Altered States: A Cyberpunk Sci-Fi Anthology Read online

  “Oh, yes. That will sign over a number of your possessions equal to the cost of your Integration.”

  “So I'm giving you guys my stuff? Will that cover the cost?”

  “No, but that’s all right. Whatever isn’t covered constitutes a charitable write-off in our case. Any other questions?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I still don’t know what exactly all this is. Everything’s vague. I know you guys say I’ll be happy, and when we talked on the phone said I’d be reunited with my wife. This is going to sound like a stupid question, but is it like a dream in there?”

  “Excellent description, sir.”

  My dreams have been bittersweet lately. It’s great to be with my wife, living like we always lived, but waking up is the hard part.

  “Will I ever wake up? Like, get out of this?”

  “No,” he replies. “It’s a one-time event. Your consciousness will be permanently uploaded and your body stored in our facilities.”

  “It’ll be well-cared for? I won’t need to worry about a thing?”

  “Of course not. Any other questions?”

  “What about the rest of it?” I ask. “How does it feel?”

  “Since I'm not in there, I can't speak with authority, but as far as I know, you'll feel yourself begin to meld with the Singularity and become one with it. Technically, it's not a collective consciousness, but a single dwelling place. Kind of like a big apartment building made up of all who undergo Integration. Without walls, of course. It’s all a digital expanse. Pure mind. Solacium designed it to be a place of utter happiness and joy. We try to ease you into it so that it doesn't hit you all at once. You'll go from “I” to “we” to kind of a new “I”—is this too philosophical?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m following.”

  “You'll then gain a profound sense of awareness of your new self, as well as a sense of peace and connectedness to all things. Think of...Nirvana.” He sounds nearly rapturous by the end. A true believer. Well, that's a good sign.

  “Anything else, sir?”

  “No,” I say. I guess I won't be needing anything where I'm going.

  I finish filling out the last form and slide it over to the guy, who stares at it as he’s about to type, then pulls his fingers back with a jerk, clicking his tongue like an angry school teacher.

  “Oh, sir, I'm afraid this won't do,” he says, finger on paper. “You list your happiness as 'five' on a scale of one to ten. We require all Integrators to be an eight or above.”

  “Yeah? What was my wife?”

  “A ten, sir.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I guess I could believe that. She was always pretty happy about everything, as far as I could tell. I mean, we loved each other. Love each other, I should say. She’s not dead. Just elsewhere. Only complaints she ever had were about not moving ahead. But what the hell did that mean? I didn't know and when I asked her, seemed she didn't either. She was just restless. Part of me thought maybe she did want a kid after all, but was maybe too afraid to bring it up, thinking it would upset me. Or maybe she knew the bad spot we were in. But, no. Not if she was a ten. Things were pretty good.

  “I guess you can put me down as a ten, too, now that I think about it.”

  “Are you sure about that, sir? Is that accurate?”

  “Yeah. If my wife was a ten, then I am, too,” I say. “Things are pretty good.”

  “Wonderful,” he says, dotting some “I”s and crossing some “T”s. He fixes my little mistake and then slides the forms into a slot in the desk.

  “Question,” I say.

  “Yes?” he replies.

  “Will I see my wife smile in there? Or at least feel it?”

  “She’ll appear to your consciousness exactly how you conceive of her, as beautiful as the first day you met.”

  That sounds too good to be true. If Mary’s in there, though, she believed. I have to believe, too. Maybe this will be as good as it sounds.

  “If everybody Integrating is happy, then why Integrate in the first place?”

  “Nobody wants to plateau, Tim. We all want more. This is just…more.”

  When I don’t reply, he goes on, “We will see you tomorrow, then, sir. First thing.”

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Thank you for choosing Solacium to turn your good life into a perfect one.”

  Then it's back to the apartment in the driverless Solacium car.

