The Altoid Disconnect
NO ONE is born on Alta, or few people at least. That’s not why people go there. The planet’s population is increased almost entirely by travelers who go there to have an operation. For the most part, Altoids don’t look different than most humans. Technically, they are humans, from one Earth or another. But what makes them an Altoid is that, in some way, they’re on a journey away from humanity by replacing their body parts, piece by piece. Usually, these augmentations are some kind of mechanical prosthetic, though they’re often biological, either removed from a host or grown in a lab. Everyone on Alta is on their own journey, augmenting themselves by necessity or desire to improve their lives in some way. Often, people will replace a lost limb. Frequently, they purchase a lab grown organ that can do what their old one could do, and more. Altoid augments don’t just replace a body part, they greatly improve it.
On our Earth, a prosthetic leg could help someone walk, but on Alta, an augmented leg can do much more. Typical features include alarm clocks, flashlights, GPS trackers, and tiny refrigerators. Expensive models might have built in wheels, rockets, and grappling hooks. It is not unusual, if someone needed one leg replaced, for them to replace both at the same time simply because leg augments can run faster, jump higher, and kick harder than their naturally occurring, biological counterparts. In fact, it isn’t unusual for people to travel to Alta to have their legs, arms, or anything else replaced just for the fun of it.
Augmentation is a continuous process and doesn’t stop after a single operation. Most Altoids find augmentation irresistible after their first procedure. Augments improve their quality of life and, as people age and their bodies wear out, augments become more and more tempting. Price is the prohibiting factor. Most Altoids are wildly wealthy by the standards of most worlds, but the ones who aren’t find ways of affording as many augments as they can. Some jobs will help cover costs, and Altoid banks give more loans for augments than they do for cars and houses combined.
Altoids are a treacherous, business minded people. It isn’t uncommon for low level workers to sabotage their superiors. In fact, it’s expected, and even encouraged in the culture. Altoids believe usurping a superior’s position shows ability and initiative, and that those instincts should be rewarded. There is very little that is taboo in their society as long as it is profitable. On Alta, profit and morality are nearly identical concepts. Much of their social structure is centered around employment. Since people either work on Alta to afford an augment, or work in the industry itself, a great deal of their social interactions are informed by the hierarchies established in the workplace. High level executives become social tastemakers, and their status is signaled by the degree to which they’ve changed themselves. With rare exceptions, the wealthiest, most powerful Altoids have very left of their human body at all.
A common Altoid activity is the 4-D movie, in which a story is projected into the eye in the form of a single pulse of light. The light carries such a massive amount of information that it gives the viewer the experience of a full-length movie in an instant. Some 4-D’s have been known to last longer, giving the experience of a month or years long story, conveyed in a flash of concentrated light. Altoid art exhibitions are well attended events, as are music events which begin as seated concerts and end as smoke filled dance halls. Very little art is actually made on Alta. Some of it is imported from other worlds, but the most popular “art” is created by robotic writers, painters, and composers with artificial intelligence. I attended a concert at the Opera House in which all the music was spontaneously generated by an A.I. orchestra and, because it wasn’t recorded, the music came and went the instant it was generated and was gone forever. The same is true for their A.I. visual art exhibits which use complex machines to paint fantastic, if random, visuals and then shred and burn them seconds after their creation. There is a quality of this limited experience that is very popular among Altoids, especially those further along in their augmentation process.
It is common for travelers new to Alta to view Altoids as something other than human. They consider them something unnatural because they replace so much of themselves with artificial parts. But Altoids would be quick to point to a pair of glasses or an organ transplant and ask you to explain the difference. A tension exists between the improvement augments offer and the humanity they sacrifice. Most Altoids draw a line between “going too far” with augments and “living in the dark ages” by refusing them, and would say they balance it well. They might look down on a “machine head” for being more augmented than them, while also envying their wealth and power. At the same time, they might pity a “caveman” for their lack of augments, while missing the humanity of their original body.
Most are unafraid of losing touch with humanity and are eager to become as powerful as possible. Some goes as far as to augment their brains. This is an expensive and ambitious operation that most don’t attempt. It often comes late in life, when minds begin to wear out. The process involves copying the Altoid’s mind onto a computer, and then inserting that computer into their head. All of their thoughts and memories are supposedly captured and recreated in order to simulate consciousness. On Alta, they refer to this augment as a digital consciousness, or a DC. The highly augmented people on the planet view DC Altoids with respect and fear and refer to them as True Altoids. DCs allow their users to think faster and more efficiently than organic brains. Their users learn to disconnect from their sensory experiences and fall into deep, and powerful thought. In this state of disconnection, an Altoid can solve difficult problems, and can plan elaborate business proposals that think only in the efficient terms of data and numbers. A disconnected Altoid is unencumbered by ethical considerations and thinks only of the fastest ways to create wealth. For this reason, those able to disconnect are often very successful and wealthy. They are the most influential, powerful Altoids, though they are often reclusive and detached.
