The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories by Allan Kaster

Author:Allan Kaster [Kaster, Allan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AudioText
Published: 2017-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

IT STARTED WITH THE gamers. It wasn’t enough to stare at screens any longer. They wanted to be there, in the scene. They wanted to smell and hear the alien planet where they battled evil robots, to feel the steely resolve of their avatar and enjoy her victories and mourn her losses. They wanted it all.

That meant moving hardware into the skull, bypassing the slow crawl of the senses. Once we’d wired our occipital lobes, you could predict the natural progression of commerce: Not just visuals, but smell, and sound, and feel, and taste had to come next. So the wires spread through our neocortexes, like the roots of some cognitive weed. Autonomic functions came after, the wires reaching down into the subcortical regions of pleasure and pain, fear and joy. We gave up all the secrets of our brains, and sank the wires ever deeper.

Then people started to wonder, what other kinds of software could you run on this interface?

Pornography, sure. The first and biggest business: orgies raging through the skulls of overweight teenage boys lying alone in their unmade beds.

But after that, people began to demand more extreme experiences. A black market formed. For the buyer, the problem is one of imagination: What would you want to feel and believe, if you could feel and believe anything? For the coders, the problem is one of demand: How can you make the consumer come back again? The solution was as old as software: Write code that erases itself after a use or two, but leaves you desperate to spend money on another copy.

That code was dangerous, but it wasn’t the worst. The worst was written by the coders who did not want money. They were users themselves, or zealots, and their code might just stick around. It might not want to go.

RedKing was a program like that. RedKing was as permanent as polio. And RedKing made people kill.

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