Chapter Nine

Chapter 9

    The theater was packed. Mary has sprung this on Damien as a surprise after he’d gotten home from work the last day, and he’d done his best to be excited, although he was still deeply troubled from the events at work.

He had spoken with Rose for over three hours, and through his relief and joy, an insistent, irritating part of him had begun to notice something off. A mutual friend referenced that he did not remember. A favorite restaurant that he could not place. A turn of phrase that didn’t sound like her. The vast majority of his mind was screaming that this was insignificant, irrelevant, that these were tiny things, unimportant – that she was still Rose. However, it was screaming to drown out that little nagging part of him who said that nevertheless, these little things made all the difference in the world.

     He hid this from Mary, and sat back to enjoy the show. The theater had been a movie theater originally, but when the movie theater business had stopped making sense, the building had been bought on the cheap by a theater group and remodeled for stage. The front two rows of seats had been removed to make a large, open area.

     Damien had never been to a play before, so it was easy to be fascinated by the experience. The lights had dimmed a moment before, and the darkness was suffocating, save the dull red glow of Mary’s hair. Around him, the murmuring of the crowd pressed inwards on him claustrophobically, buffeting him around like invasive current of pressure, rising into crashing breakers as everyone tried to speak over the noise. Suddenly, the curtains were swept aside. On the inside, a vast mural had been hung on the wall behind. There were few enough people on the stage, but somehow they projected the confidence of those with an army behind them, just outside of visibility.

     At their head, two men stood. One of them was noble, the other hideous. The nobleman was Arthur, and the ugly one was Mordred.

     “I will not draw the first sword, Mordred.”

     “Nor will I, Father.”

     The play continued. The snake was killed, and the final battle played out, and was interrupted with Merlin, who explained the context, and took the story back to the beginning.

Damien grasped the story easily enough, between the efforts of his literary constructs, and Mary’s somewhat plainer whispered explanations. They had front row seats, so he had a fantastic perspective on the action.

Damien had never seen anything like it. His education had been haphazard at best, since the public school system had collapsed when he was eight. His father had been considerably too busy dying to do much in the way of home schooling, so he had more or less raised by his specs until he was intelligent enough to learn to control them.

The Gardener had helped him when it could, although back then, it had still been barely-sentient – he didn’t achieve his current lucidity until his father had dumped all the programs and memories from his specs into it shortly before dying.

     As a result of these unfortunate circumstances, Damien had never read the Arthurian legends, and had never been to a play, or even heard much about them, except in the vague, background sense that most people hear about alpha proximus in. He knew they existed, but had never had an urge to watch one, or learn more. He had, like most people, more or less assumed that they had died out.

     Now, however, he was riveted. The clashes of metal, the sweat, the sprays of blood from trick swords. It was utterly different from the games and movies he had been playing since he was a child. It was… real.

     Evidently, he thought, listening to the rustling of the crowd, he was not the only one so entranced. He had no idea that this place had such a following.

     It was remarkable to his constructs especially, how this could have such a vast feel of authenticity, of immediacy, even though he was close enough to see the bulges of the blood-bags, to see the retracting swords.

And somehow, he also knew that if they’d used glasses overlays for the special effects, it would somehow have ruined it completely.

     Then, he understood what was going on.

     “You didn’t tell me this was run by the Luddite party!” he hissed at Mary.

     “Would you have gone if I did?”

     “Well, yes, I suppose so, but-“

     “Then what’s the problem?”

     Damien knew when he was beaten.

     The Luddite party! The name didn’t exactly have negative connotations as such, but connotations it did have. It was something spoken of in lowered voices, and spoken about publicly only by the most radical of radicals.

     They compared themselves to those had earlier fought for the separation of church and state – their ideology was the separation of technology and culture. They weren’t anti technology by any means; the leader was a hundred and thirty year old cyborg, so that much was clear. They did, however, maintain a lifestyle that included aspects from the culture of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents, such as museums, theater, paper books, and democratic government.

The government side was what separated them from just another hippy group. They had written a constitution, formed an arbitrated legislative and judicial system, and were applying to communities on a voluntary basis: They’d patched a militia together out of volunteers, and they allowed communities to ‘opt in’ to their form of government, if they provided a certain number of volunteers for militia service, and paid taxes. In return, the communities got the right to a fair trial, the right to have disputes arbitrated by a jury of their peers, right to preservation from unreasonable search and seizure, right to protection from assault, right to free speech and freedom of the press, etc.

