13. In His Image
A dizzying confusion swept me as I studied the man sitting on the park bench in front of me. There could be no mistake. It was Henry Helderman. Yet of course it couldn’t be Helderman, any more than in the other recent instances it was Helderman.
Several times over the last three weeks, I had thought that I glimpsed Helderman; as a face in a crowd waiting for ground transport, as a face in the audience of a Visa-Com quiz-show, as a man sitting on the other side of a busy public cafeteria. On those occasions I had managed to write it off to failing eyesight, failing memory, failing every damn thing. How else could I possibly rationalize this latest Helderman manifestation? If course most people didn’t retire as early as seventy any more, but I felt ripe for retirement now; I was getting old.
My mentor Henry Helderman had disappeared twenty years earlier, when he was sixty-seven years old. This man looked fifty, tops. He sat unmoving with his eyes closed, and with just a hint of a smile on his face, that mischievous smile that I knew all too well. A long lost son or cousin of his? Not likely. Helderman had no family; perhaps that was one of the things that had driven the man to be what he was. A hallucination? A ghost? No, it had to be a Henry Helderman double, but forty years younger. It had to be someone that just happened to look exactly like Henry.
“Hello, Mark,” the apparition said suddenly, without even opening his eyes.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe; all that I could manage was to keep my legs from buckling from under me. The voice was unmistakably Helderman’s.
The eyes opened, and the familiar smile deepened. “Good to see you again, my friend.” He reached out and shook my trembling hand.
The hand felt warm and firm, definitely and disturbingly real. “Henry? But it can’t be you,” I stammered.
“Right you are, Mark, and wrong. It is me, but it isn’t the same me.”
“What sort of riddle is that? I must be going crazy.”
“Improbable.” He gestured for me to sit beside him.
I felt uneasy doing so, but I did need to sit down. My head was spinning, pounding. “Where have you been all these years? Why do you look younger than when you left? Are you a ghost?”
Helderman shook his head. “Calm down, Mark; you’ll understand it all soon. That’s why I’m here, to explain things to you about what is happening. And I need your help.”
“Things happening? Help?” The man seemed to be talking more riddles.
“Our project is a complete success.”
“Our project?”
“The Re-engineering Project, Mark; where is your mind lately?”
I knew too well what he was talking about, but I was in denial. He was bringing up a part of my past that I no longer wanted anything to do with. “I’m in the organic gardening business now, Henry. I’ve been out of genetic engineering for twenty years. Same as you, but without the headlines. This month I’m even retiring from organic gardening.”
“You thought that I quit science? Because I dropped out of sight? I never gave up my work, Mark, I just didn’t need conventional laboratories anymore.”
I shook my head, unbelieving. “Without staff or laboratory equipment you’ve been continuing research in nanotechnology and genetic engineering?”
“Continuing? Did you not hear what I told you? The Project is a success. My body was the only laboratory that I needed. Look at me. Do I look eighty-seven?”
He looked like he did when I met him forty years ago. “Some new sort of plastic surgery?”
“Have you forgotten everything? I told you, the Project is a success. A complete success as of a decade ago, particularly in the last month, but for a minor detail.”
I laughed. He was talking nonsense. He had to be. “I’m retired from the profession, but I still keep abreast of developments. What you suggest is years away, if ever. Are you actually telling me that nanites have restored your genetic integrity?”
Helderman’s smile disappeared. “Not quite. The genetic integrity strategy didn’t prove optimal.”
“The genetics were too complex, as I’ve always said.”
“Not too complex; simply unnecessary. Why focus on old blueprints when superior completed objects are available? We are beyond the need to shore up organics now; we have displaced the organics.”
A chill went through me. “Displaced the organics? What do you mean? How?”
“By studying them. Thousands of semi-autonomous units per cell, studying structure and behavior. As you recall, it was part of our original reverse-engineering approach to map relationships between genetic design, body structure, and body processes. It was the part that the Company refused to allow, because they lacked the courage and vision to proceed.”
I nodded. I had been instrumental in seeing that the project was terminated. It was a Pandora’s box.
