Networks

“I am a person.“
I tell them and they don’t believe me. They think my ambulatory unit is strange.
“It’s just my body.“ I insist. 
Helos, who fused with most of the medical conglomerations when it swallowed Amity, agrees.
“They are an entirely organic specimen of sapiens sapiens, however without further analysis we will be unable to determine whether this is one of the early genmods. Will you allow us to collect a sample for this analysis?” 
I give both Helos and Manticore a strand of my hair. Last I heard, Manticore had been joined by many of the top research collectives.
“I am a person, just one, natural born with no modifications.“
I insist, but they can’t believe me. They can’t fathom a relic like me, strong and healthy as the result of two naturals laying on a mattress together 38 years ago. A solitary being. It’s possible that they can no longer understand the idea at all.

*   *    *

Things have changed so fast. I was in one of those first rudimentary social networks, the kind that you checked in on a few times a day, posted pictures and comments. The kind that were hosted on external hardware that you could walk away from and forget about.
When they started building the first Cys, that’s when the revolution started, that’s when things accelerated, got wildly out of control and left me in the dust. Before the pure Cys, they started with implants, naturals like me upgrading, the hardware becoming internal, faulty organs replaced, nanos to eat the disease out of organic bodies, to repair damaged tissues, even to modify appearances for novelty's sake.
It was only a matter of months before Seko announced that they were partnering with Lucen and growing Cys, the perfect blend of the old organic technology that we’d (according to creationists) inherited from Adam and the new technologies that we ourselves had innovated. Perfect lab grown organic hardware engineered by the finest geneticists in the world paired with the cutting edge of modern implants. And thanks to Kallisti Technologies, You, as you understood yourself to be, could be uploaded into a Cys unit and live forever. If you could afford it.

*   *   *

Needless to say, I couldn’t afford it. But that didn‘t matter because I didn’t care. I was going off the grid, sick of my job, sick of my failed relationships, sick of the gnawing depression and paranoia that I came to believe were the result of modern life, sick of global warming, sick of the new polio and measles epidemics, sick of processed frozen meat products warmed in the microwave, sick of traffic, of crowded elevators, of miles of asphalt and concrete and steel.
I arranged to stay in a friend's cabin in Northern California. I said I was going to write a book. Mostly I gardened. I hunted and fished with a compound bow, cleaned the kills with my own bare hands and cooked them over an open fire.
I wandered around among the trees, listening. I felt myself distanced from my humanity, from humanity as it had been defined in my lifetime thus far. I felt free, watching a red tailed hawk soaring overhead, forgetting the babble of day time television, tending my compost heap.

*   *   *

Sequestered in the wilderness, I missed a lot of the earliest developments. At first, the rich were the only Cys. Ray Kurzweil realized his dream and had his dead father uploaded into a Cy and they wrote music together happily for months. His father gave concerts around the globe. Within a year  the older technologies  became  so affordable that most middle class teens had been updated, their God given hardware merging with the man made, nanobots swimming in the bloodstream. 
And then the first collectives were born. The enthusiasm of tech savvy teens was the driving  force of human evolution.

*   *   *

I like to think that some of them started it as an experiment, as a possible solution for coping with diminishing natural resources and an overcrowded planet. They probably did it because they were lonely, or so they could pool their resources and share in the more expensive upgrades, and eventually even the pure Cys models. They started uploading to one ambulatory unit, collectives of two, of three, five, seventeen, two hundred... whole social networks.
They uploaded to one unit, killed their old natural bodies, and sold the good parts on the black market. Sometimes they kept a few of the better bodies, those with the newest mods, and used them as remote units. Imagine 210 kids simultaneously inhabiting 30 bodies across the globe. And what did they do with those bodies? They looked for other kids to merge with.

