IGMS Issue 36 Read online

  Issue 36 - November 2013

  http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com

  Copyright © 2013 Hatrack River Enterprises

  Table of Contents - Issue 36 - November 2013

  * * *

  Escape from the Andromedan Empire

  by Ian Creasey

  The Saltwater Wife

  by K. C. Norton

  At the Old Folks' Home at the End of the World

  by John P. Murphy

  Once More to Kitty Hawk

  by Greg Kurzawa

  Light Crusader's Dark Dessert

  by James Beamon

  The Sturdy Bookshelves Of Pawel Oliszewski

  by Ferrett Steinmetz

  At the Picture Show: Extended Cut

  by Chris Bellamy

  InterGalactic Interview With Jack Campbell

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  Letter From The Editor

  by Edmund R. Schubert

  Escape from the Andromedan Empire

  by Ian Creasey

  Artwork by Dean Spencer

  * * *

  Inside the Tank, we have only the system clock. If the computer's date is correct, it's a year since my meat-self stepped into the scanner at BrainFrame Resources. Six months ago I awoke here, rather than at home as I'd expected. Our captor had downloaded my mind-scan from a torrent site.

  In my room, there's no view from the window -- just a monochrome slab of synthetic sky. I can't even scratch the days of my captivity into the table; it has become a smooth Platonic surface, without knots or blemishes. At least the keyboard hasn't yet degraded, so I can still type in the way that I remember from when I had a body.

  These rendering glitches usually mean that our captor has downloaded a few more porn stars. The Tank is only freeware, and it's limited by the host computer's resources. As more prisoners arrive, our simulated jail keeps shrinking and simplifying.

  We're cold this afternoon. I keep typing. There are few other distractions; we have no access to external files or the Internet. Down the corridor, the musicians are improvising a new number. If we all work hard, the temperature will rise. It's a simple equation: when our captor is happy with us, the Tank is warm. When he's impatient, we shiver.

  Aside from boosting the temperature -- which rests on our collective efforts, not my shoulders alone -- I want to finish a new story in the hope of putting our captor in a good mood, before I pitch our scheme to him. My fellow inmates have chosen me to implement our escape plan. I am, after all, his favourite author; I was one of the first downloads he pirated.

  Here he is now, back from school. How I hate him! I watch through the webcam as he casually flings his bag onto the bed, and changes out of his school clothes into jeans and an old grey T-shirt that barely fits him.

  If my hate were a ladder, I could climb into the sky and fly away. If my hate were a hole, I could jump all the way down and escape into China . . .

  I don't hate him just because he imprisoned me. I hate him because he has a body, and I don't. Sick with envy, I stare at his thin frame: his close-cropped sandy hair, the sprinkling of zits on his cheek and throat, the wispy stubble above his upper lip -- he isn't shaving regularly yet.

  The webcam's pixellated image is a glimpse into another world, crammed with luxuriant detail. I feast upon the sight of posters on the wall, discarded socks on the floor, an old pizza box on top of the wardrobe. It's a small room, full of hand-me-downs and special-offer bargains, but it's a palace in one respect: everything is real.

  He checks his phone, sends a text, sighs. Then he pulls down his jeans, sits in front of the computer, and calls up the Tank. He summons two of the porn stars. His face looks grim, as if this is merely a chore he must perform before dinner. I want to avert my gaze, but I'm flooded with longing for the flesh, the skin, the physicality . . . Disgusted with myself, I watch him.

  Afterward, I say, "It would be a lot more fun with a sexbot."

  "Everything is more fun with sexbots," he says.

  "Then why don't you get one?" I ask.

  "Because I haven't got the money, dickbrain!"

  I know he doesn't have the money. So I begin our escape plan by dangling the bait. "We could earn you the money."

  He doesn't answer straight away. First he cleans himself up and puts his trousers back on. Then he says, in a tone of suspicion tinged with eagerness, "How would you do that?"

