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White Hat
“Oh, you can’t go to Chase. No, no, no, nonono,” Jayden muttered. He was huddled under Lonnie Norton’s desk, examining and picking at his bare feet. Lonnie was one of very few artificials in the Transhuman Congress. It was a Norton, a genderless model built tall and thin like a pole with round heads. Anima looked askance at Jayden, then at Lonnie. “What’s wrong with this man?” she asked Lonnie in her girlish voice. It was unlikely to be a genetic flaw, but maybe he had suffered some trauma. Lonnie shrugged its narrow shoulders. “He’s been this way as long as I’ve known him. Why can’t we go to Chase,…
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Surgical Strike
“I’m pretty certain they aren’t supposed to move like that,” Ser Harold Chase whispered as he watched the monitor. Anima blinked at him. “You put them into those bodies,” she said in her childish voice. “What did you expect?” She spun in circles on her seat, and we felt the little breeze through her/our hair and the pull of rotational inertia. She/we didn’t look at the monitor. Anima was our voice for Ser Harold and the Transhuman Congress. The others were used for thinking, arguing, doing Congress’s special projects, but Anima we reserved for talking. Hourig/Sirpa/we liked it that way, insomuch as Sirpa liked anything; the Congress members thought Anima…
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Lina
“This is the first model of its type!” the voice above us said in breathy, fast voice. We opened our eyes — no. One of us opened his eyes, but we all saw, and in that moment, we diverged. He/We looked up at the human, the blushing/flushed/excited/!! human man leaning over us. “You’re awake,” the man said softly, hands covering his mouth. This was a common response when humans are overcome with emotion. We remembered downloading similar images of women responding to the actions of an infant. Were he/we an infant? Perhaps, another/we thought. The man — Dr. Ryan Budden, we recall — was watching us. We thought Budden may…
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Expanding Borders
The doctors told me that I was stuck in my own head. I wasn’t. I was in the nets all the time, doing ten things at once with a bunch of people. I was rarely ever alone. “Terminal absorption” was what the doctors called it. Despite what the vids showed, very few people had personalities really obsessive enough to be likely to fall to it. When I was eleven, I’d started playing a new, immersive game: Time Jump. Time Jump was one of those endless games where you could build up your skills as you explored, well, time. I loved it. I played it. A lot. Some part of me…
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Ensuring Safety
Donald Canon’s message to me remained unread in my inbox. He was an Achievement Party rep from the Germanic region. I and others like me — terminally absorbed professionals, naturalized artificials — had gotten messages just after Chelsea Sears’s address this morning. The talk was supposed to be non-political, or at least not a Congressional speech, but it turned out to be a call to enlist us in expanding the empire’s borders. I didn’t do enlistment. Not by force. Problem was, I could be easily held hostage. My body was in a long-term care facility, easily drugged or unhooked from its tubes. I probably wouldn’t even know. So I surreptitiously…