They say strobe exposure helps reduce depression and confusion – the logic is lost on me. I was not a fan of these places. I bought my usual fare: yucca sushi, Protean brand grasshopper chips, CBD- infused starfruit.

When I got to the checkout there were no swiping stations, just a woman with an augmented viewing headset waving people through the exit. Everybody except me. She put her hand up and said: “Doge, you don’t seem to have an account.”
“Where do I pay?” I asked.
She pointed to her head. I held up my phone. She laughed. “No no, we don’t take that anymore. That’s ancient.”
It had been my mother’s.
“How am I supposed to pay?”
She shrugged. “Doge sorry but they took out the scanners. Haven’t you read the signs?” A banner on the wall over her head made clear: phone payment is being turned off.

“But what am I supposed to do?”

She pointed to her head. Even in the strobing environment with the loud music my dejection must have been visible. She waved me through.

“Doge just this once,” she said. “Go get the chip. It’s free. It’s the krem.”

I thanked her and left. There are decent people everywhere.

Just outside the door I reached into my jacket pocket and turned the activator dial for the
vest. Inside the store the lights dimmed and the strobe effect stopped. The music descended into white noise. I stood there for a minute or two, then I turned the dial again to bring it back to normal and walked away.

It was a strike back.

Out on the street airbikes scooted overhead. On another layer above drones carried packages and cargo in an orderly swarm. Right away I realized I had screwed up.
A young man – just beyond a teen – in blue medicos stopped and said something to me. I did not even hear the words. I thought he had seen me use the vest. This might be enough to get me carked too. I slipped into the swirl of vendors and shoppers and soon found my way to an empty street. Then I went home and hid.

A day later – after I had carried some small package from an old warehouse to a boat bound for overseas, vest on, disrupting cameras and scanners the whole way – I sat in my favorite place: a park overlooking the river. It was across from an old industrial zone owned by one of the big bio firms. Now it was a called the Colony. They had retained the old industrial facades, and built bio-luminescent hardscape walls twenty-five feet high. At night they glowed in soothing colors. In the daytime, I just liked the view. After a job it helped bring me down, but on this day I could only worry.

I was determined not to get the Chip, but how would I avoid it? There was no requirement that you get it, of course, because we are free people and we can choose our life path. But… the Chip certainly had something to offer: linkage to the global comms net, a life of intermittent dopamine infusions via constant audiovisual stimuli, free housing, subsidized food, constant health monitoring and treatment.

I always said no. It might be fine for those who don’t mind the interposition of the Tran5ept Corporation between their eyes and their brain. I was not one of those people. I had read too much.

I looked up from my worries to see the man in the medicos coming up the path in my direction. I did not wait around. I nonchalantly stood up – as if I had not seen him at all – and walked to the nearby gate, then dodged around a corner and through an alley. After several turns I slowed my pace. He had not followed me.

But I had really screwed up.

For days I lingered in my apartment on the top floor of a crumbling house in an old hilly neighborhood on the east side of T____. I worried incessantly. I thought I would have to confess to the boss that I had blasted the market in a fit. They might take the vest and discard me. The vest had begun to feel cursed. Finally, I ran low on coffee – of all things – and headed out to a little market where they would still take a coin push via wi-fi. It was an antique transaction, but the money was still green.
I locked the door behind me. An exterior staircase led down into the backyard where wrecked furniture had piled for years. I did not notice the man in the medicos at first. I was at the bottom of the stairs when I heard his voice.

“We meet again! Please don’t run again,” He said. “I need to talk to you.” He stood beside an old picnic table.
“I don’t know who you are. You better get out of here.”
He said my name. Even under my visor and coat he could see me shudder. “Why did you do it? How could you?”
“You better walk away,” I said as firmly as I could. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”
He looked around the yard. The piled up junk. The rotting staircase on which I stood. I pulled an old .38 revolver from my jacket. It was an old pre-network antique – non-traceable in realtime and highly illegal.
“You better run away,” I told him.
“Don’t do anything,” he said. “You know me. Do you remember sending your DNA in to be tested twenty years ago?”
I did. It was a failure. I got back a form letter breaking down my origin by location in Europe. It meant nothing. I had hoped to find some connection to the past. It was stupid.
He produced and unfolded a white sheet of paper. “Do you recall this?”

I slowly descended the steps, eyes on him, until I got close enough to see it. It was the letter. Then he produced a copy of my application. “You signed this document giving Tran5ept Corp the right to do whatever it chose with your sample. It’s right here. Here is your signature. Do you remember signing it?”

“So what? Where did you get that?”
“Tran5ept gave it to me. It’s their proof.”

He carried himself more smoothly than the herky-jerky sims that the gang had hunted. I
stared at him.

“Who cares? It was a release. You don’t sign, they don’t deliver. It was stupid anyway.” “Do you not know what they did?”
I shrugged stupidly. I did not know.
“They brought me back in a lab! I’m your father. Can’t you tell? I know I look like a
teenager but I remember everything. I remember you as a baby.” I had had dreams like this.
“Tell me something a sim could not,” I said.
He told me about the last thing I ever said to him as he lay dying. My mom had gone for coffee and we were alone in the hospice room.
“You kissed my forehead,” he said. “You said ‘Don’t go old man.’ But it wasn’t up to me. I would have stayed if I could.”

