Part # out of #.
Ok, so I reformatted the story. Now it starts out with Jessica. Nothing is changed in the actual writing, I just moved her chunk of story. She makes the presentation the day before the rest of the story. I made a line so you can see where the story picks up from last time. Is this format better or worse?
I enter the meeting room and place my notebook in front of my seat. I walk over to the projection screen and say, “Alright, ladies, gentlemen, let's begin,” my voice is without accent, it has a studied meter that my speaking coach says makes me seem more professional. I take slight pauses, I was told that this gives a sense of importance to each word. The trick is also to make what you're saying actually important and interesting in content and not just to blather on taking imperious pauses. “The first order of business on your agendas should be the matter of the tidal power plants of Northern New York. Parts of Queens and the Bronx have been experiencing brownouts in recent months. This is by no means a shocking or unforeseeable development, the changing and still somewhat unpredictable currents of the Atlantic have left us without much tidal movement before. What was not delivered by our tidal plants was supplemented by our solar generators, especially during these warmer months and energy imports from upstate, of course. If you would all look to the screen, the “soup” as our air is now colloquially referred to is inarguably getting thicker, blocking almost 53% of the sunlight that hits sensors a few hundred meters above sea level, compared with 42% this time last year, and this activity is somehow damaging our panels. We've detected some malicious nanotech activity at these panels, but nothing is yet provable as to connecting it to one of the other houses. There is also a possibility that this is not a corporate effort, and, well, there might not be an actual, concerted effort to damage these panels. Our engineers are still working on it.” Behind me a rectangle of data, a meter high, two wide, switches to a chart with a number of jagged lines, all climbing upwards menacingly.
“Rising also, if you would please note, is the cost of energy importation from the Upstate nuclear plants. Note here, the sale of these plants American government ownership to the Lanzhou Energy Interest. No significant price increases until this point, here, January of this year. An average of four percent monthly increase in cost ever since then. Our lack of home-grown megawatts, combined with this increase in cost will mean we will soon reach our subsidized housing energy budget limit. We will not be able to supply the several thousand residents of the outer boroughs with 24 hour air filtration within the month.” The entire room, a room filled with my colleagues stares at me, mouths agape, as if I've committed some indescribable blasphemy, as if I've defecated right there on the conference table. I have brought up the fact that people will die if we do not do something, something entirely within our power, quickly.
“Ms. Li, thank you so much for your presentation. The board has already considered this fact and we have decided to allow rolling brownouts between the hours of 000 and 300 every other evening until the tides return to their natural ebb and flow, which our meteorologists are predicting will happen, by the latest, September or October.”
“You can't just cut off the power. I've seen as many as ten or more people living in these airtight closets we call studios. Suffocation is a real possibility in these situations. We have to at least inform-”
“Ms. Li, our decision has already been made. The tenants are warned not to over-occupy their quarters and any illegal occupancy is not a legal concern of Citi-Kraft-Morris. Again, thank you, Jessica.” My boss points to my seat with his arm. I can either sit down now and take some kind of slap on the wrist for this presentation or I can go down fighting, guns blazing, indicting the company and everyone in this room with charges of premeditated murder and loss of humanity. In my mind, I do this. I invoke the image of infants and mothers, locked in an embrace as they quietly choke on their own CO2. I call my bosses inhuman. I rage against the machine. I tear down the building with my words. I'm on every news feed regaling reporters with the tale of how I saved the poor and turned around an evil conglomerate. I silently walk back to my chair, smoothing my unwrinkled black skirt. I sit down and open my planner, becoming wholly engrossed in tonight's planned activities.
Good morning, Ben.
I'm still dreaming. You know how I know? It's because my life isn't shit in here. I don't have to get out of bed, my girlfriend isn't a zombie that has neither slept nor been awake in the past three days. I don't have to go to work. That's all in this cozy little dream world though.
At the sound of the tone, it will be 600 hours. What follows this message is a tone so piercing, so jarring, that any thought, a more accurate term might be delusion, of being able to sleep another moment is vaporized.
Yes, I'm up. Enough. Please.
Mercurial Deliveries, a Citi-Kraft-Morris subsidiary, thanks you for your promptness in-
Suzy. Off.
I am really regretting allowing them to install those electrodes in my inner ear, but what are you gonna do? Every single fuckin' job out there requires invasive surgery this, mind-altering NCSs that, and that's just what they put in the contract. My friend, tiny Mike(congenital growth disorder), was working for that new synthetic meat chain and I swear they completely rewired the kid. Last time I was over his house, his entire fridge, freezer and all, was packed, absolutely stuffed with synthmeat. I mean he can't even process the stuff, his stomach acid is around pH 4. Canned synthmeat, with that unsettling trio, the cartoonish pig, cow and chicken giving the thumbs up on the label, lines his shelves, his counter, it was everywhere. He must be spending his entire paycheck on what was basically inedible for him. When we asked what he was eating, and if he was maybe excreting whole, unprocessed chunks of synthmeat, he just smiled at us. He claimed he was feeling better than ever. He had clearly lost weight, though. And he looked really pale, actually. I should see what Mikey's up to.
I climb over Angela, the lump that used to be my girlfriend, and head over to the bathroom to wash my face. I wash up and check myself and my mail in the mirror, I don't have an ounce of body fat and neither does Angela, but for very different reasons. I'm a bike messenger. I spend about 9 hours a day peddling in a prolonged artificial adrenaline surge that propels me to speeds and distances that would be unthinkable for bike messengers twenty-five years ago. Angela? I haven't seen her eat in a while. She's constantly on. I can't tell when she's asleep or awake, her eyes are always closed. The creepy part is that her eyelids are always fluttering as if she's dreaming. I message her, you hungry? The reply takes a few seconds, no thanks, babe. I spray on my second skin and check the fridge for anything edible.