     This outdated ideology had been surprisingly popular, especially among communities with an older population, who had been alive before the collapse of the original government (The Gardener was a member, and made generous contributions of food and volunteered several of his Harvesters and trucks for militia service regularly). It had also put them into near-constant conflict with the larger corporations, who had recently staged major assaults on militia activities, and were threatening economic sanctions against anyone involved (these threats were undermined by the simultaneous offers of other companies, smelling an opportunity, of low-priced goods).

     Back on stage, Arthur was being barged down the river to Avalon, and the curtain was closing. Damien was on his feet with the best of them, clapping his heart out.

     After the bows had taken place, Mary took him by the hand, and gently but firmly directed him backstage. To his surprise, they were not challenged, but were welcomed. The place was an open area, perhaps the size of a small home. Dressing stalls were arranged against the back, and the middle of the room was filled with a circle of chairs, surrounded by tables stocked with an eclectic mix of fresh fruit and vegetables, and pure junk food.

     Mary began introducing him around. The actors looked different out of costume – blank, somehow, after the enveloping personas he had seen them take on before. He had never realized it, before, but glasses really changed the faces of people, as he had rarely seen people without them. Mary wore an expensive pair of stylish, glossy red ones; slim, attractive, and cool. Damien’s were a much chunkier pair of black ones with HD screens and about five times the processing power; unattractive, and practical. He glanced around the room. The glasses here were again different – understated. They had had no trouble remembering their lines on stage, it occurred to him, and he hadn’t seen any wires – they obviously were not as dependent on the glasses as normal people were.

     His glasses flashed up a memory before his eyes of something he had never read; a study they had done years ago, in which they had paid fifty college students to go a week without their glasses. The study had to be called off after two days, since thirty seven of the participants were living on the street by then.

     The glasses had the effect of replicating certain functions of the brain, like memory and certain modes of thought that could be offloaded to constructs. As a result, the brain realized that it no longer had to remember things (the glasses did it for them), and no longer had to think in certain ways. The result of this was that the areas of the brain normally used for the things the glasses now did much better were re-wired and put to something else. Organic memory suffered a 90% decrease in effectiveness within five years of buying a pair of glasses, as did several kinds of rational analysis, fact-checking, and anything else the constructs did. The people effectively become a processor, thinking the thoughts fed to them by their glasses.

     Due to the sheer volume of brain tissue freed up, the people with the glasses also experience a two-fold hike in IQ very rapidly after beginning to use the glasses. Combined with the other advantages such as eidetic memory, mental communication, and instantaneous knowledge and mathematical prowess, the benefits overcame the dependency associated.

     Damien himself never removed his glasses, except to sleep. He couldn’t stand being conscious without them; if he wasn’t wearing them, he was blind, ignorant, and stupid. The most nightmarish part of the assault, to him, had been having to deal with a stressful situation without his glasses – with most of his mind missing, he was as lost as a child. The glasses, it occurred to him (or perhaps his constructs), were more Damien than the meat-bag thinking the thoughts.

The flesh and blood Damien existed almost exclusively to serve as the primary agent of the glasses – the glasses had absorbed his opinions, views, and memories, and had refined and expanded them a thousand-fold. Now, they were feeding them back into the world through him, and he was acting as the executer of far more interesting thoughts.

A person he was being introduced to snapped him back to reality.

“Hello Mr. President.”

“Hello Mr. Grey. I hear you’re a good friend of Mary’s these days.”

“Yes, sir. We’re dating.”

“Congratulations. Best of luck to you both. Come right this way, I want to introduce you to some of the militia. We’re very grateful for your father’s help these days.  He cannot attend meetings very often, of course, for political reasons, but he helps out when he can.”

Damien didn’t have the heart to correct him as he followed the man through the scattering of people in the room. He didn’t look much like an old man – at a hundred and two, he’d been one of the early adopters of metabolic-restructuring reconstructive therapy (more commonly known as Rejuvenation) – they’d finally worked the kinks out of it so it no longer killed lab rats, and the President had volunteered.

He went in for surgery, and they doused his muscle tissue in a steroid cocktail to make them grow, chemically recalcified his bones, patched his heart and veins, sent a biotic swarm to clear the plaque from his arteries, inserted neurotransmitter-producing artificial micro-tumors into his brain to ward off dementia, and finally shot him full of engineered phages that threw his mitochondria into overdrive - as a bonus, they also gave him full body cosmetic surgery.

The result was that he walked out of the hospital looking like a young man, and promptly went to work for the Luddite party. After two years of this, an assassination attempt (barely) failed, and left him with three limbs missing, and most of his body cavity eaten out by a rogue biotic swarm (some would argue that it had succeeded). The doctors gave him the option of vat-growing most of his body, or replacing the damaged components mechanically, and he’d opted for the latter. As a result, his vital organs and three limbs had been completely replaced by machines that did the same things, but better (he was fortunate that this happened to him after targeted immuno-suppressants had been invented).

