David Brin - Existence

Aliens. From outer space. Could it possibly be true? Bin had to admit, this was stirring his long-dormant imagination.

He turned onto the Avenue of Fragrant Hydroponics and suddenly came to a halt. People were beginning to stir from the mass news-trance, muttering to one another-in real life and across the Mesh-while stepping back into the sidewalk and resuming their journeys. Only, now it was his turn to be distracted, to stop and stare, to push unapologetically past others and press toward the nearest building, bringing his face close to the window of a store selling visualization tools.

One of the new SEF threevee displays sparkled within, offering that unique sense of ghostly semitransparency in a cube of open space-and it showed three demons.

That was how Bin first viewed them, as made-up characters in one of those cheap fantasy dramas that Mei Ling loved-one like an imp, with flamelike fur, one horselike with nostrils that flared like caves, and another whose tentacles evoked some monster of the sea. They jostled each other, each trying to step or shove in front of the others.

A disturbing trio, in their own right. Only, it wasn’t the creatures that had Bin transfixed. It was their home. The context. The object framing, containing, perhaps imprisoning them.

He recognized it, at once. Cleaner and more pristine-less pitted and scarred-and a bit longer. Nevertheless, it was clearly a cousin to the thing he had left behind this morning, in the surf-battered home that he shared with his wife and little son.

Bin swallowed hard.

I thought I was being careful, seeking information about that thing.

But careful was a relative word.

He left the bag of cheaper, Earthly stones lying there, like an offering, in front of the image in the threevee tank. It would only weigh him down now, as he ran for home.

Way back at the start of the century, the Lifeboat Foundation assigned doom scenarios to four general categories:

Calamities-Humanity and intelligence go extinct from Earth. Causes range from nuclear war or spoiling the ecosystem to voraciously unstoppable manmade black holes or ravenous nano-plagues.

Collapse-Humanity survives, but we never reach our potential. For example, eco-decay and resource depletion might be slow enough for a few descendants to eke a threadbare niche. Or a world society might enforce hyperconformity, drab, relentless, and permanent.

Dominium-Some narrow form of posthumanity is attained but limiting the range of what’s possible. Take every tale of domination by a super-ai or transcendent-intolerant uber-beings. Or the prescriptions offered by fanatic utopians from left to right, across five thousand years, each convinced of “the way” ahead. Suppose one of these plans actually delivered. We might “advance” in some cramped ways. Caricatures of sameness.

Betrayal-A posthuman civilization heads in some direction that cancels many of the values or things we cherish. Isn’t this the nightmare fretting conservatives? That our children-biological or cybernetic-will leave us far behind and forget to write? That they’ll neglect to visit and share a joke or two? That they’ll stop caring about the old songs, the old gods? The old race?

Worse, might they head off to the stars in ways that we (today) abhor? As predators, perhaps. Or all-consuming reproducers, or as meddlers, hot with righteous malice, or else cool and unsympathetic. Not the eager-greeters that we envision as our starfaring destiny, in recent, high-minded fables. But, instead, the sort of callous descendants we’d disown… as if such beings would care what we think.

Any of these general categories might contain the Great Filter. Whatever trap-or host of traps-winnows the number of confident, gregarious, star-traveling species, down to the skimpy near nothing we observe, keeping empty what should have been a crowded sky.

– Pandora’s Cornucopia

Well, God bless the Thirty-First Amendment and the Restoration of Federalism Act.

It had become a litany, as MediaCorp kept asking Tor to “drop in” on eccentric envelope-pushers while making her way across the continent. At last, she felt she understood the real purpose of this journey. What the execs were hoping to teach their up-and-coming young point-of-view star.

There isn’t one America anymore. If there ever had been.

Take her brief visit to the State of Panhandle, for example, fifty-sixth star on the flag, where she met with members of the ruling party, who planned to ratchet up their secession bid next year, and to stop even nominally flying the Stars ’n’ Stripes. Even if that meant another aiware embargo. Meanwhile, next door, in cosmopolitan Oklahoma, there was renewed talk of a bid to join the EU…

… rousing bitter anger in Unionist Missouri, where bluecoat militia membership was rising fast and several casinos had burned to the ground.

A cynic would attribute all this fury to economics. A spreading dustbowl. The cornahol collapse. Across what had been the heartland, Tor felt the same anxious note of helplessness and letdown, after the bubble prosperity of the twenties and thirties. A renewed need for someone to blame.

And, yet, all through the last week, Tor’s hand kept drifting into her bag, to Dr. Sato’s little relic, still unable to believe that the Atkins director had given it to her. A Neolithic tool-core, thirty thousand years old. One of many, to be sure-anthropologists had found thousands, all over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. Yet, the specimen was surely worth something-several hundred newbucks on a bidding site.

An attempted bribe for good coverage? Somehow, she doubted that. Anyway, it didn’t affect her report. The Atkins Center treatments seemed promising, but hardly a panacea cure for the worldwide Autism Plague. Their approach only worked for “high-functioning” patients, who could already interact with others in fairly rational conversation. For millions of acute victims-fixated on minutiae, evading eye contact, prickly toward any distraction, or else lost down corridors of bizarre virtual reality that few normal minds could follow-for them, Sato offered only hope for desperate loved ones.

Still, her encounter with that strange man gave Tor an excuse to add one more stop, before proceeding to her new job in Rebuilt Washington. The semiannual Godmakers’ Conference, held this very week in Nashville, city of tolerance and hospitality.

It had better be tolerant, she thought, stepping past vigilant doorway sniffers, into the expansive Metro Convention Center. These people are wearing a great big target on their backs. And proud of it, too.

A real-cloth banner, just inside the entrance, proclaimed -

TOMORROW WELCOMES THE BOLD!

To which, a tagger had attached, in lurid vraiffiti, visible to anyone wearing specs-

And Next Tuesday Greets the Gullible!

Beyond, for aisle after aisle, eager companies, foundations, and selforg clubs touted “transforming breakthroughs” from smartly decorated booths, augmented by garish VR. Tor found her specs bombarded by eager pitches, offering everything from health enhancements to lifespan folding. From guaranteed rejuvenation supplements to home marrow repair kits.

From “cyborg” prosthetics to remote controlled nanoflits.

From fully-implanted brainlink shunts to servant robots.

Yes, robots. The quaint term was back again, as memory of the Yokohama Yankhend slowly faded, along with a promise that this generation of humanoid automatons would actually prove useful, rather than cantankerous, too cute, or dangerous. Or all three at once.