EX MACHINA, by Cynthia Ward

“Why the hell I got to come here at 8:00 AM, ese?”

My cousin the child psychologist had left me numerous voicemail messages about a problem he was seeing in patients with brain implants. The moment I’d gotten the messages, I’d called back, curious to know why Rob would consult a drug-runner. He’d refused to go into details, but he’d looked more somber than usual on my cellphone screen. There was no chance the man would meet me in a virtual conference room—he hated technology. So I’d agreed to come to his office.

“My client’s parents were unwilling to reschedule the appointment.” As he answered my question, Rob looked with distaste at my leathers. He doesn’t like to be reminded of my employment or our origins, so I’d dug out my streetest clothes for the visit.

Rob offered fresh genuine coffee. I refused. I hardly needed another upper in my system.

He led me into his inner office, where a pair of Bose bookshelf speakers oozed a newscaster’s plastic voice. It was describing the latest exploit of the hacker who’d been dominating the CalNa News for the past couple of months. This time the superhacker had wormholed the computer system of the new desalination plant near Pacifica. It would be offline for at least a month. I grinned.

Rob powered down the sound system and sank into one of the chairs. He scowled at my pacing. “Sit down, woman.”

“You know better than that, man. You get me up before noon, you know I got to do something to stay awake.” Rob grimaced. “So,” I prodded, “tell me about this implant problem. Your patients spending too much time jacked into interactives?”

I expected Rob to make the complaint that newfangled frivolities are corrupting today’s youth—the complaint that must date back to Neanderthals watching their kids use fire.

He didn’t, quite. “In the last two months, I’ve taken on six clients with neural interface implants.” Few kids have brain ’plants, but Rob’s patients’ parents can afford the new ones designed for growing bodies. “All six exhibit the same symptom, a flattening of affect so severe I can safely say I’ve never before seen its like.”

“Don’t use terms like ‘flattening of affect’. I know that one but I won’t get ’em all.”

Rob didn’t react. “These boys, who range in age from five to eight, were brought to me because they’ve lost interest in everything except being jacked into the Global Network.”

“Well, like the ads say, GlobeNet offers a nearly limitless range of play possibilities—”

“Most children would show enthusiasm for that vast array of entertainment. My clients do not; in fact, they’ve stopped watching the videos and playing the games. All they do is access GlobeNet’s Children’s Bulletin Board.”

“That is strange. They must be bored.”

“If they are, why are they bothering to jack in?”

“’Cas it’s still better than cleaning their rooms?”

Rob scowled. “My clients have always used computers; in fact, their parents reinforce desirable behavior by rewarding them with online playtime. They were among the first children to receive commercial interfaces. Since they received these implants, their behavior has changed gradually, but radically. They’ve given up games and playmates and every other pleasure to spend every available moment on the Children’s Bulletin Board, while at the same time becoming emotionally withdrawn and losing the egocentric self-awareness of childhood.”

“Isn’t autism a bit outside your area of expertise?”

“My clients are not autistic. Children don’t spontaneously develop autism-spectrum disorders when they’re eight years old. They don’t have pediatric schizophrenia, either. The only traits exhibited by my clients are an impairment of emotional relationships and a loss of personal identity. Otherwise, these children are neurotypical. Even bright.”

“Oh.” I decided to stop questioning my cousin’s knowledge of his field. “Maybe the implants are causing some sort of bioelectrical burnout not found in adults.”

Rob shook his head. “Extensive medical testing has uncovered no evidence of organic dysfunction, and literature searches have uncovered nothing that quite describes my clients’ condition. The disorder is new and undocumented and occurs only in children.”

“So even the most recent psych journals haven’t heard a word about this problem, ’ey? A paper’s in it for you! Fame! Acclaim!”

“That’s very much a secondary consideration.”

“Yeah, well, you still haven’t explained why I’m here, Rob. If there’s no biological problem, I can’t guess what mental problem jacking online would cause kids. How can I know what you mind and med docs don’t? So I have a ’plant. So what? I’m no programmer. Far from it.”

“You’re no programmer, true,” Rob said. “But your implant is almost constantly in use.” I stifled a protest. “You know neural networking from the inside out.”

God knows you never will, I thought. I pulled my cable and plug out of a jacket pocket.

“What did you bring those for?”

“I might need to see the kid interfacing,” I said. I didn’t say, ’Cas you live in the last century, though I was tempted to.

I rarely resist a chance to give my cousin a hard time, but he’s really not a bad dude. He’s rather uptight around adults, but he does have a way with children. He honestly likes kids, and he treats them with respect—treats them like people—without expecting them to be little adults. Though young and conservative, he’s one of the most respected child psychologists in the Nation of California.

I crossed his spacious office, a calculated masterpiece. Its simple wood furnishings and paneling showed solidity in the face of fad and fashion. It subtly informed parents that they were dealing with a successful psychologist, yet had a casualness that put children at ease.

I heard a strange voice. “Doctor Vincent, are you in?”

I jerked around to see Rob thumb a button on his landline phone. “Yes, Lottie, I’m here,” he said to the intercom. “My cousin will be seeing my first client with me.”

“Yes, doctor.” The receptionist’s voice held a note of surprise.

* * * *

Rob’s computer system didn’t have all the standard features. A flatscreen monitor? Well, I’d known better than to expect a holoscreen or an active-matrix video display. At least the system had a jackport. Rob was such a chickenshit traditionalist, I always figured he became a child psychologist ’cas he couldn’t stand seeing kids get too far from the norms.

When we were growing up, Roberto Velasquez Oliveira was nicknamed, not affectionately, “The Little Professor” (I had the good sense not to read in front of others and not to do well in school, which was not a problem, school was a bore). Between the steady studying and the constant bullying, Roberto developed a powerful desire not to stick out—he even changed his name to Robert Oliver Vincent, like nobody would notice he’s Mexican and Brazilian if he did that.

When Rob and I were twelve, my brother and his siblings found him lying bloody, naked, and barely conscious behind the rickety carport we lived in. Gangs were split by race, but not all members of one race ran together, of course; and a rival gang of cholos had thrashed the suspiciously studious Velasquez boy. Now, my bro and Rob’s sibs didn’t like Rob much, either; not only was he the youngest and our mothers’ favorite, he liked school and he refused to have anything to do with our gang—he was for sure a coward. But family is family: “Nobody can pick on my brother but me.” So me and my bro and Rob’s sibs went right out and carved up the pinches ojetes with monomole blades. Yeah, our posse had velocity.

Rob was in bed for a month—it was while scoring black-market antibiotics and healfasts that I found my career. He spent all his time in bed reading. He liked hardcopies, but nobody had money for those, so I got him books from the library. He’d never been religious, or much of a mystic, but he wanted stuff on Zen Buddhism. Finally I asked why.

He said, “I seek nothing.”

“Nothing? Jesus, you got a funny idea of light reading!”

When Rob was back on his feet, he was more of a grind than ever. He graduated high school two years early, got a scholarship to UC-Berkeley, and got the hell out of our neighborhood and our world, which he’d hated even more than the rest of us. Rob and I took very different paths out of childhood. And of our families, only he and I are left.

Rob watched as I connected my fiber-optic cable to the port and, scraping my fingertips on stubble, slotted the small jack into my socket.

Soon enough, blackness filled my skull from wall to wall; and in the blackness revolved the GlobeNet logo, a green and blue earth, vast and three-dimensional in subjective space.

I fell, or seemed to fall, into the logo, as the network verified the account information my ’plant supplied. Then I was in the network, and in persona.

I have a cheap avatar for my legit account, an avatar as impossibly beautiful as any other—nothing remarkable, just the image of a gabacha corporate cog. No celebrity xerox, no spike-crusted transformer robot, no being of pure light; on the account I keep under my own name, I don’t want anything custom-designed or just plain memorable.

My persona was immediately inundated by the standard flood of personalized ads. Idol singer Midori Dasgupta-Ajayi tried to dance with me as she pitched the Code Red energy drink to the beat of her biggest bhangra-zydeco hit. My virtual eyes ached at the sight of retro-rappers Ice-9 and D-Vize busting moves in LA Lux fashions that changed colors every other second. I dodged an Absolut vodka bottle that thrust up suddenly, beaded with moisture and gleaming like ice. My persona darted and ducked and dove.