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I spoke a few times with an Altoid named Tim Whatley who’s had a DC for several decades. I asked Whatley about his augments: which came first, and whether or not he was scared when he had his DC installed. The following section quotes him directly, though I edited it together and got his approval on the final copy.
“No, I was happy to get it done. A bit nervous when it was time for the surgery, of course. But, it was the right thing to do. I’d been confused a lot back then, y’see. I started losing track of things a lot more often after eighty-something, I believe. And so, I had a DC arranged. I was already on Alta, working in finance. I’d come originally–well, originally, I’d come to get a new liver but the first Altoid augment I got was my legs. They were easy and my company helped pay for them. But I had to wait for my liver to be fabricated. They printed it in a lab, out of…well I don’t know what, but it’s a printed liver, not a mechanical one—works great.
“But, you asked about my first augments. I got my first one when I was fourteen. A saw at the mill I worked at took off my first three fingers. That was back on Earth—my Earth. It got infected and made work hell. But, eventually it healed, and Mr. Wilhelm—he was my floor boss—he built me a glove with a plank—a bit of wood, y’see, sewn in where my fingers had been to use as a guide—to use as a push stick for the saws. So, y’see, it was really an ingenious augment ‘cause I used it every day to feed lumber through the saws. I used it every day, till I lost my legs and had to stop working on the floor. That was—well, I was twenty-six. A brake cable snapped on a truck and I got pinned up against a fence. Broke my back and my legs stopped working. But, I got a chair—my first chair. I guess that was my second augment. Anyways, I wasn’t out of work, ‘cause Mr. Pitt—he owned the mill at the time—liked how I worked and he gave me a desk job as a scrivener. I took the plank out of the glove and fit it with a pen fixed in place so I could do copy work. And I did other stuff as well, and it paid pretty well, and I set money aside, and when Pitt died I bought the yard. I ran the mill for about twenty-five years.
“The mill had ruined my hearing, so I had to get a hearing aid, so that was my third— well, I’d gotten glasses years before, so that was my third augment. Glasses, hearing aid, glove done up with the pen…uh, let’s see. I got dentures eventu—well, even before that, I got two false teeth, right here, after I fell off a horse. I got them from a man who owed me money. I don’t know what number I’m on. See that’s the beauty of the human spirit of self-improvement. We’ve been augmenting ourselves as long as we’ve been able. It’s just us Altoids willing to see it though, all the way to the end.
“Anyways, once my liver started acting up, a friend told me how to get to Alta and, of course, it wasn’t a hard decision to go.
“I got work, pretty quick, like I said, in finance picking election winners to pay for the transplant. Election winners? Well, I don’t do it anymore. It was a matter of predicting spending trends. Politicians work for corporate interests, so people vote by spending money. It’s about picking the candidates aligned with profitable businesses, but also watching trends and picking candidates willing to work for companies we think will be make it big soon. That’s where my company came in. It paid pretty well, and they helped pay for my legs ‘cause my chair was pretty old and it looked bad, for them.
“I got my legs, and then my liver, then I did my hand. Replaced it with a model popular at the time that used magnets to pick things up at a distance. But I had it replaced when I did the rest of the arm, maybe twenty years ago. Did the other arm not long after cause the first one was so good. They detach and convert into little—thopters, they’re called. Flying drones, you might say. They fly around and pick things up for me and they have sensors that report back to me. The bulk of my organs have given out and been replaced in one way or another. And my eyes. I got my eyes after I got the DC from some kid who didn’t need them. Look, they fly around and see for me, and I can bring them back into my head to recharge. I got a third one a few years back. It’s actually outside watching the door right now.
“Anyways, I got the DC maybe thirty years ago. Like I said, I got confused a lot when I was younger. Some days were good, but others I’d have a hard time remembering things—little things at first, like where I set something down, or I’d forget my briefcase at home or on the train or something. But then I was forgetting where I was part way through the day, or who my coworkers were. That was scary. Sometimes I’d just wake up in a new place. And I’d get these nonsense ideas in my head—crazy stuff, and I just couldn’t let it go. I can’t remember what, but eventually it started affecting my work. I made a bad call and lost a client. So Gack—Todd Gack, my supervisor, convinced me to get the operation.
“I can remember the procedure perfectly. They recorded it and uploaded it to the new brain, so I can remember the whole thing happening. It was brain surgery, so, yeah, I was scared. You bet I was scared. They cut me open and—sometimes they take out all the tissue, but they left maybe twenty percent of mine. My spines good, the top at least, so I still have most of my original stem. Anyways they replace the rest with fabricated tissue and processors, and wire it up to a drive—like a hard drive.
