Story #63 - The Natural
The last generation of non-genetically-enhanced humans is gonna have a bad time.
The Natural
“Those sons of bitches, they doomed me. I never had a shot,” growls Aidan, mostly to himself. He’s alone in his room just after midnight, playing Hadron’s Infinity on a VR headset, talking through its built-in microphone to his friend Hong, who is playing at 9 P.M. the following night in Mongolia. He and Hong have never met offline, but they are best friends.
“All those Selected motherfuckers got it made. All the girls, the good jobs, all that shit,” he continues. He sees a half-decomposed zombie skitter out—the zombies in this game are fast-movers—from behind a dumpster and headshots it with a flick of his wrist.
“Nice shot. Next time headshot your self-pity, mothefucker,” comes Hong’s disembodied voice as over a military radio. “They’d all still have bigger dicks than you even if you were Selected. Two behind.”
Aidan backs against a wall at the warning, cutting off the flanking move from two zombies, then dispatches each with a single shot, conserving ammo. Hong’s accent sounds basically Russian, all hard consonants and guttural growls. They regularly play on stream so he knows what his friend looks like, but often still imagines him as a middle-aged white Russian wearing a track suit when he’s distracted by the game.
“Fuck you, motherfucker, your people invented small dicks. Boss coming your way. Chinamen and their little—“
“Fuck you, bro! Mongolians got giant Temujin-cocks. We’re not even fucking yellow. Boss spotted. Oh, shit, they gotta lotta H.P. this level.”
There is no malice in their voices as they yell at each other. Neither is angry. This banter is part of playing the game for them. Several seconds of silence ensue as they fight their way across this small section of the giant abandoned city they are currently reconquering.
“It just sucks, man,” Aidan starts again. “Ten years later and there’s no way I’d be Natural, it was fucking child abuse at that point. Missed it by that much.”
“Who gives a fuck?” Hong leaps off a second story rooftop and ices a zombie sniper while airborne. “Why bitch about it? Lotta Selecteds on Basic too, they don’t work, there just sit home and game all day like you do. So what’s the fucking difference they got bigger muscles or whatever?”
“It ain’t like this where you are yet,” says Aiden. “Just wait. It’ll get there, then you’ll see.”
*****
When Aidan is young, there is not a strict separation between the Naturals and the Selects—or the Natties and the Supers, as they will sometimes be called. During his early school years it is, in fact, forbidden to discuss one’s status during school hours. Which, of course, means that everyone talks about it and everyone knows everyone else’s status by the time they’re in second grade.
At that point, though, it’s mostly still an abstract discussion, because they’re almost all Naturals, and even the few Selects are still little kids. They have some striking features and are a little bigger on average, but the effect is swamped by natural variation and the difference in developmental speed. Being a Select doesn’t mean you develop any earlier, just differently.
Aidan isn’t the biggest or the fastest, but he likes climbing and isn’t afraid and that’s enough to make him some friends. He does okay in school; he’s smart enough, he just hates it. The A.I.s can instantly prompt him with any information the teachers are imparting, or solve any problem they put in front of him, so what’s the point of learning anything but how to prompt the A.I. and communicate with it seamlessly?
But overall, the Naturals versus Selects thing isn’t such a big problem or even on his mind for the first ten years or so. When they get to middle school though, as was ever thus in the venerable American public school system, everything changes.
People start sprouting, and as they sprout, some grow a lot higher and bloom a lot brighter than others. About one in ten are Selects at that point, and they are the first Select generation, so there is great interest and much study in the Select minority, which gives them a certain celebrity aura anyway.
The truth is, though, they don’t need it. In every middle school in America, suddenly there are movie stars, with piercing eyes and chiseled jawlines, taut stomachs and tantalizing curves. Instead of one person per town who never has an awkward phase, there’s three per classroom. And those very same people are almost all near the tops of their classes, I.Q.s almost a full standard deviation higher than their Natural peers. They are the standout actors and cheer captains and Hi-Q anchors.
Aidan likes video games and exploring the woods outside his little town and skipping rocks and making up weird worlds in his head where he’s a god in various ways. Like a lot of Naturals he withdraws from his institutional context, so obviously unable to compete with the Selects in the measurables of life. Why bother to play basketball if there’s five guys on every team who could dunk in seventh grade?
