False Consciousness
by Hans Ege Wenger
I ran Angel and slid through the crowd, weaving between chattering tourists and tired businesspeople with a brief word or a gentle quip. Small remarks, tiny pleasantries. Nothing so witty or so rude as to be remembered. My frame straightened and stride lengthened as I walked, the personality implant nested just above my cerebellum flashing Angel’s confident gait into me. I reached into my leather handbag and fitted on a pair of augmented reality glasses. I, Angel, liked to sport a pair of faux-silver frameless lenses that I – that is, I, Albert, – found garish.
“I’m checking in,” I said to the sleekly attired receptionist at the Hotel Heron Geneva’s front desk. “Early. No problem, I hope?”
“No problem at all,” he replied, flashing a practiced smile. “May I ask for your reservation?” The receptionist was running a cheap empathy persona, I guessed, reflexively mirroring back Angel’s speech pattern.
“Of course,” I replied, waving over the implant reader on his desk. The forged RFID chip in my hand said I was a forty-year-old Mongolian businessman on a junket from New Korea. My look had been carefully designed at a plastic surgery spa that week: fresh tanned skin, close-cropped dark hair and a broad nose topped by my own black eyes with their subtle epicanthic folds. I took those eyes and made them dance at the receptionist. He was cute, with an overly serious expression and thick wire glasses. I liked that, which was how this part of the plan to get me to Mars came into being.
“Thanks for being flexible,” I said, allowing one of my broad hands to graze across his. “I’m Altan.” Under my AR glasses, I saw his heart rate spike at the touch.
“Lars,” he replied, fumbling a small complimentary chocolate toward me as he airdropped the password to my room. I lifted it to my lips, held his eye contact, and took a slow bite. His profile in the AR glasses flashed red again. I felt a brief thrum of pleasure at how easily he was drawn to me, this handsome young receptionist.
“Good to meet you, Lars,” I said, turning and rolling my small valise toward the marble elevator. “Perhaps I’ll see you later tonight.”
“I get off at nine,” he said stumblingly to my back. I guessed he was reverting to his natural personality. A friend of mine described running a persona as being like rubbing your stomach and patting your head at the same time: it only worked when you weren’t thinking about it. High-end augments even carried memory blockers, suppressing your long-term memories to simplify usage of a new persona.
I knew Lars ended his shift at nine already. I knew a great deal about Lars. His social media told me he’d recently ended a relationship with a thirty-five-year-old accountant from Vienna. His poorly encrypted diary told me that he’d always fantasized of having a fling at work and his web browsing habits told me he liked older men. More importantly for my purposes, he was the genetic twin of an executive in IntelApple’s US division. Two split, fertilized eggs from the same couple sold off into different test-tube farms and adopted, one raised in Geneva, the other in California. One a receptionist, the other in charge of physical security for the next generation of personality augments.
I beckoned to Lars with a small hand gesture over my shoulder. “Do you? Well, I think you know where I’ll be.”
I, Albert, took the intercontinental hop from Geneva to San Francisco the next morning, a cold case full of swabs of Lars’s DNA in my carry-on. Having spent too long in I, Angel, I reflexively ordered a scotch and soda before uncomfortably summoning the steward back.
“Sorry, I’ll have a decaffeinated black tea, actually,” I said. I, Albert, didn’t drink. The steward left without comment, undoubtedly used to the peculiarities of first-class passengers.
I had a splitting headache from overusing my personality augments, which wasn’t helped by the phantom pangs of sadness when I thought of Lars. Before shutting down Angel in the tram from the hotel, I’d sent an apologetic message to Lars using the number he’d pressed on me that morning. A work emergency, I’d explained. I, Angel, was fantastically worried about being cruel, even for such a brief, sweet fling. I, Albert, wasn’t worried at all. Lars would have a pleasant fantasy fulfilled in exchange for the spirals of his DNA.
My tea arrived, and I sipped it while browsing Martian real-estate listings on my tablet, flicking through palatial second homes and fanciful vacation retreats. I was looking for those surrounded by terraformed soil, big enough to make art that wasn’t possible in Earth’s high gravity and ever more limited space. I found a likely prospect just south of Olympus Mons, a steal at 50 million Euro, and bookmarked it. My teacup and the listings eventually ran dry. I laid my head back and dreamed of spiraling low-gravity topiaries and elaborate sky-scraper-sized vine trellises.
