***The black eye came loose and rolled onto the wax paper of the dissection tray with a thick thud. He avoided looking at it directly. The milky film surrounding the dilated iris was ribbed with deep brown veins, but within the iris was a darkness that reflected the bright white LEDs with a twinkling intensity of intelligence that gripped his stomach with a mercilessness that could hang on for hours after he left for home. Those expressing the traits of the true psychic were institutionalized and medicated until their deaths. He read the rumor pulp about the military having plans for developing true psychic soldiers, but he also knew there were already biological and hardware machines that could wage war much better than any man ever could or ever would. His finger slipped within the orbital cartilage of the red fin's skull and jabbed a lobe of the softball knot of the hard cased brain. "Jesus," the thing's thick tail twitched hard and slapped his elbow, sending his torch pen to the floor. He quickly bent to pick it up and returned it to his tray of tools as he tended to his task. The reason was more primal and closer to every human being's core than fear could ever cut.***
"I, lab tech grade three, being of sound mind, unique conception, and perceptive of the self begin the dissection of product serial A.2.N.S. lowercase double R., common catalog the 'Red Fin', on the 13th of August, 2123." The autopsy room of the mortuary was awash in shadowless white light from the strips of powerful diode lamps inlaid into every seam of the walls and surrounding the long drains that formed foot wide crosses at each juncture of the floor panels. By the time the task would be done and the specimen sent to the incineration wing he would need to turn on the overhead sprinkles of weak reactive enzymes and bacteria to make sure all of the biological material was rinsed down the silver rimmed mouths of drains and unable to regenerate faster than the septic tanks below could dissolve it.
He breathed heavily into his mask. The containment suit was no more uncomfortable that day than any day before and his fingers could still transmit their deft strokes easily enough to the task at hand on the stainless steel table. The first and second cross cutting strokes released brown stasis fluid from the dimpled red skin of the thing and air rushed into the heavily compressed main cavity as the cartilage surrounding the vital bladders of its basketball sized torso sprang open. Normally the red fin would be deep underwater, the retina of its fist sized eye receiving information and recording it on the folds of its softball shaped compound brain. It was a research machine. Developed to be popped out of a chute on a mid-draft research vessel, it would sink like a rock to its functioning depth. The change in pressure would force its ribs inward and the compressed stasis fluid would react and generate heat to power its artificial musculature and physiological processes. Twin paddle shaped and stumpy arms pumped it along as it sought out and sighted sea floor life. Bio-luminescent bladders poured out light whenever it detected electromagnetic differences that indicated life. When it stores of energy grew low it pumped itself toward the scent of the only food it was programmed to eat contained at the end of a tow cable inside of its retrieval cage. A magnificent thing. Red fins had no mouths. Only detectors of varying varieties. They were not reusable.
Ken, worked on the quality control staff of the lab. Every fifth A2NSRR was to be cut apart and thoroughly examined to be sure the flow of products was reliable. "Four illumination units beneath left and right scapulae." He rattled the words off like a read/write head crossing bits of familiar magnetic zeros and ones, presence and absence, on and off. "Stasis fluid tank wall polymer of minimum two centimeter thickness," unceremoniously he thrust a hand between the plastic and bubble sponge coated flat ribs and the stasis bladder lining. Gripping it tightly like a child gripping the scruff of a puppy's neck he tugged on it hard enough to unseat it from its fibrous linkages and slip it free without spritzing his face mask with the stink and tarry slick of the brown stuff, "of uniform thickness throughout," he spoke into the camera's he could not see, but that recorded everything happening in the small autopsy room as soon as the lights were turned on. His mind wandered while his body worked.
The events of the previous week were still fresh on his mind, though more sensational news came and went on an hourly basis. Every day, speaking the authentication into the electronic eyes and ears that watched and listened to him work kept the thoughts uncomfortably present. So much so that he found it difficult to think about anything else while he was away from the sterile and controlled work of the lab mortuary. The vacuum of thought filling endlessly when he was walled in by it.