I start frying some bacon and eggs, synthetic of course, buttered toast, all in herculean proportions. I'm going to need all the fuel I can get. My bag is packed with protein bars, water, extra breathing masks, my Farsa goggles, everything is there. I was hoping the smell of fried food might get Angela to stir, but if it hasn't worked for the past two days, I don't see why it would now. I sit watching the news projected on my far wall and shovel in as much food as size of stomach permits. The only thing news feeds agree on anymore is traffic. Changing channels gives you a completely different view of the world. There is no group too small or too psychotically fringe to not be pandered to. I try to stay away from anything international. If you think it's bad here, just wait until you hear what havoc recent technological innovations have wreaked in Indonesia. Western Europe isn't handling it too poorly, though. Some say better than here, their currency is definitely more stable. But it's not like there's any chance of me getting a Visa in this lifetime. I'm stuck here. I look around my studio apartment, peeling paint, the vent on the western wall pumping out clean O2,what looks like water damage in the corner above the door with accompanying mold, and who could forget my comatose girlfriend. Jesus. What a fucking hole.
I walk over to the bed, “Angela.” No response. “Angela!” I grab her shoulder.
“What? What in the hell do you want? I'm busy.” I look into her eyes, they're very pretty, too bad they're never open.
“I'm leaving.” I sigh out.
“You made me get off for that?”
I look into her eyes a little longer and I bring my face closer. I can see something in her eyes backing away from me, sometimes I think she's disgusted by the physical nature of kissing, fondling, etc. Fuck it, at least she still pays her half of the rent, though I'm not entirely sure how. Or if I want to know how. I kick my door open as my endocrine system is artificially cajoled into first gear from corporate headquarters. My landlord, a short man in his sixties maybe with what might be either Hispanic or eastern European background, comes out and starts yelling.
“You are always making so much god damn noise! Why do you always break everything? Terrible tenants!”
“Hey, I think the mold in the corner grew an eye last night! Maybe you wanna take a look at that? Oh wait, I forgot, you're a fucking slumlord! Shut the fuck up!” I am now slamming my feet down on each step as I walk down the stairs, towards him and the exit. I notice my heart beat, it's getting faster, more forceful, if I don't find a new job soon, this shit will probably give me a heart attack by age 30.
“You don't like it? Leave! I don't need shitty people like you shitting up my house!”
Shitting up his little shit pile. Christ. I have to keep myself from hitting the little fuck as I head outside, I grab my bike and, yes, I slam the door on my way out. He comes out onto the sidewalk in his ratty robe and boxers, screaming something, but I've already started peddling, and I've already synced up some angry hardcore to my heartbeat and my body has shifted into travel mode and I've already left my block.
I'm tearing down Flatbush Ave. I'm not traveling full speed, the electrical assistance on my bike isn't even on. My bike is a Gencycle, the last gift I received from my parents and probably the most useful thing I've ever gotten from them. It cost near a thousand euros and it's worth every god damn eurocent. It has millions of nano-scale generators that acquire electrical energy from the kinetic force of the bike's movement at a startling 90% efficiency. This energy can be used to assist in peddling for speeds that rival high power motorcycles or to just cruise around at a comfortable clip. I hardly ever use the latter function. I swerve around a car that's only half pulled over and making a terrible squealing sound that ends when the driver cuts the engine. A dark cloud of smoke erupts from the engine in a single, giant exhalation. Passing through this cloud is almost refreshing, sure, it's oppressively hot, but at least it displaced the dense soup that is the air outside of Manhattan.
I have to wear a second layer of artificial skin, a high-performance air filter that fits over my mouth and nose (I go through about three of these a day), sound-transferring earplugs, and my Farsa goggles, all of which makes a seal with my artificial skin at the molecular level. Why the Byzantine defenses you ask? It is all due to the fact that the air around the island of Manhattan has a concentration of floating nanobots of approximately 10,000/m3. On the island, this number is significantly smaller and more controlled, but I still never take off my mask. Some of these bots are built for surveillance, they latch onto any animate object to attempt to monitor the purchasing habits of their host, others are advertising, the kind that literally gets stuck in your head, the government releases hunter drones that analyze the sea of nanotech and attempt to destroy any with illegal functions, but when released, they are almost instantly obsolete and the politicians continue growing these bots just to be able to say they're doing something, and the worst have nano-scale chemical synthesizers(NCSs) on board that can do anything from making you gain weight, to creating an artificial desire for a product or service, to releasing potent and often extremely addictive drugs directly into your bloodstream. Those who don't wear defenses and spend extended periods of time outdoors, quickly lose any sort of personality or humanity they may have once had. The homeless population doesn't come close to having normal human behavior anymore. All they are capable of is holding out handmade advertisements, abusing chemicals and sometimes having complete psychotic breaks where they attempt to draw gigantic murals on walls featuring laundry detergents and fortified wines with their own bodily fluids(they usually die before they complete their master work, but there was one near the South St. Seaport that was completed and was really quite beautiful); or attempt to eat and fuck, simultaneously, everything in sight, animate and inanimate; or just good old fashioned self-abuse from all the conflicting messages whirling around in their heads(Buy X, Don't Buy X, Buy Y, Buy Z if and only if you want to live, etc.). These people don't even have money, for Christ's sake.
I hit an incline that signifies the beginning of the Manhattan Bridge and I lean forward to counter the change. The bike path is littered with people who have been evicted from the island for lack of funds, lack of housing, or lack of connections. They're usually off to a side, leaning against the railing, but occasionally I have to pull myself and my lightweight bike a few feet off the ground to clear a (dead?) body laid out across the entire bike path. On those occasions, I pray that they're not laying in wait to rob, eat, or rape passersby. I once was about to clear a well-dressed man laying across both bike lanes when all of a sudden he awoke with a start, as if from a bad dream, my back tire clipped his forehead and sent him careening back to dreamland. There's only a few on the path today so it's an easy ride. I approach the checkpoint where a few bikers wait in line to be scanned, pay and enter the island. I only have three major mods, the standard high-speed telepathy with accompanying retinal projection display and audio simulation(everyone and their grandmother has this one), the metabolic regulation mod that came free of charge under my work contract with Mercurial, and a black market mod, a cephalic splitter.
