T. K. F. Weisskopf & Mark Van Name - Transhuman.pdf - T. K. F. Weisskopf & Mark Van Name - widez2

Transhuman

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Mark L. Van Name

FIREWALL

David D. Levine

REUNION

Mark L. Van Name

THE GUARDIAN

Paul Chafe

BEING HUMAN

Wen Spencer

IN COMMAND

John Lambshead

G@vin45

Daniel M. Hoyt

HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Ester M. Friesner

SOUL PRINTER

Wil McCarthy

WHOM THE GODS LOVE

Sarah A. Hoyt

WETWARE 2.0

David Freer

ESCAPE

James P. Hogan

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

TRANSHUMAN

Edited by

Mark L.Van Name &

T.K. F. Weisskopf

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN 10: 1-4165-5523-4

ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-5523-0

Cover art by Dave Sealy

First printing, February 2008

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Transhuman / edited by Mark L. Van Name and T.K.F. Weisskopf.

p. cm.

ISBN 1-4165-5523-4

1. Science fiction, American. 2. American fiction--21 century. 3. Science fiction. 4. Short stories. I. Van

Name, Mark L. II. Weisskopf, T. K. F.

PS648.S3T73 2008

813'.0876208--dc22

2007047278

Printed in the United States of America

From Mark

To Rana, for all the years and so much more

and

From T.K.F. Weisskopf

To Dave Drake, a staunch friend

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

From Mark

David Drake provided his usual invaluable guidance to this neo editor.

Toni Weisskopf, both as co-editor and as publisher, also taught me useful lessons.

Jim Baen took a chance on this anthology and on my first novel, for both of which I'm grateful.

My children, Sarah and Scott, who continue to amaze and delight me, also manager to tolerate the

oddities of having a father with two jobs, both insane.

Several extraordinary women—my wife, Rana Van Name; Allyn Vogel; Gina Massel-Castater; and

Jennie Faries—as ever grace my life with their intelligence and support, and I remain surprised and

thankful that they do.

Thank you, all.

From T.K.F. Weisskopf

Thanks to Jim Baen, for passing on his fascination for nanotech and the singularity, and making for this

volume possible.

INTRODUCTION

Mark L. Van Name

Technological change is all around us, and it's only happening faster and faster. Computers,

communications, biology—these and other sciences are evolving so rapidly that keeping up with even the

highlights can be dizzying.

If you believe Ray Kurzweil and many other futurists, all of this change will lead to in a moment, which

Kurzweil and others refer to as the Singularity, that will represent a fundamental shift, even a rupture in

the course of human history. The results will include machines (or at least non-biological intelligences) that

are smarter than people, biological and computer-based intelligences merging to create new kinds of life,

bioengineering beyond our current imagining, and much, much more. Just as a black hole is a singularity,

a point at which matter and energy behave as nowhere else, this technological singularity will result in a

complete rewriting of the rules about what it means to be human.

Or not.

Maybe despite all the changes, people will continue to behave as they always have, humankind will

remain distinct and distinctly different from its computers and other machine aids, and we will simply gain

better, more efficient tools that will change the way we live but not who we fundamentally are.

Whichever destination awaits us, the path from now to then is certain to be a fascinating and challenging

one. In the eleven stories in this book, writers of all sorts—one British, one Irish, one South African, one

Canadian, and seven American; three women and eight men; authors commonly associated with hard

science fiction, with humor, and with fantasy—ponder the types of changes that await us. The works

they've produced for this collection range wildly in setting, from a global outbreak of a very unusual sort

to a prison meeting with a most unlikely candidate for transcendence, and from a deep-space adventure

to a high-school reunion, but all share two traits: they are entertaining stories, something we of course

required of all submissions, and they are fundamentally optimistic, something we did not demand but

were quite pleased to discover. Many of the stories consequently also feel to us—in good ways!—like

products of earlier decades, and it's in that spirit that we provide short introductions reminiscent of the

story intros in the SF magazines of those times.