I hugged him. I was twenty years older than he had ever been, but he felt like I remembered. It was like nothing else. It felt to me that time and space had lost their hold. I was existing at an intersection where my father was both dead – true, inarguably – and alive. Also true, apparently. I had to accept it.

“We thought they paid you,” he said. Looking around the junk-piled yard and the rotting house, he shrugged. “We thought you sold us on purpose. Forgive me.”
“How did they give you these words? I don’t understand. How did they populate your memory?”

My father – simulacrum or not – touched my arm gently, just for a moment. “The human imagination at its greatest leap can barely encompass a smidge of the possible.”
He slapped the back of his hand.

“This is not fake. This is as real a body as I ever had. And this…” He pointed to his head and his heart. “The bio bosses got surprised. They found that when you clone, you bring back the mind.”
“Cloning is consciousness,” he said. “Cloning is resurrection. Do you understand? What I saw and felt and did before… I remember it all. We all do.”
“But how do they find the old memories? How do they transfer them?”
“There is no need,” he said. “In quantum physics two objects separated in space can react as if they are one. This is the same. Quantum consciousness is connected to your DNA. If you reproduce that DNA sequence in a different time or place, that reproduced DNA sequence will share consciousness with the original. It will retain memories. When you recreate life using the DNA, the life form resumes where it left off. It has consciousness of what came before and what is happening now.”

It could hardly register in my mind.
Cloning is consciousness. Cloning is resurrection.

“They’re bringing them back,” he said. “First it was me and your mother, and now it is your whole line of inheritance – twenty-five thousand generations – back to the beginning of

Homo Sapiens if they can. Me and your mom, and our parents, and their parents, and their parents. All the DNA of your family is encased in the cryptic subnucleus of the cell. They’re all inside you.”

My head swirled.

“I told them I would bring you back if I could find you. Please come! Do you want to
meet them?”
I had never wanted to meet anyone. But now this was different.
“Where is Mom?” I asked.
“She is not speaking to me,” he said. “She hates the company, she won’t take the Chip.” We crossed the river toward the old industrial zone. I looked back at the old town and
saw the buzz of colors constantly shifting along the spectrum and blinking rapidly. We went to the Colony.

“They have had scientists and anthropologists living with us and studying us for years. Finally we told them we would not cooperate in their studies any more until they let us meet you. We went on strike. That was your mother’s idea.”
“I had no idea,” I said. “Why bring them back?”
“There is money to be made in science,” he said. “And they do own us. For each of us there is a clear paper trail from DNA submission through emergence from the grow lab. Heck we’re not even chipped yet.”
“Don’t do it!” I said.
“I will, I’m sure, so cancer does not take me again.” “But you can come back.”
“Nothing is free,” he said.

The main gate opened as we approached. Inside they waited: hundreds of faces. I walked among them an old man among resurrected youths. Some stared, some applauded, others ignored me altogether. Whispers came to my ears as I turned in circles.

My father raised his hands out to them and they came forward with a mixture of applause and frowns. All around me people spoke urgently – many seemed angry or confused – but I could not understand their words. I tried to hug them and listen to them as best I could. What did I have to offer these people whose time to rest had surely come? Soon they had dispersed. I was not that interesting to my ancestors. It tracked.

We came to a complex of structures lit up in green bio-luminescent sheen. A few of the ancestors followed us curiously. My father led me on a long walkway bordered on both sides by growing crops. The place smelled of dirt and manure.
I could hear sheep in the distance.

My mother waited for us at the end of the walk. She was so young. I was far older, but it did not matter. I had her back. We embraced and I could not help but let my emotions go. She held me, and I knew that the line of life and death had been forever erased.

She pointed to a tall windowless structure behind her. “This is where they are growing our ancestors – right in here. Every few months the doors open and another epoch reveals itself. People emerge who died centuries ago, who believe they are in heaven or hell. They cannot communicate with anyone other than the academic linguists who have set up shop here. It’s obscene. The human order was not made for this.”

“But maybe it was,” said my father. “Maybe this is exactly what it was made for.” “I don’t do cosmic causality,” she said tersely.

I did not go back to the city.

Sometimes when I wake it is as if I am in another place entirely, in a different room, a different life. I imagine it with since resonance that it feels real – maybe moreso than what is right in front of me. I feel multiple parallel lives all happening at the same time. I cannot see them or talk to them, but I feel that they are real. This is at least one variety of consciousness. They say that if one were cloned in multiples each could see and hear what the others see and hear. But I don’t think it is all that neat. My DNA belongs to the Tran5ept Corporation, so in effect so do I. Perhaps the clones resting within the grow lab do not have sensory input. Maybe they are just clusters of cells – my cells – who do not yet understand that I am out here. I stand by the grow lab wall. I feel them.