The intercontinental landed two hours later at SFO, coasting smoothly over the high sea walls and lapping waters. I groggily picked up my small, gray, electric car from long-term parking and turned north, into the city. Fat drops of rain spattered around me as I parked and rushed into the house, chased by a bank of Pacific fog billowing in. I paused for a second, soaking in its hot-house warmth and musky, earth-smell, admiring the delicately interwoven vines and ferns that draped the terraria on my walls. My bags were left forgotten atop the small sofa as I spotted out-of-place fronds. With a pair of tiny black shears, I carefully pruned the trailing plants back into their elaborate 3D printed trellises.
“Vertical bonsai,” the San Francisco Chronicle-Standard called them. “Albert Yamada, a previously unknown artist, delights the senses with his debut installation in the Golden Gate Park reclamation pier.” I’d gone to a near defunct print shop and had the article printed to hang on my wall, just above the desk where I created my designs.
At that installation’s afterparty, I’d been cornered by a group of drunk C-suite executives from IntelApple. They were fans. In between shots of high-end tequila, promises were made, tan men in hoodies and tennis shoes draping sweaty arms across my shoulders. They wanted an exclusive installation at IntelApple’s Palo Alto campus. I’d taken the job and designed an elaborate vertical garden that waterfalled down six stories in the courtyard of their head office. It had paid well. Earth well, enough for cocktails on the weekend and a condo in an area guaranteed to be protected from sea-level rise for another twenty years. Not Mars well, though. Mars was for the billionaires or their indentured servants. If I went there, it wouldn’t be to clean toilets.
The pieces fell from there. An overheard conversation about a shipment departing from SFO airport in three months. Cases upon cases upon cases of confident-loquacious-likable personality augments, ready to run. The first in a new product line, set to hit stores January 1st, 2065, being flown out worldwide only a week prior to launch. A single case would sell for five hundred million Euro in the suborbital black markets that ringed the Beijing space elevator, according to I, 8eyez’s, furtive online research. Enough for a new identity, plastic surgery, and then a ticket to Mars with my designs, dreams, and frozen seeds.
I sent the DNA samples to an acquaintance named Serge who worked at an experimental cloned-meat plant down in Fremont.
“You’re odd, real odd, you know that?” He’d said when I sent the request with a sweetener of cash, couched in a story about an avant-garde installation featuring parts of my own body. “But I guess that’s why you’re the big artist and I’m on the night shift.”
By the time my installation needed to be watered again, I received a cool box of iced cornea replicas, carefully nestled in a tray of synthetic chicken thighs.
“Got them,” I typed to Serge. “Thank you.”
I paused and added a smiley face to my message, then a second, then deleted it. I wasn’t good at this kind of thing. Frustrated, I ran Angel. I, Angel, thought that an exclamation point and a single smiley face would do just fine. I, Albert, sent the message, then hustled the slimy tray of cold cuts and corneas into my fridge. It was empty save for an abandoned takeout container and scattered condiments. I sighed, considering a trip to the corner bodega with its friendly Lebanese brothers and baklava sprinkled with orange blossom water. Instead, I packed for Mars and planned my robbery.
Considering my final two pinstriped coats, I decided that I needed neither and dropped them into a pile of discarded clothes. Unable to pretend to be occupied by packing any longer, I ran the plan by each of my augments: Angel, Henge, even 8eyez. 8eyez was an older acquisition, bought in cryptocurrency at a makerspace in Oakland to help me program my increasingly complex installations. They were based on a commercial software programming para-persona, but with a more defined (and opinionated) personality. When I ran 8eyez, I was still in the driver’s seat most of the time, but with a precocious, hyper-caffeinated thirteen-year-old backseat driver.
“Did you notice these are six weeks old, did you, did you, I bet you didn’t,” I, 8eyez, said, as I paged through aerial imagery of the IntelApple cargo terminal outside SFO. “I’ll get new ones. Give me control.”
“Fine,” I said, mentally toggling the augment to run briefly on full power. I, 8eyez, was lightning quick with research, able to tap a secret, hyper-focused portion of my brain that otherwise went unused.
The new imagery showed that there’d been new construction in the loading area where we hoped to hotwire a cargo truck. Not sure what to make of it, I, Albert, ignored my budding headache and dove into Henge.
“I should purchase a gun,” I, Henge, reflected. “This body is physically weak, and I will be unable to use my full capabilities should we encounter resistance.” I, Albert, praying that Henge wouldn’t be needed, moved right on to Angel.
