Warden Read online

  The ground seemed softer somehow. She glanced down: below, the asphalt had been replaced with a mixture of sand and dirt.

  She lifted her gaze, but motion drew her eyes even higher, where insects roved to and fro a few meters above the path.

  “Odd,” Rhea said. “The insects… I didn’t notice any in the Outlands, but now they’re everywhere.”

  “Those aren’t insects,” Horatio told her. “They’re drones. Nearly all of them are autonomous. Most act as repeaters for the local wireless network, and they’re also equipped with micro cameras so the settlement’s central AI can keep tabs on everyone. The ones in the distance are for transport. If you look closely, you can see the payloads. They service all online orders for the capital city and its shantytown.”

  Squinting, she noticed there were indeed bigger drones in the distance, traveling around ten to twenty meters from the rooftops. They all carried payloads. Gizmo flew at roughly the same height, which seemed to be the regulated allowance for transport drones.

  “Not all of the smaller drones are operated by the settlement’s AI,” Will said. “A few of the insect-sized ones you see above? They’re flown for leisure. Adults and kids alike use them to explore the city, or race. They piggyback on the settlement’s wireless network, allowing them to get a pristine HD video feed across the entire city. It can be a lot of fun, plus it’s a whole lot easier for a resident of Rust Town to get into Aradne by drone. With solar power, regenerative braking, and multiple drones in reserve, people can spend their whole lives inside their AR goggles, flying around. There are racing leagues. Exploration guilds. Tournaments. It’s a whole world of its own. Not all that different from those who spend their days in VR, in fact.”

  Rhea watched as one of the transport drones descended, depositing a metallic bag in front of one particular container before taking to the skies once more. From the tantalizing smell emanating from that bag, she knew it held food.

  One of the children snuck away from the others, obviously intending to snag the meal, but the container’s bulky door opened a moment later and an unshaven, shirtless man snatched up the metallic bag and slammed the door shut.

  “There are also people who only interact through the world remotely via androids,” Horatio said.

  “Yes,” Will said. “But that’s more a hobby for the rich. In Aradne, android roleplaying is quite popular—a lot of the people you’ll see walking around are synthetics. Some, like you, are cyborgs with their brains directly inside the units, but others are simply human beings at home, encased in full body motion suits, relaying their every movements to their personal androids.”

  “Too bad we’re not going to Aradne…” Rhea said.

  “Nope,” Will said. “If you’re really curious, you can watch a few videos about the city on VidTube. You do have a Net connection now… though to be honest, it won’t look much different than here, save for better looking buildings.”

  She made a mental note to do that later sometime.

  “I would recommend you be careful what you watch on VidTube as well,” Will said. “Start with the PG-13 streams. Newly wiped minds are very impressionable, after all. Not too far removed from the mind of children, in fact.”

  “Except I’m not a child,” she said, a little more peevishly than she’d intended.

  “No,” he agreed. “But you are naive. That’ll change, once you get hardened up to the real world. Videos won’t really help with that. They’ll probably give you the wrong impression.”

  “But PG-13 streams will only shield her from the harsh realities of the world,” Horatio countered. “They’ll definitely give her the wrong impression, as you call it.”

  “True,” Will said. “But that’s why I said to start with the PG-13 streams. She can move on when she feels ready.”

  “I’m not sure how much time she’ll have to watch videos either way,” Horatio said. “You plan to take her to Master Bardain as soon as we’re done here, yes?”

  “Yeah,” Will said. “But we’ll probably have a one or two night layover while Bardain trains her. Enough time for her to stream some videos, if she so chooses.”

  “Somehow I have a feeling she’ll be too tired to stream videos…” Horatio said.

  “Then she’ll learn everything she needs to know in the real world,” Will said. “From us. It’s probably better that way anyhow.”

  The trio passed a group of children, who paused in their playing to watch Rhea and the others go by. She noticed that all of them were wearing glasses with small green lights active in the lower right of the frames.

