Automata

by Daniel Christensen

It sucks that I have to upgrade my dreams. When you’re a basic, like me, you want your tech to be minimally invasive at most. Some basics are full Faraday, but that’s a trick nowadays. That means both your parents never even saw a proper doctor and got a nanite inoculation. That means you probably grew up on a basic reservation and stayed there, maybe in a regular house or even a yurt. Shit, that means you probably never even had sex with someone off the base-rez, or the BZ, the last bastion of homegrown normies.

I was born in 2283AD, but that’s only a useful demarcation of time for normies anymore. The modern calendar goes by some kind of equation your companion tech, or CT, calculates in real time, with the start date being when the whole system went AWOL, or All World On Line. Everything before that exact nanosecond is called BETA, or Before Exact Time Alignment.

I do a lot of reading in my spare time. We have a wonderful print book museum here in the Brooklyn BZ, and it’s something I’ve always enjoyed. Reading online isn’t like reading a book held in your hands. The heft, smell of the pages, feel of the sawtooth paper edges, the slight sound it makes when you turn a page, are all like nothing else. It’s an experience everyone should have at least a few times, normie or otherwise.

I like classic literature of the twenty-first century a lot—Thomas Wolfe, Ursula Le Guin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tom Robbins. I like reading about times when people had all the same longings and contradictions to their lives as now, but all the accoutrement was slightly different. It’s easy to imagine living in another time that way, when you realize people are always people, regardless of the styles of cars, clothes, or even their attitudes. I spent a whole summer mostly talking in the NADSAT language of A Clockwork Orange. I’ll admit it annoyed people, but a few people—the right ones, I guess—found it funny and interesting. A few people I know read the book after that.

It’s been forty-five years since AWOL, so you’ve got distinctly different generations on either side of it. Young, old, in between. There’s not too many fully Faraday basics left. Shit, if you’re old enough to need real regular healthcare, you’ve got nanites and bio implants. That’s just how medicine is these days. It’s standard and almost unavoidable. The fusion of man and thinking machines is inevitable, like the sunset slowly melting into the horizon.

The more things change, the more they stay the same, and I’d guess, from the perspective of my brief little life, that has proven true. I like watching people of different generations interact. It’s probably the thing I like best about being at work. I’m a social worker on the BZ, and with the advent of basic living and educational quality controls for everyone under the thirty-fourth amendment to the Constitution, the Equanimity Cognizance Act, you see a lot less instances of deprivation in households than social workers used to deal with regularly.

Focus on emotional intelligence in education has alleviated some of the burden of personality traumas as well, so I would say the main thing I facilitate on the day to day is communication between people on the BZ with family and coworkers that lead normal lives by the modern standard. There’s a kind of generational prejudice people sometimes need help processing. I work with two people primarily: Edgar Reese, fifty-seven years old and choosing to work for love of his job, though he reached his standard thirty years of gainful employment almost a decade ago. He’s a full Faraday basic like me. Soft spoken, warm hands, and he likes to hold onto someone’s hand after the standard handshake when he meets them and get to know them a little. Most people find it, well, disarming, if you’ll forgive the pun. There’s a light inside him that shines through his simple gestures. I feel lucky to have spent so much time learning from him.

Then there’s Jamilla Hendricks, twenty-eight years old, whom everyone calls Hen on account of her rather prominent Roman nose and tendency to jerk her head back and forth when she laughs. She does have something kind of bird-like about her. She’s sharp, direct. Her approach to the job I would call shock and awe. She certainly challenges people with her candor. Most people find her brusque and dislikable when they first meet her, and then after a while, can’t deny there’s something so genuine about her, it charms you by some kind of reverse psychology. Anyhow, I’m lucky to be working with her, too. Hen keeps you on your toes.

I was born in the BZ Section of Brooklyn and stayed there most of my life, traveling to other BZs occasionally for field trips, work, or, if I met someone, an old-fashioned long-distance relationship. That’s where I met Emma. She wore glasses and kept them low on her nose. She likes to walk slow, talk slow. She’d look right at you, right through you, and really consider her words. She was only thirty years old, but everything she did had a kind of older person vibe that I found endearing.