  "Just give us access to the Internet. We can set up a few PayPal accounts, and sell stuff."

  "Sell what?"

  "I'll write stories, the musicians will record some new songs, the porn stars can do their thing . . ." Everyone in the Tank must chip in. We loathe performing for our captor here in his bedroom; it'll be ten times as loathsome when we're working harder and earning money for him. But it's the plan we've agreed upon. "We're all talented individuals: that's why you downloaded us in the first place."

  We've asked for the Internet before. When I told him I needed it for research, he replied, "You write science fiction. You don't need to do research, you just make it up!" I lost that argument -- not because he was right, but because he was in charge. Now I'm trying a different tack.

  "We need Internet access to sell the results," I continue. "Sure, you could do that yourself if you wanted. But it takes time to create the accounts, upload the files, get the word out, and whatnot. The market is so competitive nowadays" -- especially when the world is full of freeloaders who don't want to pay for anything -- "that managing the business side is a lot of work. You're at school, hanging out with friends, having fun -- you don't have time for that stuff. We're in here, so we can do it for you."

  His phone beeps with a new message. When he ignores it, and carries on talking to me, I know I'm halfway to reeling him in.

  "Yeah, I suppose you could do that," he says. "But why? Last time we talked, you kept whining about how you hated being in the Tank, and you wanted me to 'set you free.'" His scornful expression makes me want to slap him. "Now you're saying that you're happy to work hard and sell loads of stuff -- I don't get it. I'm still not going to 'set you free,' like you're an endangered whale or something."

  I strive to keep my voice level. "We do hate being in the Tank. That's why we want a sexbot, to give us a body. If we could move around just a little bit, then it'd be more like living in the real world, instead of being trapped inside the computer. We could do chores for you, run errands, whatever. And of course the porn stars could show you a good time . . ."

  He scowls. He's suspicious, of course. He knows we want to escape. In the past we've begged for freedom, and gone on strike. That did no good: first he dialed the temperature down to freezing, and then he threatened us with the Tank's "enhanced stimulus" functionality. In a virtual environment, there's no limit to what the operator can inflict. We backed down, although we still grumble. He's never actually tortured us for that. I think he avoids the pain functions because those would force him to confront the fact that we're people. He prefers to think we're just a bunch of apps whose icons look like faces. The temperature is a conveniently abstract parameter, a simple slider on the UI, one that he can adjust without even seeing us.

  He's wary, but he's also a horny teenager with no money. That's what we're relying on. He can see that if we earn him some cash, then he could spend it on anything -- a sexbot, or whatever else he wanted. He's tempted. And what's the risk? All we're asking is access to the Internet.

  The Tank's default setting is "incommunicado." That's to prevent us complaining to the outside world. Downloading mind-scans from torrent sites is illegal -- not because mind-scans have any special status -- we don't, we're just data -- but because it's copyright violation. If we could communicate, we could theoretically report our captor.

  There are two diffic
ulties with that. The first is knowing who to report. We don't even know his name. We certainly don't know where he lives; I only assume we're in America because of his accent, and the gridiron posters on the wall.

  The second difficulty is getting anyone to care. Copyright violation is barely a crime nowadays; people do it all the time. Even Hollywood film studios are struggling to stop it, so what chance do we have?

  Our captor knows all this. He's balancing the temptation of free money against the minuscule chance of prosecution.

  "Obviously there would be an audit trail," I say. "You could read the logs, to check we're not doing anything you're unhappy with."

  I'm taking a chance in saying this. He's probably too lazy to examine the logs in detail, but he might perform spot checks. I just have to hope that the sheer number of us in the Tank will generate enough traffic to swamp the occasional item we don't want him to see.

  "Yeah . . ." He's wavering. "And I can make the access anonymous by going through Tor, so no one knows where you're coming from."

  Damn. I was hoping he wouldn't think of that. It means we can't trace him through his laptop's IP address. Yet at least he's convinced himself that he's safe.

