Code Enforcement: Wetware

FOREWORD: This tale is set in the world of tomorrow; one shackled to the problems of today. A world bound by the laws of thermodynamics, where faster-than-light travel is the stuff of science fiction and teleportation is a mad fever dream. This story takes place in the next century, where late-stage capitalism and increasing reliance on genetic and cybernetic optimization has produced a mistrusted transhuman minority class. This is a world where the promise of a better tomorrow has been broken to pieces, where science couldn't lift humanity beyond our nature, or even beyond our solar system.

This is a setting where scientist Ray Kurzweil's 'law of accelerating returns' clashed with economist Jacques Turgot's 'law of diminishing returns' and lost, badly. This is a universe where, even as humanity invented better tools and thinking engines at ever faster paces, it bunched up against insurmountable bottlenecks in computation, molecular nanotechnology, and synthetic intelligence. The limits of our material science and engineering form a wall in the road to singularity. A wall that humanity runs into headlong, with a profound crash.

Moore's law peters out as transistors plateau at the size of atoms. Quantum computing, once hailed as the new savior of computation, increasingly peaks within the same order of magnitude as neurons. Experiments in growing neural networks beyond certain thresholds result in profound trans-human psychosis. Attempts to bootstrap AI into godlike intelligence either implode under their own complexity in spectacular examples of chaos theory made manifest, or else become so alien to baseline humanity as to appear functionally sociopathic.

Simply put, intelligence and computation hit local maximums. Peaks in optimization increasingly constrain human engineering. Within these bounds, technological advancement slows to a crawl. New substrate architecture or software code are the niches where creativity flourishes, but even these are merely shallow pools from which humanity desperately laps novel improvements. Commodification of new computing technology stalls out, and investments in future development are fraught with risk and low expectations of reward.

The result? Sluggish but inevitable system collapse. Where humanity previously surged from Earth on waves of subliminal chemical rockets and fusion engines, surfing the tsunami of accelerated scientific development, we now stagnate. The collapse of the tech bubble and the following economic crash precede years of armed conflict, leaving humanity scattered across the solar system in an aborted diaspora. In a society where life is cheap and everything else is expensive, an increasingly cyber-civilization wars with itself as unmodified humans retaliate against a future that left them behind.

This is a world in which technology has improved by leaps and bounds, but where people are still chained to the economic systems we 'enjoy' today. It's a world where unmodified (or 'baseline') humans find their abilities increasingly obsolete, and their skillsets ever less competitive in job markets filled with made-to-order AI. In this world, in defiance of the saccharine dreams of futurists and transhumanists and tech-cultists everywhere, utopia remains a fantasy. In a time when technology has advanced to the point of human-mind uploading and interplanetary travel, capitalism is still king.

The creaking, ad-hoc system flounders at the straining limits of its decaying reach. Oligarchs and mega-corporations feud over the isolated clusters of civilization among the void. A pseudo-government, formed to reign in the remnants of armed conflict and underground factions, finds itself policing a semi-lawless frontier beyond the core planets. Code Enforcement Officers desperately try to stem the tide of malware, hackers, and evolving synthetic life undermining the digital systems on which humanity relies. But don't worry; even in the darkness of the future, for the beleaguered digital cop, there will still be coffee.

Hello, I'm Lieutenant Mel Cruz. It's short for Melody; something of an older-style name. It's not because I sing, for the record. My parents were throwbacks to a simpler time, and enjoyed some antiquated naming conventions. I'm currently in torpor, a machine-maintained hibernation used for deep space travel. I've been on a six-month journey from Luna to Europa, though I've barely been aware of it. Oh, before I forget, I'm a 34-year-old Scouting Officer for the Code Enforcement branch of the Exonet Maintenance Bureau. To put it in Luddite, I'm a cyborg law enforcement officer, and digital systems are my beat.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

I'm also realizing that a twelve-year long stint as Scouting Officer on Luna, deep in the core of the Sol system, has spoiled me. It's obvious the moment I try to access the exonet. I'm used to lightning-fast connections. I'm accustomed to the vast web of interlocking virtual environments that pervade the Earth-Moon binary. Sadly, I find only a few virtual ports, low bandwidth, and whisps of automated traffic. Well, since I'm now aware of it, I presume the ship's AI is waking the meatsuit.