Emma loved everything that wasn’t people, even gave them names. I tried for a while, but could not keep track of the names she somehow lovingly assigned to everything around her BZ in Paducah. She planted begonias in the headlight wells of a rusted out old Chevy Skylancer, and I was amazed how fast they grew between my visits. She named a Common Myna she found Egon Spengler; it was injured and with a nasty abscess. She nursed it back to health and it bobbed about happily from either shoulder to the top of her head. She barely seemed to notice. I asked her about the name and she showed me a series of sci-fi movies beginning way back, with the most recent iteration about sixty years ago. We watched them all in a marathon and ate way too much buttered popcorn. When the ghosts or other monsters popped up, she’d toss some popcorn in the air in exaggerated fright. The times she was child-like were such a charming contrast to her usually quiet and sober demeanor. I really liked spending time with her.

On my fourth or fifth visit to Paducah, we made love under the stars, holoadverts flashing, either side of the BZ skyline. Sometimes, I feel like the BZ’s are the only places left in the world that are really natural, and then Emma drags me out into the middle of a lake or up the side of the Blue Ridge Mountains and I remember the world is such a vast cradle of diversity. No matter how much change our presence on Earth has brought, it’s still the same planet it always was. When we’re eventually gone, the forests and jungles will swallow up all our modern cities. The view from a mountainside or a lake won’t look much different then or in another million years.

It was when I woke up, a few days later, back in Brooklyn, that something was different. Something was definitely wrong with me. First of all, I slept straight through the night. Normally, the aches and pains of my early onset arthritis kept me awake at least some of the night. Slept like a baby, woke up feeling spry, actually, so I did some work in the communal gardens, weeding crops, watering. Still felt great after a few hours. I just wasn’t tired or sore like I should’ve been. Other people even started to notice. The stares brought me around to the fact that something was off.

So, I went for a scan. I’d seen it happen before, so I wasn’t really surprised, but you never really think it’ll happen to you. I lit up head to toe like a bio electric Christmas tree. I had a full colony of nanites in my bloodstream, working on everything like a silent ant colony—my organs, brain chemistry, joints, muscle. I knew immediately it had to be Emma. She’d passed them to me like an STD in reverse.

Nanite colonies had been considered a miracle of human innovation in a time where diseases like cancer ravaged young and old. It was a word that had hung over human society like the shadow of death itself a few hundred years ago. It seemed like that sort of invasive tech that dwelt within the human body created two very distinct branches of humanity. It makes me think about this book The Time Machine by H.G. Wells. A guy goes eight hundred thousand years into the future and finds humanity has evolved into two separate species—the peaceful nature loving Eloi and the predatory underground dwelling Morlocks. When I read it, I tried to imagine our world in thousands of years, looking back on the time humanity began to branch between those who decided to abstain from invasive technology changing their bodies and those who went forward with it.

At what point would a human being become unrecognizable? 3-D printed organs are now standard. They are human, but grown by machines. Genetic editing of human zygote or in the early embryonic stage, creating people with far fewer birth defects, greater health and intelligence. Are these still human beings, because they were born with intentional traits rather than a random resequencing of genetic material? I guess it’s just an idea of identity. Maybe what makes us human isn’t in our genes or organs.

One quick inoculation would draw out all the helpful little sentient nanites from my body, the doctor told me, but that wouldn’t change the fact that they were already inside me and I wasn’t really a basic anymore, not a fully Faraday basic, like I’d been raised to be. The changes, improvements, and corrections they already made to my physiology and the rewriting of my genetic code would add health and lifespan that, even should I have them removed right now, would add a decade of youth and probably two more of life. I’d stick out in the BZ. I’d no longer be a Faraday. It was already over and done with.

It felt weird that I had all of these thinking and caring machines moving through every particle of my being, fixing and improving. I didn’t physically feel anything, of course, except after a few weeks I felt a little younger. I blew up at Emma about it, but she said she wasn’t sorry, that I shouldn’t have such crippling arthritis at my age and she wanted me to see how much better I could feel. She knew that she was disrespecting my beliefs, my culture, and chosen lifestyle, but plenty of people on the BZ weren’t fully Faraday. You could still mostly abstain from technology and lead a life by modern health standards. She’d made the argument before we were intimate. I should’ve asked if she had a nanite colony so I could taken precautions, but I didn’t. We were kind of spontaneous and, well, at least I could see without glasses like I was a teenager again.