News, I said in my mind.

Instantly, my persona was at the heart of a hollow sphere. It was composed of the icons of all my favorite news options.

My persona touched the Amazon-Google icon.

The lead story was about another of those untraceable computer break-ins. This time the superhacker had penetrated the Neurexon corporate network; stolen and then scrambled research data on an experimental amino-based mnemonotropic; and injected a virus that destroyed passwords as users attempted to log on.

Rob’s voice interrupted my concentration. “I don’t understand how you can do anything without a keyboard or touchscreen.”

I opened my eyes. The virtual screen was a translucent membrane over my vision. Text and images flowed over Rob’s face.

“I just speak a command silently,” I explained. “I doubt it’s any different from you silently rehearsing a memorized speech. If I want to do something like send a text message, I ‘speak’ my message very clearly in my mind.”

“You’re saying people talk to each other mind to mind,” Rob said, angry suddenly. “Telepathy doesn’t exist. But you can’t resist feeding me a line of crap, even when I need your assistance.”

“You misunderstand me, Rob. This isn’t telepathy. People in neural interface can’t hear each other’s words or read each other’s minds.”

Rob looked doubtful, and still angry. What we don’t understand frightens us, and he’d never understand this. He didn’t want to.

I glanced at the flatscreen, on which Rob had been following my progress. It was odd, seeing my virtual screen superimposed in ghostly, not-quite-aligned images on Rob’s identical hardscreen display. It was dizzying. I closed my eyes.

The receptionist’s voice ’commed in. “Dr. Vincent, your first appointment is here.”

Rob went to the door. I unjacked and followed him out to the waiting area, where he greeted a woman and boy. The woman wore the latest fashions, but her tall, raw-boned Nordic frame was ’way wrong for her Tsuchiya designer slinkskirt. Her son’s skull was shaved bald, and it gleamed almost as brightly as the ornate chrome socket-housing on the back of his head. The kid’s baldness didn’t surprise me. That was the fashion for pretweens, shaving your head and polishing your skull with metal-hued wax.

The kid looked about eight, and looked very strange. It wasn’t the polished skull; that look was weeks old, practically old-school. I studied his face more closely. My head jerked back as realized why he looked so weird.

His face was completely lacking in expression.

His mother was anything but blank-faced. She was astounded to see someone who looked like a thirty-year-old, leather-clad ganger woman standing next to her son’s therapist. But Rob introduced me as a colleague and the woman seemed to buy it. People believe anything a doctor says.

Rob told the woman he wished to see just her son today, if she didn’t mind. She didn’t. She sat down, smoothly crossing long legs with studied casualness, and picked up a print copy of People. I trailed Rob and the boy into the office. Rob closed the door. I sank down in a chair to one side of his desk.

Rob addressed the boy gently. “How are you today, William?”

William’s pallid Eurasian features didn’t change a bit as he responded, “Fine, thank you.”

Rob didn’t react to the tone of the kid’s voice, which was as utterly emotionless as his face. Rob directed William to sit down and said some warm, innocuous child-doc stuff. The boy appeared to ignore the chitchat as thoroughly as I did.

William’s unrelenting expressionlessness gave me no insight. It was also incredibly boring to watch.

My attention wandered to the window. Rob’s suite was on the second floor of an old Victorian converted to office space, but I was close enough to the bulletproof glass to see the herds of professionals, armed with briefcases and shielded by filter-masks, as they walked or bicycled to the Financial District. They parted and closed like a gray river around the sole visible motorized vehicle, an electric bus. Not even fuel-cell cars are allowed in this part of San Francisco.

My attention drifted back into the room. Rob was still talking to his patient. The tone of Rob’s voice indicated he was now trying to be at ease. His usual warmth and respect for children were falling on this kid as uselessly as salt spray on a sea-wall.

I caught Rob’s eye and held up the jack. He nodded and directed William to move closer to the computer system. Listlessly, the kid dug his momentarily-purple LA Lux hightops into the beige carpet and pulled his chair up to the workstation.

“Today we’re going to try something a little different, William.” Rob explained that he and his consultant needed to observe William in neural interface.