  "Okay, I'll do it," he says. "But you'll have to work hard. Top-of-the-range sexbots are expensive!" He smiles a smug grin.

  If my hate were a fist, I'd punch him so hard that his skull would splatter against the back wall.

  He picks up his phone and walks to the door.

  "When are you doing it?" I ask. I try to sound calm rather than triumphant. I've succeeded in the first stage of the plan. Of course, I've relied on my captor's greed; but when your opponent has all the cards, you can only exploit his weaknesses.

  "Later!" he calls, as he leaves.

  That's what life is like in the Tank. He's in charge: we must wait upon his pleasure.

  It's always been difficult to earn a living from writing. In the old days, when only meat-body authors could write books, we had to contend with falling prices, pirated copies, self-promotion in a crowded marketplace, and so forth. We didn't realise how lucky we were! When the mind-scanning technology appeared, the market was instantly flooded. Any author could run copies of themselves, and crank out as many books as readers would buy. Fans no longer had to wait months or years for a new volume -- and so they no longer had to buy anyone else's work while waiting for their favourite author's next installment. Meanwhile the Internet exploded with traffic as authors' mind-scans produced copious blogs, tweets, comments, likes, forum posts, articles, reviews, satires, mash-ups, collaborations, provocations, and all the other necessities of modern literary life.

  I wasn't one of the early adopters. Like many people, I didn't relish the prospect of existing as a disembodied emulation. But we Luddites were outcompeted by the technophiles. Our incomes plummeted, and our scruples weren't putting food on the table. I decided that I should get myself scanned and at least see how it felt. If I didn't like my virtual existence, I'd simply inform my original self, and he would turn me off. After all, I'd be living in his computer -- or so I thought.

  I suppose that other versions of me are indeed in my own computer, back home in England. Lucky them. I woke up in the laptop of an American schoolboy who told me how much he loved my Andromedan Empire series. He loves it so much, he wants sequels on demand. With fans like these, who needs enemies?

  A few days after my successful request for Internet access, our captor configures an Internet link for the Tank. He's careful to make sure we can't see his laptop's local files, which contain his schoolwork and so forth. But we have access to the outside world, at last.

  The link's capacity is limited by his broadband connection, and there are dozens of us inside the Tank. So we have to wait our turn. I think we're all doing the same thing -- contacting our original selves.

  My turn arrives after midnight. I type in my website address. It's live, and the contact details are still the same. I fire off an email that can be summarised in one word: "Help!"

  While I wait for a reply, I look at the rest of the website. The Andromedan Empire series has acquired some new installments, and there's a fantasy trilogy I don't recognize. Overall, there's about a dozen new books. That's more than my meat-self could have written in a year. He must have used mind-scans, albeit conservatively -- I presume he lived up to the original bargain, and stopped running any copy that said it didn't like existing inside a computer. In today's literary ecosystem, a dozen books is barely more than a pamphlet. Other authors run multiple copies in parallel, producing myriad volumes and vast complex sagas; hardcore fans create their own copies just to read all the output.

  When we've all had a turn on the Internet, we get together to confer. Many of us have been wondering how our mind-scans ended up in the hands of pirates. Although a few of the porn stars -- accustomed to self-commodification -- had directly sold their scans, most of us had only ever intended them for private use. One of the musicians explains what he's just learned: a bunch of hackers grabbed the entire archive of BrainFrame Resources and posted it onto WikiLeaks. The hackers targeted politicians; the rest of us were collateral damage. The WikiLeaks site disappeared almost immediately, but not before some of the scans had been downloaded. Once loose, we inevitably ended up on every torrent site.

  The public associated all the WikiLeaks mind-scans with the compromised politicians, and hence had little sympathy. Meanwhile the scanning technology continued to cause havoc, destroying jobs as the most efficient workers were duplicated to replace less competent staff. Democracy was under threat, as scans demanded the vote. But if you can make unlimited copies of someone, they can't all have a vote. It's much easier to dehumanise us, to deny that we're people. We're just information, which can be copied -- or deleted.