The splitter is a system of signal regulators that can sort of move the majority of your consciousness into a certain area of your mind while dampening the output of other areas. Both areas continue to function at near-full capacity, it's just so that your greater consciousness is not aware of one of the two activities. E.g. a man can sit at an assembly line and put heads on dolls all day with near the same accuracy and speed that he would if he were aware of the action, but he can also respond to emails, watch movies, or study quantum physics with his spare brain time. There are side-effects, cephalic splitting into three areas is about all the human mind can take. With three-way splitters, the rates of neurological disorders, disassociation from physical reality, paranoia, hallucinations, arrhythmia, loss of coordination, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and of course, Split Personality Disorder often develop. The same applies to two-way splitters, though all these side-effects are much rarer for us. Also, you can't really divide up consciousness between two activities that are in the same general area. If one were to put heads on dolls and control a construction crane remotely, there would be a lot of cross chatter and the results would be undesirable, if not disastrous. I don't dare fire up my splitter until I cross the checkpoint and get the scans out of the way. Inactive, they just seem like an odd configuration of my two legal mod clusters and are ignored. I walk my bike into the booth that seals around me, all air is evacuated and pure O2 is pumped in. It's enough to give you a head rush. My bike and I are scanned completely and my scent is scanned for any potential dangerous chemical traces. The screen flashes the fact that my $350 US toll has been paid by Mercurial Deliveries, Inc. and the exit slides open with a rush of air escaping from the pressurized booth.
“Thank you for doing business with the Island of Manhattan Security Corp. a subsidiary of the American Defense Group. We hope you enjoy your stay.”
I hop on my bike and roll down the walkway flanked by armed guards with that glazed-over look in their eyes which suggests they may not be paying strict attention to their current task. The rates of pornography addiction in the country have sky-rocketed to the point where it's basically an epidemic now. These men are doubtlessly watching orgiastic configurations of human beings and repeatedly stimulating the reward centers in their limbic systems. These pathways wear out quickly and it eventually takes more and more stimulation to get the same feeling, which is an all too familiar behavior for anyone who has been or has known an addict of any sort. I roll onto Bowery and query Suzy.
Hey, Suzy, do I have any jobs?
Always. Please hold one second. She has to coordinate about a hundred different messengers all over the city and the finding the most efficient use of us is not always easy math, even for a Class-IV AI, well I assume she's class four, they are mostly used for coordinating travel routes, truckers, taxis- Ben?
I'm here.
I'm uploading the addresses to your wetware.
Please, call it a brain, or a telepathy cluster, you know I don't like that term.
My apologies, prepare for upload. Do you want turn by turn and traffic guidance?
Always.
I check the addresses. I'm heading uptown as usual. Halfway down the list is an address that sticks out like a sore thumb. Long Island City. Queens. Crap. I usually don't have to leave the city. I'm gonna have to turn off my splitter for that. And it's a drop-off at 1400 hours. I'm going to miss part of my bio-netics group. Oh, this is truly some bullshit. Suzy?
Receiving, Ben.
What is this? 78 Northern Boulevard? That's Queens, I don't know if-
This type of assignment will of course entail a bonus, I'm authorized to offer an extra $10,000 US plus billable hours. You are, as always, free to decline any work.
Damn, that's a nice little bonus, and when you start declining, they tend to assign you less and less work in more and more unpleasant areas. I guess I don't really have a choice this time. Ok, Suzy. Sounds... acceptable.
Excellent, the bonus will be wired to you upon delivery.
Gotcha.
It's 752, my first class starts in in sixty-eight minutes. My first class on Tuesdays is physical psychology, basically phrenology, but with full resolution 3-D brain scans. Turn left here. I turn onto Houston. Bike messengers seem like an anachronism to people nowadays. Why don't you just send it electronically? Encrypt it and send it over secure channels? I'm pretty sure there is no such thing as a secure line anymore. The only way to keep something secret is to hide it in the open, make it look like something else, lodge it somewhere in a few terabytes of code, everyone is scanning everything. The government, competing houses, freelancers looking to steal and sell secrets(these guys are often the worst, tweaked out 3rd worlders that will do just about anything for a few US bucks). You can't hack a human being. Well you can, but we are kept on a tight leash when it comes to foreign NCSs. Our movements are constantly monitored and the data we carry can be destroyed remotely at the drop of a hat. The people in charge of these firms also tend to prefer hard copies, and when you have more money than God, hiring a kid on a bike isn't exactly a huge sacrifice.
I decide to activate my cephalic splitter. Starting a splitter is a hard experience to describe. You can feel a chasm growing somewhere in your head. Your consciousness is straddling the gap, one foot firmly planted on each side, and you have to choose which side you want to jump to, I've never not jumped so don't ask me what the consequences of that are. As soon as you do jump, the feeling of a chasm instantly dissolves and you can only focus on what is directly in front of you. I'm still standing on my pedals, I know what pedals are, I can feel every muscle and nerve in my legs, pumping away, but now I'm capable of significantly less abstract thought. In fact the extent of my abstract thought capabilities right now is realizing that I can't think abstractly which can get very confusing if you focus too much on it.
I attempt to spell my name backwards and I get thrown to my frontal lobe. I entrust my physical coordination and reflexes with the task of keeping me alive and picking up packages. I've already checked my email by the time I'm conscious of what I'm doing. I open up and review my notes for my bio-netics meeting, physical psychology is kind of a joke. There's a macro and a micro unit, viewing how the mind works as a whole and then getting as specific as high-traffic neural junctions. Despite it seeming to be of a very technical nature, it would be more appropriate to call this class philosophy of thought. The professor is a burn-out that has clearly consumed more than his share of substances in his lifetime. Don't get me wrong, he's interesting, scratch that, insightful, when he's lucid, but this is not the most common event. I load my group's bionetics final project, a theoretical mod that would practically doubles the human mind's ability to absorb information by simultaneously stimulating emotional centers while providing information. This is all purely theoretical and becoming suddenly and inexplicably emotional would probably cause a bit of distraction to the user's studying.
