Genius

2024-10-06 Fiction

The first thing Jane does every morning while the dull fog of sleep inertia is still thick enough that the continuation of personal identity has no discernible attraction is to select a form of genius from a heads-up menu that is the only sharp thing on her vision. By the time her neurochemistry and brain topology stabilize enough to make caffeine relatively safe she has within herself a deep and subtle skill she did not fall asleep with: only what a previous generation would have called genius can productively use the conceptual and technological tools of the economy Jane survives in and thanks to and for, and only intensive neural engineering can provide geniuses at the scale and flexibility needed to keep society constantly on the right side of the edge of doom.

With every morning's new genius comes a new variation of her personality. Some changes are too slight to be noticeable during a single day except to the implants that monitor and modulate her brain. Others make the person she is now different from the person she was and from the person she will be. Jane keeps her old self as a knick-knack on a folder she never opens and makes plans for the future as if performing observances for a religion she has no belief in.

Some things in her never change, so other things outside her will remain the same. Sociopathy requires a license she cannot afford. Political and corporate loyalties are extremely illegal to be changed from the outside and it's only seldom done. Her memories remain. Her social ties up to a point. Her name, for what it's worth.

And another thing or two. She owes. From the day's first full awareness to the night's last thought she's aware of her debts. For the crimes of the past she owes revenge on the unpunishable dead. To the future victims of present crimes she owes an attempt to change what she cannot.

To the people who hacked her implants against her consent and to her eternal gratitude.

Every morning Jane goes to her job with a genius for dissimulation that can fool her own implants and a genius for revolution that cannot change the world on its own. But there are others with a genius for subversion; she's not alone. She knows it's not enough. But there's a folder with the memory of a woman that's no longer her but to whom she also owes.