EARS WAS ANXIOUS TO meet with Molli and Peter in the morning, so he arrived at Peter’s house an hour early, shortly after Peter departed on his bike for the coffee shop. He was frazzled and fatigued after having stayed awake, communicating with the various geedee communities on social media. Even during the night, his usual access points into the networks were so overloaded that he was waiting minutes for responses, and he nervously chewed his nails to the bleeding point.
He knocked on Peter’s door and got no response, so he waited in his truck and closed his eyes. Ears had to force himself to stop looking at his phone, as the gravity of this event was just now sinking in.
Given his constitution, this news was too upsetting to ponder its myriad implications. His mind was buzzing with possibilities, and he needed to purge the thoughts by spilling them out among his confidantes.
After sitting nervously for twenty minutes and biting what remained of his frayed nails, Peter finally rolled up and knocked on his window.
“Hey, you’re early, big guy.”
“Peter!” Ears screamed with delight in his high-pitched voice. He flew from the door and lurched forward, clumsily hugging Peter as he dismounted.
“Dude, enough already,” Peter shrugged, backing off and laughing uncomfortably.
“Sorry, Peter. I’m manic about the news, the meaning, the implications. It’s exciting, scary, evocative.”
“Okay, okay! Let’s get inside and wait for Molli to show up,” he suggested as he unlocked the front door.
Peter was quite accustomed to Ears’ frenzied nervousness. Ears was a unique varint. He was a clipper, though he hated the word. Among his friends, the moniker was just another example of non-varint insensitivity and bias against those like him.
In the brief timeline of human genome modification, Ears was an early clipper. His parents were wealthy Bostonians and prominent members of its Jewish community, which might have led other kids to other places. But Ears suffered from severe self-doubt throughout his teen years, preferring the anonymity and closeness of social networks where people didn’t tease or harass him because of his slight build, red hair, and freckles.
An outgrowth of obsessive introversion, Ears flirted in his early teens with modest geedee body coloring that included simple genetic changes to skin coloration, in lieu of getting painful tattoos. Once in college at Temple, he became attracted to the growing array of genetic augmentation options.
He shunned the mechanical human adaptations that included circuit and chip integration, or any degree of metal infusion or robotics, feeling those were less natural and perhaps even anti-religious. But modifying his own genetics? That made perfect sense.
One day while skipping class, he scoured the web news feeds and came upon a fast-motion video of a perfect human ear growing in a petri dish. Something about the video touched him – especially the idea that an ear’s refined sensitivity might enhance his own sensitivity to the world.
Multiple eyes like the one Dirksen sported were cumbersome and maintenance intensive. Polynoses were ugly, as were the numerous options for lingual modifications like split tongues. The growing number of alternate limbs, tails, and enhanced musculature variations also seemed too extreme.
Ears wanted none of that. He desired instead to hear the unhearable, to catch the meaning behind the meaning of what people were saying.
“How are you feeling, bud?” Peter inquired. “Sleeping better?”
Ears peered up at the garage ceiling, covered in acoustic foam. This place provided him great comfort – darkness, consistency, and quiet.
“Much better with that new foam mattress. The two ears on my backside are less irritated, and it even helps with these ones on my shoulders since I’m a side-sleeper.” He patted the small bulges over each of his deltoid muscles where undersized auricles hid beneath his shirt.
“I imagine that’s got to hurt, but you look a little more tired today than I’ve ever seen.”
Ears shook his head. “I can’t start in yet, Peter, not without Molli. Let’s wait until she gets here, okay?” Ears stuttered, nervously holding his palms over the two ears on his neck, just below the natural ones.
“Geez, it must be something big, dude, but I’m good to wait for her. Anything to drink?”
“Yeah, water is great. I’m limiting my sugar intake due to the aging factor.”
