The Hormone Jungle by Robert Reed

Author:Robert Reed
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626814660
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 2014-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

12

She called herself Wisp. That probably wasn’t her name during her flesh-on-blood existence—a lot of us acquire new identities after the transformation, either out of shame for the past or a willingness to start again with the proverbial clean slate. I don’t which it was for Wisp. Maybe neither. I don’t know how she made her money, but she had plenty in the early going. She never explained how she had died, but I knew it had happened at a tragically early time. Telling that was easy. Wisp had a young girl’s makeup, a young girl’s passions. That makes it tough when you’re Ghosted. You are so disappointed with so much. Like the sky. “It isn’t quite right, you know?” The taste of food. “Why’s it so bland? This is my favorite meal, for goodness sake.” The feel of any surface. “I mean I can tell it’s wood. And that’s metal. But I can’t…I don’t know…it all feels so simple, you know?” Of course we would explain the problems to her. AIs can do only so much. It’s one thing to see a scene on World-Net, a moving picture and sound and you the detached viewer. But it’s something else entirely for you to be a part of that picture. The numbers of calculations are enormous, not to mention instantaneous. A single AI can build a fantasy on World-Net. A thousand AIs are required to build and maintain you inside a simple home. And never, never will the illusion feel right. Certainly not to a newly Ghosted person. There’s some basic physics involved. I can’t explain it myself, but the core of the concept involves a natural randomness in a living person’s environment—the way air molecules strike the skin, the way your sensory inputs are subject to quantum effects, and so on. Not a million AIs working in tandem can effectively replicate these very tiny effects. And Ghosts are aware of their absence, believe me. Wisp was very, very sad to learn it was so. The flatness. The grayness. The bland meals and the wrong sky and all the rest. She came to us with a lot of money, yes, but she did the very worst thing possible. She tried to reproduce the life she knew from before being a Ghost. She spent much of what she had to do this, never succeeding, then when she could see the end of her resources she tried something particularly foolish. She tried to coax and cajole us, her fellow Ghosts, into granting her new money.

I must say she was good. Very good. I was tempted myself, several times. But when you’re truly alive you think only once before giving away riches to a pretty face. If that. And when you’re a Ghost you think twice, or more, and you resist. In life it’s only hard-won money, you see. In a Ghost’s existence that money represents existence. You see? And no one is going to let that go. Not for a smile, surely.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.