"A true psychic," he breathed, shaking his head. "Electrostatic veins," his long thin razor separated a layer of skin from the left side of the slender central fin running along it's entire spine. A true psychic declared himself. The act was not new. So many studies were coming across the covers of peer journals for the past twenty years, coming as fast as pigeons diving on a spilled feed bag, that covered the subject in great detail. When the first human case came to light, the concept was several years explored. He could still remember picking up a shining soap scum white copy of the Hartha Rose Institute Quarterly Compendium and reading the second blurb in red ink: "A Study of Accelerated Breeding in Di-Chromatalids". "Veins are numbering one, two, four, and nine," he counted them by feel alone. The tiny bacterium, almost simple enough to be nothing more than bits of on and off static charges switching as they took in protein chains from the gel they were suspended in, were bred and bred and bred and bred, again and again. In each generation the members with the shortest reproductive cycles were singled out and bred again until generational differences in metabolic efficiency and electrostatic complexity were being newly expressed and doubled not from month to month of constant breeding, but week to week, and in batches unpredicted and irreproducible, day to day. It was the breakthrough of the year and the culmination of a decade long process.
Speculation about applications and scare stories blanketed the common news. He could remember when every other movie coming out was about some super virus or ultra nanomachine. Sitting up reading that copy of the Hartha Rose late into the evening months after he first picked it up and well into the publication of the following quarters edition, he noticed the speculative paper nestled into the last breath of the last pages. One doctor Hozuii Inoa wrote about the preliminary findings of an ongoing study he was performing. The thing belonged in a psychology journal more than anything else and, back then, he skimmed through it. The connection felt tenuous. Inoa was a member of the team that worked on the generational acceleration project at the high powered New York institute and left to pursue his own angle. He speculated about the consequences of unregistered generational acceleration in highly developed, highly connected, densely populated segments of industrialized, information driven societies. He had a rare prescience. Back then.
"Bifurcation of the lateral flexors is within the resting tolerance of nine point," he adjusted stainless cobalt blue plated micrometer dials on the hand tool, "zero zero one millimeters." More deft swipes of blades and insertion of stints helped him along and kept the pale tan fibrous flesh of the red fin's muscle away from the bright white light and his prying tools. He rattled off more numbers and figures. The generation gap was shrinking faster than many thought possible before 2110. The average amount of information a man absorbed by age 21 doubled downward roughly every two years. That is, Inoa proved it soundly. His team crushed mountains of data into dust and inspected every grain of that dust before building it into a mountain range of evidence and then scaling the face of every peak of that range they sought answers. The answers led to more and wider ranging studies. The plausible became probable. The impossible became unlikely and the unlikely entered the bounds of reason. Extra sensory perception was happening. Everywhere. Inoa was one of the first to definitely and scientifically express the trait and Ken's mind walked his trail of information with fingers as fast as the ones that leafed through his paper and now the innards of the Red Fin.
New and more powerful minds were in the education systems soaking up and connecting data faster than anyone ever had before and Hozuii Inoa's team found them and guided them as far as their own limitations went and they flew light years further on leaving his team and the New York institute could do little more than track them. But as things accelerated it all became normal. Ken saw a handful of his own medical school classmates blow past him in his college years. Flying threw material like solar sails fully rigged against wide band laser beams. "Central nervous ganglion. Intact," he yanked it free, the pop of tearing material like stressed cellophane was heavily muffled by his mask. They pushed the boundaries. It felt like he only read that article yesterday instead of nearly twenty years ago. Biological machines. "God damn machines," he mumbled to himself as he pushed the black start button on the rotary micro saw and touched it to the thick skin surrounding the bulbous red fin's black eye. They made biological machines a reality. They could learn a thousand page text in a single month, verbatim. They made organs and clones and actual hardware that could repair itself. They made zero emissions factories and the idnet. And then they began growing artificial brains, simultaneously, across the globe.
Their children made artificial brains that could think by the time they reached an age when he was much more interested in throwing rocks at lily pads and watching the goldfish slink away beneath the skin of the pond water like orange scarves. Papers peppered every surface of every journal, speculating about a psychic sub-mind. He read about the deaths. Some of the transcendental generation's children were beyond prescient. Some were so far beyond extra spatial perception that no one could understand what they were. Before any determination could be made they died of cancer.