  She ran a quick Net lookup on those glasses, and the search results informed her they were a form of AR goggles. Cheap enough that nearly everyone could afford them, they provided non-cyborgs with the same HUD that she had built-in. The green light indicated that the goggles were actively recording. She wondered if the central AI that Will had spoken of was accessing those video feeds, too. Probably.

  She also looked up the thin visor that Will himself wore above his eyes and discovered, unsurprisingly, that it was a model of AR goggles, too. It sat below his brow, just above the eyes, so that it could project augmented reality images directly into his irises.

  She glanced at the children once more, who had returned to their playing. A small, insect-sized drone spontaneously launched from the glasses of one kid and hovered in front of them. The trio promptly segued into a series of ridiculous poses as the drone emitted several tiny flashes of light. Rhea performed another Net search and discovered that in addition to point-of-view recording, many AR goggles also came with built-in selfie drones.

  Will took the lead and turned onto a wide, central street. Here, many of the lean-tos and cargo containers were open, with kiosks set up in front. Stands showcased various goods, with simple service robots ready to offer assistance. Usually there were humans lounging in the lean-tos behind, babysitting the robots. Sometimes the human proprietors manned the stalls directly.

  Though obviously some kind of market district, there were still surprisingly few patrons about. However, a steady stream of transport drones made up for the missing foot traffic. These machines either landed at the different stalls or hovered directly in front of them. Service robots or proprietors would insert packages into the gripping appendages of the drones and the machines would promptly take flight again. There were also a few autonomous, six-wheeled ground vehicles on the roads, these tugging around loads too big for the drones to carry, such as a rotating vat of concrete in one instance, or a bundle of heavy metal pipes in another.

  The autonomous drones and ground units would explain the lack of people. Why bother leaving the house when delivery drones could run your errands? With Net-enabled AR glasses, you could have the meal of your choice delivered directly to you, and while you ate it you could socialize with friends across the city—or the world—just as if they were in your own living room.

  Most of the buildings and stalls weren’t labeled in any way: customers were apparently supposed to guess what was offered based on the displayed goods. Then again, with all the machines flying about, maybe humans weren’t the intended audience anyway. Or at least, not the preferred audience.

  Those few people she saw out and about were dressed in loose, drab clothes, selected so as to not stand out, she thought, with hooded cloaks draping their heads and shoulders. To a man, their eyes seemed defocused while they walked: they studied empty regions in front of the different shops as if viewing something only they could see.

  The cloak Rhea wore was little different from those of every other citizen. She fit right in. Well, she was one of the few who kept the hood raised, but hey.

  Will showed her how to access the public profiles of the scarce passersby via her HUD. This allowed her to see their age, occupation, and whatever else they wanted to share publicly—basically the equivalent of the “feeds” or “walls” one often found on social media when looking up someone. Even the robot vendors had public profiles, though their feeds were usually blank.

  Up until now, Will had stayed roughly in the middle of the path, equidistant from the buildings on either flank, but now he swerved toward the leftmost side. Horatio and Rhea followed. As she neared the buildings there, suddenly she knew what the few passersby were looking at.

  As soon as she got within three meters of each stall or building in turn, augmented reality popups would overlay her vision, inviting her to explore such creatively named stores as “Bardo’s Battery Emporium—Best Lithium Salt in Rust Town.”

  As she continued, the overlays appeared with such profusion that they began to become annoying. Though sometimes they obscured much of her vision, they were translucent, and any real-world objects behind them were outlined a bright blue, preventing her from accidentally running into anything, or anyone.

  “Gotta love AR spam,” Will commented.

  When she neared a rather decrepit looking cargo container, the overlays took a turn to the pornographic, and she quickly learned how to deactivate them entirely.

  The instant her vision cleared up, she couldn’t help but sigh in relief. She also realized that roughly half of the graffiti on the surrounding buildings had vanished at the same time. It made some sense that virtual graffiti would be just as popular as the real-world variety, if not more-so.