My body, that is, and I suppose not a half bad one. Just over 180cm, no physical augmentations. It's as human as any, save for a ring of four small implants running from my right temple to the back of my skull. All subdermal; I prefer going stealth. No need to advertise that I'm augmented. I mean, most Scouting Officers are, but less than a fifth of the baseline population goes for it. I'd rather not hear the whispers and answer questions.

My implants let me visualize most of the input from the exonet. That's purely an aesthetic choice. I know some cyborn prefer auditory input. Some perceive sensory input entirely in virtual environs, or virts. I prefer an overlay; I can see data-ports shining like gems in the walls of the aging vessel, and rippling threads of silver where wireless signals propagate from the access terminal. As I access the terminal and touch that thread, the line blooms with code, like a tree sprouting branches and twigs and leaves. It's versatile. And beautiful.

It's about the only thing that is. My smell is… ripe. I smell like… well, someone who hasn't bathed in months, but with sharp chemical overtones. My skin somehow feels both dry and oily. And sticky at the same time. I'm wearing my full uniform, the blue and black synthetic fibers wrinkled, but thankfully unstained. My mouth tastes like… nothing I care to name. I'm just saying, I've had better days.

I'm still groggy as I open my eyes, feeling the burn of the ship's deceleration pressing me against the mesh webbing of my harness. My limbs ache, my skin is cold and clammy, but my belly and torso are burning. It takes me a moment to realize I'm still coming out of torpor, the mechanical scarab on my back flushing the chemicals from my bloodstream. Twin tubes pumps saline into my dehydrated veins, and suck metabolites out.

Being webbed in place leaves me feeling helpless and edgy. Licking my dry lips, I crack my neck and take a slow look around the cargo bay. The transport is utilitarian; there are no private rooms, or even hibernation pods. Just twin racks of 'scarabs', the insectoid-locking backpacks that provide the cocktail of chemicals to send passengers into torpor and slow metabolic activity to a crawl. It's not a quick or easy revivification. I can see why the Jovian passenger liners ditched it.

My jaw clicks as I work some moisture into my mouth and call up the navigation system. Our destination pops up; the grey-white oblong sphere of Europa, and the massive body of Jupiter behind it. The station above the icy moon looks insignificant by comparison. A heavily modified O'Neil Cylinder conjoined with a skyhook. It looks like a child welded two toy models together.

It's balanced in synchronous orbit over Europa, ferrying loads from the autonomous mining machines below. I smirk a bit at the title: Ursa Miner Station. It never gets old. That's what happens when you let an exonet poll pick your station name. Somewhere near Venus, there's a navigational beacon named Buoy McBuoyface. People never learn.

The route is etched in silver lines across my vision, along with docking information in hashed lettering. There's a docking port along the axis of rotation, outside the habitation rings. The skyhook itself emerges from the other end of the station. Not a true orbital lift, unlike Callisto. But I can see the glow of the active networks, and resist the urge to link in. I'm still a few hours out. The lag would drive me mad.

I check some stale beam-in news from Luna. Nothing much, a few interesting digital-life demographic reports, some unrest after the Gaian League seeded malware in a mining company's networks. Some Luddites on an anti-synth march in New York got gassed. An uproar on the exonet over some privatization contracts on virt spaces. Same shit, different day.

Feeling my stiff back protest, I turn my head and try to ping the Scarab. I sigh when I receive flashing denial in my vision; it's safety-locked and won't release during deceleration. Fantastic; I guess I'll just…hang around. Well, I don't have any luggage to get to, anyway. Passengers pay for transport by the gram; nobody's comping me the extra fuel costs. It was cheaper for me to just buy everything there... or, here, I suppose.

Plus, it helps make it a clean break. A whole new place, with all new people. Starting over. Speaking of that, a few unread messages blink in the periphery of my vision, like raindrops tapping the surface of a pond. Preview text pops up in a bubble; Alex Wells. I flick it away: yesterday's problem.

With nothing better to do, I ping my implants and pull up my work files. A series of icons and written text appear in my mind's eye. Melody Cygnus Cruz, rank; Lieutenant. Current Assignment: Third Precinct Code Enforcement Branch, Ursa Miner Station. Orientation Packet and Onboarding Materials. Well, if I'm stuck waiting for my flight to taxi in, I might as well get on with the paperwork.