_____________________________________________________________________
I log into the OIVU system. I secure my connection with a password of randomly generated hexadecimal characters in a string that is approximately 102048 long. You either protect yourself or get spam injected directly into your sub-conscious. I choose the prior. Welcome to the Open International Virtual University. Brought to you by the Wiki Collective. I check my schedule and get linked straight to my Physical Psychology classroom, which is decidedly no frills. I'm facing the familiar wall that stretches forever covered in every single note the professor has ever put up available for public perusal at all times. He put up a short story once about an industrial vat of formaldehyde filled with thousands of brains. The brains retained consciousness somehow and also developed hyper-sensitive tactile sense. They would swim around feeling all the other brains, getting a sense of what the person was like by studying the structure of the other suspended minds. It ended in a kind of awkward, well I guess I would call it an erotic scene, between two former lovers who reacquainted each other with their pleasure centers. It was actually a pretty handy study tool for the reward center test as they were activating very specific and technically correct areas in each other's disembodied brains. It also gave me the idea for my bionetics final project. I scroll to the short story, which has received over two-thousand comments, mostly positive. I start reading the comments, but the class is called into session. I can pause Professor Serilla's feed, but I prefer a live performance.
Serilla appears in a burst of psychedelic smoke, teachers have the right to use as many effects and models as they desire, while we students get wire models, with our names in the ugliest, blockiest font you can imagine, suspended over our heads. There are about seven thousand eager young minds logged into the class, actually some are off doing something else, while others are quite old, and some are probably bots running ads in discussion groups, but seven thousand entities, some even paying attention to the professor, like myself.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and others, today we will be studying a fascinating phenomenon that was once a serious medical problem, the seizure. We have a copy of one of the few cases that occurred during a full 3-d brain scan, recently released by the American government. It shows in fascinating detail, pardon the jumpiness of the image, couldn't be helped, the poor girl was not in control of her motor functions at the time, yes, in fascinating detail the activation of several key areas simultaneously, here, here and here...”
I woke up at 0645. I've been awake for just over an hour. I have to be at work in just under the same. I've had several high-caffeine-substitute, vitamin-enhanced energy drinks. I have a corporate-sponsored fitness cluster, being out of shape is like having leprosy in biblical times, people will stare, make comments and openly insult those even slightly over-weight, I know, I've done it. The cluster can remove acetaldehyde, the chemical responsible for hangovers, from your system, but it never seems to work fast enough. I am currently in the shower letting water heated to body temperature hit me from all sides. My head is stuck to the tile in front of me with a very slight vacuum formed between my skin and the porcelain, or porcelain-substitute, or whatever this wall is made of. There's a man in my bedroom, I assume I slept with him. I cannot remember a thing after I left work last night. I went to the Hermit with Jane, then O'Donnell's? Then, oh, there was another bar. What happened to Jane? I set the temperature higher and mentally prepare to leave the hermetically sealed shower cabin. The water turns off with a thought and a burst of steam exits the cabin with me, I feel like an alien stepping off a space ship in one of those old sci-fi flicks. I turn to the mirror that removes condensation as it collects on the glass.
My blow drier is a ray-gun, “Take me to your leader.” No 'we come in peace' bullshit.
I hear the man in the other room, “Mmmm... ugh.” I can hear lips smacking, limbs stirring. Shit, what's his name? I quickly get dressed and meet him in my bed room.
“Hi, I'm Jessica.”
“Mmm, yeah... I know who you are, good morning.” Christ, is he thick? “Oh, shit, hah hah, I'm Don. Don Mertzer, nice to meet you.”
“Can I get you a Joule?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“Nope, sorry.”
“Alright, gimme a bottle of that over-processed piss.”
“It's good for you.”
“It tastes like piss.”
“Well, you can just not drink it if you feel that way.”
“That's,” he takes a large swig and coughs afterwards, “that's not really an option. You're Jessica Li, right?”
I guess I told him that last night, “Yeah? So?”
“The one who gave the presentation on the subsidized power shortages?”
“Yeah, do we have to go over last night's conversation? I'm running a bit late.”
“Well, you weren't really in a state to tell me anything last night, the entire branch is taking about you, though. There's a pool to see if and when you would get fired.”
Getting fired from CKM in New York City is like getting exiled from your tribe a few thousand years ago. Usually demoting a person is enough to get them to work for a few months without pay. I don't really like people betting on my life. “OK, that's enough. Get out.”
“Hey, wait, let me get my pants on.”
“Out! Now!”
“Wow, you're pretty strong.”
I half-drag him to the front door as he jams his other leg into his pants.
“It was nice meeting you, please never speak to me again.”
“Can I get my shirt?”
I hand him his shirt and shut the door.
He yells through the closed door, “You know, I put five hundred bucks on you not getting fired!” An examination of the chart hanging on the 17th floor office on 288 5th Ave. would show the initials D.M. under the column “Jessica Li gets fired within the week.”
It's 0830, I'm going to be late. I pick up the phone, “Yes, I'd like to order a taxi. My address?”
Serilla stopped talking about seizures and epilepsy a while ago. After he noticed a tangential question in his inbox, he started explaining the differences between seizures in human beings and in other large mammals, which led to a discussion of his childhood dog, Torquemada, Torq, for short, which led to a discussion on bonding between house pets and adolescents, which then took a turn the details of which I don't quite remember, followed by his opinion on strapping cameras and GPS tracking systems on third world feral children, followed by a dissertation on psychological and sociological differences between rural and urban house cats. Class ended while he was answering a question about the differences in temperature required to bake cakes at different altitudes, asked by a kid who claims to be from Tibet. Serilla is simply incapable of not answering questions.
I log out and decide to send a message to my group mates, but there is already one in my inbox from Jerry, a member of our group. We're deciding whether or not to push back the meeting two hours. Are you available at 3? Well, this is excellent. I reply, Yeah, 3 is fine. Well that's one headache I don't have to deal with. Now I just have to deal with this one. I put up a huge translucent Stop sign in my view and switch to the other side of my brain. I'm traveling eighty miles an hour down Broadway. A huge, ghost of a stop sign floats in front of me, for reasons I can't fathom. I pull over onto the sidewalk and start gulping down a sports drink. My splitter starts to shut down and my hands fly to the side of my head, dropping the drink. I feel like ripping my hair out or running headfirst into a wall. My throat groans and my eyes water. The two halves of my brain come rushing together like the parted Red Sea and rush back into each other mixing and separating over and over again. That familiar feeling like something has clicked and my head stops swirling. I'm whole. And very hungry.