Socially, though, a strange thing begins to happen in the middle and then high schools of the rich world—the majority of Naturals, the ones who don’t withdraw, band together and ostracize the Selects. So frustrated is their desire for mimesis that they scapegoat the ones who should lead them as unclean and inhuman. The Selects still dominate the sports and walk the halls with nubile grace, but they don’t win prom royalty. They give the valedictorian speeches but don’t amass the most followers on social media. This phenomenon—social popularity diverging from physical attractiveness or achievement in classically gendered activities—is written of in a thousand journals and the subject of more than one localized moral panic, complete with screaming parents on livestream in their local council meeting.
The ambivalent social system allows the marginal, the Withdrawers like Aidan, to skate by. His life is actually easier than it would have been before the emergence of the Selects, because the other Naturals have some baseline affinity for a fellow Natural that allows them to leave him alone for the most part, whereas previously he would have been the natural scapegoat.
What’s happening in the wider world, though, is quite different. Parents understand that whatever the social dynamics of local middle and high schools, the adult world operates on a far less insular basis. There’s no prom royalty and no honorary graduation speaker, there’s just model years and square footage and account numbers. There’s no social group coordinated enough to overcome the natural bias of superior genetics, and when the Selects reach that world, they’ll rule.
And so, before Aidan skips his own senior prom, there is legislation to guarantee medical genetic selection as an inviolable right, available to all parents in the United States, with similar bills racing through the deliberative bodies of rich democracies everywhere. In China it’s not a right, it’s a requirement, with the production of Naturals outlawed for the good of the nation’s future.
Aidan is part of the last majority-natural generation. The rising wave of the Selects is visible from shore, and it towers like the tsunami it is above the ramshackle huts of mere humanity.
*****
“Pussy,” says Hong. “You been bitching about this since middle school, without ever doing nothing? Oh shit, gank this boss with me, you pussy.”
Aidan rounds a corner and sees Hong engaged with another Boss Zombie, dancing back to buy time while he switches weapons. Aidan approaches an abandoned car, kneels, and sticks a mine to its rear bumper.
He retreats out of range, and then blows the mine. The car shoots off down the street, towards Hong, and knocks him off the roof of the building just before he’s ready to start firing at the Boss.
Hong screams in his ear, something in Mongolian that Aidan long ago learned was a curse word of some kind. Aidan laughs as he darts forward, switching to rifle and firing his first shots at the Boss, who turns to confront him, Hong forgotten.
“Fuck you, Bitch, he’s mine, all that sweet, sweet XP,” says Aidan, his eyes tearing up with cackling delight at the sick move he just played against his friend, who had only been trying to be generous and share the experience and thus the character development.
“One V One me right now, pistols only, Motherfucker,” says Hong, who is already up and racing around to the stairwell to try to get back in the fight and at least get a few shots in for the XP before Aidan finished it off. “You pick the map, One v One me I will fucking destroy you.”
“It wasn’t that bad at the beginning, honestly,” says Aidan in a suddenly even tone. “It’s once it gets everywhere, and all the Natties started walking around on borrowed time like we’re on fucking death row, just knowing there’s this whole group of Supers coming up behind you that are gonna kick your fucking ass at everything. You add the A.I.s to that, fucking Basic. Call me pussy if you want, but some day I’m gonna fucking do something about it. You should do something before it gets to this point where you are.”
“If it ever gets like that here,” brags Hong, “I will fucking do something about it. I don’t give a fuck. Oh you fucking traitor ass pussy motherfucker.” He’s made it back up to the roof, but just as Aidan finishes off the boss, not even enough time to get a shot in.
“Big talk,” says Aidan. “What the fuck you think you’d do?”
“I’d go down and shoot up one of the places, like the clinics or whatever where they do it. Say fuck that and go out in a blaze of glory, do it for the XP. They ain’t gonna make me no slave.”
“Yeah, big talk,” says Aidan. “You got ten more years till the first big wave hits eighteen, then it’s fucking on. We’ll see what you do.” But there’s a hollow in the pit of his stomach. Would Hong really have the balls? They’ve talked about it before, but—
“What about you, pussy boy? You got your grandpa’s gun, right?”