  Except when I get back, there are a few guys in gray overalls crowding my apartment, moving out all my stuff. The place has been picked clean. Nobody acknowledges my presence. In the next room, I hear someone say, “This stuff is worthless, they're just going to dump it.” Another replies, “Who knows? They have those 'People Museums' in The City these days. Maybe one of the Solacium people will take some of the pictures. They're kinda nice.”

  One of the guys emerges from the bedroom with a box full of the pictures from the wall and I snatch out the top photo as he passes. He dismisses me with a look and a grunt and keeps moving.

  “What the hell do you think you're doing?”

  I know the answer before he gives it. He gives it anyway, without breaking stride or making eye contact. “We have a work order. Says you're going for Integration. Means you signed your stuff over.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I get it now,” I say. “You could've left me a pot to piss in.” I quickly check the bathroom; they didn't take the toilet out.

  The last guy just shrugs it off, gives the place the once-over while I stare, and then goes out the door. The apartment looks much bigger with nothing in it. Hasn’t seemed this big since the day Mary and I moved in. She said we had too much room. Sure, we filled the place over the years. Jesus. Even the pictures are gone from the walls now. I can't take any of this shit with me, I know. But I didn't even get to watch them dismantle my life before my eyes.

  I’ve got this picture and its frame left, at least. I take the photo out and let myself absorb it. Mary won’t look like this inside. She won’t look like anything. I don’t need it to memorize her features: the pale, freckled skin, untouched by age in this photo. That flaming red hair, petite nose and tiny mouth. I took this one of her at Campbell’s Ledge. She loved hiking there. It overlooks where three streams meet a river in the depths of a beautiful, forested valley. That smile.

  I fold the picture in half and put it in my front shirt pocket. Close to the heart, to be symbolic.

  I have nowhere to sleep tonight. I don’t have anything. I guess I did it to myself when I signed it all over. But I have the photo and I have my memories. And tomorrow morning, I'll be with my wife again.

  No problems. All melted away. Nothing to worry about. Never have to wipe my ass again.

  That's something.

  I sleep on the floor. Don’t even have sheets. Not that it’s cold. It just would be nice.

  My back is killing me and the last thing I want to be doing is lying down, but it’s what needs to be done. Wires are coming out of every part of me. My veins are probably a mess. It’s not painful having it in there, but it’s like an IV—every time you shift, you can feel it moving around inside you. They numbed me to hell, but I’m still uncomfortable. Maybe it’s the knowledge that they're poking around in my brain, but I can't be sure. I'm still conscious and thinking straight, so far as I can tell.

  “What's it going to be like?” I say to the nurse, or doctor, or Solacium Integration Specialist, or whatever they are called—the one that's probably putting wires in my brain.

  “Well,” she says, biting her lower lip. I'm interrupting her concentration, obviously. I probably shouldn't do that. Last thing I need is for this to go bad. She stops and looks down at me. She's got a pretty face. A redhead. Like Mary. Can't smell this lady, though. Wouldn't want to anyway.

  “Can I smell in there?” I say.

  She laughs. It's nice to see somebody smile. And not a glow-in-the-dark smile, either. “No,” she says. “And you won't have to w
orry about bathing, either. None of that's necessary.”

  She didn't get my meaning, but I got my answer.

  “How come you aren't in?” I say.

  “The cook eats last,” she replies.

  “Just like the CEO.” And Mary. I’m coming, Mary.

  “Yes. I’ll go in one day, though,” she says.

  “Do you live in The City?” I ask.

  “No,” she replies.

  “Why not?”

  “Since I'm going to Integrate one day, they won't allow it. When we reach our quota of jacked people, I can go in and join you.” She pauses for a moment. I don't have anything to add, really. She'll get what she wants one day, that's just about all anybody could ask.

  “Are you ready?” she says after a moment.

  “I am,” I say. “That's it?”

  “I finished hooking you up before we began talking. I was just double-checking connections. Standard procedure.”

  “Oh.”

  “Then we can begin?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  She disappears and that's the last I see of her. It'll be the last I see of anybody in this life, I imagine.

