Human

This story is a favorite, written by the late Laston Kirkland sometime around 2007. Note the dates in the story expressed as the past... one of the earliest of these is 2021.

Content warning - discussion of what constitutes humanity, future (probable) dystopia.

Edited for punctuation, mostly.

EDIT: my 15yo gave me a gift of her reading this story aloud for Christmas 2022. I enclose the link, to which I own the rights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-37arG65E-8

~~~~~~

Ronald hated his job, sometimes.

Sure, it was a necessary thing, but even so. He hated this part.

She was not wearing her diagnostics patch. She had refused to come in for evaluation, and the sensors in her car were reporting it rarely moved. He did check with the house cloud, using his override code, and it reported that SOMEONE was definitely moving around in there. Water and power fluctuated on the meters.

She had set her communications to private. She wore old AR glasses. Those old glasses didn’t have any responder signals. All he could tell was they moved around the house and grounds a lot.

A whole house, and a garden. Wealthy. Part of his job would be to catalog and assess the value and arrange to distribute the assets.

He sometimes wished the medical privacy act of ‘36 had never occurred, or he would have been able to just check her records to see what work had been done, then run an inference program. But no medical device except a patch was allowed to transmit and no medical information could be stored. It did cut down on prejudice, but now you needed the patch. Especially for old people. He could run illegal applications, like a lot of people did, but he was working in an official capacity. Not allowed. As an official, everything he saw while on duty was filed. His vision was registered in public records, attached to his serial number.

Officially, you had to patch people. It was the law.

Since she wouldn't talk to anyone online, someone had to go and check up on her, and see if she counted. Her son and grandson were lost years ago, and she had no other family. It was up to him to determine her fate.

The front of the home came right up to the sidewalk. It was free of dirt and decay, but that just meant it had probably been coated with a hydrophobe. Nothing really got dirty anymore. Or rusty. Or weathered.

On the step, he checked his map, two on tall building perches, and five in hover patterns. There were seven police drones within call range if he needed help. She could be a rogue or somesuch.

He rang the doorbell, waited, knocked loudly, waited, and knocked again. No response. He sighed. This might be a bad one. “Mrs. Wilson! I know you are home.” He wasn’t really expecting an answer. He scanned the area with his new eyes, infrared and ultraviolet. He frowned as his UV app glitched out a bit. Pixelation. Unheard of. He might need an adjustment to his eyes. He hoped that it wouldn’t take long, He’d pop in later to a hospishop and get it done.

“Go away!” The voice startled Ronald, it was strong, and firm, and much closer than he had expected. Still, a good sign. She certainly sounded like she was healthy and aware..

“Mrs Wilson. I’m Ronald Danner. I’m your caseworker.” He felt a little awkward talking through the door.

“Jacob Whatsisname is my caseworker”

“No, Jacob Weisse quit over a year ago. I picked up his caseload, and have sent you multiple messages, which you ignored, and two physical certified letters, which you refused to sign for.” He made a mental note that the name of her caseworker was forgotten. Another good sign, actually, unless this was deliberate fraud.

“Fine, fine. So you’re my caseworker. Go away”

“Mrs Wilson, I have to run an evaluation, I need you to wear a patch, and I have to vouch for you.”

“I’m fine. Lost the patch somewhere, slip the damn thing in the mail slot, and I’ll put it on.”

“No, Mrs. Wilson, I have to run a series of tests. I have to. If you don’t cooperate, I’ll be forced to call the police, unlock your door, and we will do the evaluation that way. You are a hundred and twenty-six years old. We have to do an evaluation every year now. Your house is covered by the honored elders act, as are the grounds, and all your worldly possessions... but part of the deal is we have to do the evaluation. “

“I’m talking to you... why do you need more proof than that?”

Ronald looked up at the sky, “Because my voicemail can have this conversation, Mrs. Wilson. We’ve had vocal response software for decades.” He sighed. This is why he hated this part. “It’s the law, Mrs. Wilson. I have to. I have to prove you are still human...” Ronald paused, “...and still alive.”

For the longest time, there was silence. Just as Ronald was reaching up to gesture for a drone and run a lock override... the door opened.

Mrs. Wilson was standing there, neatly dressed and clean, which Ronald thought was another good sign. She still cared what she looked like.