“Hmm, you remembered that podcast then. It’s good you can do that since I can’t seem to limit sugar myself, and Molli is always on my case. But then, do you live a dull and longer life without sugar, or do you enjoy a shorter but more exciting, fulfilled, and pleasurable life with it?” Peter smirked as he opened the door to exit into the house.
He came back with two plastic bottles of water.
“I know,” Peter acknowledged. “Don’t give me heat about the microplastics in the oceans thing. I recycle, and I hope the gents that come pick up my trash, or I should say the robotic garbage trucks, are not taking these little bottles out and throwing them in the Charles River.”
Peter and Ears immediately focused on their screens, consuming the various reports across the globe of reactions to the obelisk. While waiting for Molli to arrive, Peter raised his head and opened his mouth with hands in the air, hoping that Ears might concede to a brief conversation, but Ears shook his head with a disappointed frown.
Minutes passed, then Molli knocked on the garage.
“The front door is open,” Peter hollered.
“She’s here!” Ears scrambled from the garage to greet her at the door. The two returned arm-in-arm.
A slender twenty-five-year-old, Molli flipped her hair backward as she walked through the door.
“I got a handsome escort into this magnificent studio,” she bragged. “It must be some special day!”
Beaming broadly, Ears responded, “More than you can imagine.”
They sat in their usual places – Peter in his leather chair at the podcast desk, Molli at her engineer’s desk in front of the screens and audio mixer, and Ears to her side at his laptop.
Once they settled in, Ears rose and took command. “Do you mind if I begin?”
“No problem,” they replied.
Assured he had their attention, he sat back down. “Can we put the screens away while we discuss this?”
“Sure,” Peter agreed as they placed their screens in prone positions. They were accustomed to peering at each other over the screens while talking, so this unusual request implied an auspicious conversation.
“Bear with me for a second, you two. Molli, did you cut your hair?” Ears inquired.
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, yes, just a little, and it’s still quite long. Jesus! I can’t get away with any change around you guys.”
“Sorry. Back to the topic.” He smiled and pointed at Peter. “You see this gentleman sitting across from us? This is the man who carefully polishes and nurtures his global image as the scientific maven. The chosen one with the wondrous gift of gab to those who wait with bated breath for his weekly podcast revelations. The king of resplendent technological zing. I know he’s not on a sugar diet, but I understand he has been on a forced media diet that happened to occur on the most compelling, exciting day of science in the history of humanity.”
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Peter raised his eyebrows. “What? How did you find out about my media diet? I only told a few people, and I started it yesterday in deference to Molli’s comments.”
“Don’t look at me,” she countered. “It’s not like a few hours away from your barrage of media feeds would be bad for you.”
“Oh, Peter. My name is Ears, and I’m obviously very well-connected. You must have told somebody in your network, and somebody told someone else, and everyone knows now.”
Molli took a deep breath. “I can’t conceive of why anyone cares. If they do care about what Peter does in his spare time, they must be living pathetic, monochromatic lives.”
“Oh, thank you, my friend,” Peter grinned.
“Let’s set this aside, about the science maven who has ignored the most important event in science these last critical hours,” Ears continued. “Our podcast can now have an entirely new direction, if you don’t mind my suggesting.”
“Funny, that’s what we were discussing yesterday,” Molli interrupted. “Peter and I were contemplating getting more edgy with the content.”
“Good, I get that, totally edgy. So much to discuss, I don’t know where to start, so I’ll just begin.”
His hands shaking from excitement, Ears took a clumsy swig from his water bottle and wiped his chin to avoid dripping on his keyboard.
“Let’s forget the obelisk for a second, then come back to it.”
He glanced at the ceiling again, something he liked to do when contemplating his next sentence, then sighed. “It’s the geedee underground. I probably mentioned many times, but things were heating-up even before the obelisk.”
“What do you mean? Are you planning some new Boston revolution? Throwing tea from ships in the harbor?” Peter winked at Ears.
