The Future

_{Art By Lacey Byington.}

I have to admit, this is not the future we thought we were building. We imagined a future where we were gods and would change the world. Fix all of humanity’s problems. We were half right. We solved hunger with synthesized foods, pleasing to the senses, filling to the stomach, and vitalizing to the body. Inequality has been minimized to the lowest levels it’s ever been. Community spaces filled the need for contact as religions crumbled and fell. Sure, a few cells held on here and there, but God means nothing to a world in which no one fears death.

That’s what they say, anyway. You’ve learned these things, but they mean nothing to you if you never lived them. You live on a ray of time in which reality was fully formed at the moment of your first conscious thought, and all that’s ever existed is limited to one continuous now from that point on.

I was four hundred thirty-six years old, not yet ready to be called immortal, but closer than anyone else. I was the first. We began with computers, but as chip manufacturers hit the quantum limits of what silicon could do, and then carbon, we learned to program matter. Sub-particle scale nanobots. We mastered assembling quarks, bosons, and leptons into machines that could rewrite the world.

You don’t know what a doctor is, do you? No, of course not, that was after your time. Look it up sometime, you’ll be surprised at how fragile a body could be back then. But, it did not take long before we could manipulate a living person's DNA. If you were not born perfect, it only took a month or two for you to be made perfect.

My proudest moment was when I developed the “Bio Interface Molecule,” what you call BIMs now. We no longer needed clumsy macro scale machines to translate between our wishes and our reality. But we couldn’t wish away war, and my invention reversed the direction wars took. They transformed from battle fields half a world away to a cancer within a single body. Every human was warrior and warzone.

It was the time after that, after the rebuilding had been completed and relative stability had been established, that you came along, wasn’t it? Yes, it had to be. Not many were born after that. But my intent wasn’t to give you a history lesson, nor was it to brag about my own writing of it. I would tell of my last living days, and how I came to be as you see me now.

My story takes place in the city of New Eden. Your face tells me that you’re not familiar with the city. I’m not sure it’s still there. It’s long since gone silent. But it’s enough to know that during the last years of war, we built the city underground and shielded it from incoming malicious signals. That’s not to say no one was hacked any more, but the attacks were much less frequent.

Time is—well, it’s different for me now. I still think of it as the day after I died. So, I’ll tell you as I perceive it. I learned 3 days ago I was targeted for an attack by hacktivists. It didn't seem too serious, just Organic First hackers who got their hands on some heavy molecule machines. Nothing I hadn’t seen before, so I didn’t take it seriously. When I was a kid, hackers were geniuses who sat in the dark banging on a keyboard all day and night. Even I had done my fair share. Every scientist and engineer is a hacker at heart. Sometimes it took on a bad connotation, most of the time hackers just liked to push the boundaries of what people thought possible.

Now, they are hit men and terrorists.

I began my day like so many others. I went to the cafeteria down the way, had my morning coffee and talked with the other Series Ones. It’s amazing to think that through all the advances and connections, talking has never been replaced. From there I walked to the park and watched the darkness in the still pond there to clear my mind. I enjoyed the artificial breeze on my face. I think it’s my favorite memory. It was my last quiet moment alive.

As I rose to leave the park, three punks clad in white leather, sporting aluminum bats and heavy iron pipes walking toward me. Not what I was expecting my hit man to send my way.

I began to walk past them nonchalantly, but was caught by the arm. A bio-augmented grip tightened, putting my arm to sleep, and my mind raced, trying to gain access to his implants. As the group closed in around me, I was able to access his systems and shut down power to all extremities. He fell to the ground just as his buddy swung a pipe at my chest. I was able to turn just enough to take the blow on my left shoulder. I felt the bone shatter as I was thrown meters from the group.

I used my right arm to lift myself upright and was already off at a sprint before I had fully regained my balance. The thugs were after me in a flash. With their augments, they were stronger and faster than I was, and were gaining on me fast.

With all the attention I could spare without tripping over the curb as I ran, I tried to hack the bigger one's bio-system. As commands flowed through my head, I could already feel the bones being set in my arm.

I rounded the first corner I came to and ran directly into a crowd of protesters. I shoved my way against the movement of the crowd and realized it was useless to try to keep up the hack. Too many signals.

I looked behind me in time to see the bigger of the punks reach the edge of the crowd. The first person in his way, a short man reminiscent of the hippy's back in the 20th century, had the inconvenience of having his head removed via lead pipe. The lady behind him, then covered in a goo of blood and gray matter, screamed. The organization of the crowd gave way to the chaos of a mob.