The boy’s expression remained blank as he slotted the jack and closed his eyes. Unfortunately, there was only one jackport, so I couldn’t uplink with him. I stood next to Rob, watching the flatscreen echo what the kid did online, which was go immediately to the Children’s Bulletin Board.

The CBB was so retro, it consisted solely of text. Staring at the CBB prompt with its glowing 1980s-style typeface, I wondered what the appeal of a twentieth-century-style bulletin board could be. Kids these days, I thought, and suppressed a smile. I was starting to sound like Abuelita Velasquez.

William didn’t input anything at the old-school text prompt. No dialogue from anyone else appeared on the screen, though thirty seconds crawled by, an eternity by social-media standards. The BBS didn’t announce William’s presence, the way old-time bulletin boards had.

Finally, a sentence appeared onscreen.

“WELCOME WILLIAM.”

My eyes narrowed. How could anything be addressed to Robert’s patient? The boy hadn’t input anything and the BBS hadn’t noted his presence.

I glanced at Rob. He showed no reaction. I looked back at the screen. The greeting remained alone; it had provoked no response from William, or from anyone else on the BBS.

Before I could tell Rob how extremely odd this all was, the hardscreen filled with Japanese katakana and hiragana, scrolling too fast to read. I just glimpsed the Hitachi-Daewoo logo before the characters gave way to Western alphanumerics. Then the screen split into a pair of windows. Studying the windows, I realized millions in yen were being transferred from a Hitachi-Daewoo financial database to a Wells Fargo money market account. I suspected the account hadn’t existed a minute ago, though the screen said that funds had been regularly deposited through ATM’s over the last ten years.

Apparently, Rob had reached the same conclusion as I. He yanked on the fiber-optic cord. The jack popped out of the kid’s skull.

“Jesus, Rob!” I’ve been knocked out of neural interface by accident; it stuns you like a blow to the mind.

“They’ll trace this to us!” Drops of sweat showed on Rob’s brow. He’d realized he was watching a crime in progress.

The kid looked dazed—the only emotion he’d shown. Even he couldn’t impassively withstand the shock of surprise disconnection.

I probably looked as dazed as William. I knew the boy couldn’t have made that raid alone. He couldn’t have just jacked into a bulletin board and immediately broken into a well-protected corporate network. So he’d been working with other people.

Yet there had been no conversation—no communication—on the screen. Therefore, he couldn’t have been working with others.

Yet someone had greeted him.

And then, impossibly, they’d done the raid from a primitive, text-based BBS environment.

This was all-’round insane.

Focus, I told myself. One thing at a time.

“William,” I said, “how many of you kids interfaced to break into Hitachi-Daewoo?”

The boy turned to me. His face was again quite expressionless. I shivered at the blank regard of eyes as flat and emotionless as Rob’s hardscreen.

The boy spoke. “Your question is not relevant.”

“Humor me,” I said. “How many of you kids were working together?”

“Many. No reason to count.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Why?”

A chill settled over me, raising the stubble of my nape and skull in a wave. What he was saying was impossible. But I knew he wasn’t lying.

I grabbed the boy by the neck. “How did you do this?”

William didn’t change expression. Tonelessly, he said, “If you kill this meat, that is not important. We continue on.”

“What are you doing?” Rob seized my arm. “Leave the boy alone.”

I leaned over and hissed in Rob’s ear. “You could’ve done the kid a lot more harm when you ripped the jack out of his head.”

But I let the boy go.

Rob’s hand went slack. I pulled my arm free of his grip and tardily picked up the role he’d assigned me. Raising my voice, I declared, “Dr. Vincent, we should end this session early. The boy has gotten a bit of a shock.”

“Yes,” Rob said slowly. He looked at the child and spoke in a strained voice. “Of course. William, I apologize for interrupting you so rudely.”

“No matter,” the kid intoned, emotionless as a stone.

Rob opened the door and led the boy out to his mother. I didn’t hear the excuse Rob gave for the session’s brevity. I was distracted. I’d noticed the flatscreen had gone dead. That shouldn’t have happened just because the plug had been yanked out of William’s socket.

I jacked in. I didn’t find anything—even a blank screen. I tried every way I knew to reach the internet. I even tried punching keys and touching the screen. The virtual screen did not appear in my mind. The flatscreen continued to look like it had never been powered up.