I enter the meeting room and place my notebook in front of my seat. I walk over to the projection screen and say, “Alright, ladies, gentlemen, let's begin,” my voice is without accent, it has a studied meter that my speaking coach says makes me seem more professional. I take slight pauses, I was told that this gives a sense of importance to each word. The trick is also to make what you're saying actually important and interesting in content and not just to blather on taking imperious pauses. “The first order of business on your agendas should be the matter of the tidal power plants of Northern New York. Parts of Queens and the Bronx have been experiencing brownouts in recent months. This is by no means a shocking or unforeseeable development, the changing and still somewhat unpredictable currents of the Atlantic have left us without much tidal movement before. What was not delivered by our tidal plants was supplemented by our solar generators, especially during these warmer months and energy imports from upstate, of course. If you would all look to the screen, the “soup” as our air is now colloquially referred to is inarguably getting thicker, blocking almost 53% of the sunlight that hits sensors a few hundred meters above sea level, compared with 42% this time last year, and this activity is somehow damaging our panels. We've detected some malicious nanotech activity at these panels, but nothing is yet provable as to connecting it to one of the other houses. There is also a possibility that this is not a corporate effort, and, well, there might not be an actual, concerted effort to damage these panels. Our engineers are still working on it.” Behind me a rectangle of data, a meter high, two wide, switches to a chart with a number of jagged lines, all climbing upwards menacingly.
“Rising also, if you would please note, is the cost of energy importation from the Upstate nuclear plants. Note here, the sale of these plants American government ownership to the Lanzhou Energy Interest. No significant price increases until this point, here, January of this year. An average of four percent monthly increase in cost ever since then. Our lack of home-grown megawatts, combined with this increase in cost will mean we will soon reach our subsidized housing energy budget limit. We will not be able to supply the several thousand residents of the outer boroughs with 24 hour air filtration within the month.” The entire room, a room filled with my colleagues stares at me, mouths agape, as if I've committed some indescribable blasphemy, as if I've defecated right there on the conference table. I have brought up the fact that people will die if we do not do something, something entirely within our power, quickly.
“Ms. Li, thank you so much for your presentation. The board has already considered this fact and we have decided to allow rolling brownouts between the hours of 000 and 300 every other evening until the tides return to their natural ebb and flow, which our meteorologists are predicting will happen, by the latest, September or October.”
“You can't just cut off the power. I've seen as many as ten or more people living in these airtight closets we call studios. Suffocation is a real possibility in these situations. We have to at least inform-”
“Ms. Li, our decision has already been made. The tenants are warned not to over-occupy their quarters and any illegal occupancy is not a legal concern of Citi-Kraft-Morris. Again, thank you, Jessica.” My boss points to my seat with his arm. I can either sit down now and take some kind of slap on the wrist for this presentation or I can go down fighting, guns blazing, indicting the company and everyone in this room with charges of premeditated murder and loss of humanity. In my mind, I do this. I invoke the image of infants and mothers, locked in an embrace as they quietly choke on their own CO2. I call my bosses inhuman. I rage against the machine. I tear down the building with my words. I'm on every news feed regaling reporters with the tale of how I saved the poor and turned around an evil conglomerate. I silently walk back to my chair, smoothing my unwrinkled black skirt. I sit down and open my planner, becoming wholly engrossed in tonight's planned activities.
Good morning, Ben.
I'm still dreaming. You know how I know? It's because my life isn't shit in here. I don't have to get out of bed, my girlfriend isn't a zombie that has neither slept nor been awake in the past three days. I don't have to go to work. That's all in this cozy little dream world though.
At the sound of the tone, it will be 600 hours. What follows this message is a tone so piercing, so jarring, that any thought, a more accurate term might be delusion, of being able to sleep another moment is vaporized.
Yes, I'm up. Enough. Please.
Mercurial Deliveries, a Citi-Kraft-Morris subsidiary, thanks you for your promptness in-
Suzy. Off.
I am really regretting allowing them to install those electrodes in my inner ear, but what are you gonna do? Every single fuckin' job out there requires invasive surgery this, mind-altering NCSs that, and that's just what they put in the contract. My friend, tiny Mike(congenital growth disorder), was working for that new synthetic meat chain and I swear they completely rewired the kid. Last time I was over his house, his entire fridge, freezer and all, was packed, absolutely stuffed with synthmeat. I mean he can't even process the stuff, his stomach acid is around pH 4. Canned synthmeat, with that unsettling trio, the cartoonish pig, cow and chicken giving the thumbs up on the label, lines his shelves, his counter, it was everywhere. He must be spending his entire paycheck on what was basically inedible for him. When we asked what he was eating, and if he was maybe excreting whole, unprocessed chunks of synthmeat, he just smiled at us. He claimed he was feeling better than ever. He had clearly lost weight, though. And he looked really pale, actually. I should see what Mikey's up to.
I climb over Angela, the lump that used to be my girlfriend, and head over to the bathroom to wash my face. I wash up and check myself and my mail in the mirror, I don't have an ounce of body fat and neither does Angela, but for very different reasons. I'm a bike messenger. I spend about 9 hours a day peddling in a prolonged artificial adrenaline surge that propels me to speeds and distances that would be unthinkable for bike messengers twenty-five years ago. Angela? I haven't seen her eat in a while. She's constantly on. I can't tell when she's asleep or awake, her eyes are always closed. The creepy part is that her eyelids are always fluttering as if she's dreaming. I message her, you hungry? The reply takes a few seconds, no thanks, babe. I spray on my second skin and check the fridge for anything edible.