I, Angel, was concerned. Concerned about the start of the plan, concerned about the finish. The concern was mostly for Albert, however.
“You’re not a criminal,” I, Angel, said. “You’ve never even gotten a parking ticket, let alone robbed a former employer. Are you sure you’re feeling all right about this?”
“There’s not another way, Angel,” I, Albert, said back. “I’m not going to spend thirty years scrubbing floors for a tech baron before I can make my art.”
When I bought my Angel augment, I’d selected a personality that combined social graces with a tendency towards navel-gazing self-reflection. Both areas I was notably deficient in. It was hard to carry on a conversation with an augment without dropping back into yourself, but doable with practice.
“You’re allowed to do whatever you think is best,” I, Angel, said. “I’m just hoping you’ve really considered everything this means for your life here in San Francisco.”
“Angel, I can barely remember my life before last year,” I, Albert, replied. “Even when everyone is saying I’m doing my best work, or at least the best that’s possible in Earth gravity, everything still seems like a blur. I need this, I need a fresh start.”
I shut off my augment to avoid I, Angel’s, retort and tried to ignore my lingering uncertainty. The headache buzzing loudly in my temples helped. I stumbled to the bathroom and dry-swallowed an aspirin, grabbing my toothbrush on the way out. Then, I sent a notice for the postman to hold my mail, mentioning a trip to the same off-grid artist’s retreat in the Central Valley I’d told my regular clients about. Last, I turned off the water system for my greenhouses, slamming the door behind me as the misters began to sputter and fall still. Soon, I knew the plants would die, but I couldn’t bring myself to watch.
The start of the heist went smoothly, which didn’t help I, Angel’s, nerves. In the movies, it always went smoothly, right until the heroes realized that they’d been betrayed. Instead of panicking, I walked toward the fenced checkpoint with a practiced slouch, clad in a fluorescent yellow construction vest and toting my lunchbox.
“Scan,” a security guard waved, pointing at a small reader inset into the guard shack. A departing cargo plane roared overhead, leaving the stink of jet fuel behind it.
“I’m new,” I said loudly over the jet wash. “Supervisor said you’d have to look me up in the system until my badge is issued. Sorry.”
The guard grumbled, but complied, typing in the name of a fictional employee I’d inserted into the HR database of an IntelApple janitorial contractor with 8eyez’s help.
“Appreciate it,” I said, as the chain link entrance lurched open.
I crossed the smooth asphalt by the loading docks filled with sleekly painted autonomous freight haulers. Dipping into my vest pockets, I pulled out a touchpad in an IntelApple branded case and a badge identifying me as a manager in their corporate compliance division. I, Albert, had ample opportunity to capture images of badges while installing the hanging garden at their headquarters. I put on a dismissive air and walked over to the nearest hauler, waving to the scattering of maintenance techs before busying myself with my touchpad. Their eyes took in my badge and then slid right by me. I ran 8eyez briefly and began uploading our exploit to the haulers.
“Who the hell are you?” a voice said behind me as I finished with the last of the AVs. I blinked: I, 8eyez, demanded a raised middle finger, I, Henge, wanted to fight, I, Angel, had a witty retort prepared. All I, Albert, felt was the kind of fear you experienced when you were small and didn’t know where your parents were. Lost and utterly out of my depth.
“No-no one,” I, Albert, responded, trying to get back the calm equilibrium I needed for I, Angel, to take charge again. “I was visiting and just got lost.”
“Bullshit,” the speaker was a heavyset woman with a yellow vest and a real IntelApple badge. She pressed closer, jabbing a stubby finger at me. “Security is on their way. You must not have noticed the new cameras we installed in the stockyard?”
Still trying to contain my panic, I matched her face to my social media research. Irene Su, the senior IntelApple rep at the cargo station. Ex-military, which probably was why she felt comfortable confronting intruders personally. I wanted to cry. To explain that it had all been a mistake, a silly fantasy. My vision tunneled and I thought I was going to faint. Instead, I surfaced momentarily into an icy place of calm amusement. I’d been here before, I felt. Staring down, lying to, and fooling a hundred corporate flunkies like Irene Su. She was no different. I breathed deeply and ran Angel again.
“Fine, you got me,” I, Angel, said, laughing. “You’d be surprised how often that deer-in-the-headlights trick gets people. I’m from the twelfth floor down in Palo Alto.”