  Here I come, Mary.

  I feel nothing as the minutes pass. I stare at the ceiling and let my mind drift, probably not unlike it will soon. Twenty years is a long time. The past few years have been routine. Mundane, even. But the early years, boy, were they something. Weekends away hiking, enjoying nature. Isn’t much of nature left these days, with the explosion of technology. The photo is in my hand. I don’t remember how it got there… But that's okay. I can see Mary, hair rustling in the low wind coming off of a creek that wound toward a cliff. It's where I proposed. Had the ring in my pocket the whole time. She didn't see it coming. I never thought of myself as the romantic type, but I was pretty proud of myself. She accepted and to this day, whenever I hear the sound of rushing water, on the TV or even sometimes when I run bathwater, I think of going down on one knee at the top of that waterfall. She bawled her eyes out—the happy kind of bawling. I used to–

  My head starts to quiver. Maybe it's more my brain. But I'm not trembling. It feels like static is swirling through me. No shock, just steady tingling, like electrical fingers dragging lightly across my body.

  The room starts to dim and slowly my sight fades to blank. I should be scared, but I'm not. It could be the drugs or the anticipation of Mary. The rest of my senses dim. Is this what dying is like? But this is living, the commercials say.

  There's...something. Something at the edge of my mind, I feel it inching over me.

  Me?

  Mary, where are you?

  Senses return. No, not senses. The sense of something. Of everything? There is something enveloping me. Millions of people. Not people. Consciousnesses? One thought. Millions of thoughts in nanoseconds of time.

  Mary, where are you?

  Thoughts pulse at me, with me, from me…we are powerless…we are trapped…over and over until…these are not the voices of tens or nines or eights…where are you…where are you…where are you…it’s all I feel, like I’m being thought at, or thinking with…the collective feeling of loss and misery of all who come to this place…it’s all mind…we are trapped…I am…I know I’m fading away…dying?…I feel…Mary?…and the me that I am becomes lost in the we that we are.

  END

  TOM BORTHWICK is a life-long Scranton resident, traveler, English teacher, adjunct professor, political blogger, some-time political candidate, and a whole bunch of other fun stuff that leaves little time to breathe. He is a graduate of Marywood University with a BA in English and received both an MA and MFA in Creative Writing from Wilkes University.

  His work has previously appeared in the Cohort Review, Raven's Light Journal, and Bewildering Stories. He is currently finishing a novel, titled Flash Mob.

  Borthwick's blog and links to his work can be found at www.tomborthwick.com.

  COTNER’S BOT

  D.L. Young

  Originally published in The Colored Lens, Summer 2012 – Issue #4.

  “A robot didn’t do this.”

  I said it with flat certainty, but I knew it was the last thing the boss wanted to hear. I flipped through the last couple pics of oil paintings on Nathan’s slate.

  “But whoever did paint these has decent technique and obviously understands the trends of the last couple decades.” We sat in the gallery’s cramped office. It was actually my office, but when the owner stopped by it became his (as his feet on the desk made clear).

  “Nathan,” I said, “why didn’t you just send these to me? Hate for you to waste a trip over here.”

  I looked up and realized he hadn’t heard a word I’d said. Nathan had that feral, hungry stare I’d seen a hundred times, looking past me through the glass door into the gallery’s showcase area. I didn’t have to turn and look to know there was an attractive female wandering about. Some billionaires buy stretches of Thai beach property to get women. Some buy Hong Kong movie houses. Nathan Pendergast, hotshot investor, bought a Soho gallery. He once told me he had a thing for artsy pussy.

  “Nathan?”

  He turned his attention back to me. “So they’re good, right, Alex? I want to show them right away.”

  “We can’t.”

  “What? Why? They look pretty fucking good to me.” Nathan never tolerated the word no for more than a few seconds. His face abruptly changed into what I called stage one anger: eyes widened into a hot, incredulous stare that said how could you possibly not see it my way? At this point, I had to be careful. Stage two was explosive: screams, threats, fists pounding the desk.