I start frying some bacon and eggs, synthetic of course, buttered toast, all in herculean proportions. I'm going to need all the fuel I can get. My bag is packed with protein bars, water, extra breathing masks, my Farsa goggles, everything is there. I was hoping the smell of fried food might get Angela to stir, but if it hasn't worked for the past two days, I don't see why it would now. I sit watching the news projected on my far wall and shovel in as much food as size of stomach permits. The only thing news feeds agree on anymore is traffic. Changing channels gives you a completely different view of the world. There is no group too small or too psychotically fringe to not be pandered to. I try to stay away from anything international. If you think it's bad here, just wait until you hear what havoc recent technological innovations have wreaked in Indonesia. Western Europe isn't handling it too poorly, though. Some say better than here, their currency is definitely more stable. But it's not like there's any chance of me getting a Visa in this lifetime. I'm stuck here. I look around my studio apartment, peeling paint, the vent on the western wall pumping out clean O2,what looks like water damage in the corner above the door with accompanying mold, and who could forget my comatose girlfriend. Jesus. What a fucking hole.
I walk over to the bed, “Angela.” No response. “Angela!” I grab her shoulder.
“What? What in the hell do you want? I'm busy.” I look into her eyes, they're very pretty, too bad they're never open.
“I'm leaving.” I sigh out.
“You made me get off for that?”
I look into her eyes a little longer and I bring my face closer. I can see something in her eyes backing away from me, sometimes I think she's disgusted by the physical nature of kissing, fondling, etc. Fuck it, at least she still pays her half of the rent, though I'm not entirely sure how. Or if I want to know how. I kick my door open as my endocrine system is artificially cajoled into first gear from corporate headquarters. My landlord, a short man in his sixties maybe with what might be either Hispanic or eastern European background, comes out and starts yelling.
“You are always making so much god damn noise! Why do you always break everything? Terrible tenants!”
“Hey, I think the mold in the corner grew an eye last night! Maybe you wanna take a look at that? Oh wait, I forgot, you're a fucking slumlord! Shut the fuck up!” I am now slamming my feet down on each step as I walk down the stairs, towards him and the exit. I notice my heart beat, it's getting faster, more forceful, if I don't find a new job soon, this shit will probably give me a heart attack by age 30.
“You don't like it? Leave! I don't need shitty people like you shitting up my house!”
Shitting up his little shit pile. Christ. I have to keep myself from hitting the little fuck as I head outside, I grab my bike and, yes, I slam the door on my way out. He comes out onto the sidewalk in his ratty robe and boxers, screaming something, but I've already started peddling, and I've already synced up some angry hardcore to my heartbeat and my body has shifted into travel mode and I've already left my block.
I'm tearing down Flatbush Ave. I'm not traveling full speed, the electrical assistance on my bike isn't even on. My bike is a Gencycle, the last gift I received from my parents and probably the most useful thing I've ever gotten from them. It cost near a thousand euros and it's worth every god damn eurocent. It has millions of nano-scale generators that acquire electrical energy from the kinetic force of the bike's movement at a startling 90% efficiency. This energy can be used to assist in peddling for speeds that rival high power motorcycles or to just cruise around at a comfortable clip. I hardly ever use the latter function. I swerve around a car that's only half pulled over and making a terrible squealing sound that ends when the driver cuts the engine. A dark cloud of smoke erupts from the engine in a single, giant exhalation. Passing through this cloud is almost refreshing, sure, it's oppressively hot, but at least it displaced the dense soup that is the air outside of Manhattan.
I have to wear a second layer of artificial skin, a high-performance air filter that fits over my mouth and nose (I go through about three of these a day), sound-transferring earplugs, and my Farsa goggles, all of which makes a seal with my artificial skin at the molecular level. Why the Byzantine defenses you ask? It is all due to the fact that the air around the island of Manhattan has a concentration of floating nanobots of approximately 10,000/m3. On the island, this number is significantly smaller and more controlled, but I still never take off my mask. Some of these bots are built for surveillance, they latch onto any animate object to attempt to monitor the purchasing habits of their host, others are advertising, the kind that literally gets stuck in your head, the government releases hunter drones that analyze the sea of nanotech and attempt to destroy any with illegal functions, but when released, they are almost instantly obsolete and the politicians continue growing these bots just to be able to say they're doing something, and the worst have nano-scale chemical synthesizers(NCSs) on board that can do anything from making you gain weight, to creating an artificial desire for a product or service, to releasing potent and often extremely addictive drugs directly into your bloodstream. Those who don't wear defenses and spend extended periods of time outdoors, quickly lose any sort of personality or humanity they may have once had. The homeless population doesn't come close to having normal human behavior anymore. All they are capable of is holding out handmade advertisements, abusing chemicals and sometimes having complete psychotic breaks where they attempt to draw gigantic murals on walls featuring laundry detergents and fortified wines with their own bodily fluids(they usually die before they complete their master work, but there was one near the South St. Seaport that was completed and was really quite beautiful); or attempt to eat and fuck, simultaneously, everything in sight, animate and inanimate; or just good old fashioned self-abuse from all the conflicting messages whirling around in their heads(Buy X, Don't Buy X, Buy Y, Buy Z if and only if you want to live, etc.). These people don't even have money, for Christ's sake.
I hit an incline that signifies the beginning of the Manhattan Bridge and I lean forward to counter the change. The bike path is littered with people who have been evicted from the island for lack of funds, lack of housing, or lack of connections. They're usually off to a side, leaning against the railing, but occasionally I have to pull myself and my lightweight bike a few feet off the ground to clear a (dead?) body laid out across the entire bike path. On those occasions, I pray that they're not laying in wait to rob, eat, or rape passersby. I once was about to clear a well-dressed man laying across both bike lanes when all of a sudden he awoke with a start, as if from a bad dream, my back tire clipped his forehead and sent him careening back to dreamland. There's only a few on the path today so it's an easy ride. I approach the checkpoint where a few bikers wait in line to be scanned, pay and enter the island. I only have three major mods, the standard high-speed telepathy with accompanying retinal projection display and audio simulation(everyone and their grandmother has this one), the metabolic regulation mod that came free of charge under my work contract with Mercurial, and a black market mod, a cephalic splitter.
