Tevun-Krus #7 - CyberPunk

Transistence

***

It wasn't long after the introduction of memmers—androids with memristor/transistor hybrid brains—that the Global Human Freedom movement sprang up. In short, the last hundred years or so have gone like this: national governments began signing foreign investment agreements allowing corporations to sue national governments for damages to their profits. Corporations leveraged this not only to sue per se, but also to expropriate and enact their own legislation. Powerless, national governments collapsed and in their wake came corporate governments. Corporate citizenship usurped the now completely worthless national citizenship; as a corporate citizen, one held the privileges of corporate citizenship only as long as one worked for the corporation.

Then came the memmers amid great fanfare and multiple Nobel prizes. By 2075 the emancipation slogan "Memmers of Society!" rang from every rafter and tarmac, and in 2078 memmers became eligible not only for employment but also for personhood, and by extension citizenship, in a corporation. The tireless memmers, requiring no sleep or compensation, soon depreciated the value of humanity in a corporation until all but the most workaholic memmer-like humans were unemployed, and therefore had no rights or representation as citizens of any country. The global economy had become a runaway train, completely disconnected from any benefit to humanity, though monitoring every move—human and android alike—via Pulsenet.

We humans woke up en masse, realized we were pets to the memmers we had lauded only a few years before, and have been fighting a losing battle for dignity and equality ever since. So far our only victory is developing Coconet, a Samoa-based clandestine network protected from memmer and corporate infiltration. We need more than this. Much more. We are determined.

***

Peter is on our Coconet connection, holo-chatting with our monitoring staff in Samoa and checking on the integrity of the Pulsenet connection when the alarm on the bypass unit goes off. The rapid succession of beats sounds like Guud is going into cardiac arrest, but when I look over, he has turned his head and is staring straight at me. It's the Pulsenet connection.

"What's going on?" I shout to Peter over the din.

Peter, out of Guud's field of vision, makes a throat-slitting sign, and points at the display, which is now registering two independent and differing signals for R102-ADGC9; one of going about his scheduled impregnation sessions with women like me in the endangered race breeding program, and one of waking up to find himself lying half-dissected on a stainless steel table.

And my face, wide-eyed at Guud's stare, is now locked in the mind of every memmer on the planet, associated with Guud's confused dissection memory that has already skittered through every node of Pulsenet.

I am a dead woman. The next martyr. Or one of, depending on whether they get to Peter first.

The alarm stops pinging.

Bypass restored. Pulsenet connection restored, the display reads.

Guud is awake and trying to move, but with all his chest and abs nicely butterflied, he isn't getting far.

I prepare a new probe and incapacitate him again with a transistor jammer. He falls limp to the table, his head hitting with a metal-on-metal ring.

Peter and I look at each other. We each know what the other is thinking. Execute Emergency Plan A. I pocket a spool of siliconized carbon fiber thread for later sewing up Guud, and nod at Peter.

Memmers are designed to weigh approximately the same amount as comparably sized humans, which still isn't comforting when Peter and I drag Guud's 180-pound body across the room to the flight pod down the hall. Already, the sound of footsteps high above us rings in the tunnel alleys leading to our deep salt-mine laboratory.

We light up the flight pod and lift off into the adjacent salt cavern. With distance building behind us, I motion for the Coconet interface cube and when it lights up, I program the lab destruction. I check the location of the memmers on the Pulsenet connection. Close to the lab. Ten metres. Five.

Execute, I tell Coconet, before I have a chance to think twice.

Explosions rock the pod like a canoe in whitecapped water. An orange glow and the occasional spear of flame and spark emanate from the tunnel from which we'd just come. The memmers in pursuit disappear from Pulsenet.

Peter and I both breathe a sigh of relief and he begins to maneouver the pod through the tunnel system to the surface.

"Memmers intercepting," I hear over the Coconet link.

We check the Pulsenet display. Three new craft coming at us, with intercept time in thirty seconds.

"Get us out of here," I urge Peter, ineffectively swallowing my panic.

"I'm going as fast as I can!"

We're weaving through narrow tunnels between caves, walls appearing ghost-like and equally unannounced in the harsh headlights of the pod. The darkness swallows up all but these flashes of near-death. O Ancestors, I need you now... save us!

My only memory of my Haida great-grandmother is of her telling me the story of how her apple wouldn't sync with her android. As a four-year-old, I thought it was hilarious that a fruit should be expected to sync with a robot. My father later told me that the apple and the androids were both transistor computers, which made the story all the stranger because really, who's ever heard of computers who don't talk to each other like a pack of gossiping grannies? All that's left now is a shell of nostalgia, both for my grandmother and for those days when barriers to information transfer existed. To have both of these back now—for Pulsenet to be impossible—would be pure heaven.

Anti-aircraft bullets slam into the pod from behind, rocking us. Glass shatters and the back of the pod explodes. I am flying in mid-air, wondering if we can save Guud and our transceiver membrane and his memristor brain and the precious connection to Pulsenet for phase two of the infiltration. Thoughts of Guud and Pulsenet fade into the depths below me.

I am flying like an eagle. I am an eagle.

It's only after a few minutes of flying like an eagle that I realize... I am not dead.