Further: Beyond the Threshold by Chris Roberson Read Free Book Online

inferior, due only to the pigment of their skins.”
    I remembered the stories my grandfather had written and the prejudices he’d faced long after the period to which the escort alluded, and kept silent.
    “Humanity’s understanding of itself was expanded again,” the escort continued, “when it was realized that the differences separating humanity from its nearest animal relatives were far outweighed by the similarities, and the definition of human was extended to include uplifted chimpanzees and other great apes.”
    I’d carried on conversations with cyborg great apes and cetaceans in my time and had harbored the suspicion that they’d been much more intelligent than they’d let on. And if “uplifted” even further? It was easy to see how it would be difficult to deny the humanity of a gorilla who understood the law and argued for his rights, whether with reason or with his fists.
    “Then the first digital incarnation, uploaded from a living human mind, challenged people’s limited definition of what it meant to be alive, and to be human. When the sentience of those early digital pioneers was finally recognized, the definition of human was extended once more. Finally, when the first truly artificial intelligences became self-aware, they were ultimately recognized as offspring, though of their designers’ minds, not their reproductive organs. When the AIs were granted full rights and citizenship, they were accepted as human.”
    “And so human means…?” I struggled to fit everything I’d been told into a single, all-encompassing definition.
    “Human is used to refer to any Earth-derived sentient.”
    I nodded, mulling that over. “And is there any non -Earth-derived sentience?”
    “That, sir, is a question to which many would be quite eager to know the answer.”

TEN

    My aching joints were ready for a rest when the escort finally directed me to transfer to progressively slower slidewalks. We were moving only at the pace of a gradual amble when the escort indicated a concourse intersecting the slidewalk up ahead.
    “Now, sir,” the escort said, “if you’ll step off the slidewalk, we have almost reached the accommodations prepared for you.”
    The transition from moving sidewalk to solid ground was a little disorienting at first, but after a few steps, I got my land legs back under me. The concourse extended at a right angle from the slidewalk, easily a hundred meters from side to side with medium-height buildings rising up on either side. The escort indicated that our destination lay at the far end of the concourse, but we quickly found our way blocked by an odd assortment of beings crowded in our path.
    In the network of virtual worlds in which I played as a kid, players’ alters could take any form. Some of the worlds of the Pentaverse were oriented along “magical” lines, with creatures resembling those from mythology and folklore, while others were highly technological, peopled by cybernetic humans and robots. When I logged in and navigated my alter through the Ein Sof, there were always new classes of beings to see, new hybrids of multiple forms crawling, walking, flying, or swimming along. I think at one point it was estimated that there were more morphologies in the Pentaverse than the number of terrestrial species that had ever existed in reality.
    And after a childhood of that, and an adult life spent patrolling the interplanetary gulfs, surrounded by space-adapted humans, cyborg animals, and mutants, I would have thought little could faze me, but the sight that greeted me when I stepped off the slidewalk proved me wrong.
    The crowd ahead of us was variegated and strange to behold. Some were clearly human, though with unearthly colorations and strange body modifications. Others appeared to be animal forms, familiar from the zoos of my childhood, but dressed in clothing and carrying themselves with obvious intelligence. Still others were made of metal and glass and gems, artificial