Attempts were made to treat it, but it proceeded so aggressively, so body choking quickly that every treatment failed. Their progenitor's medicine was stymied. He himself had difficulty wrapping his head around the photographs once they came across his information crawler after being declassified and uncensored after a protracted judicial battle between national secuirty and the demands of free information for all. Their bodies looked like massive callouses. And then a teen came forward. Dieing of the super cancer. The generational killer and answer to the simultaneous grip and palm searing slippage of human definition that kept Ken numb away from work and ceaselessly anxious at it. The super cancer. The ultimate decelerator. "God's foot on our brake pedal," he muttered the words of a conservative news caster that clung to the back of his tongue through the years. The cancer was not a cancer at all, but an expression of true psychic ability without total self perception. Their minds, so hungry for information and advancement, were attempting to clone their bodies from the inside out, choking them to death on their own dividing and doubling flesh. Their was a project underway, amongst those who suffered the true psychic development; the ability to command each cell of their body actively, but lacking the ability to perceive the limitations of their own corporeal form. They were working to solve the problem on their own and extend their lives, the boy revealed. And fear kicked in.
The black eye came loose and rolled onto the wax paper of the dissection tray with a thick thud. He avoided looking at it directly. The milky film surrounding the dilated iris was ribbed with deep brown veins, but within the iris was a darkness that reflected the bright white LEDs with a twinkling intensity of intelligence that gripped his stomach with a mercilessness that could hang on for hours after he left for home. Those expressing the traits of the true psychic were institutionalized and medicated until their deaths. He read the rumor pulp about the military having plans for developing true psychic soldiers, but he also knew there were already biological and hardware machines that could wage war much better than any man ever could or ever would. His finger slipped within the orbital cartilage of the red fin's skull and jabbed a lobe of the softball knot of the hard cased brain. "Jesus," the thing's thick tail twitched hard and slapped his elbow, sending his torch pen to the floor. He quickly bent to pick it up and returned it to his tray of tools as he tended to his task. The reason was more primal and closer to every human being's core than fear could ever cut.
"We were safe," he sighed, taking more care not to repeat the action. Avoiding a bad review before the upcoming promotions month was one of the wiser thing to do these days. And the safety was shattered. The man went to the steps of the Hartha Rose biological research facility and declared himself a true psychic. He was 23. He was immediately taken into custody to be studied. Nothing was found beyond the accelerated metabolic rates and prescience of the typical transcendental child and even clear ESP activity was documented. The man had already gained all of the knowledge available on the subject of his own existence and had written and planned out several studies that he brought in a folio with him. He was studied for days, but the accelerated scientific minds of the Hartha were again stumped and asked him to prove himself. He did.
The man came to the New york institute, but it was not him. It was an exact copy. He went to the Gloster Center in London minutes later. And they all spoke, at once, the exact same words. He was one mind, one truly psychic mind. The world stopped that day for an instant, but the story was quickly closed up, sewn up like a wound on mankind's consciousness. No paper pursued the topic. No speculation followed the breaking of the story. A hand came up to rub his eyes, but banged against the thick plastic of his face mask. He chuckled to himself. He wasn't even sure if he could clearly remember reading the story on the idnet. His information crawling could have been fritzing again. He may very well have been browsing the rumor pulp uncomfortably close to sleep. "How many copies of himself could he have made?" Ken asked himself this every day. How many would he himself have made if he could.
He wheeled the silent casters of the cart to the stainless steel door and red caution text of the inter-departmental shield, wheel lock, and conveyor and pressed the wide flat square button to open it. "Technician grade three has concluded the metrics on product serial A.2.N.S. lowercase double R." He slid the tray and the red fin's parts onto the moving floor behind the opening and watched the door close before returning the cart to its designated position in the center of the room. Each day he recited the report's opening, but each day he wondered more and more about the statement of action. It was a statement designed to declare agency in a world in which automation and intelligence was a concern and a threat that lost clarity by the moment. "The next generation wasn't coming. It's already here," he thought to himself as he entered the decontamination chamber and the spray nozzles began their work. His thoughts turned to the spattering of violent crimes that peppered the idnet's news nodes and the lightning pace at which things happened all around him. He knew he was not keeping abreast of the world and he knew it had little to do with effort and much to do with his own ability. His mind was sound. He had a mother and a father. He was aware of himself, but whether or not he was self aware was a question he knew neither he, nor any offspring he would ever produce, would ever be able to answer.
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