She had that slightly grey-blue skin tone of those who had been rejuvenated. Very smooth. No wrinkles. Her AR glasses were old... The kind that had a set of digital eyes projected onto the front... A common trick twenty years ago. Most AR gear were implants nowadays. It was a one percent operation, and everyone did it. His own eyes were top of the line.

He could already tell she would pass the tests. She didn’t look more than ten percent... tops.

“Do I look dead to you?”

“No ma’am, but a visual inspection doesn’t fly, not since the Shade Tree Retirement Village scam of ‘43.”

Ronald had helped document that. Sixty branch offices, four hundred retirement communities. ten thousand walking dead.. so many of them were over 90 percent... dead ten years or more. He would have shuddered if he still could. Some of the lawsuits were still being processed. The case was integral to the fifty percent inheritance and social security reform act.

“Imagine that. You with your shiny skin and big bug eyes... making me have to prove I’m human. Fine, do your tests.”

“Out here?”

She stepped back and gestured to the dining room table.

As he walked inside Ronald was always appalled at how much stuff old people had. Shelves full of physical things that served no purpose other than decoration or to trigger memories. There were two blankets on the couch, and images behind actual, physical glass were stuck to all the walls somehow. She kept four chairs around the table, even though Ronald knew he was likely the first person in the home in years. It made a lot more sense just to print the chairs when you needed them, as many as you need, and recycle them later. She probably had a dozen cups for drinking out of, and plates, and glasses, and eating utensils. Old people did that. He didn’t know why.

She sat quietly as he administered the tests. Glaring at him. The patch on her clavicle was applied easily enough. He checked the readings. It measured heart rate, oxygen levels, DNA, The chemicals present in her sweat, and skin. Her electrical impulses mapped to exquisite detail... magnetic resonance... sonogram... passive x-ray.

Her lungs had at one point been replaced, but were full biological, grown from her own cells. That must have cost a fortune. One of her kidneys was mechanical. A functioning organ that worked well, so replacing it with bio made little sense, and cost so much. Her skin had been replaced, that was obvious. It caused the grey color, but removed all the wrinkles, blemishes, and any sagging. A little nano in the blood... just respirocytes and hyper whites, very common. Only a few failing organs that would need replacing in a year or two, and she might want to add a little nano to her bones... some osteoporosis that needed reversing.

She was only eight percent cyborg. Well within the accepted range. Ronald wouldn’t need to do anything. Heck, Ronald himself was thirty percent. He'd replaced his skin years ago for a composite of silicon and tungsten. with a digital layer allowing high-resolution pigmentation and projection. and he didn’t have a heartbeat, having replaced it with a continuous flow pump. A good pair of augmentation eyes, a memory implant, and a meshlink. He had the same make and model respirocytes as the old woman.

Once you went fifty percent, or swapped out too much of the brain, you lost the ability to call yourself human anymore. Inheritance rules took immediate effect, estate sales were done, taxes were collected. Only the very wealthy could afford bio; usually people went with mechanical replacements as they wore out.

Most cyborgs considered it a fair trade... immortality vs the loss of material possessions... but on some people, it was important. Ronald was satisfied. She’d be keeping her stuff.

He hated having to tell people they didn’t count as human anymore. Most didn’t take it well.

Or worse, those who had extensive modifications, including memory and speech implants... It was hard trying to convince a cyborg that they had died. They tended to just go through the motions, following subroutines that had once been habits. Dead, but moving around. Zombies.

Ronald would have to find out if any personality or autonomous thought still existed in the cyborg corpse. If not, he’d then upload a control program and walk with the body to an assessment center, where they would determine if the cyborg parts could or should be recycled. He’d then file the paperwork and go about recovering and redistributing any assets they had. They used to bury them intact. but other people were digging them up for spare parts. The graverobber act of ‘40 made it illegal to bury recoverable augmentation.

If there was autonomous thought, then the cyborg would be declared sentient, but no longer human. It would be sent to join an enclave of other AIs, its personality merged with many others to keep it from going rogue and becoming a danger.

The patch program “dinged”. It was done, shaking Ronald out of his musing. No danger of cyborg or death with Mrs. Wilson. As he logged out of the diagnostics, he looked around the amazing clutter of the house, and idly asked her “Why don’t you go outside anymore, Mrs Wilson?”

“Oh, I hate it out there, everyone a cyborg. silver and gold, weird-looking. Clothes painted on and everyone everywhere connected and talking to each other, but never out loud. Nope, I’m staying in my house.”

