The Ice Traveler

The Ice Traveler
By: Priscilla Rhoades
I don’t want to disturb you or anything but the world is run by evil men. Pimps and presidents, porn kings and CEOs, drug lords and DEA. It’s hand-in-bloody-glove, a prizefight in the pit bull ring of this life we’re in, you and I, whether you believe it or not. Say you’re shaving some morning, listening half in dreamtime to the radio news and you hear another story about a billion dollars in aid to some butcher in Africa, a billion in aid to some dictator in Latin America. You ever cut yourself wondering where that money is coming from? How it’s rolling off the Fed’s presses, green as backyard mint? I’m here to tell you, we went off the gold standard a long time ago; that money’s backed now by blood. Some people call me a victim, but I don’t look at myself that way. The way I see it is this: I’m still here. Though we’re all on the government’s hit list—blacks, gays, hookers, G.I. Joe who was dumb enough to re up. I know my country injected those poor bastards in Africa with the AIDS virus, only they’re not dying fast enough so it’s on to the next plan. I know we dumped a mountain of crack on the brothers in Southeast L.A. The Tuskegee Experiment didn’t end in Tuskegee, and there sure as hell isn’t a shortage of ideas left in that demonic brain trust known as the CIA. Now, you would think that someone with my viewpoint would be naturally inclined toward depression—paranoia is a given, of course. But you would be wrong. Naturally, I’ve done my time in the psych ward, and you won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve been hooked up to that lightening rod known as shock more than once. I call it the ice house, that place you go when the blue-white bolt slaps you upside your face like salvation, and I’ve spent more than one lonesome afternoon crawling my way down from its frozen walls. Not that I attribute my calm to Jesus--although the original suffering son and I are on first-name terms. No, there’s a reason for my equanimity and it has nothing to do with religion. But perhaps I should tell you my story. You’ve heard it before, or something like it; I’ll tell it to you anyway. Close your eyes, as the good doctor says, get ready to dream. I was born under the sign of Taurus, that makes me steady and stubborn like the bull. I never really knew my mother—she dropped me off at her sister’s one day when I was three, went out for a six-pack and never came back. My aunt read us our horoscopes every day. She was a Libra with the bad taste to marry a Pisces, who made a fishy exit over the sweet Pacific. She married again, this time to a man who was born under the stars of hell, I’m absolutely sure of it. I don’t remember the first molest but I remember the last. It was my fifteenth birthday and when he came at me, hands already on his fly, I pushed past him and ran, and I didn’t stop running until I’d made it to Hollywood. Yes, it’s a cliché, but as I said, you’ve already heard my story. And so you know that I lived on the street with the other hookers and hustlers, runaways all of us, abused children is what we were. I worked the clubs, a lap dancer by profession with a little extra on the side. You know what comes next. In my case it was cocaine, an Andes of coke, washed down with an ocean of wine. Now, suicide is a funny thing. Sometimes you do it neat—a thirty-eight slug in the frontal lobe—and sometimes you do it sloppy. Me, I’ve been sloppy every time. So after my third visit to the locked floor, I was transferred to the neuro-psychiatric ward of that big university up on the hill, into the care of Dr. K. Dr. K looked like every trick I’d ever turned, with his perfect children smiling up at me from their photographs on his shiny desk, where I sat for my client intake. “How old are you?” he wanted to know. “Twenty-nine,” I said. The truth is I turned thirty last April, but I can’t bring myself to admit it. That’s really old for my line of work, and I feel it. And then once again I was telling my story to some sad shrink, reciting the cliché that is my life. And like all the rest of them, Dr. K wrote it all down, taking notes as if he was really paying attention. “We’ll need a few tests,” he said when I was done. They’re always surprised. Clients and psychiatrists, white-collar guys always think you must be dumb, otherwise why work the sex trade? “You’re bright,” he said when he saw how I scored. He was still making notes, and upside down I thought I could make out what he had written: IQ 130, borderline personality. I could tell by the way his mouth changed then, the way he moved his thin little lips, that he wanted me. Not for sex—I can read that easy enough—no, this was more like some kind of scientific lust. “Sign this,” he said, pushing a piece of paper across the desk. “What is it?” “Informed consent.” I figured informed consent must be what you sign when you’ve got no choice. Because before I could read it all, Dr. K reminded me that a lot of my activities had not been exactly legal up to that point in my life and that a call could be made to the relevant authorities, it was all up to me. So I signed. “What’s it about?” I said. “This experiment I’m volunteering for.” His eyes brightened, the first light in them I’d seen until then. “What if I gave you a chance to live forever,” he said. “Would you take it?” “I don’t know,” I said. “It would depend.” “On what?” “On what forever was like.” That didn’t stop him; he was like my step-uncle that way; once he got the spark, he couldn’t help but burn. “Nanotechnology. Direct neural interfaces. Robotics. We are about to enter the age of spiritual machines. And you,” he said, looking at me but not seeing me at all, “You are the first step.” “I don’t understand,” I said. “You’re not supposed to,” he said, and then he reconsidered. “All right. You’re a bright girl. Have you ever heard of Moore’s Law?” I shook my head no. “No, I don’t suppose you would have. Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel—you’ve heard of Intel?” “Yes.” “Good. Many years ago Mr. Moore made an observation. Mr. Moore noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. This caused Mr. Moore to make a prediction, which was that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future, and it has. Mr. Moore was right, for the most part, and his prediction became known as Moore’s Law.” “Uh-huh,” I said. “That’s part of the equation. The other part is neural plasticity. The brain is more malleable than we once thought.” “So what does that mean?” I said. I was starting to get seriously bored. “You want to put a transistor in my brain?” “A microchip,” he said, “actually a series of microchips that will act as a recorder for your experiences. Think of it as a video camera in your head.” “Oh yeah?” I said. “And then what? What happens after you’ve recorded what’s in my head?” “Then, when the time comes, we remove the microchips and transfer their data to a computer.” “Too weird,” I said. Now I was interested. “You can do that?” “That’s what we’re going to find out,” he said. * * * Imagine a silicon piranha, a cobra made of microchips; picture a cybernetic reptile that devours its prey. Its name is Mother, and it’s the bastard child of some techno-crazy I’ll never meet. Mother’s real and she’s here in the neuro-psychiatric ward of this university hospital, and only Dr. K and his government moneymen and I know. And now you. “Doesn’t it bother you?” I said. “Screwing around with somebody’s brain?” Dumb question, but I had to ask. “A wise man once said that in the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.” Of course it didn’t seem right to me, not that right and wrong mean much in this world except to the person who’s being wronged. In theory, you have human rights—even humans who get experimented on—but as far as Dr. K was concerned, I’d forfeited those rights when I overdosed my way into my last lockdown. “I thought you wanted to die,” Dr. K reminded me. “Suicides repeat. You would have succeeded eventually. If looked at in the proper light, I am actually saving your life.” But the strangest part was that the more I thought about it, the more I came to see it his way. Dr. K was right about one thing at least—suicide. Chances are I would have tried it again and eventually I would have done it right. And then I thought about the ways we all try to con death—by having babies or writing poems or getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard. No one wants to admit that there’s a skeleton underneath our fragile skin, that we’re terrified of the darkness inside, that all that keeps us from the edge is a tentative heart still beating. And he was right about something else. He knew as well as I did that mine was a throwaway life. An old, suicidal sex worker—what chance did I have, really? And then it occurred to me, maybe this was my chance. * Bright lights, sanitized smells, the colors green and white, doping down, some kind of sweet drug running through my veins, a pain in my arm where the needle went in, the doctor asking me to count backwards from fifty. The last thing I remember is forty-seven. * The surgery went well, I’m told; the implant was successful. One chip behind the optic nerve, linked to a half dozen others. From now until the day I die, there will be a back-up copy of my life. And that day will be here quicker than you might think. Because as soon as I’ve seen enough, you can bet they’ll be downloading me into a computer, dumping my soul into a machine, and after that, well then why would they still need me? Some sorry ass who can expose what they’ve done? Put your money on Mother: I’ll be gone. Not that it’s even about me anymore, a broken-down lap dancer. As they say, I’m just the first step. Downloaded into Moore’s Law, a hard drive a decade ahead of those other cyber greyhounds racing rings around the cosmos, I am the model. And that, in its own strange way, is why I am at peace. Where I dance now is on the head of a pin, a microchip so small not even the angels can find it. It’s the devil’s technology, that much I’m sure of, and I am the testament that man shouldn’t play God, that the iceman cometh. In artificial intelligence, all things are made new. I am a new creation, and I have glimpsed immortality. And as for you—I don’t want to disturb you or anything but as far as I can see, the future doesn’t need you.