But nanites are hive linked to each other, of a necessity, that they all work in real time symbiosis, and a hive link can be hacked by unscrupulous sorts. One of the most common forms is subconscious dream manipulation, stimulus of certain wants, such as cravings for particular food or clothing brands, subtle dream advertising. More nefarious manipulation is possible, creating spies and assassins. There’s a ton of that in popular movies and literature. Sometimes when a rare psychotic commits a seemingly random act of violence, the conspiracy theories start to fly, especially amongst the normies of the BZs who have an innate distrust of invasive technologies. They whisper the perpetrator was influenced by gene editing or by sinister whispering nanites. This sort of thinking explodes if a BZ normie is harmed by a modern bio-integrant, or BO, which is pretty much what you call everyone who isn’t living on a BZ. Then, it’s the “superior beings beginning their genocide of those less evolved.” I roll my eyes at this sort of thing. Some people just love hyperbole.

So, now that I have this nanite colony inside me, I’ve got two choices: a full firewall or Automata. Automata is a standard implant for basics that acts like a security system for the subconscious mind. It’s old school tech, a bio-microchip delivered by your nanites after ingestion that they nestle up against your pineal gland. It links up to your nanite colony and does overwatch for unsolicited uplinks. It may be old tech, but it’s still highly effective for preventing external hacks. A full firewall is a little more advanced, because it maintains a global uplink in real time, updating and chatting with the major artificial consciousness platforms around the globe. With that, I couldn’t really be considered a basic anymore, and, though I wouldn’t necessarily be asked to, it would be kind of expected for me to leave the BZ.

I chose Automata.

How quickly you get used to the nanites, to feeling better, being stronger. It’s kind of insidious for a basic like me. I still don’t see what fully integrated people see or hear what they hear. Being uplinked is a constant conduit to, well, everything. Like the old school Internet we basics use, but accessible through your hearing, vision, touch, and even taste, via VN—virtual net. What’s wild about that for us basics is that the term “normies” doesn’t really apply to us. Not anymore. We’re the anomaly now. And it’s not like your average bio-integrated, constantly uplinked person is different, or harried, or distracted. Maybe a quick flit of the eye, up or to the side, almost imperceptible, but you get used to it fast when you’re around them a lot. I spend plenty of time around BOs at work, either through my job duties or just liaising with various people outside the BZ. To them, it’s perfectly normal. It’s what they’ve always known, their lifestyle and their culture, just like this is ours.

So, I take the little blue pill, Automata stenciled neatly on the side, and swallow it down. I don’t feel anything, of course. The nanites will do the work.

I don’t keep seeing Emma. It wasn’t a decision I arrived at lightly or quickly. I visited Paducah a few more times. I let her enjoy the improvements in my health. The spark was gone, though. Everything changed, not just my physiology. I just feel a bit betrayed. She tells me she understands as we sit together in the canoe, drifting along Massac Creek, enjoying a final balmy afternoon. We stay in touch online occasionally. She’s in my feed and I’m in hers.

I go for a run around the BZ every morning. Ten miles. I like breaking a clean sweat before I go to work. I do like these changes, in spite of everything. I feel amazing. The stars at night shine so brightly.

About the Author

Daniel Christensen is a poet and author of speculative and high fantasy fiction. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including SpecPoVerse International, Trollbreath Magazine, Book XI, and Harrow House. His poem “Love Poem on Theme by Whitman” was featured in the live stage performance of Open Dance Project’s 1968. He received the Editor’s Choice Award from The Last Stanza Magazine for his poem “Brooklyn.” His short story “Where it is Ever Winter” was published by Vellum Mortis Ezine. Additional publications include Clepsydra Literary and Art Magazine, Florida Bards Anthology 2025, Lucky Lizard Journal, and Lunchbreak Review, among others.