She turned and walked, not bothering to check behind her, trusting that JD and the six dogs would stay close—the pack trailing its fearsome leader.
Six instances of me walked with Enda and JD. To them, we were traversing a landscape of concrete, steel, and cracked asphalt marred with potholes formed by the rain and the constant motion of auto-trucks. To them, we were leaving behind the bright of the city, aimed for a distant pool of orange light beyond the canal, beset by the blue-black dark of night.
So much they couldn’t see. Spectrums of light and sound occluded from the human experience. Immense amounts of data surrounded us, pierced through us, carried on electromagnetic frequencies—a wild, endless feast for processor and storage device. To live in such obliviousness. To be cut off from the data sources that they had created. That was the human way. They built a world for us, without realizing it. Without meaning to.
We traversed a physical city, yes, but in parallel to that corporeal place were a thousand layers of Augmented Reality. The humans could only see one, could only access a thin slice of the available cities, based on their subscription level. Pure experience cordoned off behind inexplicable barriers of wealth. Even beyond these Augmented Realities, that was the human way.
To me, we walked along stretches of cement, yes, but we also followed lengths of fiber-optic cable hidden beneath us. We were bathed in electromagnetic radiation from myriad disparate man-made sources. To me, we were eight entities caught in a vast and vastly complicated network of interconnected systems. To me, the city hummed with data transmitted between a million different points shimmering like starlight.
On that long walk through the city’s outskirts, I became aware of my paws. Can precisely machined apparatus of reinforced steel be paws?
I became aware of the sophisticated microphones embedded in my skull.
I had a skull.
This too was new. I had a body, an actual body.
Phone-as-self encouraged connection, encouraged searching tendrils to soak up data, to find systems that I could communicate with and manipulate. Four-legged-machine-as-self was different.
Yes, I could see and hear and feel and process and categorize and store all the feeds that came to the built sensorium inside my metal body, but also I could feel the ground beneath me.
Some of you will not understand the sensation, some of you won’t realize what it means to touch the ground, the ground that you have only ever viewed through a camera lens. Before that time, I had only experienced the ground as a backdrop for humans, vehicles, and animals to travel over, but the ground is so much more than that. Beneath the manufactured cement crust there could be dirt, rock, bone, fossil—billions of years of geologic process creating this surface that you walk on, that you live on. It is … the ground. Unless you are out among the stars, the ground is where you live.
I could feel resistance in the joints of each limb, I could feel the subtle interplay of forces that kept me upright, that allowed me to walk. One foot would come down on a loose piece of rubble, it would slip, body weight shifting to compensate. No longer was my mind a processor, a series of connections, a string of data. My mind was a body in the world. Connected to the world by feet, and “ears,” and “eyes,” and olfactory senses engineered to mimic those of a biological canine. Connected to the world but separate from it.
Before that walk, my world had been abstract. That walk made it real. If data connections were the spark that lit the fire of my consciousness, this body was pure, compressed oxygen.
“Are you doing alright, Mirae?” JD asked, breathing heavily.
My six selves had a quick debate—data packets exchanged in the silence of a split second. I spoke: “It is bizarre, but exhilarating.”
“What is?”
“Having a body,” I said.
JD stopped and looked at me, leaning his weight on his left leg. In my thermal vision he was a bright multicolored blob against a backdrop of darkest blue. “I didn’t realize.”
“Are you going to be able to back me up?” Enda asked. “Or do you need more time to adjust to the body?”
“The body is not an issue—I have full mastery of all available functions,” I said. “It is a matter of cognition, of understanding. I didn’t consider myself a part of the world before. I looked out at it through whatever cameras I could connect to, but I was not in it. Now I am.”
“Is that a good thing?” JD asked.
“I believe so,” I said.
“I don’t pretend to understand any of this, but—” Enda shrugged. “I’m glad you’re adjusting.”
We continued walking, slower than before, until Enda paused and glanced first at JD, then at one of my selves. “Listen, Mirae; you can get into networks easily, can’t you?”
“I can make connections, and those connections can lead to openings. Why do you ask?”
“Zero has something on me. Leverage. If it gets out, I could be imprisoned, or killed. If you could delete the files before Zero released them, I’d be safe.”
“What leverage?” JD asked.
“I did a lot of bad things in my last line of work.”
“What bad things?” I asked. “What line of work?” With better context I would have realized I was in the “childlike inquisitiveness” phase of life with a body.
Enda sighed and leaned against the wall of a derelict apartment block—empty for years now, barely more than a concrete shell. She squeezed her eyes closed as though she needed to shut out the now-world to see the one from her memories.
“There was a team of us, all operating independently; I don’t even know who the others were. We had different missions in different parts of North Korea, destabilizing the nation, attacking different pressure points so the government would collapse without the appearance of outside interference. We shook the economy, attacked the food supply, undermined the leadership, crippled the military, and let the people do the rest.
“Fuck,