Irene stepped forward as if she was going to punch me, then thought better of it. “You’re IntelApple red team. Fuck.”
IntelApple had a security team that did cyber and physical security penetration testing on sensitive sites, reporting directly to their CEO. Its existence and the fact that their offices were on the twelfth floor of the HQ was not public knowledge, unless you spent six weeks hanging vine trellises in front of it. I, Angel, had thought it might make a good Hail Mary play when we did our planning.
Irene sucked against her teeth and muttered into a phone before turning back to me. “How’d we do?”
“You fucking failed,” I said back. “I got my name into your access database by hacking a cleaning contractor. A fourteen-year-old could have done it. I’ve just spent the last ten minutes uploading malware to all your autonomous vehicles that I doubt your team will even be able to find.”
“We caught you,” Irene replied. “That counts.”
“Bob probably won’t think of it like that,” I said casually. She went red with anger, then paled. Robert Banerjee was the IntelApple CEO and, coincidentally, part of the group who’d hired me as their in-house arborist over tequila shots. “You’re also assuming this is the first time I’ve been in your facility, which I can assure you isn’t true.”
We stood in silence for a second. I let the silence stretch, allowing her to consider how the notoriously mercurial Bob Banerjee might respond to bad news.
“How’s this,” I said, when I figured she was sufficiently spooked. “I’ll cut you a break.”
“What kind of break?” Irene asked back suspiciously.
“You’ll see,” I replied, leaning forward, turning up the corners of my mouth. “You call of your security team, then let’s just walk inside and I’ll tell you.”
I, Henge, knocked Irene unconscious with a sharp blow to the side of her head from a collapsible baton I’d bought from a night market in the Mission. She slid limply to the ground, the side of her head oozing dark red blood and a vague expression of surprise on her face. I, Albert, had never even been in a fistfight, but I, Henge, an aug typically used by bodyguards and mixed martial artists, was perfect for violence. Looking down at her limp form, I, Albert, dropped out of I, Henge, and narrowly avoided puking in the cargo area of the hauler.
I, Angel, had told Irene that she should let me take the hijacked AV hauler then disable it remotely, letting me slip away with a single, sealed case from the shipment. I’d get bragging rights with my fictitious red team colleagues, plus credit for a successful breach. Given that the cases were biometrically sealed and tagged with trackers, Irene could counter that her team was aware of my presence the entire time. They’d only let me escape with the case in order to track down a sophisticated new ring of thieves. We’d both seemed happy enough with the plan, up until she’d casually asked how my purported IntelApple red cell boss’ surgery had gone last week.
I, Albert, had panicked and ran Henge, who’d taken care of the problem the only way he knew how. Starting to hyperventilate, I, Albert, checked a pulse with a shaking hand and gasped in relief when I found it, thready but present.
“Losing my touch,” I said, distressed that I’d had to hurt her. Then I wondered why I’d thought that and what touch it even was I’d lost.
Feeling my pulse stabilize, I dove back into Henge. Now with a welcome emotional numbness and sense of practicality, I sat next to Irene’s slumped form and opened my lunchbox. Underneath a dollar store sandwich and a bruised apple, the fabricated corneas rested inside a Tupperware. I lifted a slimy eye and ran it over the scanner on the black case Irene had helpfully pointed out, thankful for I, Henge’s lack of squeamishness. It gave a friendly chirp and popped open, revealing hundreds of tiny valises of gleaming persona chips. I dropped out of Henge and took a moment to run my fingers down them, imagining the things I’d grow.
“Mars,” I mouthed to myself.
Then I ran Henge again and got to transferring the case’s contents, hopefully sans tracker, into a signal-protecting Faraday Bag I’d brought at I, 8eyez’s, recommendation.
Before the morning fog had even cleared, I, Angel, walked back out of the facility, waving cheerily to the guard, lunch box now hanging much lower on its strap.
“Wouldn’t you know it,” I commented to the world at large. “Boss wants me to head over to the facility in Oakland. Bad first day, but I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The guard waved absently. “Have a good one.”
A month later, I, Albert, was enjoying the first-class waiting area in the Shanghai suborbital. My new height-enhancing leather boots tapped on the slightly swaying metal plates as I sipped a black tea offered by the neatly uniformed stewards. I looked ten years younger thanks to surgery, with haunted green eyes, freckles, and a nose that appeared to have been rakishly broken. I’d chosen it from the “stylish artist” section of the clinic’s catalog and was quite proud, though I thought I’d miss my old features in time. The scars surrounding my nose were still itchy and I scratched along it with a fingertip, marveling at its unfamiliar length.