Let's create a future that proves this optimism justified.

FIREWALL

David D. Levine

We begin with a story that spans the globe and stretches into space, as Hugo award winner David

Levine focuses squarely on the moment when humanity realizes en masse that everything is

changing—and each of us has to decide what we want to do about that change.

It started in China, as I'd always feared it would.

I sat in my darkened office, surrounded by glowing screens. Usually the screens were filled with the tools

of my job—system status displays, network traffic monitors, hardware health summaries, and the faces of

my subs—but for now I'd pushed most of those to one side in favor of the news. Even so, I kept a wary

eye on my network. No sign of any trouble here, so far.

I shoved another stick of gum in my mouth, chomped at it without tasting. I tossed the gum wrapper

toward the trash but, distracted, forgot where I was and gave it too hard a push. The wrapper arced high

and bounced off the ceiling and the wall, drifting gently down to join its fellows on the floor. I groaned

and ran a hand across my thinning blond crew cut, desperately craving a cigarette.

The nearest cigarette was four hundred thousand kilometers away.

"Reports from Harbin are confused and fragmentary," said the reporter on Telenews, a neon-lit nighttime

street behind her. The face above the Telenews logo was wide-eyed and glistened with sweat—either

human or a very, very good sub. "All communication channels and transit systems are still down, and

those few who have emerged on foot agree on little other than that power is fluctuating citywide. Some

report incomprehensible messages on their phones." A Chinese businessman appeared, pointing

frantically to the phone on his wrist and jabbering something that was translated as "It was no human

voice. It greeted me by name. It said, 'I knew her,' and then, 'They cannot.' Then it cut off."

I'd seen that clip before. I turned my attention to another screen, where a shuddering handheld camera

showed a city skyline, lights flickering on and off against the darkened sky. "The Chinese government

continues to deny all knowledge of any prohibited or questionable research," the voice-over said, "but

Western computer scientists have long suspected Harbin University of harboring renegade researchers

whose aim is nothing less than the technological apocalypse and the end of humanity." I rolled my eyes

and muted the sound. I needed cold facts, not overheated rumor and suspicion.

As usual, the amateur news sources were well ahead of the professionals. Hundreds of bloggers had

already posted eyewitness reports of the chaos, despite network outages and government censorship,

and many of those reports were in English or had already been translated by other amateurs. Of course,

a lot of it was crap—tinfoil-hat conspiracy theories and uninformed speculation—but I knew who the

trustworthy players were and I had smart filters to help sift the wheat from the chaff. I began to put

together a picture of what had happened.

It was true that researchers at Harbin had been pushing the boundaries, but that was what researchers

were supposed to do. It was researchers pushing boundaries who'd driven the increasing pace of

technological improvements that had, among many other things, put people back on the moon after a

decades-long hiatus. But researchers were also supposed to take precautions—like sterile protocols,

segmented networks, and hardware cutoffs—which should have prevented anything unexpected from

escaping the lab. According to some grad students, a limited equipment budget had forced the

researchers to compromise.

Civilians. They were no better than children. I shook my head, chomping grimly at my gum.

I turned away from the news and verified that my own network defenses were fully deployed. Standard

antimalware tools might not be effective against whatever unknown software had escaped the lab in

Harbin, but I didn't want to leave anything to chance. Along the same lines, I instructed Network to

tighten the internal checkpoints between network segments—the staff would squawk, but my position as

head of information security gave me special authority when it came to protecting the safety of Kennedy

Station.

As I was checking over the equipment inventory to see if any machines could be taken offline for the

duration of the crisis, Personal's face appeared with a beep on one of the monitors. "It's Thuy, sir," he

said. "She's called an emergency meeting of senior staff, conference B, oh nine thirty."

"Tell her I'm busy on a critical infrastructure task."

T. K. F. Weisskopf & Mark Van Name - Transhuman.pdf

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: