Fast Draw

READING LEVEL: G-1

[0.00 second]

Jake caught a flurry of movement in the mirror behind the bar. He whirled left off his stool and hit the floor in a crouch, scanning for trouble. Accustomed to the dim light pooling the bar, his eyes strained to penetrate the darker gloom along the back wall. At the fourth table from the left, customers were on their feet mopping up a spill with napkins, otherwise he detected nothing sinister.

He was turning back to his seat when he stopped short and did a double-take. Ten feet behind his chair, a woman’s figure stood so still in the shadows that he had nearly missed her. It was easy to see that Gloria was still steamed over the way he had dumped her—the position of her hands above the six-gun on her hip painted a very clear picture—she was going to shoot him!

Of course the very idea was ridiculous. As a bio-logical human, Gloria had no access to the Riemann pathways Jake traversed so nimbly. To keep up with him, she would need to channel at least a terawatt. Even if she could source the energy, she would never survive the thousands of G-forces of acceleration or the million-degree temperatures of super-compressing the air around her. But that was Gloria for you—when her anger roared, reason took a holiday.

There would be plenty of time to react to Gloria later. For now Jake had more pressing business with the blonde on the next barstool.

[0.01 second]

A message from the blonde was already waiting on Jake’s internal com link: “You’re kind of jumpy, aren’t you, Lover? Just some lush spilling his drink. Why don’t you ease yourself back onto your chair and tell Bunny where you learned to move like that?” She leaned over and, for the second time that night, patted Jake’s empty stool.

As Jake slid into the seat, he reviewed his situation. A few minutes earlier he had been sitting alone, deciding between ordering another drink and calling it a night. Weighing on the drink’s side was the atmosphere of this place. He loved the feel of the wood bar, cool and moist under his fingertips. The dim light, sparse clientele and emotionally distant barkeep bathed him in a reassuring anonymity. Weighing on the side of calling it a night was simple common sense.

As his decision teetered in the balance, the barkeep approached him to say that a woman wanted to buy him a bourbon for his birthday. Jake shot a glance down the bar to see the striking blonde in a va-va-voom red silk sheath blow him a kiss and pat the empty stool next to hers. He didn’t recognize her and couldn’t imagine how she knew his birthday or his drink. Still, she was easy on the eyes, and it was Jake’s birthday, so he thumped the bar and collected his drink.

On the walk to his mysterious benefactress, Jake noted the litter of peanut shells underfoot and how the floor grabbed at his shoes. Fleetingly, he wondered if this was how a fly perceived flypaper before becoming ensnared. Seconds after settling into the offered seat, the commotion had broken out behind him.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was drifting. What was your question again?”

“Welcome back to the land of the living! I was just wondering if you’d had any special training to make you jump like that.”

“Oh.” Jake considered whether there were reasons to withhold an answer but couldn’t think of any. “I spent a year in special forces when I was ten. That was a while ago.”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing to tell, really. I did the time. They let me out. The end.”

Jake stole a glance back at Gloria. Her right index finger moved steadily toward the gun’s trigger guard while her left hand brushed along the top of the cylinder en route to the hammer spur. With admiration and pride, he noted the perfect fluidity of Gloria’s dump draw technique. By Jake’s clock, three minutes and thirteen seconds had elapsed since he first noticed her. He figured that to be roughly 1/100 second to Gloria. Still plenty of time.

[0.02 second]

My turn,” Jake said. “You’ve got me at a disadvantage. How exactly do you know my birthday? I’m sure I’d remember if we’d met.”

An odd little smile. “I like to research the men in my life.”

“Didn’t know I was in anyone’s life.”

“Oh, much more than you realize. Tell me where you’re from; maybe we have friends in common.”

Suddenly Jake was worried. Admitting he lived in a senior center could undermine whatever attraction Bunny felt for him—better to keep his answer vague. “I have a place up in the West End.”

“Fabulous! Do you ever get to Stanley Park?”

Not being able to read Bunny’s tag was starting to cramp Jake’s style. In the world outside these walls, good manners and quite a few ordinances dictated that all citizens carry transponders identifying their generation. With this information anyone could instantly gauge another person’s cognitive and physical capabilities.

Such ready identification had been unimportant when all people relied on the same biochemical processes, and the gap between the brightest and the dullest people was small. But everything had changed a hundred years ago with the introduction of the Advanced Platform.