“Seriously. My networks are very restless given the widespread, despicable treatment of varints. Please understand things are happening faster than the media reports. They are six months behind, and this is even more true for the secretive robotic types like grippers and mechs. I’m not talking insurrection yet, but these hybrids process information differently, far different than a non-varint.”
“Are things that bad?” Molli asked.
“It’s a matter of degree and position. Among the varints like me, some are augmenting their mental capabilities at astounding rates without the help of any mechanicals. We see that every day on the streets here, right? At Harvard, MIT, BU, UMass. They see ‘gold in them thar hills.’ And we are fortunate enough to be here, smack dab in the worldwide center of new tech and evolving humanity.”
Molli squinted at him. “Yeah, but what’s so different now? A few years ago, the prognosticators predicted that varint body tech would disrupt things in a huge way, but little of that came true. The streets are still passable, key diseases disappeared, and we should be able to live for eternity at some point soon. Certainly for much longer than ever before at this juncture.”
“Even with my sugared Cokes?” Peter joked.
“Not sure how to say it,” Ears continued, ignoring the banter. “A scientific term, I can’t recall. Peter, what’s that tipping point where one additional drop in the solution changes everything about it?”
“I believe ‘titer’ is the word,” Molli replied.
“Got it. You don’t see what I see from the geedee community. It’s not just the physical variations happening. People are moving into different mental realms. I mean, some chippers are learning to access all stored memory. Between their innate, God-given brains and their circuitry, they are advancing to mentalities beyond our understanding.”
Peter looked dubious. “Ah, come on. They’re not slipping into different quantum dimensions. It’s not like they can affect space-time or use dark energy to power the world. They live under the same rules and scientific laws we live by, and they’re still citizens and are required to be somewhat civil.”
“Don’t misunderstand. What I’m saying is that these folks are on the cusp of something new, meaning a revised definition of humanity. It’s not negative, and I’m not sure it’s positive. It just is. It’s happening.”
“And relevance to the podcast?” Molli wondered.
“The relevance is that we should get some of them on air to discuss where their heads are, if I can call it such since some of them use extra appendages and systems and networks, you name it. But I’ll leave it at ‘heads’ since most of them seem to retain only one of those,” he laughed.
“Whew.” Peter hissed between his teeth. “We’ve been avoiding having these way-out edgy hybrids on the pod since it was too far away from our charter of discovery and basic science. The whole topic seems much more like applied physics for me, which I hated because it brought my GPA down, in contrast to basic physics, which I loved.”
Molli tapped her fingers on the mixer. “I’m warming up to the idea. Meaningful content, the kind that keeps listeners attentive, applies to the here and now. Ears is right, as usual. Things are happening so fast that nobody is capturing the impacts well, and the major media takes far too long to report at this level. Worse yet for them, this is about human interest, which doesn’t attract advertisers and ratings. I mean, who wants another story of a varint with a kangaroo tail? That got old after the hundredth video segment. The media can’t outdo itself any longer with the odd and unusual. We have an opportunity to talk about reality behind the news flash, like life as a varint. Some are literally enmeshed in their own worlds, whether they are alone or networked together, and we should talk to them and get into those heads. I don’t care if they don’t sport PhD’s or come from MIT. They’re interesting, and that means ratings and sponsors and food on our tables.”
Peter grinned, responding, “Hey, you’re the producer. I’m just the good-looking talent and therefore unable to express an intelligent opinion. But this discussion is like when we spoke yesterday, Molli. I’m okay to do this. You’re not getting a negative vote from me.”
He glanced at Ears and scratched his head, then ran his fingers backward through thinning brown hair. “So, does this trail of thought segue back to the obelisk?”
Ears placed both hands over the ears on his neck as if he wanted to cover something unseemly.
“It’s the obelisk, the fear, the concern for what it means. As poor as the image was, it implied something. At Harvard and Columbia, they came to the same early conclusion. The carvings or glyphs or whatever you call them on the obelisk did not speak to love and amity. They appeared as a warning – something a race of beings would send to warn others. It looked like annihilation of one species by another.”