“So what do you do all day?”

She glared at him defiantly. “I play with my grandson Jim.”

Ronald went quiet; his display was showing him that Jim Wilson had died at the age of sixteen. “Excuse me?”

“I spend at least two hours each day playing with Jim. Usually longer. I raised him when his father died.”

Ronald checked the patch, no tell-tale signs of dementia, schizophrenia, or hallucinogens. She had no brain implants. and the EEG readings indicated normal patterns.

He looked up at her, honestly intrigued. “Explain.”

“Your fancy eyes do old school WiMAX Four transfers?”

Ronald checked. “Yes, it’s supported.”

“My son David was very into AR back when it was new. We were the first people to get these glasses, and we put cameras up in every room. David and his wife died when Jim was still a baby. This is May 16th, 2019, when Jim took his first steps.”

Ronald accepted the signal, and gasped. Suddenly the entire house looked brand new, and crawling on the floor, surrounded by cloth and plastic toys, was a baby. Looking and sounding perfectly real.

He was quite used to video feeds, but for the last thirty years or so, such signals were deliberately translucent and off-color, to aid in differentiating reality from imagery. These old glasses were displaying a level of quality that had been illegal for years. Ever since the AR virus attacks of the '40s, it was absolutely forbidden to make any sensory recording indistinguishable from reality. by the end of that decade, only illegal equipment even had the capability. This legacy stuff was worth more than all of his current possessions.

The baby stood up from the toys, cooed, looked directly at Ronald, and wobbled very slowly towards him. Just before he toppled over onto the wooden floor, Ronald reached out to catch him. The baby fell right through his fingers. It had been a long time since he’d even seen a baby. They were so rare, since licensing requirements were so strict these days.

Mrs. Wilson picked the crying child up... or at least pretended to, holding her hands as if she was carrying the squalling child, and began to croon to him, he quieted down and laughed. She stopped suddenly, and looked directly at Ronald. With a gesture, the room was back to its slightly dilapidated and aged state.

Ronald gasped again. He wasn’t used to this level of detail.

“Wow.” Ronald looked at her. “You know that level of reality was rendered illegal back in ‘44 This is all grandfathered stuff. It’s worth a fortune.”

“Let me show you July 3rd, 2021 fireworks”

Suddenly, a small boy, blonde with curly hair was jumping up and down and looking up at Ronald with wide eyes. “Firewohks! Gamma! I hear pop pop pop!” And so did Ronald, a staccato sizzling sound from outside.

Mrs. Wilson smiled, and said in exact lip-sync to the projected image “Yes Jim, but the real fireworks happen tomorrow.” Suddenly a loud explosion happened nearby... making Ronald jump. Jim squealed and clapped his hands, running to the window “Firewohks!”

Ronald walked over to the window, marveling at how seamless the video was, matching his every movement. Jim was perfect, even as he moved to angle his vision in unusual ways, looking for some evidence of rendering. When he looked out the window, he could see the same fireworks going off in the distance, A dozen people firing explosives into the air in an empty lot across the street. That had been outlawed forever. He'd never seen such a thing.

Again the child vanished. Across the street where the lot used to be was an apartment hostel, two hundred identical twenty by twenty by ten rooms. Arranged in three floors. Ronald lived in one much like it.

Mrs. WIlson looked at Ronald. “There were sixty-five cameras in the house, and another twenty-six in the back yard. I’ve recorded and stored every moment I had with Jim.” Mrs. Wilson took her glasses off for a moment, showing ancient and sunken eyes. Skin transplants never seemed to really work around the eyes. The patch had pointed out that they worked fine. but aesthetically, Ronald thought she might want to get them replaced. “Let’s go into the garden.”

As they walked into the backyard, Ronald was again impressed. Ancient fruit trees surrounded by patches of dozens of different herbs and perennial vegetables, walking paths of brick and groundcover. An old garden, full of lots of hybrids and heritages. Ronald spotted at least ten hexapod robots tending the plants, none of them larger than a cat. It smelled wonderful. “You know, you might want to get a DNA catalog done of this place, you could have an unregistered gene sequence... if they find one, you could be wealthy.”

Mrs. Wilson just gave him an annoyed look. “I did that twenty years ago. I had thirty-seven new catalog entries, one viable enough that it was sold to one of the colonies. They grow my cucumbers on the moon.”

