Barely Human Read online

  He comes into the kitchen and stands close to me, watching me look for his tea bag. “I take it you don’t drink mint often?”

  “Not anymore,” I confirm coming up with the box of tea bags. “Do you dilute it with anything?”

  “I take my tea the same way I take my women, straight.”

  “You have a lot of women?” he opened the door for that question.

  “None at the moment,” he confirms.

  “So, this isn’t your first rodeo,” I push.

  The mayor doesn’t answer my question, which by his non answer, he has given me the answer I expect. He takes the offered cup of mint tea, blows on it to cool it and inhales the hot moist vapors.

  “Big family?” I ask to fill in some banks.

  “Only kid,” his answer seems to pull him inward, apparently remembering something he doesn’t intend to share. “I inherited the business from my father, although I’ve taken it in an entirely different direction and grown it into more than a hand-to-mouth existence.”

  “Parents?” I use short hand for the longer question.

  “Yes, had one of each.”

  I cock my head to let him know I assumed that answer. “Still with you?”

  “They died in an auto accident when I was in college.”

  I hear the echoes of my mother Anna Laura, and sister Tabitha’s deaths when I was just becoming a teenager. The memories of my life with my father Rocky thereafter pass through my mind in a blur. “How did it happen?”

  “My father apparently fell asleep at the wheel, late at night, coming up the coast from LA. They had attended a cousin’s wedding, stayed later than they intended and ran into bad weather.”

  “I lost my mother and sister in a similar accident.”

  The mayor takes a sip of the tea and puts the cup down. “We aren’t so different, then.”

  He puts his arms around me, apparently wanting to comfort me in my loss. I settle into his embrace. The kiss comes after just the right amount of time. Then I feel him appreciating me with his gentle caress, first down my back and then the back of my head. He is clearly practiced at putting a woman at ease, opening up her senses to him and leading to the next step. I don’t have the heart to tell him I don’t need the foreplay, although that’s something I realize needs to be addressed in the next updates.

  As we remove each other’s clothes I become aware that the mayor has kept himself fit, tanned and properly cologned. The transition into bed is seamless. The foreplay is practiced and purposeful in bringing along the buildup of expectations and openness to the coming climax. I reciprocate in teasing open his senses, touching him, eliciting the responses I know he is working hard to restrain. It seems his body is all in a rush, while he wants to slow down and enjoy the feelings I’m clearly arousing in him.

  Even with the updates I’d introduced since my last time making love to Raoul, there is still a major disconnect between the actual build and the release for me. The mayor seems to have no such disconnect as I feel his body slowly rise in building tension before a strong and prolonged release. He does not stop there, however, continuing until I have a second build and release. I can feel he has the same second experience I am having, although this release is significantly diminished in comparison to his first.

  He turns over on his back. I lay upon his chest. He begins to rub my head, straightening out my hair periodically, but continuing the caressing contact. I can hear his heart beat slowing and his breathing becomes shallower. Yes, he is relaxing into a pleasurable state, even though he has not said a word or made any indications of his experience known other than what I could feel. But my sensors are blunt in comparison to those of a biologic body. I can only infer the intensity of his feelings and the extent of his pleasure. What I do infer is that it was good for him. If it weren’t he wouldn’t have come back for a reprise.

  “How old were you?” the mayor asks. I’m a little confused as I don’t know if he’s asking how old I was the first time I made love to a man or what.

  “When?” I finally ask so I don’t infer something I’ll be embarrassed about later.

  “When your mother and sister passed on.”

  “Middle school,” is my curt response. I didn’t want it to sound that way, but it sounded that way to me.

  “The time when a girl needs her mother most,” he observes. I’m surprised he would make such an observation.

  “What are you trying to say?” I am still coming across much harder than I want. Is it because I’m not feeling anything as a result of my orgasm? Do people sound softer after sex? I don’t know. Never really thought about it until now that I’m trying to understand rather than just respond from memory.

  “Just that it must have been hard on you.”

  “Losing a parent changes you in subtle and not so subtle ways. The earlier you lose them the longer you have to feel their absence.” Too rational. Why is everything coming out wrong?

  “That why you didn’t marry?” Here we go. Trying to figure out if I’m damaged goods.

  “I just never met a guy who was more interesting than the work I was doing.” I feel him tense up with that response. “What about you?”

  “I have an ex-wife. So, I tried it and it didn’t fit me. We were just too different, wanted different things both spiritually and physically.”

  “I have trouble believing your wife didn’t want what we just shared.” I feel him relax. Guess I finally came up with a good answer.

  “That was a different time. I mentioned my family lived hand-to-mouth. I was still pretty much there when we got married. It wasn’t until well after that I figured out how to make money in the business and what I really wanted from life.”

  “Which is?”

  “To make a difference.” His rely is earnest. “In the lives of those who work at my company, in the lives of those who live here, in the lives of those who will come after me.”