By: Priscilla Rhoades

        I don’t want to disturb you or anything but the world is run by evil men. Pimps and presidents, porn kings and CEOs, drug lords and DEA. It’s hand-in-bloody-glove, a prizefight in the pit bull ring of this life we’re in, you and I, whether you believe it or not.

        Say you’re shaving some morning, listening half in dreamtime to the radio news and you hear another story about a billion dollars in aid to some butcher in Africa, a billion in aid to some dictator in Latin America. You ever cut yourself wondering where that money is coming from? How it’s rolling off the Fed’s presses, green as backyard mint? I’m here to tell you, we went off the gold standard a long time ago; that money’s backed now by blood.

        Some people call me a victim, but I don’t look at myself that way. The way I see it is this: I’m still here. Though we’re all on the government’s hit list—blacks, gays, hookers, G.I. Joe who was dumb enough to re up.

        I know my country injected those poor bastards in Africa with the AIDS virus, only they’re not dying fast enough so it’s on to the next plan. I know we dumped a mountain of crack on the brothers in Southeast L.A. The Tuskegee Experiment didn’t end in Tuskegee, and there sure as hell isn’t a shortage of ideas left in that demonic brain trust known as the CIA.

        Now, you would think that someone with my viewpoint would be naturally inclined toward depression—paranoia is a given, of course. But you would be wrong. Naturally, I’ve done my time in the psych ward, and you won’t be surprised to learn that I’ve been hooked up to that lightening rod known as shock more than once. I call it the ice house, that place you go when the blue-white bolt slaps you upside your face like salvation, and I’ve spent more than one lonesome afternoon crawling my way down from its frozen walls.

        Not that I attribute my calm to Jesus--although the original suffering son and I are on first-name terms. No, there’s a reason for my equanimity and it has nothing to do with religion.

        But perhaps I should tell you my story. You’ve heard it before, or something like it; I’ll tell it to you anyway. Close your eyes, as the good doctor says, get ready to dream.

        I was born under the sign of Taurus, that makes me steady and stubborn like the bull. I never really knew my mother—she dropped me off at her sister’s one day when I was three, went out for a six-pack and never came back. My aunt read us our horoscopes every day. She was a Libra with the bad taste to marry a Pisces, who made a fishy exit over the sweet Pacific. She married again, this time to a man who was born under the stars of hell, I’m absolutely sure of it.

        I don’t remember the first molest but I remember the last. It was my fifteenth birthday and when he came at me, hands already on his fly, I pushed past him and ran, and I didn’t stop running until I’d made it to Hollywood. Yes, it’s a cliché, but as I said, you’ve already heard my story.

        And so you know that I lived on the street with the other hookers and hustlers, runaways all of us, abused children is what we were. I worked the clubs, a lap dancer by profession with a little extra on the side. You know what comes next. In my case it was cocaine, an Andes of coke, washed down with an ocean of wine.

        Now, suicide is a funny thing. Sometimes you do it neat—a thirty-eight slug in the frontal lobe—and sometimes you do it sloppy. Me, I’ve been sloppy every time. So after my third visit to the locked floor, I was transferred to the neuro-psychiatric ward of that big university up on the hill, into the care of Dr. K. Dr. K looked like every trick I’d ever turned, with his perfect children smiling up at me from their photographs on his shiny desk, where I sat for my client intake.

        “How old are you?” he wanted to know. “Twenty-nine,” I said. The truth is I turned thirty last April, but I can’t bring myself to admit it. That’s really old for my line of work, and I feel it.

        And then once again I was telling my story to some sad shrink, reciting the cliché that is my life. And like all the rest of them, Dr. K wrote it all down, taking notes as if he was really paying attention. “We’ll need a few tests,” he said when I was done.

        They’re always surprised. Clients and psychiatrists, white-collar guys always think you must be dumb, otherwise why work the sex trade?

        “You’re bright,” he said when he saw how I scored. He was still making notes, and upside down I thought I could make out what he had written: IQ 130, borderline personality. I could tell by the way his mouth changed then, the way he moved his thin little lips, that he wanted me. Not for sex—I can read that easy enough—no, this was more like some kind of scientific lust.

        “Sign this,” he said, pushing a piece of paper across the desk.

        “What is it?”

        “Informed consent.”

        I figured informed consent must be what you sign when you’ve got no choice. Because before I could read it all, Dr. K reminded me that a lot of my activities had not been exactly legal up to that point in my life and that a call could be made to the relevant authorities, it was all up to me. So I signed.

        “What’s it about?” I said. “This experiment I’m volunteering for.”

        His eyes brightened, the first light in them I’d seen until then.

        “What if I gave you a chance to live forever,” he said. “Would you take it?”

        “I don’t know,” I said. “It would depend.”

        “On what?”

        “On what forever was like.”

        That didn’t stop him; he was like my step-uncle that way; once he got the spark, he couldn’t help but burn.

        “Nanotechnology. Direct neural interfaces. Robotics. We are about to enter the age of spiritual machines. And you,” he said, looking at me but not seeing me at all, “You are the first step.”

