Stories of Singularity #1-4 (Restore, Containment, Defiance, Augment) by Susan Kaye Quinn

Author:Susan Kaye Quinn [Quinn, Susan Kaye]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: science fiction, singularity, robots, cyberpunk
Published: 2015-12-03T05:00:00+00:00

The ascenders provide everything a legacy human needs to survive… survive being the operative word. Just enough food to not starve. Community housing that isn’t actually falling down around our ears. And enough medical care to keep us alive… unless we happen to need a new heart or liver or, God forbid, some genetically-based therapy that might alter some tiny fragment of our DNA. Because that DNA is the whole reason we exist, still preserved long after most of humanity ascended into super-intelligent human-robot hybrids. Humans are just the legacy of that pre-Singularity time—the living museums that preserve the genetic diversity of what used to be the human race.

In reality, we’re just a bunch of pathetic apes that evolution passed by.

All of which means a trip to the hospital is often the beginning of very bad news. Either you get the instant cure—all that hyper intelligence means ascender medicine is radically effective—or you get the evaluation. Which means whatever you’ve got falls into the category of things the ascenders won’t do jack about. Not because they can’t cure virtually any human disease—because they don’t want to alter their precious DNA museum.

Just one of the many reasons I loathe every fiber of their cybernetic beings.

Eli’s a little calmer, now that we’re in the hospital room with his mom. She’s back from the eval, but she’s out—I guess whatever test they ran put her under. She looks bad. Pale. A sheen of sweat on her forehead. Mrs. Brighton’s always been pretty in an elegant kind of way—but that’s gone now, stolen by whatever disease is suddenly ravaging her body.

I’m leaning against the wall near the head of her bed, while Eli paces in front of the window. Tension is stringing my body tight as we wait for the report.

The last time I was here, my grandpa got his death sentence handed to him. He came in for simple gall bladder surgery, but the bots found something else—a rapid-progress form of Alzheimer’s. I’d noticed he’d been more forgetful, but I thought he was just getting on in years. I didn’t understand what the report meant at first, but the old man did. He knew the ascenders were officially done with him. After we came home, he transferred his small amount of savings to me and made me the controlling resident of his apartment. I thought he was just concerned about the Alzheimer’s, but then he showed me his stash of religious relics, the ones he kept hidden from the ascenders and their police bots, and I knew something was up. Not long after, a man I’d never seen before came to visit—I thought he was a priest. And maybe he was, the way he snuck in, looking over his shoulder. All I know is that the next morning, my grandpa had passed away from a drug-induced seizure. The old man was stubborn that way. The ascenders wouldn’t give him what he needed to live—so he was determined to choose when to die.

It’s still

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