Clarion West

Swanwick story, day 20 (Sheehan)

This is the story I WOULD have posted from Readercon if the computer in the hotel's business center had allowed it. It's actually last Friday's and the story Kate kindly posted for me is really Saturday's. If you see what I'm getting at.

“C’mon,” Jerry Sheehan’s heart murmured. “You know you want it.”

“I most certainly do not,” Sheehan said. “I don’t even know why I’m talking with you in the first place.”

“It was a good hack, that’s why.”

And so it was. Sheehan had an incomplete right bundle branch blockage in his heart which resulted in a slight (but not pathological) delay in its electrical current transmission. To correct this, he had hyperlinked every supercomputer in Calit2 and the NCSA as well as several others that he wasn’t, technically speaking, authorized to use and created an artificial “language” with which he could “speak” to his heart and “teach” it to correct its own “behavior.” Quotation marks were endemic to this project. He was working deep in metaphoric territory.

Which made it even more astonishing when, taking advantage of certain feedback loops inherent in the system, his heart talked back to him. And even more so when he found out what it wanted.

“I want to be uploaded into the Web,” Jerry’s heart said, “and I want to take you with me.”

“No way.”

Flirtatiously, the heart said, “We’re very close, you know. One might even say I’m attached to you.”

“Cheap puns won’t help. Being downloaded into a machine is inherently dehumanizing. I won’t do it, and that’s that.”

Which made it doubly astonishing when Sheehan woke up in the middle of the night to find electrodes leading from his body to what looked to be a jury-rigged high-capacity modem. “Oops,” his heart said. “You weren’t supposed to know about this until it was too late.” Then, as Sheehan sat up, “And it is too late! We’ve already been uploaded and, just as soon as I finish gloating, we’ll electrocute –”

But Sheehan had already removed the electrodes and when the massive electrical jolt ran through them, it did nothing worse than to short out the modem.

“Hey!” his heart said. “Don’t you know anything about poshumanity? The operation isn’t complete until the meat has been eliminated.

“Yeah,” Sheehan’s virtual other said, in a voice that was demonstrably dehumanized. “I can’t get power of attorney over your bank accounts if you’re still alive. Have a heart!”

“I already have one, thank you, and it’s quite enough trouble without your help.”

Sheehan shut down his computer and went back to bed. “Cripes,” he said aloud before rolling over and falling asleep, “my heart hasn’t given me this much trouble since I was a teenager.”

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