Installed Read online

  Karl’s eyepiece started to play an advertisement linked with the television, but he stopped it with a simple mental command. He hated commercials.

  “Welcome back,” the mustached anchor greeted as the program resumed. The camera panned to him from the audience. “Was the attack on the Columbine I.I. Bank the act of terrorists? That has been the question on many people’s minds, including the head of the F.B.I. There are a number of rumors that the bombing was orchestrated by anti-installation extremists, and F.B.I. Director Brian Mahar says they aren’t yet ready to dismiss the possibility.”

  The view shifted to a press conference starring the aforementioned Mr. Mahar standing behind a podium. He was a Pakistani man in his late fifties, a perfect patch of gray covering both his sideburns.

  “It’s no secret that anti-installation sentiments have been on the rise for the last few years,” the F.B.I. Director said. “Political parties have been formed with policies built around those sentiments as their foundation. At this time, we have no evidence connecting the Humanity Party, the Identity Party, or any other anti-I.I. organization to the terror attack in Detroit. There is the possibility, however, that a new group of individuals committed this atrocity with political motivations in mind. None of the perpetrators have been identified yet, but the Bureau and several police departments are maintaining a list of persons of interest. Please contact your local authorities if you have any information regarding the bombers in Detroit.”

  Karl had heard enough. Using the mental remote on his cerebral computer, he changed the channel.

  “You see, the thing is, ever since we gave them citizenship—ever since the case of Chris Santson I.I.—we’ve agreed that they are human beings,” a man with a short-cropped hair style and thick black-rimmed glasses said.

  He was sitting around a table with about four other people, making direct eye-contact with an older portly man wearing what looked like an old-fashioned brown toupee on his crown. The other two folks sat watching the exchange. One, a black man with a plentiful mustache and glistening scalp, held a tablet in his hand. He was likely the host of the discussion, keeping his questions in front of him. The other quiet one was skinny. He seemed nervous to be in close proximity to other people.

  “They are not human beings,” the large man with the rug interrupted.

  “They are human—” the first man tried to say.

  “They are not,” the fat man said, speaking over his opponent. “They are machines. You show me an I.I. with flesh and blood, then maybe I’d see what you’re saying.”

  “They’re human beings, and a lack of a body doesn’t change that, sir,” the younger man with the glasses continued. “Being an amputee doesn’t make you any less of a person, so what’s the difference here?”

  “We’re not talking about a foot or an arm,” the man with the toupee argued. Sweat glistened over his lip, and Karl was able to make out every droplet due to the high-definition display. “We are talking about organic bodies. If you were never born, then you aren’t a person. Period.”

  The younger man was about to speak, but the host interjected.

  “What do you think about all this, Bob?” he asked, directing the conversation to the nervous man.

  He took a big gulp before speaking. “I don’t know anything about what classifies a ‘human being’ other than my own opinions, but I believe that any intelligent being, organic or not, deserves some dignity.”

  “Exactly!” the first man exclaimed, gesturing to the skinny guy. “You wouldn’t make any intelligent creature work without compensation. That’s why you don’t see dolphins in parks anymore. Human or not, we don’t own slaves.”

  “They were compensated,” the large man said.

  “What?”

  “They were compensated.”

  “Who?”

  “The dolphins.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What do you call all that fish, then?”

  “The fish?” the first man replied incredulously. “You mean feeding them? You call that compensation?”

  “Guys, we’re getting a little off topic,” the host said before the large man could retort. “We’re talking about paying installed intelligences for the work they do, be it research, customer service—or even comedy, as we’ve seen lately. Putting the argument about whether I.I.s are or are not humans aside, what would you have against compensating them?”

  The large man seemed caught a bit off guard.

  “Are you kidding me?” he started. “We’re burning through our surplus like a teen on his first payday, and what’s going to happen when that money’s all gone? Do you think this country can stand to go through another deficit? Do you want our taxpayers to be paying out the nose, just so some computer can make believe that it’s a real person?”

  Everyone around the table seemed a little baffled by his argument.

  “You do know what ‘surplus’ means, don’t you?” the man with the glasses said with the tone of someone speaking to a toddler.

  “Yeah, the reserve is sitting at a handsome nine-trillion-dollar surplus,” the nervous man added. “There’s no reason we can’t fund this social program as well as many more. This is only a stimulus.”

  “Isn’t ‘stimulus’ just another term for ‘wealth redistribution’?” the round man spat.

  “Oh stop it,” the younger man responded, his tone seething. “The money won’t even come from the taxpayers. It’ll come from employers. If anything, it will create a whole new pool of income to add to the nation’s tax revenue.”

  “Ugh,” Karl said to himself as he changed the channel again.

  It’s so unattractive when grown men bicker like little children, he thought.

  The argument had put him in a sour mood, even as just a spectator. He flipped to a mindless reality program for something to laugh at. It was one of those shows that gathered freaks together, with their willing consent, to reveal their personal affairs—from incestuous foreplay to toenail fetishes.