        “I don’t understand,” I said.

        “You’re not supposed to,” he said, and then he reconsidered. “All right. You’re a bright girl. Have you ever heard of Moore’s Law?” I shook my head no.

        “No, I don’t suppose you would have. Gordon Moore was a co-founder of Intel—you’ve heard of Intel?”

        “Yes.”

        “Good. Many years ago Mr. Moore made an observation. Mr. Moore noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. This caused Mr. Moore to make a prediction, which was that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future, and it has. Mr. Moore was right, for the most part, and his prediction became known as Moore’s Law.”

        “Uh-huh,” I said.

        “That’s part of the equation. The other part is neural plasticity. The brain is more malleable than we once thought.”

        “So what does that mean?” I said. I was starting to get seriously bored. “You want to put a transistor in my brain?”

        “A microchip,” he said, “actually a series of microchips that will act as a recorder for your experiences. Think of it as a video camera in your head.”

        “Oh yeah?” I said. “And then what? What happens after you’ve recorded what’s in my head?”

        “Then, when the time comes, we remove the microchips and transfer their data to a computer.”

        “Too weird,” I said. Now I was interested. “You can do that?”

        “That’s what we’re going to find out,” he said.

* * *         Imagine a silicon piranha, a cobra made of microchips; picture a cybernetic reptile that devours its prey. Its name is Mother, and it’s the bastard child of some techno-crazy I’ll never meet. Mother’s real and she’s here in the neuro-psychiatric ward of this university hospital, and only Dr. K and his government moneymen and I know. And now you.

        “Doesn’t it bother you?” I said. “Screwing around with somebody’s brain?” Dumb question, but I had to ask.

        “A wise man once said that in the game of life and evolution there are three players at the table: human beings, nature, and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of the machines.”

        Of course it didn’t seem right to me, not that right and wrong mean much in this world except to the person who’s being wronged. In theory, you have human rights—even humans who get experimented on—but as far as Dr. K was concerned, I’d forfeited those rights when I overdosed my way into my last lockdown.

        “I thought you wanted to die,” Dr. K reminded me. “Suicides repeat. You would have succeeded eventually. If looked at in the proper light, I am actually saving your life.”

        But the strangest part was that the more I thought about it, the more I came to see it his way. Dr. K was right about one thing at least—suicide. Chances are I would have tried it again and eventually I would have done it right. And then I thought about the ways we all try to con death—by having babies or writing poems or getting a star on Hollywood Boulevard. No one wants to admit that there’s a skeleton underneath our fragile skin, that we’re terrified of the darkness inside, that all that keeps us from the edge is a tentative heart still beating. And he was right about something else. He knew as well as I did that mine was a throwaway life. An old, suicidal sex worker—what chance did I have, really?

        And then it occurred to me, maybe this was my chance.

***

        Bright lights, sanitized smells, the colors green and white, doping down, some kind of sweet drug running through my veins, a pain in my arm where the needle went in, the doctor asking me to count backwards from fifty. The last thing I remember is forty-seven.

***

        The surgery went well, I’m told; the implant was successful. One chip behind the optic nerve, linked to a half dozen others. From now until the day I die, there will be a back-up copy of my life. And that day will be here quicker than you might think. Because as soon as I’ve seen enough, you can bet they’ll be downloading me into a computer, dumping my soul into a machine, and after that, well then why would they still need me? Some sorry ass who can expose what they’ve done? Put your money on Mother: I’ll be gone.

        Not that it’s even about me anymore, a broken-down lap dancer. As they say, I’m just the first step. Downloaded into Moore’s Law, a hard drive a decade ahead of those other cyber greyhounds racing rings around the cosmos, I am the model.

        And that, in its own strange way, is why I am at peace.

        Where I dance now is on the head of a pin, a microchip so small not even the angels can find it. It’s the devil’s technology, that much I’m sure of, and I am the testament that man shouldn’t play God, that the iceman cometh.

        In artificial intelligence, all things are made new. I am a new creation, and I have glimpsed immortality.

        And as for you—I don’t want to disturb you or anything but as far as I can see, the future doesn’t need you.

Priscilla Rhoades, originally from California, has lived in the mountains of North Carolina for the last decade. She descends from a line of North Carolinians that stretches back to the Revolutionary War. Her mother always said they were collateral descendants of Edgar Allan Poe but, alas, it proved to be Edgar Allan Poe the mayor of Lenoir, NC--not the other one. Priscilla writes anyway. Her work has appeared most recently in Southern Gothic and Storyglossia.

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