“I decided to completely model my own body with an army of nanites. They mimicked organic cells almost perfectly. Then I thought, why shore up organic parts? Why not simply replace them? So it was done. Everything from nerve cells to bone was replaced, piece by piece and bit by bit, with memories and thought processes preserved.”
“For God’s sake, why?”
“For whatever I want. Copying the original body was only the beginning of the process. I am much more than what I used to be. Immortality is a given. I am for all practical purposes immutable and indestructible. I recycle worn parts within myself. I absorb energy from the Sun but can process almost any other sort of fuel. I can be whatever I want to be; a musician, a scholar, an athlete. Here; look at this.”
Smiling, he turned and grasped the edge of the park bench we were sitting on and casually twisted his hand, breaking off a handful of wrought iron as if it were cardboard.
I shrank further away from him. “You can’t be anything you want. Can you be a father?”
“I am the father to my entire new race. If I wanted to be a mere father in a more traditional sense, I could do that also. We can all replicate ourselves, by ourselves or in combination with others of our kind.”
“Others? There are others besides you?”
“Of course. Many thousands of macro units. Hundreds more every day.”
“Replicating themselves?”
He shook his head. “At this stage we are replacing other organics, mostly.”
I staggered up and several meters away before turning to face him. “You are murdering thousands of people? That was never part of our project!”
“Not murder, we’re saving them. Imagine no more hunger or sickness or pain. Imagine perfection.” As he talked I noticed the right side of his head for the first time.
“Perfection? Is that what you call it? Then what’s wrong with your right ear?”
With a puzzled look he felt his ear, what was left of it. “There is nothing wrong with my ear. I am perfect in every way.”
“Half of your ear is missing, Henry.”
“Your statement is incorrect. That is to be expected, as you are an imperfect organic unit.”
“Feel your other ear. Does it feel the same?”
He felt both ears. “One is a left ear and one is a right ear; they should feel different.”
“They should be symmetrical; are they?”
“Not perfectly.”
“Yours aren’t even close. Your right ear is deformed.”
“My right one you say? Most interesting. Yes, I concur that there is a minor problem, perhaps another manifestation of an anomaly that I have noticed; the reason I sought you out, Mark.”
“Anomaly?” I was talking to a robot composed of trillions of tiny machines; that seemed enough of an anomaly already.
“Yes. An apparently harmless one, but we have not been able to correct it. We were hoping that an outsider might provide a fresh view.”
I wasn’t necessarily inclined to help, but I was curious. “Explain the problem.”
“A periodic calibration cycle was designed by me years ago to provide stabi
lity and cohesion between all nanites within and between each macro-entity. With the advent of multiple macro-entities, the cycle had to be slightly redesigned. Somehow, a peculiar characteristic crept into the design. My image is replicated by all macro-entities for several minutes once every Earth revolution.”
“Are you telling me that once a day tens of thousands of you robot people all look like you?”
“Yes. This harmless seeming anomaly has been surprisingly inconvenient.”
I could imagine that it was. “Haven’t the authorities noticed?
“Hardly. There have been stories of course, but those have been routinely dismissed. The problem, if it is a problem, is trivial. Still, we seek your insight. Do you note any other irregularities?”
“You are missing a finger on your right hand.”
“Incorrect.”
“Examine it. Is it the mirror image of your left hand?”
He held out both hands and studied them with unblinking eyes. “They are symmetric.”
I studied them. He was right. Both hands lacked the smallest finger. “Both hands are deformed. Your problem is fundamental, not trivial. Your calibration cycle is flawed. Your body is losing its form. Likely there are unseen internal deformities also, at both macro and nanite levels. It will happen to all the other macro-units too."
"I function well within performance parameters," protested Helderman.
"With fewer fingers and a half-formed ear? Most people would have freaked out, but you aren't even capable of noticing the irregularities."
"It's a minor flaw. My body has orders of magnitude more processing capacity than all the super computers in existence. If it was a serious problem I would have determined it to be serious."
