Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 203 by Neil Clarke

Author:Neil Clarke [Clarke, Neil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, science fiction, Science Fiction - Short Stories, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Science Fiction And Fantasy, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short stories
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2023-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

VI

Five years later, one weekend morning in the early spring, He Xiaolin was sorting out her seasonal wardrobe when she found the same pack of pain relief patches inside the pocket of an old cardigan. The cool scent of wintergreen oil had soaked into the fabric. She checked the cardigan carefully and found no moth holes despite its age, so she put a dust bag over it and returned it to the closet. There were still more than a dozen patches left inside the pack. She picked it up, looked at it for a while, sniffed at it to remember the scent associated with pain, then threw it into the trash. She hadn’t used any of these in a long time.

Two years ago, more than fifty million units of mixed reality glasses were sold worldwide. Although the matching neural interface peripherals hadn’t completely replaced keyboards and touch screens, they’d become popular among industry insiders like her. Now, by wearing a myoelectric induction bracelet, she could turn her wrist and move her fingers in a natural way to make all sorts of customized gestures in the mixed reality workspace; her movements were no longer limited to interactions with the keyboard, the mouse, or the touch screen. The bracelet looked similar to the smartwatches that were popular a few years ago, with a few extra small metal patches on the wristband. Its slogan was, Don’t let your device limit you, be it wearables or your own body.

In theory, she didn’t even need to actually move: by merely imagining the desired movement, the corresponding neural impulse would be captured by the sensor before it reached her fingers. When she used light to carve, color, and render the forms, the bracelet would gently hold onto her like a second layer of skin or a third hand. Like her, it could produce visible objects out of imagination that only existed in the dark.

The Internet was no longer just a 2D interface within the browser window. After the advent of a broadly accessible and user-friendly hardware infrastructure, the immersive new world of 3D finally pulled everyone in. New software, frameworks, and ecosystems popped up everywhere, much like how the mass adaption of smartphones led to the mobile Internet boom. Whenever Xiaolin reflected on all of this, it always felt a bit surreal. The changes took place with incredible speed, yet everything had been a long time coming in the vein of paradigm shifts like graphical user interfaces and machine learning. The early signs of these shifts often appeared well in advance, and it required decades of work, faith, and dreams of many faceless individuals across generations before anything could come to fruition. Most people back then could not see it coming, and even if they did, they often chose not to believe it. Things that seemed inevitable in hindsight were merely a few stars scattered in the fog. The fog was that of the unknown, mixed with stereotypes, conceit, and fear. Very few could gather up these isolated spots of light to deduce and imagine what the world could look like.

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