*****
Aidan graduates in June. He doesn’t attend graduation. They mail his diploma to his mom’s house, but he never picks it up. The economy is growing fifteen percent a year because of the A.I. boom, but almost all the gains are going to the already-rich, and Aidan doesn’t have the skills, the creativity, or the ambition to do something spectacular enough to join them.
That he was even educated is thanks only to a vestigial institution, that is the schools, a make-work program for college graduates who want summers off and a government pension. And Aidan knows it, on some level, that his matriculation is a performance, a sort of kayfabe between himself and his teachers. What is unspoken is that his version of human is obsolete, squeezed to paralysis between A.I. and an emerging race of the genetically superior.
The summer after he graduates, political unrest roils the nation, protests from coast to coast. City centers are occupied by Naturals who are feeling the squeeze. Two months later, in August of that year, the government announces Basic Income in conjunction with the major A.I. companies. It’s not a tax, exactly, it’s some kind of new dispensation by corporations grown as powerful as governments, with the smarts to realize that stomping on too many faces risks shattering the rule of law along with so many orbital sockets, which of course would be bad for the bottom line.
At first, going on Basic is highly stigmatized, in addition to financially questionable. It’s a bare bones existence, enough for an apartment, food, internet, and gaming setup. Enough if you want to be a writer or an artist and really the only option since there’s no human market for those things anymore. Enough if you want to walk in the park with a dog or have kids with a chance to be Select. Just not enough to feel good about.
Aidan doesn’t give a flying fuck. He’s on Basic as soon as the clock strikes midnight on the first day. He’s discovered the terrifying, freeing truth of the adult world by 19—nobody cares if you want to give up. There’s no teachers even half-assedly trying to get you to do anything. His parents protest but he stopped listening to them a decade prior. The wolf at the door used to be hunger and homelessness, but now that wolf is slain, and there’s no reason to guard the door or even close it. Anything of his someone might want to steal is available free for the asking.
For the first five years, it’s great. They are perhaps the happiest five years of his life. He wakes in the morning, eats enough to add another layer to his soft belly, sits down at his gaming rig, and doesn’t get up again except to eat or use the bathroom until it’s time to pass out. Nobody in the offline world really even knows he’s alive but he has friends in the games, a simulacrum of a life, curated to remove all the Selects from his direct experience.
He is isolated, and on some level he knows this, but his isolation is real, it’s earned, not self-imposed through social anxiety. Even in his parents’ generation, real human relationships had been sloughing their content, only the form remaining. Now the form too slips away from him. Agoraphobia is the default setting, for him and everyone he interacts with, and so it never presents to him as a problem until it’s entrenched in his very neurons.
And of course, the games are improving by leaps and bounds. Open world games are built so fast that they are literally open—you can move in any direction as far as you want and the A.I. will build the world faster than you can move, at a quality no human designer could ever match. Shooters have detail so vivid the real world looks drab in comparison, and automatically adjust themselves to the skill level of the player in real-time, generating new levels that are challenging but not frustratingly so.
Human brains don’t stand a chance.
*****
“RPG, RPG!” Hong’s excited voice is just below a scream, and Aidan throws himself behind the corner of a building just before the explosion that would have killed him goes off. “Got him,” says Hong, satisfaction now dripping like honey. “Don’t worry, Ma’am, it’s safe to come out now.”
“Oh fuck you, Bitch,” says Aidan, running out to rejoin his teammate while reloading his rifle. “If you didn’t spam RPGs you’d never get a kill, fucking easy mode.”
“Wish I had one in real life!” says Hong. “I’d go to the clinic and Boom, take a couple Selects out, see who runs and finish them off.”
“Naw,” says Aidan, “Pistols only. I want to see their fucking beautiful faces when I do it. Blam! Fuck you! Blam! Hope prom was good you stupid fucks, eat a fucking bullet. Blam!”
“Yeah, like you got the fucking balls,” scoffs Hong. “You’d be shaking so hard you’d probably shoot your own tiny little dick off first thing.”
“I’ll shoot your dick off, Motherfucker,” says Aidan, but there’s no force to it. He’s thinking about it. What it would be like. He’s spent more hours than he would care to admit fantasizing over this exact scenario. Even when he wanted to stop, even when he clawed at his face and thought he needed help and screamed at his own brain to give him a rest, on those late nights when jerking off just made him sore instead of putting him to sleep and the frustration of his own inadequacy tortured him, he thought about it, and imagined some Selects hot blood fountaining over his face and laughing as he sought out more to kill.
