ALTERED | futurity

Even an unknowing clone can make choices about identity. EDDIE SHANK, clone of Edwin, is 14 now and has become a well-known disruptive Virtual Reality designer with his own company, under the auspices of his father, who has used his money to create the world-class Shank Research Center for Advanced Science. A fair amount of this research is to keep himself alive, and secretly, to reach immortality. His second youngest son, Zak, helps him with this, but Edwin is most proud of Eddie. Something finally turned out as planned, except that Eddie has secrets too. He’s devious and obsessively ambitious. He’s developed a VR nanopatch, a tiny device released into the wind that attaches to the nervous systems of large populations to trick them into believing reality is whatever Eddie says it is. He makes a test run by convincing the entire Eastern US that the giant robot, GORT, from his favorite movie, The Day the Earth Stood Still, is attacking. His ultimate goal is to create global chaos because he can.

Eddie is also trying to build an Artificial Intelligence implant for his own brain, so that he can hack into other AI systems. Eddie is not a good boy. He’s a sociopath driven by an insatiable anxiety that comes when he’s confronted with limits, which is why he takes an interest in the similarly afflicted Anna Stein, who he helps along on her way to Mars, leaving her new family in the middle of the night.

Virtual Reality is now in its infancy, but big tech and money commitments have been made by Apple and Google and Facebook, so it’s gaining fast. By 2038, the virtuality of it will be undetectable, and we will have entered an age where many disappear into a customized reality manufactured from scratch. The social impact of this will be outrageous and bizarre.