The splitter is a system of signal regulators that can sort of move the majority of your consciousness into a certain area of your mind while dampening the output of other areas. Both areas continue to function at near-full capacity, it's just so that your greater consciousness is not aware of one of the two activities. E.g. a man can sit at an assembly line and put heads on dolls all day with near the same accuracy and speed that he would if he were aware of the action, but he can also respond to emails, watch movies, or study quantum physics with his spare brain time. There are side-effects, cephalic splitting into three areas is about all the human mind can take. With three-way splitters, the rates of neurological disorders, disassociation from physical reality, paranoia, hallucinations, arrhythmia, loss of coordination, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, and of course, Split Personality Disorder often develop. The same applies to two-way splitters, though all these side-effects are much rarer for us. Also, you can't really divide up consciousness between two activities that are in the same general area. If one were to put heads on dolls and control a construction crane remotely, there would be a lot of cross chatter and the results would be undesirable, if not disastrous. I don't dare fire up my splitter until I cross the checkpoint and get the scans out of the way. Inactive, they just seem like an odd configuration of my two legal mod clusters and are ignored. I walk my bike into the booth that seals around me, all air is evacuated and pure O2 is pumped in. It's enough to give you a head rush. My bike and I are scanned completely and my scent is scanned for any potential dangerous chemical traces. The screen flashes the fact that my $350 US toll has been paid by Mercurial Deliveries, Inc. and the exit slides open with a rush of air escaping from the pressurized booth.
“Thank you for doing business with the Island of Manhattan Security Corp. a subsidiary of the American Defense Group. We hope you enjoy your stay.”
I hop on my bike and roll down the walkway flanked by armed guards with that glazed-over look in their eyes which suggests they may not be paying strict attention to their current task. The rates of pornography addiction in the country have sky-rocketed to the point where it's basically an epidemic now. These men are doubtlessly watching orgiastic configurations of human beings and repeatedly stimulating the reward centers in their limbic systems. These pathways wear out quickly and it eventually takes more and more stimulation to get the same feeling, which is an all too familiar behavior for anyone who has been or has known an addict of any sort. I roll onto Bowery and query Suzy.
Hey, Suzy, do I have any jobs?
Always. Please hold one second. She has to coordinate about a hundred different messengers all over the city and the finding the most efficient use of us is not always easy math, even for a Class-IV AI, well I assume she's class four, they are mostly used for coordinating travel routes, truckers, taxis- Ben?
I'm here.
I'm uploading the addresses to your wetware.
Please, call it a brain, or a telepathy cluster, you know I don't like that term.
My apologies, prepare for upload. Do you want turn by turn and traffic guidance?
Always.
I check the addresses. I'm heading uptown as usual. Halfway down the list is an address that sticks out like a sore thumb. Long Island City. Queens. Crap. I usually don't have to leave the city. I'm gonna have to turn off my splitter for that. And it's a drop-off at 1400 hours. I'm going to miss part of my bio-netics group. Oh, this is truly some bullshit. Suzy?
Receiving, Ben.
What is this? 78 Northern Boulevard? That's Queens, I don't know if-
This type of assignment will of course entail a bonus, I'm authorized to offer an extra $10,000 US plus billable hours. You are, as always, free to decline any work.
Damn, that's a nice little bonus, and when you start declining, they tend to assign you less and less work in more and more unpleasant areas. I guess I don't really have a choice this time. Ok, Suzy. Sounds... acceptable.
Excellent, the bonus will be wired to you upon delivery.
Gotcha.
It's 752, my first class starts in in sixty-eight minutes. My first class on Tuesdays is physical psychology, basically phrenology, but with full resolution 3-D brain scans. Turn left here. I turn onto Houston. Bike messengers seem like an anachronism to people nowadays. Why don't you just send it electronically? Encrypt it and send it over secure channels? I'm pretty sure there is no such thing as a secure line anymore. The only way to keep something secret is to hide it in the open, make it look like something else, lodge it somewhere in a few terabytes of code, everyone is scanning everything. The government, competing houses, freelancers looking to steal and sell secrets(these guys are often the worst, tweaked out 3rd worlders that will do just about anything for a few US bucks). You can't hack a human being. Well you can, but we are kept on a tight leash when it comes to foreign NCSs. Our movements are constantly monitored and the data we carry can be destroyed remotely at the drop of a hat. The people in charge of these firms also tend to prefer hard copies, and when you have more money than God, hiring a kid on a bike isn't exactly a huge sacrifice.
I decide to activate my cephalic splitter. Starting a splitter is a hard experience to describe. You can feel a chasm growing somewhere in your head. Your consciousness is straddling the gap, one foot firmly planted on each side, and you have to choose which side you want to jump to, I've never not jumped so don't ask me what the consequences of that are. As soon as you do jump, the feeling of a chasm instantly dissolves and you can only focus on what is directly in front of you. I'm still standing on my pedals, I know what pedals are, I can feel every muscle and nerve in my legs, pumping away, but now I'm capable of significantly less abstract thought. In fact the extent of my abstract thought capabilities right now is realizing that I can't think abstractly which can get very confusing if you focus too much on it.
I attempt to spell my name backwards and I get thrown to my frontal lobe. I entrust my physical coordination and reflexes with the task of keeping me alive and picking up packages. I've already checked my email by the time I'm conscious of what I'm doing. I open up and review my notes for my bio-netics meeting, physical psychology is kind of a joke. There's a macro and a micro unit, viewing how the mind works as a whole and then getting as specific as high-traffic neural junctions. Despite it seeming to be of a very technical nature, it would be more appropriate to call this class philosophy of thought. The professor is a burn-out that has clearly consumed more than his share of substances in his lifetime. Don't get me wrong, he's interesting, scratch that, insightful, when he's lucid, but this is not the most common event. I load my group's bionetics final project, a theoretical mod that would practically doubles the human mind's ability to absorb information by simultaneously stimulating emotional centers while providing information. This is all purely theoretical and becoming suddenly and inexplicably emotional would probably cause a bit of distraction to the user's studying.