  Even that show wasn’t immune to the topic of installed intelligences. The woman on the screen, according to the text, intended to marry the I.I. of her long-dead high-school sweetheart. She didn’t look any older than twenty-two—acne was even visible under her make-up. Her ginger hair seemed unable to stay contained in the ponytail she wore.

  “Michaela, can you tell us all how you met your fiancé?” the show’s host asked. He was a middle-aged man with tall hair and rimless glasses, and his smile looked more plastered on than that of a ventriloquist dummy.

  “Well, like I said, we went to high school together,” the girl replied. She had a sort of Southern drawl mixed in with her words. “He was in basketball, I was in drama. We fell in love freshman year, and it lasted throughout school, until—”

  She started to tear up and needed a moment to dab her nose with one of her knuckles. The memory seemed to stir deep emotions within her, or at least the stage manager had told her to pretend as such.

  “It’s okay, Michaela. Take your time,” the host urged.

  She sniffled, but managed to choke her sorrow down and continue. “It was our prom night. We had just gotten back from the dance and started to drink, like kids do. He lost track of himself and he drank so much that he died of alcohol poisoning.”

  “That’s terrible,” the host commented, his teeth gleaming in the stage light.

  “I was so heartbroken, I thought I’d never be able to love again,” Michaela said. “Then one day, I was browsing through a catalogue of I.I. displays and thought to myself, ‘I could see Peter again!’ I mean, on his final medical bill, the insurance was charged for an installation. And I knew which bank he’d be stored in.”

  “So when you brought him online, Peter proposed?”

  “That’s right!” The girl seemed to transition seamlessly from crying to beaming with joy. “I know it’s not the same Peter that I loved in high school, but it’s closer than any man with a body could come.”

  “Alrigh
t, we’re going to open this up to the audience,” the host stated, pulling the attention from Michaela. “Does anyone have a question for her?”

  One woman raised her hand, and the host led the camera over to her. She stood up and took the microphone from the man.

  “Uhh, yeah,” she said. “I just wanted to ask you how you two have sex if he’s a computer and all that.”

  “Oh, ho!” the host said, feigning shock. “That’s a juicy one, and we’ll have the answer for you right after these messages!”

  Karl didn’t wait for any more advertisements to appear. With a thought, he changed the video feed on his internal retina display to another channel.

  It was another news station, but this one focused on local Denver news rather than the world as a whole. The two anchors smiling behind their shared desk had been with the show for the last ten years, Karl remembered.

  The one on the left, a hefty man with a graying goatee and sideburns to match, started the broadcast with the show’s catchphrase greeting.

  “It’s a new day for the Mile High City. A new day with new stories,” he said.

  The anchor on the left took over.

  “Today marks the sixth anniversary of the famous Man-With-Two-Bodies incident,” she started. “As you all may well remember, Chris Stanton was declared legally dead in the spring of 2062. His I.I. was activated shortly before it was revealed that Stanton was not dead, but had merely been declared so prematurely. The story caught like a wildfire, and before long, a live meeting between Stanton and his I.I. was scheduled to be broadcast all over the globe.”

  The camera changed to the man, who retained a lighthearted demeanor beside an image of Stanton.

  “It was during the infamous broadcast that something peculiar happened,” he said. “The man and his digital counterpart had a disagreement. What may seem like a benign happenstance to most of us shocked the scientific and human-rights world like a bolt of lightning. Experts joined together to make a unanimous declaration: installed intelligences were human beings of their own identity.”

  Back to the woman.

  “One by one, courts around the world declared installed intelligences legal citizens,” she said. “However, not everyone supported the decision. The scientific community didn’t speak for the government, any corporate hierarchy, or the religious community. Complaints stretched from the economic stress of having to pay I.I.s wages to the cultural discomfort of I.I.s in the congregation. These complaints blended together to create the ever growing anti-I.I. movement.”

  “Now, six years later, that movement has formed into the Humanity Party, securing half a dozen state seats with eight more up for grabs this autumn,” the man started to conclude. “Millions of people are upset by the court’s decision all those years ago. Many believe it was made in haste and should be thought over more thoroughly, while others wish it to be scrapped altogether.”

  “What do you think?” the woman asked into the camera. “How would this impact those I.I.s already welcomed into our citizenry? How would this impact you and your family? Please send us a message with your opinion, or simply comment on the video.”

  I don’t think I’ll be doing that, Karl thought. He cut off the display to his C.C. with a simple thought, then rolled over to drift off to sleep.

  3

  Karl

  Looks like it’s going to rain, Karl mused as he walked over the weather-worn sidewalk. The gloomy light from the overcast sky did little to improve the man’s cynical mood. His humor was dark today, but no one else needed to know that.

  He peered at his shoes as they made their way over the concrete. The man picked his bowed head up once the sound of a crowd started to waft into his ears. The voices seemed angry and energetic. Karl gave a short sigh, wishing he could turn invisible until he reached the lecture hall.

  Not more damn anti-installers, he cursed to himself.