  A drone the size of her thumb buzzed down from above and swerved toward her face. She batted it away. The drone hummed angrily, righting itself.

  A panel slid aside in the door of the decrepit container beside her, and a shady looking man peered out.

  “Hey, wanna come work for me?” the man said. He glanced at Will. “Whatever he’s paying you, I’ll double it. Girl like you could make a fortune in this place.”

  Rhea realized her fac
e had been caught on the drone’s camera and pulled her hood tighter. She took a moment to examine the decrepit building, which looked like it was made of four or five ancient cargo containers stacked together.

  “No thanks,” Rhea said, and began moving on.

  “You sure Missy?” the man pressed. “Chance of a lifetime here.”

  That made her pause.

  “Leave her alone,” Horatio said, turning around suddenly. The robot took a menacing step forward.

  The man retreated a pace, and Rhea could see his raised palms behind the door slit.

  Horatio grabbed Rhea by the hand and led her forward. She didn’t mind his tight grip. It seemed comforting, somehow. She wondered if she would have felt the same way if Will had grabbed her, and that thought worried her.

  She started when a loud clang came from behind; glancing over her shoulder, she saw that the panel in the door had slammed shut.

  “Guess we offended him,” Rhea said.

  “He offended us,” Horatio said. “There’s one thing you have to learn out here, Rhea. And that’s you have to stand up for yourself. Man, robot or cyborg, if you show weakness to anyone, they’ll try to take advantage of you.”

  “Even you?” she said. “Or Will?”

  “We already took advantage of you, in a way,” Horatio said. “Signing you to that contract.”

  “The terms seemed fair to me,” she commented.

  Horatio nodded that blank face, saying nothing more.

  On one of the buildings, Rhea spotted a strange sign that was still visible in the real world—it depicted a baby surrounded by a circle, plastering the entire front facade of the stacked cargo containers.

  “What’s this?” Rhea asked before she could look it up on the Net.

  “A fertility center,” Will replied. “We don’t allow natural evolution anymore, not in the rich quarters or the slums. If you want to get pregnant, by law you have to visit a fertility center. They’ll take your egg, wipe away all the chromosomes, and replace them with a standardized set of two, creating a fertilized ovum. Those standardized sets are slightly randomized, trait-wise, so we don’t all look the same.”

  “But why go through all the trouble?” she pressed. “If they’re going to randomize it anyway?”

  “It’s only randomized for a few mostly external traits,” Will explained. “The rest are set in stone. According to the government, this way there’s no chance of hereditary diseases. Plus, it avoids the risk of humanity slowly devolving over time. You see, as far as natural evolution is concerned, you don’t use something, you lose it. Like the tailbones we carry, vestiges of the prehensile tails we used to have as primates. Or our appendixes. Useless in every way. And because of all the mental augmentation we’ve had available to us over the past century, parts of our brain are being used less and less across vast swaths of the population. No one needs to perform complex calculations in their heads anymore—we have a chip for that, or AR to do it for us.

  “Plus, we’re far less active, thanks to drones delivering everything we need to our doorsteps, and personal robots further bringing them to our couches. Our minds have already evolved to better allow some of the more invasive tech into our heads, just as our bodies have successively become weaker. We had already allowed nearly our entire population to become dependent on prescription glasses, and we were well on the way to having that same population entirely reliant on powered leg braces to move around. Indeed, if we let evolution run its natural course, at the rate we were going, we would have devolved into a race of dumb, weak, amorphous blobs.”

  “Strange world,” Rhea commented. “But what’s to stop natural reproduction?”

  “All males have vasectomies at birth,” Will said.

  “Even stranger,” she murmured.

  “Not everywhere is like this,” Horatio said. “Take Europa. They allow natural births.”

  “Yeah, but those people are crazy,” Will said. “The Europans are going to be unrecognizable in five thousand years. The difference in gravity alone will guarantee that. They’ll be a completely different species.”