Peter’s eyebrows raised and he pulled the screen up to read the feeds.
“No, no, no,” Ears urged, waiving his finger. “You can wait for a minute on the speculation and analysis. We’re making progress. Let’s continue.”
He put the screen back down. “Why didn’t they say so on the news? I was in the coffee shop today and watched for a few minutes – didn’t see much there.”
“The national news outlets can’t stir a panic,” Ears replied. “I was up last night, all night, and once the images came online, along with the videos from the farm kids who found it, the net went wild. It’s rapidly evolving.”
Molli frowned. “What do you mean by evolving?”
“Oh, geez. What do people do when scared? They cower. They shield. They hate. They prepare. I could go on. The net is out of its crazy-ass mind right now with everyone speculating on the best ways to counter the threat.”
“Seriously?” Peter questioned, shaking his head in disbelief. “We don’t even know if this is real, much less the kids’ explanations or whatever. What are people speculating about?”
Ears shook his head. “It’s difficult to conclude that eighty tons of platinum-gold alloy are not real, much less what they’re saying about the carvings. Speculation is off-the-wall with crazed options.”
Molli tapped a pen on her notebook as she scribed some ideas. “God, that’s hundreds of millions at current prices, I think. Options? What options?”
“Mind you, it’s only been hours, but there’s talk of tactical nukes and global poison pills, among other ideas. Certain geedee groups are suggesting we should create armies comprised of robotics or hybrids. Others are speculating to replace our normal armed forces with brain augmenters, those guys you only hear about with the big brains coupled to AI networks. You’d be a fool to assume that was not already happening somewhere in the Pentagon. Oh, and you’ll love this one. Early interpretations are that the invasion involves nanobots. How lovely. I imagine nanos crawling up my legs into one of my ears, seizing control of my brain and shutting me off before I was even aware they attacked me.”
Molli sucked in a loud, long breath, the kind she had to remind herself to do every few hours. Her years of kung fu had taught her how to breathe first from her diaphragm instead of her chest. This was hard to do with consistency, particularly when hunched over in a chair managing the podcast.
There was a moment of silence while she took another deep breath. Peter and Ears understood this was her way of calming herself in order to say something wise and purposeful.
She clasped her hands together with elbows resting on the arms of her chair and gave them her placid look of certainty.
“We should put them on, all of them, or what we can get. The legitimate ones. I get it now. This is a convergence of destiny or prophecy. Here we are, humanity at the cusp of technologies more out of control than ever imagined, with governments flailing for solutions. Then there are people, regular people like us, nearly everyone, wanting to use this tech in their own domains. For better or worse, suppliers, institutions and businesses want to profit from the skyrocketing demand. We possess this amazing new set of capabilities while society’s in a tizzy from the ongoing effects. Now, in the midst of this revolutionary disarray, what falls from the sky? A voice of imminent doom.”
Peter smiled and shook his head. “My dear woman, we’re not sure it’s doom.”
She raised her hand to continue. “Bear with me, something’s coming. I’ll say it differently. Let’s assume humanity is under threat, whether real or perceived. If this object is indeed from aliens, who knows how long it’s been traveling the galaxy? It could be a race of deviant ten-year-old aliens who are pulling the wings off us, the flies, before shooting us with rubber bands for the fun of it. Yet again, it might be a wayward warning from a benevolent race sent a billion years ago. Either way, we are under threat. Then we have this tech, this crazy amalgam of tech, and we are podcasting from the center of that world of tech. Our destiny, my dears, is to expose what everyone hopes humanity will create in response to the threat.”
Molli paused for a second. “I love it!” she squealed, slapping her knees.
Ears, Molli and Peter agreed to the plan and spent the next few hours sketching out a format for the revised show. Given Ears’ connections into the geedee community, he volunteered to research and invite candidates as guests.