Now that the mob was at least partially moving in the same direction I was, movement was easier. I was able to slip down an alley and hide in a doorway as the protesters continued on. The alley grew quiet and my breath slowed, as did my flow of adrenaline. My arm stung and my legs ached.

I was afraid to leave the door way. I hadn't seen the thugs pass, but they could have, in the confusion of the mob. I tapped on the door I was leaning against. A woman who worked in the shop opened the door and I burst in and ran to the front of the store to check the street. The street looked empty, so as the woman yelled something -I was too preoccupied to understand what- I left the store.

I passed the street where protesters retreated and saw three bodies lying to the side of the road. I quickened my pace to a jog and headed back for the cafeteria. I was suspicious of everyone I passed. At the door of the cafeteria I noticed a tall, rather bulky silhouette on the other side of the shaded glass.

I backed away just as the door exploded in a shower of sparkling, cutting shards. The tall thug stood there with his pipe pulled back, ready to strike. I ran again. This time I had a plan. If I could just get home, I may be able to defend myself.

As I ran toward the high rise only three blocks away something went wrong. A feeling I hadn't felt in nearly two centuries rose in my stomach. I was feeling ill.

My step faltered and I rolled head over heel. I landed and my body convulsed and heaved. My mouth filled with a foul taste and my breakfast spilled out onto the street. I heard the steps behind me stop. Very clearly the servos in his arm buzzed and the slow methodical breathing of his machine-controlled lungs counted down his next move. Then I heard a loud thud and my vision flashed white.

I thought I had been hit, but when my vision cleared, I remembered the hippy man's head being removed with one hit from this thug. Realizing I still had my head, I rose to my feet again to run to my flat.

My vision faded in and out, the world spun. My stomach heaved almost constantly but had nothing left to return. My mouth went dry with the taste of spoiled food and stomach acid, and something else.

I reached the door to the high rise. I briefly glanced over my shoulder and saw the thug, not a step behind me as I thought he should be, but nearly a block away. I should have been curious, but I felt rather relieved. I ran to the elevator and hit the button for my floor. 47.

In the elevator, I swallowed hard, trying to rehydrate my mouth and then it dawned on me. Blood! That’s what the other taste in my mouth was. I was bleeding internally.

I then realized I had been hacked, my nanites had been turned against me and were destroying me from the inside. The doors slid open. I walked to my flat down the hall. The door was open.

My home was empty save for a high back chair facing the window in the main room. As I walked around to the font of the chair my body lurched again. This time it was only blood that filled my mouth, it also ran from my nose. It stained the tile on floor as it spread.

“Two days,” came a voice from the chair.

Again came the blood. I felt weak, unable to hold myself up any longer. My arms gave and I landed, left cheek in the pool of my fading life.

“Maybe.” It was a man’s voice, that’s was all I could tell.

Many thoughts came, but all I could manage to say was, “Why?”

My head was light and I no longer saw anything but darkness.

“Nature.”

I heard footsteps as two people entered the room, and puzzled over the answer. It made no sense. My lungs began to burn. I tried to gasp for enough air to question him again but it was caught in a caught. My body shuddered. The blood sprayed again from my mouth.

“Everything dies. It's the way of nature. You didn't think you would be any different, did you?”

Here, with him, religion never really died. There would always be those who were willing to do horrendous evil all in the name of a god.

I felt cold.

“It hurts, doesn't it?”

I nodded.

“I'm feeling generous today.”

I heard the window open. Even on the 47th floor there is no real wind when your city is underground.

I felt myself being lifted. They were dragging me to the window.

“I will give you what you so selfishly denied mankind so long ago.”

I was now being suspended out my window by my neck. The blood was pooling up in my head. I couldn't even gasp for air now.

“Release.”

I was flying. No. I was falling. I don't remember there being a flash of my life before my eyes. I opened them. For the briefest of moments, I saw the most beautiful thing I ever saw. I think.

That last sight was the cluster of high intensity lights we used as our artificial sun. Blue and red simulating the spectrum. My eyes began to sting and the sight was gone. The last thing I would ever see.

And that was it.

Here I am now. Trapped, as it were, in a machine. Unable to feel. Unable to create. Able only to remember. I know not what happened the first day. On the second day I awoke, or as it really was, I was booted up. On the third day I tell you this.

The future?

This is not how we pictured it. We thought we were gods. We thought we would change the world. We were right. I am now trapped in an un-life of ones and zeros, by a technology I created. I am not immortal, but I was the first.