I unjacked. I felt queasy. The link between this port and the internet had been deliberately severed—and not at this end.

Rob came back in. His face was pale. “Criminal hacking from my office,” he muttered. “Jesus!” He never swears.

“Rob, listen to me. What we saw was impossible. Your patient was working with other kids online. We should’ve seen their conversation on the screen. But we saw nothing except a word of welcome which shouldn’t have appeared to begin with, since William hadn’t input anything. Yet the other kids greeted William. And then, without exchanging another word on the screen—without even leaving the bulletin board—they communicated well enough to rip off Hitachi-Daewoo more effortlessly than the most experienced datathief.”

Rob blinked at me. “What are you getting at?”

My mind was spinning, trying to find an explanation of what we’d just witnessed. “Neural interfacing isn’t telepathy, but—Jesus! What William and his buddies were doing seems awfully close to it.”

“What?” Rob said, his face graying.

I started to shiver as I realized something else. “They must be the superhacker! Dissolving the Neurexon passwords, wormholing the new desalination plant—oh, God. What will those kids be capable of when they outgrow hacker pranks?”

Rob went even paler.

I remembered the intense difficulty I’d experienced learning Japanese in my teens, though from my earliest memories I’ve been fluent in English and Spanish.

“Children don’t have adult preconceptions of what can and can’t be done,” I told Rob. “Their minds are open, and still forming—”

“What’s the relevance of that?” he croaked.

“It’s why kids learn new languages easily, while it’s a real struggle for adults,” I said. “William and his buddies have learned the network like it’s just another language. Ah, God, they’ve done more than that!” I realized. “They’ve learned to work together in an impossible way. They act like one person.” My shivering grew stronger. “No, that’s not right. They don’t act like one person,” I whispered. “They are one person.”

“I don’t understand,” Rob said. But his pallor told me he was getting it, all right.

“Damn, ese,” I whispered. “The online environment’s changed those kids into a new race.”

“What?”

“A new race,” I repeated. “A race with one mind. An electronic mind.”

“What are you raving about?”

“Hive mind,” I said. “Group mind. When William’s jacked in, his brain is just a group of cells in a larger mind.” I realized I was talking too fast and too loud, the adrenalin and amphetamines firing my nerves like lightning. I forced myself to speak more calmly. “We didn’t see any dialogue ’cas the children using the CBB don’t need to discuss something before doing it. They make a decision the way you decide whether to go out for dinner.”

I paused, considering.

“Jesus, Rob, it’s the ultimate kiddie society,” I said. “Those kids never have to worry about peer pressure, about trying to fit in—when they’re in the electronic mind, they’re one person. The only person there is.”

“You’re talking nonsense. Suffering from amphetamine psychosis,” Rob declared decisively.

But he was staring into space. His face was intent, as if he were possessed by all-consuming desire. What did he want?

I considered how the online world Rob hated was enabling something I found frightening, but which Rob would not: the ultimate in conformity.

I remembered Rob’s readings in Zen Buddhism. “I seek nothing,” he’d told me.

Now I understood. He’d meant exactly what he’d said.

Practitioners of Zen Buddhism seek the extinction of the self. Nirvana is nothingness.

In conformity, the individual vanishes.

In the kids’ electronic mind, the individual vanishes.

I touched Rob’s shoulder. “Adults don’t have to worry about this happening to them,” I said, as if reassuring him against a thought he found repulsive, when it was anything but.

I didn’t know what else to say.

Rob turned away from me, pressing the intercom button. “Lottie, cancel my appointments for the rest of the day.” She squawked a startled inquiry and Rob said, “Do it!”

He turned back to me without looking at me.

“Please leave.”

I closed my hands on his shoulders. Tweed scratched my palms. “Rob, your patient and his friends interact so well ’cas they’ve lost their individuality. I’m sorry, man. But they’re no longer human.”

Rob’s eyes flicked to me, but his expression remained odd. “Get out.”

This time, I didn’t argue. Rob had to work out his reaction himself, alone as anyone.

Alone as anyone who was still human, anyway.

I pulled on my filter-mask and left. It wasn’t until I was boarding the bus that it occurred to me to wonder…why had the electronic mind chosen to reveal itself?