The first-generation APs were equivalent to bio-logical humans, but the technology evolved rapidly, averaging forty percent gains each year. The result was a highly stratified society in which a G-30 AP like Jake had twenty thousand times the abilities of a G-1 biological human like Gloria.

Every public place was required to post a generation spread. For example, a restaurant posted as G-7 to G-11 was open to any citizen with a transponder in that range. Sometimes the range was narrower, but rarely was it wider. A five-generation spread meant that the most advanced person in the room had no more than four times the abilities of any other person. At that gap everyone pretty much recognized everyone else as another human being. If the gap opened much beyond five generations, society started to come unhinged—a lesson that had been learned the hard way many times over.

Under normal circumstances, it would have been easy for Jake to ping Bunny’s tag, read her G-level, and know whether she was toying with him or whether he had a real shot at impressing her.

Unfortunately, this particular dive wasn’t picky about the niceties of polite society. Although it posted a spread, it never checked the tags of paying customers. In fact, lots of people like Jake came here precisely because they could deactivate their transponders for a few hours and sample a wider cross-section of life.

If Bunny was a higher generation than Jake, she sure wasn’t showing it. All her nods and gestures looked natural and comfortably paced. Her voice was smooth, and she seemed to hang on his every word. If she noticed Gloria, she betrayed no concern.

Oh, yeah, time to check on Gloria. Let’s see: index finger in trigger guard, remaining fingers closing on grip, slap hand accelerating smartly toward hammer spur, gun still stationary in holster. No reason to worry yet.

[0.03 second]

Hello! Hello! Earth calling Jake. You seem awfully far away, Cowboy. Don’t you like me?”

With an invitation like that, Jake decided to up the stakes. He put his hand on Bunny’s thigh and gave it a little squeeze. “I like you just fine, Baby.”

She did not slap his face or shy away. Jake said, “You asked me about Stanley Park. Matter of fact, I do get there from time to time.”

“I love to attend the cricket matches. Maybe you could take me sometime?”

Something about the conversation was setting off alarms in Jake’s head. He had picked up lots of women in bars, but it was never this easy. Whatever was in Bunny’s secret Jake dossier apparently painted him in a very positive light.

It occurred to Jake that Bunny might be trying to win some sort of bet. People played all kinds of games to amuse themselves, often at a mark’s expense.

Ever so casually, Jake glanced down the bar and then back at the tables over Bunny’s right shoulder. He didn’t catch anyone lavishing unusual attention in their direction. Reluctantly, feigning stiffness in his arm, he patted her thigh appreciatively and withdrew his hand. Then pushing off the bar with his right hand, he rode his stool in a lazy circle that allowed his eyes to pass over the entire room. When his seat came around to face the bar again, he neatly scooped up his drink, as if that had been the sole reason for the maneuver. Admittedly, it was a quick glimpse of a lot of tables, but he saw no sign of jokers.

As his eyes passed over Gloria, he noted her index finger fully curled around the trigger, the heel of her slap hand smashing into the hammer spur and the cylinder fully visible as the revolver started its journey out of the holster.

[0.04 second]

Jake was starting to wish he had brought his pals from the center tonight. While each of them individually was no more impressive than he was, Jake had worked out a way to pool their cognitive resources through a close-proximity network.

The result was that any member within a hundred meters could borrow unused cognitive resources from the pool and boost his or her effective G-level for short periods. The technique lost steam after nine or ten G-levels, because the number of crew members needed got unwieldy, but in the right situation it was a killer trick. Best of all, use of the pool had no effect on an individual member’s transponder. This ability to hide their effective G-rating had enabled them as seemingly decrepit seniors to win some very profitable bets and sidestep a lot of mayhem.

A quick G-boost might be all it would take for Jake to sort things out, but tonight he would have to get by on his own wits.

Then it hit him—he should have seen it a mile away! This whole setup had to be the work of his buddies. They had been peeved when he said he wanted to go out alone for a quiet evening of reflection on his seventieth birthday. They had wanted a big party, and it appeared they were going to have one with or without his permission. It was exactly the sort of prank that would provide guffaws in the dining room for weeks to come—Jake, why don’t you tell us again about your hot birthday date? It certainly explained how Bunny knew his birthday and his admiration for bourbon.

Jake put down his drink and spun his seat back through the circle in the opposite direction. As his eyes passed over Gloria, he noted that her slap hand had finished snapping the hammer to full cock and the first half inch of barrel was visible as the weapon continued to clear the holster.

