Transcension - Hardcover

 

 

 

seed origin j: death

Facedown in a pool of his blood, being kicked to death in the public thoroughfare by a troop of street ferals, Abdel-Malek learned that dying arrived just as he'd always feared it would: with shock, terror, and agony.

Death, it turned out, provided no soothing anaesthesia. Overwhelmed with shame, he squealed and whimpered. The hardened cap of a militarysurplus boot smashed the side of his throat, crushing his larynx. Vomiting, scarcely able to breathe, he could barely hear his wife's screams. She was frightened, but more than that she was furious.

"Gutless, selfish, stupid cowards," she shouted. "Leave him alone!"

A kind of sad, admiring love brushed his fazed brain. Another boot took him in the ribs, then the right cheek. Light bloomed; it felt as if his eye had exploded. He wanted to cover his face, but his arms would not lift from the pavement. Mohammed Kasim Abdel-Malek, bon vivantand pragmatic optimist, B. A Hons, Juris Doctor (license lapsed), D. Sc. (cog. sci.), more honorary degrees than he owned senses and limbs, desperately curled the fingers of his left hand. He was reaching absurdly in his last moments for assurance: for the chrome bracelet at his wrist.

The stupidity of his plight appalled him. The hubris. Nothing can touch me, I'm that famous guy. He and Alice had been the last guests to leave. The Greenhouse weather had been bad for days, more August than early June, the news had been worse, the dregs of society skulked in the shadows, waiting in their perfectly understandable resentment to smash store windows, snatch baubles and shiny toys.

"Sure you'll be okay?" Martha had asked, kissing Alice on the cheek, a true friendly smoosh of lips on flesh, none of your society air-kiss evasions. "Leave the dishes until the morning, honey," she told their host "Let's seethem to their car." Josh had nodded, given them a tired smile; it was obvious that all he wanted to do was pile the wreckage into the dishwasher and hit the sack.

"Nonsense," Mohammed Abdel-Malek told them forcefully. "We're only parked half a block away."

His mind, in all truth, was parked more than a block away. Abdel-Malek's thoughts remained in Cambridge, in those buoyant sunny months when his spiritual father Alan Turing, and Campernowne, and the rest of the wunderkinden, had invented out of whole cloth, in one fell swoop, the electronic computer, the theory of programming, and the prospect of machine intelligence. No, he was getting confused. Turing's device was preelectronic, fed with paper tape. My God. And Turing dead these fifty years, June 7, 1954. Some golden jubilee. He would have been 88. Old, but not impossibly old. Not remarkably older than me, after all. But those hotshots tonight, those kids from Silicon Valley.

"Still thinking about Turing?" asked Alice. He shivered despite the muggy warmth, saw that they had descended to street level. Through the glass doors, the street was ominously empty, no breeze lifting scraps of discarded newspaper or fast-food trash. Everyone with any sense was inside with the air-conditioning blasting. Stepping from the comfortable friendliness of the apartment and foyer to the stifling street was a jolt, reinforcing Abdel-Malek's melancholy.

"Mmm. Poor devil. It was nice of the kids to honor his memory."

"He was a great main," Alice said. She smiled primly. "You were all great men, Boson."

The bunch of street ferals was suddenly there on the sidewalk. They had every right to be there. It's a free country, isn't it?

"Oh Christ."

"Come on," he said with irritation. "They're just kids."

"Of course they're just kids, Kasim." Alice's voice sounded as if it had been strained through mesh. "You're not allowed to be a juvenile delinquent after you've grown up."

They were stringing themselves out across the pathway. Pimples. Stubble, tats on the skull. Lumps of metal piercing flesh. Must they make themselves so ugly?

"Juvenile delinquents! Darling, that expression went on the pension around the time Turing bit the apple. Just keep walking. You've turned into a nervous Nellie in your dotage."

Her hand on his arm, tense with dread, jerked. "Oh God, I don't like this."

A body moved into the space they passed through, thumped him cruelly.

"Watch it, you bastard!" cried the affronted thug.

Mildly, Mohammed Kasim recovered his balance. "Sorry."

"You walked straight into me. See that, bro? Muthafucka walked straight into me. Think they own the whole sidewalk, these rich fucks."

From the other side, keeping step with them, a peaky girl asked, "Got any change?"

Too quickly, Alice told her, "We never carry money."

"You greedy old bitch." The thug was outraged. "I'll fix you."

And the horror of it was that Mohammed Kasim understood; hadn't they been talking about it all night? It was his doing as much as anyone's. In all the world, he and his colleagues were the ones crucially responsible for the machines that took the children's jobs away, filched their souls from them, stole their future. It paralyzed him. He felt the battering on his body, but only as a kind of moral retribution.

It hurts, blood tastes in his mouth, he cannot see any longer from his right eye, his heart clenches in dread for Alice, but he knows that at last some payment is being rightly exacted.

Alice is still shouting. "Leave him alone, you vicious-"

"Outta the fuckin' way, bitch," says one of the girls. He hears a hard slap, a screech of pain. "What you doin' with that muthafuck?" another voice asks incredulously. "This no time for social calls." A crunching sound: hundreds of dollars' worth of latest-model cell phone under a bootheel. Maybe she had time to punch the emergency-link key.

"Get his wallet, Donnie."

They pull roughly at his person. That first burst of masochism is yielding to anger as the shock of passivity passes off; he starts to seethe with rage, with renewed fear for Alice, my God, in the middle of the...