“Well, I guess first—I should have said this first. First, they hook you up to a big computer. They stick electrodes all over your brain, all over your body. And then they start asking you questions, and they start triggering thoughts and memories. They ask you questions about your past and ask you questions about your answers. They play images and sounds, and they record all your reactions and answers, y’see, onto the computer. And they hypnotize you, and ask you more stuff to pull out all the memories you don’t even know you remembered. They prod you all over your body to get your reflexes and reactions and sensitivities, and they pump smells into your nose and mouth, and different tastes, too. They put this stuff on my tongue that tasted like—well it tasted like a bunch of stuff all at once. It kind of reminded me of eating these soggy onions my grandmother used to cook. She braised them with meat till everything was overcooked and the onions were just mushy, meat-flavored pulp, and there was barely any meat but there was plenty of onions, and she’d make you eat them all. That’s kinda how this stuff they put on my tongue tasted. But I remembered it, y’see, and so it was recorded onto the computer. And they put all that information—memories, opinions, reactions, feelings, fears—everything that made me me, y’see, and they downloaded it onto the new drive in my head, along with other programs that run the thing, and run the body and augments. And now I can taste those onions when I want to. Not that I want to often, but I can, and I can taste other stuff, like cakes I had at birthdays or the one I had at…well just birthdays I guess.
“They ask you, too—when they’re recording all your memories—if there’s stuff you don’t want to remember and they keep that but don’t put it on your drive, and you can go get it from them if you ever want to remember it again.
“Anyways, when I woke up after the surgery, I felt normal, as far as I know. But I struggled for a while with the new things. Sometimes I’d have a spasm, in my hand or something. I had to learn how to keep my body under control. And I had weird dreams for a long time. Sometimes the thing—the DC wouldn’t cycle right, into sleep, y’see, so I’d be asleep but still just seeing things, and I couldn’t move, like sleep paralysis. Other times, it’d cycle through memories, or stuff I thought was a memory, but maybe was just…well, maybe it wasn’t a memory—just a dream. But I had to figure it out. See, the DC’s got all these settings you can tweak, and you gotta get in there and set things up the way you like it.
“Mentalink—they did the procedure—they have people who help you set it up and help get you acclimated. They helped me learn to disconnect, which was hard because you’re basically turning off your brain. Or, at least you’re not using it the way you normally do, to process senses. You have to switch of your senses and, well, you still feel, but in a new way. Anyways, it helped that they moved my office down to the lower levels with the other DCs. There’s no windows and no sound really cause it’s so deep underground. And we sit at our stations and think.
“You can’t believe how much work you can get done without any distractions. When you’re disconnected from everything, there’s nothing to stop you, and you accomplish more than you ever could with an organic brain. Everything’s so clear. You can compute complex formulas in seconds—less than seconds, and you can take in pages and pages of data, and—process, analysis, synthesis, proposal—in seconds, y’see? Once I see where potential for profit exists, there’s nothing that can keep me from getting it.
“Like the kid I got my eyes from. I remember—I was at the opera house, late, dancing. Music hits you so much differently when you can disconnect from it—when you hear without listening. It means—nothing, it’s random, it’s completely unrestrained. So, I was dancing, and I saw this kid dancing beside me, and he had this flashy new ocular augment, and the eyes were out, flying around him, flashing colored lights. And it looked so cool, and the music was washing over me—over both of us—and I calculated, and we were dancing, just going wild, and then I was on him, holding his head against the floor and pulling out the augment. It was all part of the dance, y’see. There was a profit available to me, so I took it out of his head, and it’s mine now. I can’t describe that feeling, but…it’s so clear to me.
“Some people download, quote-unquote, moral inhibitors and other add-ons that try to replicate a soft brain. Don’t ask me why you’d want to weigh yourself down when you could be unrestrained—why you’d want to create meaning where there is none, not really. It makes them feel better about success, I guess. Or maybe it makes them feel like they used to, like then did as a kid. That’s a luxury I don’t have time for. I can’t really say why. You’d have to ask one yourself. Personally, I’m perfectly happy living disconnected.”
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* * *
I asked Whatley how much of him was left original. He told me that most of his torso’s circulatory and nervous system was intact, about a third of his intestines were still his (the rest were grafts from younger hosts, most of which were human). He said he still had a lot of the same bones in his chest, though they’d been reinforced, and that the muscles were still there, though they didn’t do much. He told me most of his organs had been replaced, including his heart which was a mechanical pump, as opposed to a lab grown organ, which tended to work better. But he didn’t need to pump the blood as far anymore, so it worked fine. He said he still had one original lung, and I detected some pride in his voice when he told me. The replacement for the other lung, he told me, did the work of two healthy lungs, so he felt no need to replace the other one and instead he kept it in as a novelty, a small keepsake of his old self. “Like a child’s blanket,” he said. “I can open the valve and breathe into it if I want.” He took in a deep breath and smiled as he exhaled.