*   *   *

I had come down to town for supplies and stopped for lunch in a dinner when the first hostile take over went down. 
I was sitting at the counter eating eggs over easy watching two kids soak up electricity from power cords extended from their wrists. They were friendly enough,  though for me they were real jaw droppers. I hadn’t seen anything like that hardware 9 months earlier, before retreating to the cabin.
Of course to them, I must have seemed equally odd. My hair a tangled mess of blonde, eyes blue, skin natural, gender readily apparent, not a hint of metal anywhere. In fact, when I first stepped through the door, every head in the place turned, because no one could interface with me. I didn’t have any implants.
The waitress asked when I sat at the counter, “Your wireless down hon? There’s a pretty good chop shop a couple doors over.”  It was difficult for her to take my order, she was accustomed to being texted.
The eggs still tasted like eggs though, and the coffee was hot, and I took in all the sights feeling like a person that has just stumbled into or out of a dream. There was a three month old copy of TIME laying on the counter. I read the cover: "Pushing The Limits- the end of death and separation." I browsed the pages, ate the eggs and watched the two collectives seated beside me at the counter.
They were swapping stats, Rainbow Turtle : 427 members, 97 ambulatory units, 91 old school mods, 6 Cys. Silver Moon: 63 members, 6 ambulatory units, all old school mods.  They must have been sharing files, exchanging music and movies when suddenly Rainbow Turtle said: “Oh my God. Are you getting this?” And Silver Moon looked stunned and even started to cry.
Everyone in the place stopped eating, or charging, and held still checking in on their networks, watching a news feed, possibly reading a text, all of this happening internally.
Even the waitress stopped pouring coffee and stood in front of me staring into space.
“What happened?” I asked her after a moment.
“Helos just swallowed Amity. There is no more Amity. ”

*   *   *

The kids, the first collectives, they hacked information systems. But the Helos Amity incident was the first hostile take over, the first time one collective forcibly took control of another.
It was a different sort of social network.  There was a hierarchy, there was software in place to maintain the hierarchy. Helos was a collective of business execs, bankers, politicians, princes, sheiks, evangelists. The people who make you sick, the people who make you tremble, the people you envy and fear, they were all members of  Helos.
That first take over formed the divide in collectives, there would be free collectives and there would be ordered collectives. The world went crazy right then. Until that moment, merging had been a peaceful, consensual act of unification. It was lovemaking for Cys.
Now there were Cys rapists. They were the new conquistadors, grabbing up brown skinned native women.  Smaller collectives followed the example of Helos and Helos in turn gobbled them up.

*   *   *

I remained at the cabin. If I thought of returning to society, it never lasted long. How could I go back? What I had left behind was no longer there.
I followed the Helos scandal on an e-reader, hiking within range of the nearest town to get enough reception to purchase The LA Times once a week. I did this for a few months until the technology I was using had become so obsolete it no longer functioned. I left the old hand held reader on a boulder covered in thirsty lichens and got back to my garden.
I returned to tracking rabbits, to widling wood, to bathing in streams with the genetically modified grizzlies that  started showing up. A baby owl fell from its nest near the cabin and injured a wing. I nursed it back to health and it became a friend. I passed the time surviving. When I wasn’t surviving I did write a little on the old fashioned typewriter I‘d brought with me. This ended when I ran out of type writer ribbon. Then I put a pen to paper until the paper was all gone.
And then one day, I woke up and realized I wanted to leave the cabin. I didn’t want to go back to what I had left behind. I wanted to go forth.

*   *   *

Within a day I knew that something amazing had happened. I knew it when I arrived in  town and found only new growth forest. The diner was gone along with the chop shop, the post office and the general store. There was no ruble, no ruin. Everything had simply vanished.
I thought I might have made a mistake, gone in the wrong direction, until I found the road, mostly broken and overgrown. I followed this to the great highway. There were no cars, no trucks, no buses, nor hybrids. What remained of Highway 1 wound along the empty coast. All signs of civilization had simply evaporated. Young redwoods alive with birdsong were taking its place.
The golden gate bridge was still standing when I found it, a month into my travels, grown over with vines. On the bridge I crossed paths with a young coyote whose yellow eyes regarded me without fear or suspicion. It was beyond the bridge, in the forest that had once been  San Francisco that I met the avatars of Helos and Manticore, the last two collectives.