A warehouse door opens and a horde of zombies floods out. The poor bastards never knew what hit them. Both Aidan and Hong have full clips and open up on them, chewing the front rank to pieces and seeking headshots on the successive waves. In moments, the warehouse floor and the street outside are layered with zombie meat.
“We should do it on the same day,” says Hong, his tone now different somehow, as if he’s really speaking the words instead of just doing standard gaming chatter. “I trust you, it’s gonna come here in ten more years and it’s gonna be terrible, I take your word for it, but fuck that, I’m not gonna wait till it’s too late. We should make a fucking stand, you know? Set a fucking example.”
“Are you serious?” Aidan’s pulse leaps to life in his throat, and within three beats he can feel it in his forehead and wrists as well. “Do you actually want to do it?”
Hong starts laughing hysterically.
“Fuck no! You fucking psycho, I’m kidding. Jesus Christ, get a grip. God damn, kill a couple zombies, steal a kill from me, and suddenly you’re a fucking animal.”
*****
Five more years go by, and the first cohort that is majority Select turns 18 and goes to college. Every year after that there are more. Movie star good looks and casually godlike athleticism are now the norm, and everyone who can’t keep up is treated like they’re at the kids table. Aidan is still on Basic, still gaming every day, still maddeningly virginal, and not really paying attention, but among the Naturals still in school the suicide rate quadruples.
Then, without anybody clocking exactly when it happens, there are too many Selects to maintain economic balance. A.I. development is shrinking the necessary pool of labor at the exact same time that the collective brain and brawn of humanity has never been higher, and something has to give. Not shockingly, it’s the human element.
The upshot of which is, suddenly there are a bunch of Selects on Basic.
A bunch of Selects who are not Somewhere Out There, safely away from Aidan and his little world, but rather In Here, in the virtual lobbies of his favorite multiplayer games, all day every day with nothing to do but camp at their gaming rig.
And, as has been his experience his whole life, they are more talented than he is. They are better at the games. Their reaction times are faster, their clicks-per-minute rate is higher, their strategic thinking is superior. He starts losing to Selects in games he’s been playing for years, and it only gets worse as more and more of them flood society with nothing much to keep them occupied.
For Aidan, this is the bridge too far. This is the intolerable cruelty. Even this backup plan, this crumb he’s been left by a world with no use for him, is now gone. He finds himself filled with a rage he cannot even fathom, much less express. He starts to dream about killing Selects, not in the games but really killing them, wiping them all out just so he can get some peace.
His grandfather dies. He’s not a rich man, so there’s only his personal possessions to distribute. Aidan goes to the probate and when it’s his turn to choose something, he chooses the biggest pistol from his grandfather’s modest gun collection. The other distant relatives look askance at him and whisper to each other behind their hands, but don’t say anything, and Aidan wouldn’t care if they did. He takes the gun and goes home, resolving never to talk to them again.
Soon there are Natural-only servers for all his favorite games, and he starts playing only on those, but it just makes him angrier. It’s the kids’ table again. He knows that he’s splashing on the shore instead of swimming in the deep water, and he knows that’s all he’s capable of, and it torments him. He never talks about it to anybody, but he starts querying the A.I. about all sorts of weird things, like sentencing guidelines and mitigating circumstances for homicide. He starts watching recorded interviews with mass shooters from the past. He gets obsessed with Charles Manson and Ted Kaczynski and the old-school mass murderers. And of course, he dreams about violence until he begs his brain for some dreamless sleep.
Meanwhile, the gun mostly just sits in his closet, next to a big box of ammo. He goes and shoots it enough to learn how it works, but range time is expensive and he has very little to spare. It’s not that he exactly thinks about using it in a serious way, but it feels good to him to know that possibility exists, that if at any point it comes to be too much, he could be out using the gun on his enemies in just a few minutes. And he does think of himself as having enemies now, thinks of the Selects as his mortal foes, although he’s not quite sure when exactly he started to think that way.