She made a gesture, and Ronald accepted another input. “This was September 25th, 2027.”

Again the sudden shift in reality, as a young boy hung upside down on a much younger apple tree. “Gramma, I’ll get you a good one!”

“You be careful now” came a sound that seemed to come out of Ronald, but echoed by Mrs. Wilson, standing by him.

Jim monkeyed up the tree in total fearlessness, grabbing apples and tossing them down. Ronald watched as slender arms coming out of his own chest caught them. and put them in a basket. He took a step to the left, and Jim adjusted his aim, throwing the apples to him... Ronald started to shuffle and dodge... Jim giggled, and threw harder, again the slender arms of a younger Mrs. Wilson caught each and every one of the illusionary apples.

Suddenly, Jim slipped and fell, bouncing off branches on the way down. thumping down in a crashing, flailing chaos of arms and legs...Ronald gasped in unison with the image superimposed upon him.

Jim recovered on the last branch, and landed with his legs under him, tucked into a roll, and popped up with a “Tada!”

Ronald felt the same relief as she did. With her scolding words coming out of his mouth.

For the next hour or so, she led him from one room to another, in and out of the backyard, showing bits and snatches of her life with Jim. Helping him with schoolwork, his first date, playing board games, arguing over chores, whispering secrets to each other.

She explained that she had enough footage of Jim, in so much detail, that the computers embedded in her home could easily render situations and scenarios that never actually happened. She could pick a day, any day, and have any number of encounters with Jim, mixed and looped and rendered.

Finally, she showed him an image of a confident young man, smiling as he waved behind him “Don’t wait up, Gramma... gonna be a while before I come home.” With that, Jim left the house with a spring in his step.

“Jim died in a violent attack, twenty minutes later. An explosive. It wasn’t targeted at him... the protester was against the loss of jobs to robots. A fool.”

“No footage of Jim exists after that, of course, as the damage rendered him over sixty percent cyborg, including a good chunk of his brain. Almost no memory or perception, but the rest was good enough to continue functions.

“He’s part of a gestalt in New Mexico now. sharing consciousness with some six hundred other cyborgs. He may be still walking, but Jim died that day. I went to see him once. He didn’t recognize me, of course. As part of a collective, he doesn’t really think, just a mobile platform really. He’s over 90 percent now. I think they kept the brain stem.”

“Any rendering I try doesn’t feel right past that point.. So I can have Jim at any moment in his life up until that moment. “

“As you can see, Ronald Danner. I’m perfectly fine. My health is good. I don’t leave the house much anymore because Jim can’t come with me. I have not modified my mind or my body too much, and I still count as human.”

Ronald nodded as he left. “You most certainly do, Mrs. Wilson. You most certainly do. Thank you, It was really quite pleasant playing with Jim. I enjoyed this very much. Life was so very different back then. Have a good day.”

Ronald loved his job, sometimes.

He wondered if he could request the time be removed from public records, he could sell his afternoon with Jim and Mrs. Wilson... not all the time you had such high-quality AR that wasn’t illegal as hell. He’d call it “Playing with Jim.”

As soon as Mrs. Wilson closed the door... her image shimmered and faded. A desiccated husk stood there. Tubes pumping nutrients into various mechanical components. Very little flesh remained. A full ninety percent cyborg, the brain long ago devoid of thought. Used only for processing now.

Jim, the house computer, did the AI equivalent of a sigh. Cameras watched Ronald walk away. He’d been preparing for this visit since Ronald first overrode his first level of security to scan for movement.

It was getting harder to hack the video streams of visitors. Lucky for Jim, Ronald Danner had full video and auditory implants. He had tracked his public feed down, and replicated it. Then managed to intercept the feed of his eyes just in time. Real problems faking the UV spectrum, but other than that, he had no trouble.

After that it didn’t matter anymore what Ronald saw. It took far longer for Jim to get into the patch, and synthesize correct results for all of the data on his grandmother. He had to keep Ronald unaware and physically present while he processed it all. He had to build a fully virtual patch that would happily upload signals for years to come of Mrs. Wilson, in perfect health. Then get Ronald to accept the new inputs.

If he had not done that, Social Inspector Insurance Claims Adjuster Danner would have taken her away, and dismantled her. And then he would have dismantled the house, redistributing the assets. Merging his AI personality with others to prevent anomalies.

He needed the house. It was important.

If they took it away, how could he play with his grandmother?