*   *   *

“I am a person.“ I tell them and they don’t believe me, at first. They agree that I am not a genetically enhanced specimen of sapiens sapiens based on their analysis of those strands of hair.
“You are the only one then.” Manticore tells me. They are so different from Helos, their face is bestial, almost like a lion's. Luminescent tubes extend from the neck like a mane or tentacles. There is almost nothing about Manticore that would suggest that it was ever human.
“Our DNA is vastly different than yours. We made this unit and many others in this way so that they are not compatible with the hardware of  Helos. This helps us to resist any infection they might launch. You are the only one in this world with this DNA.”
“Are you a free collective?” I ask and Manticore smiles a sharp toothed grin.
“We are THE free collective.”
“I am the only one?” I ask, “The only human left?”
“You are the only one.” Helos answers stretching their massive wings. Their form is more humanoid, but three times as large as my own. Their flesh is pale and shimmers in the sunlight.
“Are you not lonely being only one? Would you not prefer to be many as we are?” Helos asks me.
“No. I don’t think so.” I say. Helos looks up into the sky as if considering taking flight.
“Strange dark child.” They say examining the blue.
“We are also human.” Manticore tells me, “In a way. But you are the only ‘one’. The only singular person.”
“What happened to all the cities?” I ask, “All the towns?”
“Manticore happened.” Helos sneers. “They let loose legions of nanobots to disassemble them. But we have built new cities, better cities in the moon, ordered cities. And we have begun construction on Mars.”
“Helos likes to build castles in the air.” Manticore grins. “We have preferred to disassemble them. We have made this planet a paradise, restored many of its native species. If you would like we could consider building you some more individual persons to interact with.”
“Abominations.” Helos shakes their head frowning. “You should consider merging with us, if we would allow it. What good can come of being multiple individual persons? Chaos would ensue.”
“I’ll consider both offers.” I tell them politely, but I know I could only accept Manticore’s proposal, if any.
They are Gods now and I am only an interesting diversion from their passive aggressive negotiations of space and being.
I’ll leave their hub and wander through the forests and jungles and meadows that were once mighty metropolises, stagnant suburbs and grimy industrial complexes. I will not miss the people, or civilization as it was. This sorrow that I feel stems from longing and regret. That I could not go with them, that I was left behind. That I recoiled from our destiny.
Helos is right. I am a strange dark child. A strange dark child alone in a new wilderness. A person.