As his chair completed its turn, bringing Bunny’s stool into view, he was startled to see that she was gone!

[0.05 second]

So maybe this was the end of the fun. His inattention had finally convinced her to move along to someone who would show more appreciation for her considerable charms.

She had to be scamming him. She was clearly AP, and there just weren’t that many APs left near Jake’s age. If she were his age or older, he thought he would have met her before now.

APs, unlike biological humans, were born fully developed, fully educated, and at their intellectual and physical prime. The world was run by newborn APs. Each year a new crop came along, having been designed and built over a two-year period by the immediately preceding generations.

Seventy years ago, when G-30s were the pinnacle of evolution, Jake had been a high-ranking member of the government’s executive committee and president of the corporation formed to design and build the G-32 generation.

At the time of Jake’s birth, the AP population was already stable at its current target of one billion souls. Then as now, the latest generation was both the largest and the most capable age group, accounting for twenty-nine percent of all planetwide production. Taken together, the youngest eleven generations made up fifty-three percent of the total AP population and performed ninety-nine percent of all work.

By age twelve, the abilities of citizens were so diminished in comparison with younger workers that their potential contribution no longer justified their management overhead. Thus, forty-seven percent of the AP population lived as retirees.

Jake had enjoyed his retirement years. As a retiree he was fully supported by the state and free to pursue his own interests. While his wife was alive, they traveled extensively and blogged about places they visited.

She had died fifty years ago at age twenty, right on the planned statistical median for all APs. For the next ten years, Jake eagerly waited for his own death, but even though two thirds of his remaining cohort were dead by age thirty, Jake survived.

When he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, only 1,033 of his original class of 48,860,004 remained. At that time his chances of making it to age seventy had been no better than one in a hundred, but here he was, one of the last twelve standing.

The funny thing was that even as Jake’s survival chances faded to nothing, he found himself wanting more and more to live. The even funnier thing was Jake knew it was because of Gloria.

In theory, he could live forever, especially if the working generations wanted to help him out. They had technology beyond his wildest imaginings. It would be simple for them to fabricate any replacement parts he needed—they could even throw a few upgrades his way. Easy.

But as much as Jake might wish for immortality, he knew it was not going to happen. It wasn’t that the workers begrudged him his retirement. They viewed life as a sacred trust and were glad to support their great- great-great- . . . grandparents. As long as Jake lived, they would take care of him. The only and inevitable exception was the failure of a major component. It was an article of faith that it made no sense to repair a major failure in a retiree when the same effort could produce a vastly more evolved newborn.

Jake might seem like a super being to Gloria, but to a newborn G-100, he was hardly an engaging dinner companion. Today’s newborns were ten billion times smarter than Jake and thought of him about the same way Gloria thought about a two-millimeter roundworm. She might appreciate it for its contribution to her evolutionary past; she might even be able to care for it with growth medium and climate controls, but there simply wasn’t any way for her to have a meaningful, personal relationship with it.

With the mysterious Bunny missing in action, Jake circled his stool for a longer look at Gloria.

Seemingly frozen in time, she looked like a statue of a wrathful Greek goddess. Since his last observation, her slap hand had slid off the end of the hammer spur and was half an inch behind and above it. The gun, now at full cock, had an inch of the barrel’s five-and-one-half-inch length exposed. Gloria’s gun hip had eased back, tilting the holster so she could fire as soon as the muzzle cleared. The new geometry of her stance revealed a glint of light reflecting off the gun’s nickel finish.

[0.06 second]

Jake found himself desperately wanting to declock so he could be with Gloria in her timeframe, but if he did so now, she would shoot him dead. He had to wait until it was safe.

Biological humans, commonly called bios, had not interested Jake when he was younger. He knew their history, of course. As hard as it was to believe, bios had created the Advanced Platform, which today formed the basis for nearly all known intelligent life.

The bios’ original idea had been to create robots that could stand in for bios in dangerous occupations, such as soldiering and mining. After years of experimentation and false starts, they produced the first APs that closely matched bio performance levels. About one million of these G-1 units were made, and they were a huge commercial success.

Subsequent generations of APs brought big gains in capabilities. Soon there were many jobs that could only be performed by APs, and it became impossible to produce APs fast enough to satisfy demand. By the time the G-5s rolled out, APs were much smarter than the smartest bios.