  “That might be good or bad,” Horatio said. “Some say this forced eugenics is not protecting humanity from devolving at all, but rather limiting you from achieving your maximum potential.”

  “Well, we’ve more than made up for any limitations with our technology,” Will said.

  “Yes,” Horatio said. “And your technology will make you unrecognizable in five thousand years as well. Already, we have cyborgs like Rhea. The next step is uploading human consciousness into machines entirely.”

  “You could be right,” Will said. “Leave it to a machine to lecture us on the next phase of human existence.”

  Rhea continued in silence. She wasn’t sure whether to feel offended or complimented by Horatio’s words. Already, we have cyborgs like Rhea. As if she was unrecognizable from the rest of humanity.

  No, I’m human. At least partly.

  Two streets later, an intoxicating smell drifted to her nostrils. Some kind of roasted meat. It made her artificial mouth water.

  After a few paces, she was able to locate the source; a hawker had set up a small stall in the gap between two lean-tos and he was roasting several pieces of meat on sticks. The heat source seemed to be some sort of inverted lamp, the filament inside glowing incandescent.

  The man smiled when he caught her gaze and waved his left hand. With his right arm, which was a robotic prosthetic, he turned over the meat. The metal fingers glowed a slight orange from the heat.

  “Only one cred per stick,” the man said. “Or two creds for three.”

  “It smells so good,” Rhea told Will. “Can I get one?”

  Will gazed at her with undisguised amusement, then nodded. He turned toward the hawker. “I’ll take three.”

  His eyes defocused, as did the eyes of the hawker; then the hawker smiled.

  “Thank you.” The man picked up a stick with his robotic limb and transferred it to his human hand. Gripping it by the base, he offered it to Will, who pointed at Rhea.

  She accepted the stick and slid the hood away from her face a ways so that she could dine on the meat. Doing so exposed her features more, of course, but not from the sides—she was careful not to look around in case anyone was watching nearby.

  She took a big chunk, chewed it, and swallowed. “So good.”

  Will smiled. The hawker gave him two more sticks. Will ate the meat from one and gave the second to Rhea. She wolfed it down.

  “Protein and fat,” Will said.

  “Brain food,” Rhea agreed.

  While she waited for Will to finish—he was taking his time, savoring each bite—her gaze dropped to the hawker’s arm.

  “Lost it in the Ganymede War,” the man explained. “I was one of the first to enlist. Bad idea.”

  She quickly met his eyes, feeling bad for staring. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be.” The hawker looked her up and down. “Pretty, for a cyborg. Then again, most of us are cyborgs these days, to some degree.” He clacked his metallic fingers for emphasis. “We all strive for beauty. And yet, all beauty is fleeting. Especially that of this world. Did you know, our entire universe is falling into a super massive black hole? We’ve already passed the event horizon. Don’t you worry your pretty little face, though: because of the time dilation, it’ll be another million years before we’re crushed to a point.”

  “Well, that hit the spot,” Will said, licking his fingers. “Thanks.”

  The salvager tossed aside the empty stick and quickly led Rhea away. Horatio brought up the rear.

  When they were out of earshot, Will told her: “And that is what we call a Black Holer. A cult of people who believe our universe is trapped in the event horizon of a black hole.”

  “I see,” she said. “A pleasantly dour sort.” She pulled her hood close around her face.

  “They certainly are,” he agreed.

  “Did I mention this world keeps getting stranger and stranger?” she asked.

  “You did,” he replied with a chuckle.

  Will continued through the city, turning down several more side streets and byways. Rhea would have become hopelessly lost if it weren’t for her HUD map, which had the entire city available for her perusal. She merely had to zoom out to get an idea of where she was in relation to the entry point. The map extended beyond to the Outlands as well, covering the entire world. Will had mentioned something about how the map data was “crowdsourced,” and thus continually updated.