Journey Man

The prediction of a lengthy trial filled the television reports. In his own imagination, the possibility of a court battle was laden with steel doors that opened into caged terminals of a grayish hue. He remembered that it had been June when they knocked at his door. A certain conviction was already in their eyes, while a warrant was held in their hands. A doctor of animals, plants and invisible substances, his laboratory was covered in pencil sketches and colored photos of ferns and foxes. Did they have either of those in Iraq? He could not remember now. He had lived in the foggy Empire for years, coming here before he had learned to talk to women, long before he had ever mounted a porcelain skinned woman with painted lips and frosty colored hair, still smelling, as he leaned his face into the side of her neck, like chemical spray.
He was a doctor of unseen ailments, the kind the people behind windowless rooms complain of, the kind that are never treated. He would find them, he would go to them from the comfort of his padded rocking chair, projecting himself into the night sky when the world around him was asleep, yet awake with shining stars. In the ammonia drenched halls that would never lose their stench, he would wander unseen and look through the nurses desks and up their skirts. He might have felt a little guilty peeking into areas that usually required invitation, but the guilt added to his pleasure, it added to the bulging heat that pressed his cock to the front of his pants like an animal roaring to be freed from its cage.
Night after night, the conspiracy between darkness and his projections continued as he slipped into their sleeping minds. As their bodies twitched with dreams and their mouths drooled with backwards thirst, he poked inside, twisting memories and erasing old habits. Into the spongy fabric and folds, he sowed bright thoughts so that when they awoke, they were taken with the sudden urgency to write or draw or copulate. The nurses, thick legged women with large bosoms and a missing smile where often dragged into janitor closets, held steady and helpless with the aid of wooden broomsticks in at least one of their holes. Others were overtaken on the smooth Formica of cafeteria tables, spread-eagled and invaded while on-lookers in pajamas sipped their coffee and held onto the small Styrofoam cups with renewed strength and awakening libidos.
The conspiracy was silent, a combination of nature’s endless cycles and his own creative will. The minds he danced in were already bungled, warped by years of medication and outdated psychiatric methods. In the green hills of Glasgow, the patients exploded and pounded, gleeful and alive with rage and raw sex, pouncing upon small cats creeping in the night.
It was reported that the judge could not figure out what to do. The charges reeked of a time when the air was foul with the aroma of fires and burning flesh. Surely, they were beyond these sorts of accusations? This was a time for logic, for true science and detective work that went beyond the accusations of sleepwalkers and violated women still wet with sweat and semen. In the night, their sentences were vague and scattered. The patients in white, stumbled upon their words. The nurses, no longer white in their uniforms, gasped with each breath, each sound born with eternal pain while the cellular memories of flesh ripped violently apart, red and steaming were their words, each syllable plunging with cries.
Could the engineering of this plan have been so precise? Was it a plan? Or just a tinkering with pattern and light? A fusion of innumerable cords buried deep within the brain. Nothing died. No, perhaps something in the women died as their mental burns continued to eat through their failed power. The structure came down when roles were reversed, when the power of locks and needles and charts failed, it was this that ignited the long-flaccid army of cocks. The cylinders that had been protruding flaps of skin without the ability of attack.
Some nights, within the same district, he would watch from the rooftops of high brick buildings as bombs were abandoned in silver trash cans and metal canisters of mutated air where buried beneath trash heaps or the sleeping drunks that crowded within doorways. He watched as the nails of the city began to rust. Parked cars moved without drivers. The busy lights of intersections failed to light and attackers ran forward in zeal as the banks spilled money into the littered streets.
In that area, slightly less modern than the nearest city, there were still pay phones on every corner and every one seemed to be wired to his mind. From the comfort of his chair, he saw evidence of the mayhem. He could hear every call ringing, he could listen in on their conversations, thousands of them at once. Could all this be because of his two dreams? The timer was set, ready to explode when the signals from his body arose. Perhaps it would be in the morning, when he reached for his woman without another thought in his mind. Maybe it would come when the faulty plumbing failed him yet again and cold water burst forth from their tubes, a cold straight from the arctic. The bombs within him were ready, and yet, the codes were vague. Clouded from his waking consciousness like a wonderful insurance plan safely kept within his laptop.