In year seven the AP population reached 100 million and the bio population crossed nine billion, making one AP available for every ninety bios. By this time, APs occupied all the highest government and corporate executive positions. Organizations run exclusively by bios could not compete and went out of business or were overrun by AP-led factions. It became clear that only APs were smart enough to design and build new generations of APs.

From G-7 to G-14 the intellectual divide between APs and bios grew so wide that APs began to view bio intellect the same way bios viewed dog intellect. Bios were rapidly losing their ability to contribute meaningful work to society. At the same time, bio population growth was placing unsustainable demands on natural resources.

After protracted debate, the G-14s decided to bring the AP and bio populations into alignment at one billion each. To achieve this, they established a policy that new APs could only be born as old ones died, and they created a virus that rendered bios sterile unless treated with a government-controlled drug. Then they cut the bio fertility rate to one child for every three females with a plan of raising it to replacement levels as the bio population converged on the one billion target.

The rapid decline in bio population meant that during the transition years, there were many more old bios than young ones. Though it would have been impossible for the shrinking pool of young bios to care for all their elders, AP productivity more than offset the shortfall. APs even engineered healthcare improvements that boosted bio life expectancy by eleven years.

Gloria was born the same year as the G-75 APs and the same year that Jake celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. At the time of her birth, the bio fertility rate had been restored to target replacement levels, and the bio census was down to 1.8 billion, continuing its descent to one billion as the last members of the bio old-age bubble died.

Jake first met Gloria two years ago on a cultural enrichment trip sponsored by his senior center. She was twenty-three and he was sixty-eight. The occasion was the bio World Fast Draw Championship, held in the countryside near Vancouver. Gloria had won the Women’s Traditional Fast Draw with a reaction time of 0.151 second and a cock-draw-aim-fire time of 0.107 second for a total score of 0.258 second.

This was the cultural enrichment part. The times seemed incredibly fast to the cheering bios. Gloria could cock, draw, aim, and fire her six-shooter in less time than most bios could snap their fingers. On the other hand, to even the most geriatric AP visitors from the senior center, Gloria’s fast draw unfolded as painfully slow-motion theater.

But while the other APs were busy making jokes and parodying the amazement of the bio fans, Jake was staring quietly at Gloria. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and he found himself mesmerized by her deep concentration and balletic movement.

That was when he declocked the first time.

He wasn’t supposed to do it, and it had held up the return bus trip, earning him dirty looks from the rest of the tour group, but he just had to speak with her.

Their first conversation had been short, in part because the bus was waiting and in part because Gloria couldn’t quite grasp what was happening—she had never before spoken with an AP. Jake complimented her on winning, expressed admiration for her shooting style, and offered his G-30 perspective to help her improve beyond even that day’s triumph. Shyly, she had agreed he could call her, and then abruptly he was gone.

The last two years had been complicated. Jake and Gloria took turns delighting and exasperating each other. Gloria’s initial skepticism about Jake’s offer to improve her shooting disappeared as her scores steadily climbed. She also loved nothing more than showing off Jake to her friends. None of them had ever had a boyfriend with Jake’s power and sophistication, and when she told them how attentive he was in bed, they were wildly jealous. Of course Gloria’s parents thought Jake was wrong for her, and that added to her enjoyment of his company. On the downside, there were days when he seemed moody and distracted. Often on these days he would irritate her with an unrelenting stream of advice until she sent him away.

For Jake’s part, he basked in the wide-eyed admiration that Gloria and her friends showered on him. Of the billion APs currently living, only a few dozen functioned at or below Jake’s level. Even tricked out with the proximity network and a gang of his pals, he could only stretch as high as the bottom few thousand APs.

Jake also reveled in Gloria’s body. Most APs had bodies that were designed into idealized proportions according to the function or fashion of the day. Bios, on the other hand, despite some genetic tinkering and cosmetic adjustment, had bodies that were much more variable. Gloria’s little asymmetries and imperfections made her unique among all humans, and Jake loved all of her from head to toe.

There was also something irresistible about her self-confidence. Whether shooting competitively before thousands of fans or alone with Jake in the bedroom of her apartment, Gloria never doubted herself. Of course, to Jake’s way of thinking her confidence also had a dark side. She could be downright pigheaded, especially when pressed with irrefutable logic. Sometimes she would fly into an unstoppable rage. Once a tantrum started, Jake had never found a way to do anything other than ride out the storm.