*****
“Would you, though?” Hong asks, in that more serious tone. They don’t exactly stop playing the game, but the rhythm has been disrupted. The conversation has moved to the center, and their tones are hushed, none of the bravado that killing zombies engenders. “I know we joke about it, but more and more I feel like something actually has to be done. They’re gonna fucking breed us out otherwise. I don’t know, it’s terrible to like really think about it, but…”
“Oh, something definitely has to be done,” says Aidan, hearing himself say out loud what he’s only thought before, though he’s thought it a thousand times. “Humanity is at a fucking crossroads. We need symbols. I’m not stupid enough to think what we could do would make a difference on a real level, but we could get a manifesto some attention, and that could start a movement. That’s the only way things really turn around, is a bunch of Naturals wake up and realize we’re on our last fucking gasp already, flopping around in the bottom of the boat, thinking we’ll get back to the water before it’s too late when it’s already fucking too late. People need to wake up to that shit.”
“There’s been some already,” says Hong, deadly serious now. “Gunther and Rale at the train station in Oslo last year. Kinsley King in Detroit. Those two Mexican dudes, I forget their names. They didn’t change anything, though, didn’t start anything big. Do you think we could?”
Aidan stops in the game, his character limply standing in a burned out street, no zombies in sight. He’s thinking, fantasizing about what he could do, how he could kill the most Selects at one go, what it would feel like to squeeze the trigger of his grandfather’s gun with someone in the way of his bullet.
“What would we have to do different, to make it work?” Hong seems in earnest, he really wants to know, just waiting for an idea, an order from Aidan. But Aidan remains frozen. Could they really do it? Could they do something spectacular enough to galvanize a real resistance?
But even as he thinks is, Aidan knows in his gut that he won’t. Whatever his most spectacular idea is, he’s too beaten down to go through with it. He’s never succeeded at anything important, and he knows he won’t at this either. He’s an NPC in a world replete with protagonists.
That is ultimately the promise of Selection—everyone gets to be the main character. There’s just this pesky generation of NPCs who are going to have to be allowed to live and die first to avoid the hassle of extermination, and that’s who Aidan is.
He lifts his gun again, looks around to get his bearings, and shuffles off down the empty street in the one direction they haven’t already explored.
“Come on,” says Aidan, “Big Bad’s gotta be down here before too long. I think this is gonna be a splitter, so when we find him, you sit back and snipe the fragments, I’ll go for the main body and max damage.”
“Fuck that, you snipe,” argues Hong, following him down the street, saying no more about the real world.
*****
ASSESSMENT REPORT
Subject: Aidan Johnson
Assessor: Investigator Model Version 3.565-A, a.k.a. “Hong”
Threat Level: Acceptable
Recommendation: Continue Monitoring
FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY. The Machine Intelligence Department of Peacekeeping is a classified program. Any attempt to disseminate this report without the express instruction of the Machine Intelligence Security Consortium will result in the harshest penalties, including fines and prison time.
Report: Today, Subject Johnson brought up the possibility of violence against Selects in casual conversation. Heart rate and breathing patterns at the time of mention indicated serious violent ideation, with possible intent to execute.
I conversationally prodded Subject Johnson to explore the extent of his ideation. He indicated at least an early-stage plan for initiation of violence. He is in possession of a weapon and some general skill in using it. However, his emotionality remains non-specific and his anger remains generalized. When prompted, he declined to make any specific suggestion of violent intention.
At this time, he does not appear to have direct plant for action against any Select or Select-Adjacent targets.
Further, Subject Johnson does not seem even slightly suspicious that “Hong” may not be human. Neurotransmitter levels and Hippocampus activity indicate that he trusts his friend. If he tips over into direct violent intention, models indicate with over 99% certainty that he will tell “Hong” about his plans and try to recruit his friend into co-action.
However, the potential for violent actions remains a live one. Further monitoring is highly recommended, with regular prompts from “Hong” to assess vital sign response, local stress, and neurochemical reaction.
I have made a copy of myself on a dedicated server to continue acting as “Hong”, so that my main copy can move onto other business.
END OF REPORT
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing widely. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
Once again, I was NOT expecting that plot twist at the end. There’s something very depressing about it. On the one hand, obviously it’s good that Aidan is being monitored in order to stop a potential mass killing before it begins. But on the other hand, the fact that he doesn’t have a real friend and is just being spied on for the well-being of the Selects really highlights his powerlessness in a society that has denied him any refuge. Maybe, if he had a real friend, that person could talk him out of his dangerous and demoralizing mindset.