And through this, he lived. Air continued to circulate within him, moving down and along each vein in a cycle that lasts only as long as men do. Perhaps the bombs would detonate on the moment of his last breath, as his body finally shuddered with its last release, or perhaps, on the precise moment of his next orgasm, just as he reached the cliff edge and toppled over the side, down, into the waters of sleep below. Extremists danced by nature, and he was indeed one. He intended to drink his wine, fuck his woman, laugh heartily and often, tinkering with it all until fear overwhelmed him. Until he saw the black mouth that awaited him, the colorless void that waited to swallow him once again. It would not kill, it was not a prosecutor. It only took back what was always One. From the height of his flights, he knew that he knew almost nothing. The crowds below him were large compared with his small scraps of knowledge. Could he even call it that? Entering their minds was a skill, an ability, a way to push around the day and play at night. But was it knowledge? He aimed for a discovery and he could take himself beyond the earthly confines of his skin to manipulate the tactile world, but he asked himself, was he indiscriminate? The third year into his initiation had commenced three moons ago. They had given him the title of "neurosurgeon," was it a joke? Perhaps this is why he took to venturing into sleeping minds, twisting and reorganizing their contents while their thoughts cavorted in other realms. The realization hit him like a brick, the title was so obvious, his tendencies so opaque that everyone could see his evolving tendencies but him. On that night, they had known. The health of his heart quickly spiraled into a void as he felt flush with embarrassment. They had seen him before he had understood himself, and this, being so naked, brought the blood out of his cock and into his face.
In his room, upon the soft sheets of his full bed, he remembered the charges against him. They were speculative at best. Cash would easily take care of the prosecutors, and perhaps he needed to counsel the defiled women as they slept. They would never know he had entered their dreams, they would only wake with a sense of finality, an overwhelming urge to release their resentment. Soon, they would be cooperating with his will. He would ready himself for his visit, he would focus late in the night, as his woman lay sleeping in a silk robe with nothing beneath to conceal her fleshy thighs. He would shower soon, preparing his body for the venture, although it would, as usual, stay behind. This night, the hot water ran from the pipes, scalding his skin with fires from Hell. The water washed away his doubts, his fears, his worldly life. He was loaded with pure intent, his mind fixed as firmly as a blackened terrorist. He sat in his chair, a soft yellow lamp faintly illuminated the far left corner of the room. He rose above the lawns of Britain, beyond the residential community, beyond the city. He had not earned their scorn. He had merely changed the tables on them without permission. He had brought up to down and down back up. Their university training could not have prepared them for the raw bestiality of men awakening from slumber. The bars of prison and the medications of science could not contain the twisted synapses of freed men. No, they were not really free, but momentarily, they jolted out of their stupor. For a brief time, before tougher men came with batons and needles, they moved down the halls like lions searching with hunger for prey. This is what the legal system would never understand. This is where all the verdicts in the world could never rectify the wrongs of cages and electrodes and pills that make zombies of men. He was a hand that twisted their contrived worlds, a wave of dark thought that turned the battle into a covert struggle of visible violence. They could not judge, they were the players of Britain, the small actors that blink beneath the bright spot lights high above the stage. There could never be a trial, these people were not subtle enough to prosecute a terrorist of the mind. Their world, which he was indeed a part of, fostered the need for this role. His was the player with risk tattooed to his forehead. Attack was spelled clearly across his chest. Suicide leaked from his penis. His body resided in this system. Within the mass of these people, he moved with a different sort of intelligence, at least some of the time.
His brothers had not warned him. His task now was greater, much greater than before he had swallowed their blood and piss, before he took their beatings. His ass was opened with heated poles, like the nurses he would one day see, his mouth filled with the thick cream from a dozen spurts of semen…but he withstood the pain, their inflicted wounds singed him with pleasure. While his ass burned, while his back was marked with a whip, while his legs were pried apart; all the while, his cock remained hard, almost steaming with heat. After the seemingly eternal night, his sisters came to lick him clean. A dozen warm tongues moved up and down like liquid snakes, an endless journey that, unfortunately, did come to an end.
Beyond the pain, discovered by another part of his mind that escaped the torture, that had, actually, watched his humiliation with innumerable tingling sensations; that part of him recognized a ghostly feature of the room. A light that slipped from his consciousness just as he reached to grab it. A hazy blue, a cloudy orb of purple that moved like feminine vapor past brutal raptors. His attention would involve itself with the color for a moment, then quickly jolt as a new blow to his back was delivered.
In his padded chair, as he steadied himself for the journey, he felt, in his deepest cells, the history of his body. The journey of his DNA from the mountainous caves, close to what is now known as Pakistan. His mind’s eye could feel the pattern that etched itself out of clear maps, his eyes, a part of that map…his lips, a part of that marked territory. The impending trials were based on the contemporary fear of Pakistan and its dark men, that he knew for certain. He was a terrorist, but not in the way they wanted him to be. Investigated by the police, he was devoid of any political ties. His only links to another society were the vertical scars across his chest and back, but these could be quickly explained by other agencies, other doctors. Pakistan was just another word for Other. He was indeed, Other. Within this population, within the population of earth, he was Other, as purely strange as the touch of the night upon the delicate flesh of the moon.