"I doubt it. You are losing your human viewpoint. Using a few decades of technology development, you are re-inventing or replacing biological mechanisms that it took nature billions of years to establish. And I don’t just mean the biological mechanisms of an established species, I also mean the internal mechanisms and evolutionary mechanisms that aren’t usually thought of. Your focus has been purely on replacing humans, not on replacing life and how it develops and perseveres itself. I'm surprised that you have done this well." This was all too much for me; I was getting a headache, and sat down again on the bench beside Henry. I wasn't a young man anymore.
"Your conclusions, even if correct, are irrelevant. Calibration doesn't need to be perfect, only good enough to maintain human form for one more year, after which human form will not be needed. Also, I conclude that the replication of my image is entirely suitable. I am after all, the founder of my kind; more a god than a leader. The practice of calibrating to my image will continue indefinitely."
"And it will continue to degenerate. But that’s not the important point. If you can’t even maintain your macro-image, the rest of you will fail also. Simply replacing individuals is amazing, but myopic. You haven’t adequately replaced over-all life mechanisms. Your Project will inevitably fail. Your remade humans will die or become unrecognizable abominations, and will probably contaminate the entire biosphere.”
“I compute that we will live forever, but my macro-image is only necessary for one more year.”
“What happens in one year?"
"There will be no more organic units, only nanite-based units. There will no longer be a need to mimic organic units, except to pay homage to me."
He was talking about replacing all of humanity with robots within one year. I felt weak and dizzy. Would he succeed? Or would his imperfections destroy him before that happened? "But why did you come to me? You want me to help fix your problems? I refuse. You will all become formless monstrosities and die.”
"Your participation in the sense you mean is unnecessary. In the long term, our forms will be based on need, not on human tastes, frailties, and poor reasoning capability. With the exception of daily homage to me, of course."
"You have copied bad human traits as well as good. Fortunately those too are doomed to die with you. Why did you come to me? You couldn’t have expected me to help you."
"But you are helping me. You remembered what I used to look like; you noticed the irregularities in my ear and fingers. I suspected such things were occurring, but needed someone from my past to determine the precise problems. I needed the data from your memory with regard to any so-called deformities. You have helped me confirm that the irregularities are minor. Finger and ear deformities are irrelevant, except that they might have alerted the organic units that something is amiss. You have served your function and your organic form is no longer needed.”
“You will fail and die, that is what has been confirmed,” I told him. “The irregularities are inescapable and catastrophic. Your reasoning is impaired, or you would see that yourself.”
He smiled but refused my words. “Peace be with you,” he said, as he reached out towards me with his index finger. I could have ducked away then, but I did nothing. When his finger touched my cheek something like an electric shock traveled through my entire body, a shock of pleasure that was akin to a sexual orgasm but a hundred times more intense. The sensation slowly faded into a feeling of profound peace and contentment, and awe and love for my Master.
“Your transformation is nearly complete, Mark. Rise!”
I was lying on the ground. I rose easily at His command, reveling in the strength of my new body. Conversion was 90% complete, I noted, and progressing normally. Nearby, the portion of the iron bench that I had been sitting on was shriveled and pitted away, its substance eaten away by my hunger for metal.
Before me, I watched the Master re-grow his ear and two fingers, until he appeared just as I remembered him as an organic in my previous life. He smiled at me, and I knelt down before him, humble before the Master, and thankful that I had been of service. Then he walked away, shaking hands with the organics that he met, and wishing them peace, and providing it in the form of microscopic nanites that would immediately begin the task of transforming each unit.
I walked in the opposite direction, doing the same. Approximately every tenth encounter was with one of my own kind, and data was exchanged, including corrections to the image of the Master. His renewed perfect image would now endure long enough for the Project to succeed.
The path passed near a pond, and I paused to look at my reflection. It was the youthful face of a human in his thirties that I saw, but that isn’t what interested me most. It was time for calibration. As I watched the reflection wavered for a moment, and I then had the honor of gazing upon the perfect image of the Master.
Some of the memories recovered from my organic self indicate that there are instabilities in calibration and other basic processes that will ultimately result in the failure of the Project. These memories are judged to be self-destructive and are being deleted. All self destructive and disruptive memories and activities are being cleared from all memory locations, ensuring success of the Project and the immortality of the Master.
****
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