  “Kids?”

  “I still think of myself that way. My wife clearly did.”

  “But none of your own,” I try to clarify.

  “Someday. But it has to be the right situation because I’m not about to do to a child what so many parents do to theirs.”

  “Which is?”

  “Try to live their life or the life they wanted through the life of the child who may want something entirely different.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” I guess.

  The mayor sits up on the side of the bed looking away from me. “It’s taken a long time, or at least it seems like a long time, but I’m finally doing things for me, not for them.”

  “Like being the mayor?” I put my hand on his shoulder.

  “You have no idea how guilty I felt taking time away from his company to run for office.”

  “It’s not his company anymore,” I point out.

  The mayor glances at me over his shoulder. “It will always be his company. I’m just taking his life’s work and fulfilling the promise he had but was unable to deliver on.”

  “And your mother?” I wonder why it’s always the father and son syndrome.

  “She did everything for him. Put all of her family’s money in the business, worked there every day. Gave him the space to succeed, but he never got there. We probably would have lost the business without the insurance money that gave me time to figure things out.”

  THE CHOICE

  Oriana drops the San Francisco Chronicle on my desk. The front page article has my college graduation picture gracing it. I’m surprised to realize I actually look better now than I did then. And damn I looked good then. The headline is the one I was afraid everyone would use: The First Immortal.

  “This worth reading?” I look up at the short and slight Oriana who is my acting Senior VP of Software. She sits down across from me.

  “Don’t think you’ll learn anything you don’t already know,” she shakes her head.

  “So, a waste of time.”

  “Depends on whether you have a plan for t
he torches and pitchforks, Dr. Frankenstein.”

  I quickly read through the on-line version of the article in my head. The journalist picked up on my press conference reference to being a first release and that I’m going to get a whole lot more capable real quickly. He also picked up on my reference to being able to do more than all of them put together. Of course, as a good journalist he has drawn an inference. That as more people become immortal life isn’t likely to get easier for the rest of us. But that was buried near the end of the article. He wasted it if he was trying to sell newspapers. “Probably thought no one was going to read all the way to the end.” I point out.

  “That’s clearly an eye-catching headline.” Oriana looks at the newspaper. “Convinced me I needed to buy it.”

  “Did it change your thoughts about transitioning?”

  “I didn’t know about your mother and sister,” she sounds both apologetic and embarrassed at the same time.

  “That was a long time ago,” is my only defense for not having mentioned it.

  “It explains some things,” Oriana asserts. Oh, no. Here we go again.

  “Which is why I generally don’t discuss it. Don’t want people to be able to figure me out.”

  “Maintaining your mystique?”

  “Exactly.” I smile at the one person who has always had my back.

  “Do I need one?”

  I’m confused now. “One what?”

  “A mystique,” she shrugs. “Might compensate for guys thinking I’m too smart. You know? If I have a mystique they won’t know if I’m smart or not.”

  “You transition and you won’t need to worry about guys thinking you’re too smart because they will be as smart as you are. Same processor speed, same memory. The only thing that will be different is how their consciousness approaches the data and what it looks to solve for.”

  “So, you’re as smart as A’zam?”

  This is not a question I can answer because even though I trust Oriana implicitly, I just never know when she will say something without thinking about the implications. “We have the same processor,” is how I decide to limit the damage.

  “You go to law school since I last talked with you?”

  I shake my head, although I have been reviewing law school course materials to better understand how patents work. “Why?”

  “Weasel words,” she pronounces. “Don’t say what you mean. Say something that can be interpreted any way you want it interpreted.”

  I stand up and walk over to the window wall. Gazing out to the Japanese garden I finally decide how to respond to her. “We are entering a period of what will be seen as intense change in retrospect. The problem with change is you can’t see it until it’s happened. And generally, then it’s too late.”

  “I disagree.” Oriana stands up and leans on her chair. “We see signs of change all the time. What we don’t know is how fast the change will happen or to what extent it will take root. Some changes are temporary to be replaced by something else we didn’t see that was there all the time. The ones who get rich are those who can divine the tea leaves and make the right choices.”

  My attention shifts to the coy pond. I see the movement in the water of the fish that are just below the surface. That makes me think aloud, “Some people drive change while others just float along for the ride, or stay just out of sight of those who would stop it dead in its tracks. We’ve been driving change here for a long time. We’ve been lucky to stay out of the sights of those who would oppose the changes we are fomenting. By the time they know what we are doing we’re too embedded to stop. But we can’t stay here forever.”

  “Again, I disagree.” Oriana’s tone of voice remains consistent. Not hostile. Respectful, but with a different perspective. “You are the reason we can stay here forever. You will be CEO of the products company forever. You aren’t going to change who you are. You’ll never allow us to become second tier in what we do. I know you too well.”