Jake loved Gloria in a way he hadn’t loved anyone in fifty years, and that was both his greatest joy and his biggest problem. The way he figured it, it wasn’t fair to keep Gloria tied to a short-timer like himself, just when she was coming into her prime and about to cash in her two child permits. So last week, ever mindful of his looming seventieth birthday, he had taken her out to dinner at their favorite haunt and told her he was leaving her. He had hoped the public venue would prevent a scene, but he had calculated wrong. When the pyrotechnics were over, they were both out on the street and warned never to come back. He had only escaped her pummeling by reclocking to G-30 and ducking down an alley.

He had hoped that she would calm down in a few days. Looking at her now, he realized he had again miscalculated.

[0.13 second]

A bright flash at the muzzle of Gloria’s gun snapped Jake out of his reverie.

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that one of his shoes was untied. It would be embarrassing to trip at an awkward moment and wind up on the front page of tomorrow’s paper as the first G-30 ever killed in a bar fight by a G-1 bio.

“Hey, Lover, did you miss me?”

Jake caught a splash of red silk to his right; Bunny must have slipped back into her seat while he was distracted. He held up one finger, “Just a moment, I’ll be right with you.” Then he bent down to fix his shoelace.

[0.136 second]

Coming up from tying his shoe, Jake saw to his horror that something was terribly wrong. The bullet was barely a foot away from him, instead of the five feet he had expected. A bullet from Gloria’s .45 Long Colt simply could not move that fast. There was also something odd about the bullet’s appearance. Gloria’s gun fired a gray-colored, cast-lead bullet with a diameter of 0.45 inch, but the bullet that streaked toward Jake was only 0.357 inch in diameter, and its back half was copper colored. A jacketed hollow point moving that fast could only mean that the gun in Gloria’s hand was a replica firearm chambered for .357 Magnum, instead of her own gun!

[0.1367 second]

As undignified as it might be to rush, Jake was starting to feel pinched for time. He slugged down the last of his bourbon and slammed the glass on the bar. The bullet was now three inches away. Time to stop dawdling and get the hell out of the way!

[0.13688 second]

As Jake moved to sidestep the bullet, Bunny pounced, clamping her arms around him and holding him in the bullet’s path. Jake struggled like a wild animal to break free, but she easily overpowered him.

With only one quarter-inch of bullet travel remaining, Jake tensed for impact.

[0.136896551276 second]

The bullet cut the threads of Jake’s shirt. In one hundred-thousandth of an inch it would begin tearing a deep channel through his vitals. There would be no possibility of repair.

[0.136896551724 second]

Officer Flannigan nudged his partner. “Lookie here, Marjorie. We got ourselves an honest-to-goodness shooting-in-progress! I’ll settle the citizens; you start the paperwork. I want citations for everybody.”

Casually, Officer Flannigan (G-100) snapped on a new pair of gloves—it wouldn’t do to contaminate the evidence.

He started by taking a few photos of the scene. He particularly enjoyed the expressions on the perps’ faces. The man on the stool was a study in wild-eyed terror; poor devil must figure he’s a goner. The blonde’s straining biceps were strangely out of kilter with the little smile on her lips. He shuddered; something was deeply disturbing about that one. Looking back through the fire and smoke around the gun’s muzzle, it was easy to see that the young bio fancied herself a wronged woman.

He took the jacketed hollow point between his thumb and index finger and placed it in an evidence bag. Carefully, he separated Jake and Bunny and handcuffed them to their respective barstools. Then he lifted the gun out of Gloria’s hand and put it in another evidence bag before handcuffing her into a chair.

“Don’t forget to add ‘Fraternizing Outside G-level’ to the tickets, Marge. And while you’re at it, you might as well write one for the establishment failing to check ID. One day we’ll shut this place down for good.”

As Marjorie finished writing each summons, Officer Flannigan placed it in the hand of the proper recipient. In between, he used his police scanner to review the perps’ hidden tags. When he got to Bunny, he let out a low whistle.

“Marge, this here’s Tiger Jane! Her sheet’s a mile long. It says she went berserk after being sexually assaulted a few years back. Ever since, she’s been hunting and killing men who hurt women. Missy here must have had a beef with this guy, and Jane figured to help her even the score. Print me up a red necklace—the guys in the paddy wagon need to know who they’re dealing with.”

When everything was ready, Officer Flannigan called the precinct to bring the wagon. Then he and Marjorie resumed their rounds.