_____________________________________________________________________
I log into the OIVU system. I secure my connection with a password of randomly generated hexadecimal characters in a string that is approximately 102048 long. You either protect yourself or get spam injected directly into your sub-conscious. I choose the prior. Welcome to the Open International Virtual University. Brought to you by the Wiki Collective. I check my schedule and get linked straight to my Physical Psychology classroom, which is decidedly no frills. I'm facing the familiar wall that stretches forever covered in every single note the professor has ever put up available for public perusal at all times. He put up a short story once about an industrial vat of formaldehyde filled with thousands of brains. The brains retained consciousness somehow and also developed hyper-sensitive tactile sense. They would swim around feeling all the other brains, getting a sense of what the person was like by studying the structure of the other suspended minds. It ended in a kind of awkward, well I guess I would call it an erotic scene, between two former lovers who reacquainted each other with their pleasure centers. It was actually a pretty handy study tool for the reward center test as they were activating very specific and technically correct areas in each other's disembodied brains. It also gave me the idea for my bionetics final project. I scroll to the short story, which has received over two-thousand comments, mostly positive. I start reading the comments, but the class is called into session. I can pause Professor Serilla's feed, but I prefer a live performance.
Serilla appears in a burst of psychedelic smoke, teachers have the right to use as many effects and models as they desire, while we students get wire models, with our names in the ugliest, blockiest font you can imagine, suspended over our heads. There are about seven thousand eager young minds logged into the class, actually some are off doing something else, while others are quite old, and some are probably bots running ads in discussion groups, but seven thousand entities, some even paying attention to the professor, like myself.
“Ladies, gentlemen, and others, today we will be studying a fascinating phenomenon that was once a serious medical problem, the seizure. We have a copy of one of the few cases that occurred during a full 3-d brain scan, recently released by the American government. It shows in fascinating detail, pardon the jumpiness of the image, couldn't be helped, the poor girl was not in control of her motor functions at the time, yes, in fascinating detail the activation of several key areas simultaneously, here, here and here...”
I woke up at 0645. I've been awake for just over an hour. I have to be at work in just under the same. I've had several high-caffeine-substitute, vitamin-enhanced energy drinks. I have a corporate-sponsored fitness cluster, being out of shape is like having leprosy in biblical times, people will stare, make comments and openly insult those even slightly over-weight, I know, I've done it. The cluster can remove acetaldehyde, the chemical responsible for hangovers, from your system, but it never seems to work fast enough. I am currently in the shower letting water heated to body temperature hit me from all sides. My head is stuck to the tile in front of me with a very slight vacuum formed between my skin and the porcelain, or porcelain-substitute, or whatever this wall is made of. There's a man in my bedroom, I assume I slept with him. I cannot remember a thing after I left work last night. I went to the Hermit with Jane, then O'Donnell's? Then, oh, there was another bar. What happened to Jane? I set the temperature higher and mentally prepare to leave the hermetically sealed shower cabin. The water turns off with a thought and a burst of steam exits the cabin with me, I feel like an alien stepping off a space ship in one of those old sci-fi flicks. I turn to the mirror that removes condensation as it collects on the glass.
My blow drier is a ray-gun, “Take me to your leader.” No 'we come in peace' bullshit.
I hear the man in the other room, “Mmmm... ugh.” I can hear lips smacking, limbs stirring. Shit, what's his name? I quickly get dressed and meet him in my bed room.
“Hi, I'm Jessica.”
“Mmm, yeah... I know who you are, good morning.” Christ, is he thick? “Oh, shit, hah hah, I'm Don. Don Mertzer, nice to meet you.”
“Can I get you a Joule?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“Nope, sorry.”
“Alright, gimme a bottle of that over-processed piss.”
“It's good for you.”
“It tastes like piss.”
“Well, you can just not drink it if you feel that way.”
“That's,” he takes a large swig and coughs afterwards, “that's not really an option. You're Jessica Li, right?”
I guess I told him that last night, “Yeah? So?”
“The one who gave the presentation on the subsidized power shortages?”
“Yeah, do we have to go over last night's conversation? I'm running a bit late.”
“Well, you weren't really in a state to tell me anything last night, the entire branch is taking about you, though. There's a pool to see if and when you would get fired.”
Getting fired from CKM in New York City is like getting exiled from your tribe a few thousand years ago. Usually demoting a person is enough to get them to work for a few months without pay. I don't really like people betting on my life. “OK, that's enough. Get out.”
“Hey, wait, let me get my pants on.”
“Out! Now!”
“Wow, you're pretty strong.”
I half-drag him to the front door as he jams his other leg into his pants.
“It was nice meeting you, please never speak to me again.”
“Can I get my shirt?”
I hand him his shirt and shut the door.
He yells through the closed door, “You know, I put five hundred bucks on you not getting fired!” An examination of the chart hanging on the 17th floor office on 288 5th Ave. would show the initials D.M. under the column “Jessica Li gets fired within the week.”
It's 0830, I'm going to be late. I pick up the phone, “Yes, I'd like to order a taxi. My address?”
Serilla stopped talking about seizures and epilepsy a while ago. After he noticed a tangential question in his inbox, he started explaining the differences between seizures in human beings and in other large mammals, which led to a discussion of his childhood dog, Torquemada, Torq, for short, which led to a discussion on bonding between house pets and adolescents, which then took a turn the details of which I don't quite remember, followed by his opinion on strapping cameras and GPS tracking systems on third world feral children, followed by a dissertation on psychological and sociological differences between rural and urban house cats. Class ended while he was answering a question about the differences in temperature required to bake cakes at different altitudes, asked by a kid who claims to be from Tibet. Serilla is simply incapable of not answering questions.
I log out and decide to send a message to my group mates, but there is already one in my inbox from Jerry, a member of our group. We're deciding whether or not to push back the meeting two hours. Are you available at 3? Well, this is excellent. I reply, Yeah, 3 is fine. Well that's one headache I don't have to deal with. Now I just have to deal with this one. I put up a huge translucent Stop sign in my view and switch to the other side of my brain. I'm traveling eighty miles an hour down Broadway. A huge, ghost of a stop sign floats in front of me, for reasons I can't fathom. I pull over onto the sidewalk and start gulping down a sports drink. My splitter starts to shut down and my hands fly to the side of my head, dropping the drink. I feel like ripping my hair out or running headfirst into a wall. My throat groans and my eyes water. The two halves of my brain come rushing together like the parted Red Sea and rush back into each other mixing and separating over and over again. That familiar feeling like something has clicked and my head stops swirling. I'm whole. And very hungry.