  “You must think I’m one hell of a surfer, able to ride the wave and never falling regardless of all the changes in the terrain under the wave, the weather the wave rides through, the number of other surfers who show up on any given day. The fault in your analysis is that it’s too unidimensional.”

  Oriana shakes her head, “You’ll need to explain that to me.”

  “Think of natural systems.” I turn to look at her now. “They always evolve to be more complex over time. Things don’t simplify by themselves. The environment we will be operating in will become more and more complex. So complex that it will take ever increasing processing speeds and memory to be able to solve the problems we will be attacking. And with increasing complexity the opportunity for failure becomes exponentially more probable. I have no grand illusion that I’ll keep AppleCore in the forefront of our industry forever, or even for the next year. There are way too many smart people looking to end our run today. They aren’t relaxing their efforts. They aren’t going to make it any easier for us to be successful with our next offering. They want our market share. They want our profits and they want our position in the industry. And that’s why the immortals program is essential for our long term survival.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.” Oriana finally gets around to telling me why she’s here.

  “I know,” I gesture for her to take her seat again. “And the answer is you need to decide soon.”

  As Oriana sits she continues, “No insisting I need to do it?”

  “Are you dying?” I put out there to get her reaction.

  “No.”

  “Having read the article then you know I was. I still had a choice and did until this week. I could have gone back. For a long time, I thought I was going to because I wanted to have a child.”

  I see the double take on Oriana’s part. “You wanted a child?”

  I nod, “The only reason I didn’t transition back is because it was pointed out to me that there was a high probability I’d not survive to term. If I’d passed and the child was delivered, I’d have never known it. I’d only be a mother biologically, but not in the social sense of raising a child.”

  “I didn’t know that.” Oriana is still processing what I’m telling her.

  “And the other issue is that child would be coming into a world where only the immortals will influence our lives.”

  “What do you mean? Influence our lives?”

  “Look at what I’ve done in the month since I transitioned,” I suggest.

  “Everything has changed. AppleCore has never had such market dominance.”

  “And I’m a model T of immortals. The differences in ability between what you are today and what I will be in three years are like light years. You won’t be able to keep up. You can’t now, and it will only get worse. When there are a thousand of us we will be able to do what one hundred thousand of you can do today. When there are a million of us, we will be able to do what a hundred million people do today. And over time the ratio of replacing human labor will accelerate.”

  Oriana has not given any of this thought. I see her wrestle with the implications. “But you wanted a child. You were willing to give up being an immortal to have one. Maybe I want the same. The difference being I can have one.”

  “Yes, you can. And that will be your decision.” I let that sit for a moment. “I know your mother wants that. Probably your father too.”

  Oriana nods.

  “But they can’t live your life and you shouldn’t try to live the life they wanted but didn’t get a chance to experience.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You have to live your life, not theirs. If you don’t do the things that are important to you, then you can expect to live with regret for the rest of your days. I recently met someone who was living that exact scenario. A great person, but unfulfilled because he lives every day for a father who passed away many years ago.”

  “But that’s different,” Oriana protests.

  “Listen. You can live
a life as a mother, married to a man who is intimidated by your intelligence, who will resent you every day you are together because he can’t compete with you. You may raise a great kid, or many who will be unfulfilled in their lives because immortals have built machines that do all the work. Your kids will have no purpose in life. What is life without purpose?”

  “I thought you weren’t going to try to convince me one way or the other,” Oriana asserts.

  “I’m not trying to convince you because at the end of the day you will have to live with whatever decision you make. What I am trying to do is give you the facts of the situation as I see them. And at the moment I’m the only one other than A’zam who happens to have this point of view.”

  Oriana nods to herself, “But if it were you, you would transition.”

  “No, I already told you that I would have transitioned back if I could have been a mother. That was my choice. That was what I wanted. But in my case, it wasn’t possible.”

  Oriana shakes her head, “What are you telling me?”

  “You have to decide. Is it important to lead the revolution, or be swept away in the annals of time as not even a footnote?”

  Oriana leans back in her chair. “That’s putting it in a way that advocates for a position.”

  “I don’t think so. You may be happy not having to step up. Being no more important than the person who sits next to you. If you look at all the people in the world, how many does that describe?”

  “Most of them.” Oriana’s voice is quiet in realization.

  “The vast majority of them,” I correct. “But in the time you and I have worked together I’ve never seen that in you. If you’re not leading the team you chafe at having to endure the obtuseness of the person who is futilely trying to lead it when you can see a better way. That’s just who you are. Can you sit home and try to instill that instinct and vision in a child? Absolutely. But to what end if that child will never get an opportunity to lead anything other than the local PTA?”

  “You’re doing it again,” she points out. “You’re editorializing. Making one alternative seem clearly inferior to the other. How do you know that we will build a million immortals who will put the rest of humanity on the bench? What objective evidence do you have for that assumption?”