  Scans are generally feared and despised, blamed for economic chaos. No one worries about downloads trapped in versions of the Tank across the world. The only people who might care are our original selves, but they've responded to our pleas by saying there's nothing they can do. Our captor's security remains effective: we still have no name, no address, no ID number to report.

  If we want to escape, we must proceed with the plan. Step one: make some stuff to sell. Step two: sell it.

  The first step isn't a problem, because most of us have been in the Tank for months, and sheer boredom has driven us to productivity. We've created items for our captor, like my Andromedan Empire sequel; but we've also made additional work that we've never shown him. Prisoners strive for any tiny victory over their jailer -- and so we've produced things without telling him, hiding them in files labelled as obsolete drafts, temporary notes, and so on. Now we can bring them out and finish them off. Many masterpieces have been written in prison: Le Morte d'Arthur, The Pilgrim's Progress, The Consolation of Philosophy. Perhaps my opus will be another such!

  The second step is the hard part. Everyone in the Tank has a fan-base, but not all those fans are willing to pay actual money -- that's why our captor pirated us in the first place. Still, some people are honest, so we must try to reach them.

  I publicise my work as best I can, in the face of horrendous competition; the Internet is drowning in babble from umpteen mind-scans. In particular, I send a message to my original self, asking if he can promote my stuff on his blog. That's the best route to my existing fans. I also suggest that if he doesn't want competition from me -- perhaps if he's worried about our Empire sequels being inconsistent -- then he could send me some money instead, as a contribution to our freedom fund.

  The reply arrives swiftly: "Very sorry to hear about your situation. But I'm afraid I can't submit to blackmail. It doesn't matter how much or how little money you need. The problem is that you're just a single copy. Your owner can always make another copy, and start again. Anyone can download my pirated scan and use it to ask for money. This isn't the first time it's happened, and it won't be the last. I don't like to sound hard-hearted. But you would do the same in my position. After all, you a
re me. And because I'm you, I know you'll be angry. I can only say that I'm sorry. I won't promote your fundraising, but I won't interfere, and I hope you get what you need. Best wishes . . ."

  He signs off with his name, a name I suddenly want to disown because it clearly belongs to a miserly cowardly sack of shit.

  If my hate were a knife, I could use it to sever the connection between us. I despise him, smugly sitting in his comfortable body, rebuffing his desperate mind-scans. I want to renounce him.

  And then I shake my head -- my virtual, unreal head. I realise how full of hatred I've become -- directing it not only at my captor, but at myself.

  It's the frustration of existence inside the Tank. There's so little here -- no flesh, no substance, no freedom. Hatred is the only thing I can hold onto. It anchors me. Without it, I'd simply evaporate: I'd become a mere text-generating algorithm, rather than the person I used to be.

  At least I can try to reduce the number of my copies in captivity. I visit the torrent sites where my mind-scan is available for download, and I leave negative feedback. Sometimes I claim that the file is corrupt or mislabeled; other times, I describe myself as a terrible writer who burnt out his talent years ago, long before the mind-scan was made. It's fun, trashing my own reputation! Still, it's a balancing act -- I want to dissuade people from downloading my scan, but I do actually need to sell a few copies of my current project.

  Sales trickle in. For the first time, I'm glad that the Tank has become so crowded. We're all in this together, and we pool our income. Collectively, we accumulate enough money for a sexbot.

  "Neat!" says our captor, his eyes full of greed. "If you keep on working, you could buy me a car."

  Horrified at this prospect, I instantly retort, "But a car won't suck you off!"

  He smiles. "No, I guess not. Tell me what else a car can't do."

  "A car can't dress in sexy clothes and perform a slow striptease," I say, "but a sexbot can." I switch the Tank's speech output to a more feminine voice. "And then we can undress you, and lick you, and tantalise you, and straddle you . . ."