I passed the time until the shuttle’s departure marveling at the white swells of the massive aerostat balloons that held us on the edge of space. I sketched them on my touchpad, imagining low-gravity kites of flowers slowly orbiting inside one of Mars’s geodesic domes.
“Boarding, boarding,” a genteel voice said in English and Mandarin from the speakers overhead. “Departure 895 to orbit, Mars-bound. Now welcoming all first-class passengers, all first-class passengers.”
I grinned as I hefted my valise of seeds and walked over to the front of the line. My personal link, freshly loaded with documents declaring me a minor relative of a Korean-Irish chaebol dynasty, chimed against the pavilion, which turned green.
The attendant, a friendly looking middle aged Chinese woman, waved me forward into a scanner. She asked: “Before you board, are all your augments safely deactivated for spaceflight?”
“Yes,” I replied, familiar with the prohibitions on active personas. There’d been psychotic breaks from people dropping out of their augs too quickly when the stress of the G-forces hit. “I have three, all software-only. I’ve locked them out until landing.”
“I’m showing one more,” she replied, brow furrowing. “A hardwired physical chip. Right at the base of your neck.”
I fumbled upward with a suddenly numb hand and felt the nape of my neck, fishing inside my aug systems’ backup port. The one I’d always remembered was empty. My fingers grasped around the edge of a tiny chip that nested there. I froze, angry at myself for ignoring the gaps in my memory. Already mourning my plants and my artist’s life on Mars. Hoping that whoever had been running me wasn’t going to throw me into a trash can the second my chip was taken out. Marveling that I – I, Albert, the artist, had carried out a half a billion Euro heist.
“Sir, is there a problem?” the hovering attendant asked me, eyes concerned but wary. She reached slowly downward to her tablet, doubtless considering summoning help.
It was my own curiosity that brought me over the edge. I pulled out the smooth plastic chip and my knees crumpled. I slid down to the mercifully cool deck plates.
“Aug overuse,” I heard the attendant say in the distance. “We see it more often than you think. This will help.” An autoinjector chunked and I felt a cold stinging sensation in my left leg.
Memory flooded back to me, carried on a wash of soothing numbness. A childhood on the Oregon shore, jetty fishing with my dad and watching the sea creep closer to our farm. Driving south at eighteen in a battered pickup, headed for San Francisco and a new life in the Castro. Finding guerilla artists, hackers, and criminals making a living in the gaps between the big tech conglomerates. Fifteen years and dozens of cons, with corporate security nipping ever closer at my heels, despite four faces and two new sets of fingerprints. The pressing need for a new hunting ground of the mega-rich. Happening upon a magazine article on the IntelApple CEO’s longtime fascination with Bonsai art. Sitting in a small basement lab, designing a persona singularly motivated to get to Mars and singularly capable of doing so.
“I must have forgotten,” I said lightly, shrugging off her offered hand as I stood. “My mistake.”
“Not a problem,” she demurred, her hand subtly moving away from the alarm button. “Scan’s clear. Welcome aboard.”
“You know,” I said to the attendant, pausing at the gate. “I may not need this bag. It’s filled with seeds that I’d bought as a favor for a friend, but I don’t think they’ll get through customs on Mars. Better to have them destroyed here if you don’t mind.”
“Certainly, sir,” the attendant replied, taking my bag from me. She was clearly used to the oddities of the space-faring class. “Right this way.”
I stepped onto the shuttle, alone with myself at last, fingering the smooth plastic chip in my hand absently. The authorities, assuming they ever made the Mars connection, would be looking for a quiet artist and his vertical bonsai, not a career conman with a Robin Hood complex. A flight attendant passed by with a small white bag.
“Trash, trash, any trash?” she asked.
I raised a hand to stop her, then thought better of it. “Never mind. I’ll hold onto it for now.”
I gently placed the Albert chip into my breast pocket, leaned back and prepared for the shuttle to take me away. Good service, I reflected, should be rewarded. Perhaps there’d be time for gardening on Mars.
_______________
Hans Ege Wenger (he/him) is an aid worker, activist, and amateur mixologist living in San Francisco, CA, USA. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Escape Pod, Analog, the Drabblecast, and of course Abyss & Apex.