I asked him what he liked to do with his free time. He laughed and said that free time was something of a joke on Alta, and that it revealed my simple humanity. He told me two fundamental truths on Alta: time is money, and nothing’s free. I’d noticed my own truths as well: that Altoids work as efficiently as possible, in part, to finish work early and relax. I found they spent a lot of time and money on diversion, and Whatley confirmed he did as well, even if he called it something different.
He said he enjoyed dancing at the opera and watching 4-D movies. Whatley loved 4-D movies, but he had to prepare for them, and afterwards he was usually drained and took time off work. But, he said, when he came back to work, he was even more productive. That was how he justified the luxury to himself: that efficient play was necessary to enable productive work.
I asked if he’d had any memories removed when they installed his DC. He laughed again, and said, “knowing would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?” I asked him if he’d ever been married. He said he didn’t think so. I asked him if ever wanted a family. He told me he didn’t think there was much point to it. Family, to Whatley, seemed like a lot of cost with no return. He could understand why some people wanted to do it, but said that most “True Altoids,” as he put it, detested the sentimentality. I asked him what he planned to do with his money after he died. He reminded me of another old Altoid cultural belief—that “True Altoids” could live forever. Plenty of them had died, but there were, apparently, Altoids well over four-hundred years old, ones that had augmented themselves out of all biological originality. No one knew if an Altoid could live forever, but that was only because forever hadn’t happened yet. Wild ambition was natural in those who augmented themselves away from the natural course, and every Altoid I ever met believed it was perfectly possible that they would never die and simply live on as a mass of code and parts, moving their money from place to place.
Mickey, an A.I. poet whose work had been published on other worlds apparently wrote on the subject when it said,
“How happy is the fat, conventional cyclone!
Now portly is just the thing,
To get me wondering if the conventional
Cyclone is double chinned.”
I never got much from these lines, but they’re apparently quite profound on Alta.
* * *
I also talked with an Altoid who had a DC, but not be choice. He agreed to let me share a portion of our conversation, but asked that I keep his identity anonymous. He lives with his family on the outskirts of a larger metropolitan region where he keeps a small garden and tries to earn a living painting.
He told me, “I never wanted the DC, but I had a brain tumor—inoperable. It was going to kill me, so my family sold what they had to get me to Alta. I’ve been living with it nearly all my life. But—I never disconnect.” He didn’t appreciate being removed from the human experience which the DC forced on him. He’d opted to have a lot of extra features installed on his drive, like a morality simulator, an empathy drive, and a foible pack. “Bells and whistles,” in most Altoid’s opinions, used by sentimental Altoids seeking an obsolete experience. But among those who didn’t chose to have a DC installed, features like these were necessary to maintain their control of their humanity.
“Disconnecting terrifies me. I do as much as I can to stay grounded in reality. I’ve got arthritis in this hand, and sometimes it hurts to do chores, y’know, in the garden, or grip my brush. But I’d never replace my hand. Never get dirt under my nails again? Or lose that pain, from gripping a brush too long? No.”
“Machine-heads are pathetic. They become lost in their own minds and forget they have bodies. They forget to feel. I really have a lot of sympathy for them. They have families and then they leave them and erase them from their memories so they can be left alone to think. I never want to be alone.”
Apart from his DC, he told me he tried to keep his augments to a minimum. He was married and had two kids, both of whom were unaugmented. His wife had one arm replaced with a mechanical arm fitted with a hydraulic clamp she used to press machine parts at a factory. They weren’t poor, but they weren’t well off considering the average income of an Altoid with a DC.
I asked him if he made enough from his paintings to support his family. He told me he has to pick up extra work as a bike messenger. “Biking through the city is an exhilarating experience. It’s like flying. I love the feel of the wind in my eyes.” Painting was his real passion, and on his days in the city, he tries to sell his prints on the side of the street in between deliveries. He always made prints of his work. “I can’t stand the notion that art should be felt once and destroyed.” He took pride in painting with purpose and with a plan, “like a human,” he said. “I mostly paint nature—landscapes or pastoral scenes.” I bought one of his prints, but couldn’t make much sense of it. It looked like someone had fed the characteristics of nature through a machine and this was came out the other end. It had the hallmarks of nature—the colors, the shapes—but there was something miserable about it, some cold contrivance that was merely technically artistic.
I asked him if he ever thought about disconnecting, if only so he could make more money for his family. By this time, his wife and children had joined us in his studio and were listening to his answers. A look of pain and embarrassment, I thought, came over his face, and he looked to his kids and then up to the ceiling while he thought of answer. While he though, I studied the print and spun it to see it differently. The man’s wife walked over and flipped it around to indicate the top, then walked to her husband and rubbed small circles in his back. She said, “we try not to think too much here. It can get in the way.”