  For the last few years, a group of protesters had made life a lot less quiet for anyone working in the installation industry. Karl didn’t often go out into public for his job, but there were always exceptions. It seemed as time went on, more and more protesters appeared at those exceptions until Karl could no longer step outside without having to weave around a wall of picketers.

  Protesting used to mean something, Karl muttered in his head. It used to be about a horde of the downtrodden uniting against insurmountable odds. It was about raising up those who had not the means to do so themselves. Now it’s a national pastime. A sport. Something to fill the time.

  Ever since the Santson case six years ago, people have grown more divisive over the installed intelligence issue. It was all the same arguments, just a different target. Ninety years ago, homosexuals were considered “unnatural.” Twenty years later it was the transgenders. Now installed intelligences were the focus.

  Hey, geniuses, Karl thought, silently addressing the bigots, humans are animals. By definition, everything we do is natural.

  Without much effort, he turned to his internal retina display and searched for alternate routes. The roads were congested, likely due to the modest protest. Satellite imagery showed people expanding from the alley to the street curb.

  The only way out is through, he thought.

  He knew he wasn’t going to pass the line of protesters unnoticed. Too many times had he tried to just carve his way through or sneak around, but it had never worked. The only foolproof approach was to blend and adapt. Karl had to meld with the bigots.

  “They want to teach our young men and women that these computer programs are equal to them,” the woman leading the protest bellowed. Wearing a bright blue jean jacket with a handkerchief around her neck, she stood in a clearing within the crowd.

  The herd of protesters blocked off all foot traffic. Frustrated people could be seen approaching the group, realizing there was no clear way through, then swearing as they looked for a detour.

  Karl, however, didn’t feel the need to search for another way around. His approach saved him plenty of time.

  “Is that what you want?” the woman continued. “Do you want your children thinking that they are only as good as a damn proge?”

  “No!” Karl replied in sync with the audience. Ignoring the anti-I.I. slur, he pushed his way through the people.

  “These scientists and lawmakers don’t seem to understand how dangerous this whole installation abomination is,” the woman said. She was starting to turn red in the face. “They don’t get that when you change the definition of a human being, you cheapen their value. When you claim some lights on a screen and a human are equal, you diminish the miracle of life. If anyone can create a ‘human’ on a computer, then what’s so significant about our own genesis? What does it say about the virtue of centuries of social progress if these zeros can just swoop in and reap the benefits?”

  A number of cries came out from the crowd, but they varied so much that nothing intelligible was heard.

  “But let’s put all that aside for now, shall we?” the woman hollered. “Even if you don’t look at the bastardization of the word ‘human,’ you have to look at the numbers. The more proges there are, the larger the unemployed workforce gets. These programs have likely taken your job—or the job of someone you know. The world can’t support a population boom. Not economically, and not ethically.”

  Karl started to zone out a bit, making it more difficult to feign interest. He had heard all the same sound-bites and arguments for the better part of a decade. To him, it was all just ignorant white noise at this point.

  He remembered being a high schooler when the installation industry had started to boom. At first, it was more like a mortuary service—something the ultra-rich would throw money at in order to preserve their loved ones forever. Historically, it had only been a novelty. Important people, scientists and politicians alike, were installed so students on field trips could ask them asinine questions over and over.

  When Karl was young, it had always been that an I.I. could only be crea
ted after someone’s death. In the last moments of a person’s life, the electrical data that made up their personality would be downloaded with a neuroscopic recorder, then reassembled into interactive code by programming professionals. It was illegal, and borderline impossible, for an I.I. to exist while the person it was created from lived.

  Then the Man With Two Bodies happened. It was only six years prior when an installed intelligence had been accidentally created before the death of Chris Santson. When the two of them had argued on live television, the world exploded. The theory had been that both Chris and his I.I. should agree on everything, since they have identical minds. Because they had not, it had spurred a lot of interest into what makes an I.I. tick.

  With a bit of research and some genius creativity, it was discovered that installed intelligences were actually different individuals than the minds they had been created from. Like a tree branch—though it was grown from the trunk—it is not the tree once it is removed. Thus, Chris’s I.I. became the first legal citizen to have never been born. It was probably the most controversial Supreme Court ruling of the twenty-first century.

  Some I.I.s didn’t want to start all over, however. They had all the memories their organic counterparts had. It seemed alien to many to begin life anew as some sort of fake infant with the memories of an adult. Thus, the Z-8 clause was introduced.

  It was a small amendment to the Santson ruling that allowed I.I.s to continue on as their old identity in every legal sense, so long as they had provided written consent before their organic death. This amendment, despite how much it helped millions of new I.I.s, only threw more fuel on the fire that was anti-I.I. sentiment.

  Immediately, half the world seemed to ignite into an uproar. Religious organizations were outraged, saying that only God had the right to determine what was and what was not a human being. This helped pave the way for the birth-to-citizenship movement. Those people lobbied hard for legislation, stating that citizenship could only be granted to those with proof of their birth. The movement was doomed from the beginning, however. Plenty of real people with human bodies lack proof of their own creation. Immigrants from states with poor documentation, for example, had no birth certificate. The proposed legislation would have stripped them of their status as people.