  “It’s not that they’re bad,” I said. “They’re actually pretty decent. But there’s no way a robot did this, trust me.” He seemed to grasp the confidence of my appraisal. I sighed in relief as his expression softened a bit.

  “All right, Alex, I suppose you’re the expert. But check it out in person anyway. You never know when a good play might present itself.” His eyes again wandered past me to the showcase area. He gave me a wink, stood, and exited the office for what would surely be a more stimulating conversation.

  Managing a third-rate gallery is the kind of gig you’re lucky to get when you have a black mark on your career as an art dealer. In this business, a black mark is a black mark, and it lasts forever no matter what the circumstances were. It doesn’t matter that you were fooled by the phony Nieuwenhuis collection as much as the Nepalese zillionaire you sold it to. It doesn’t matter that you had a spotless fifteen-year run and a solid reputation. All that mattered was that your name was attached to one of the biggest art frauds of the last couple decades. Overnight you become toxic, and the people you’ve known and trusted for years—friends, lovers, professional contacts—all suddenly act like they never even knew you. And when the money runs out (and Jesus it runs out fast), you end up taking whatever work you can get—even running a joke of a gallery for a sex-crazed billionaire dilettante, so far removed from the real action you might as well be working at a Thomas Kinkade shop in a Pennsylvania mall.

  The lawyers said I was lucky to avoid jail, but as my car drove me to Jersey to interview the robot’s owner, I didn’t feel terribly fortunate. A robot painter, for Christ’s sake. Ninety-nine out of a hundred gallery owners would laugh it off, but mine sends me to check it out. Lucky me.

  “The problem isn’t replicating the logical functions of the human brain: pattern recognition, basic problem-solving, and so on—we cracked that nut years ago. It’s the creative process that none of the so-called experts have ever been able to reproduce. Until now, of course.”

  I sat on the well-worn sofa of Dr. Marcus Cotner’s modest Passaic home and listened to the scientist explain—as best he could in layman’s terms—his self-described breakthroughs of the past few years. He was in his late seventies, but still spry and fiery-eyed. And he seemed to have a bone to pick with the AI establishment, whoever they were.

  I’d read his bio on the drive o
ut. Before he retired, Cotner was one of the top minds in artificial intelligence of the past quarter century, a celebrity scientist of sorts. He gave me the prima donna vibe and seemed a bit annoyed I wasn’t aware of his work.

  “Can I show you some of the other paintings, the earlier works? Perhaps you’d like to see the sketches? They’re quite good.” The doctor was a touch too eager. I decided to cut straight to it—I hated spending time in Jersey.

  “Dr. Cotner, I’m going to be honest with you. Robot painters are considered a fairly common scam in the art world.”

  Cotner seemed genuinely surprised. “Oh, is that so? I had no idea.” He glanced over at the trashcan-shaped bot sitting in the corner of the room with paint-stained articulated digits. I had to muffle a laugh. He actually wanted me to believe this was the artist, a jerry-rigged domestic. Jesus, how sharp could this guy really be?

  I said, “Every couple of years or so some software engineer thinks he can bang out some code that’ll fool the experts, but it’s fairly easy to test creative authenticity.”

  “Test? What test?” Nathan asked in unmistakable stage one tone. I sat in my car outside Cotner’s house, talking to Nathan’s (as small as I could make it) head superimposed on the windshield.

  “Works like this,” I said. “You take a photograph and give the robot some time to interpret it into a sketch, painting, sculpture, whatever. The result always betrays the coder’s programming. The smarter nerds try to cover their tracks by combining styles—Picasso perspective with Lichtenstein textures and Pollock brush strokes. A trained eye can spot it in about five seconds.”

  “And you think this one’s a scam?”

  “I think this Cotner wants to send a big 'fuck you' to his ex-colleagues—show them he’s smarter than they are, that he was right all along, that kind of thing. Don’t get your hopes up, Nathan.”