You wouldn’t have known it to look at him, although from certain angles, you might notice that his glasses connected directly to sockets in his head (they skipped the trashed eyeballs entirely, and tunneled directly into the optic nerve), and on several occasions, he had been known to crush a rock in his hand to intimidate opponents.

The fact that he had gone back to work after the assassination attempt had been the primary key to his winning the presidential race. He was the most dedicated member of the Luddite party.

The militia men were a mixed bag – they roughly divided into the young idealists, of whom there were more than a sprinkling, the cyborgs, and the Rejuvenated elderly.

The Rejuvenators, all of whom had had their bodies reset so they looked like twenty-somethings, were easily spotted – they were the ones who looked far, far too young to carry such an overwhelming sense of tiredness in their eyes.

     They were mostly ex-cops, and represented most of the experience to be found in the militia. The energy that there was came mostly from the idealists, who hadn’t had enough time to become completely hopeless, and therefore got a surprising amount accomplished. The sheer firepower came mostly from the cyborgs, most of whom were voluntary modders - they had paid a lot of money to have themselves outfitted with high-fidelity brain implants, sub-cutaneous armor, and built-in weaponry. Most of them hadn’t breathed in years. They could take two rounds of machine run fire to the chest and come away whistling. When it came time to actually fight someone with any firepower at all, the cyborgs went in first.

     They moved around the circle, and he began to notice something. They all knew Mary. Ever last one of them had a smile or a nod for her, of the kind passed between friends. There was also, he realized, an undercurrent of…regret? Pity? Fear? Something. As soon as he could do so politely, he disentangled himself from the conversation (which primarily consisted of them thanking him for the Gardener’s support), and took her aside.

     “Are you a member of the Luddite party?” He asked.

     “Sort of. I used to volunteer for the militia. I don’t anymore. I still have friends in it. Why do you ask?”

     “Just curious, I suppose. You never struck me as a paramilitary type.”

     She gave him a wink.

     “That,” she said, “is the trick.”

     He nodded, feeling slightly confused. That had been phrased as a joke, but it hadn’t sounded like one.

The militia members were nice enough. They all seemed like the kind of people who didn’t shut the windows when they heard screaming in the dark.

     As the evening progressed, he began to realize that these were her friends he was being introduced to – she was showing him a private aspect of her life. When he realized this, he began to funnel more energy into making a good impression.

     Finally, things began to trail off. There would be no further showings that day, and the actors went home. The militia men went off their break and went back to keeping the peace. Finally, with some drawn out goodbyes, they left to grab a cab for her apartment.

     On the way there, she curled against him, body warm against the chill, creased into their bodies by late-autumn winds. He tucked his arm around her, and began to wonder what to think about the encounter with the Luddite party.

     Then, without warning, she suddenly twisted out of his arm, and whirled around impossibly fast, hair nicking his face with it’s speed. She caught the hand of a man he hadn’t even seen in the crook of her elbow, twisting it with an awful cracking sound accompanied by a scream of pain. The knife dropped to the street, and she kicked it away, warding off a blow, and shoving the flat of her palm into the bridge of his nose, which crumpled, spraying blood.

She stepped forward to stomp on the would-be mugger’s throat when Damien caught her shoulder. He saw her flinch, saw her start to spin around to attack him, and then saw her force herself to stop. She slumped backwards against a wall and slid to the ground, shaking badly. Her eyes were bloodshot, her breathing was shallow, and her pale limbs were trembling like leaves in a dark autumn wind.  Her hair was burning with a sickly yellow glow, half of it’s normal intensity.

     The moaning, bleeding mugger dragged himself down the street as he half carried her to the cab, and they drove away.

After a few moments to gather herself, she turned to look at him, and said

     “Sorry.”

     “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it. I had to find out eventually.”

     “Should have been sooner,” she muttered.

Her nose was bleeding, and she wiped it away.

     “What was that, anyway?”

     “Nothing unusual. Electrically stimulated micro tumors that produce adrenaline, hemoglobin, caffeine, Ritalin, steroids and a load of other stuff. Toxic as hell, but it gets the job done. The glasses activate it when they sense danger”

She coughed, and sank further back into her seat, shuddering
    “I hate this part.”    
    He gently asked her,
    “Did you have to do this for the militia?”

“No.” she coughed again.

“Then why?”

She looked at him again. Her eyes were red. She was almost crying.

“Please don’t ask me that.”

“Okay,” he said.

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