Writing modern science fiction is a challenge. How can a literary artist make their stories unique and stand out in a field with so many exemplary titles? I grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek along with other notable sci-fi franchises. I read the books, played the games and had my own personal fantasies about a fantastic life traveling among the stars. The biggest question when putting down my own science-fiction ideas into words was what to do about mechanical, computer controlled, non-biological entities; robots, androids and their various kin.
While reading an Ian M Banks novel from his Culture series, I was struck with an inspiring question. Robots and constructs with artificial intelligence have an imposing effect on the Culture universe and I wondered why these non-biological entities would continually put up with humans. My answer was to write a series of science fiction stories without artificial lifeforms. In my fictional future for humanity, people evolved to internalize the machine while preserving the human form. I did not want my characters to have grotesque half machine bodies like the Borg from Star Trek, with jutting mechanical apparatus. I wanted my humans to look like humans with computerized brains and microscopic devices that help operate their bodies from within. In this way my characters would present as humans to each other, but to machines they would present as machines, creating a harmonious relationship between both.
Now I needed to craft the future realm my characters would live in. Since I gave my fictional humans computerized brains, I wanted something they could use to relate to each other constantly. I wanted something like the internet, except broadcast throughout the entire solar system, since I would be expanding humanity’s reach all the way to the Kuiper Belt. Science fiction stories have official and non-official titles for things, so I named mine the Solar System Information Service, or SSIS. Since it would be lame to have to continually write that onerous title in my stories I came up with the slang term Big Sis.
The Big Sis functions much like the internet of our day. With their brain-computers humans can access the Big Sis no matter where they are in the solar system to gain information, send messages, and record their experiences to share them in real time. Most importantly, with the Big Sis they can access machines, give them tasks, and monitor their functions. The machines of my future world are not servants or slaves because they do not have minds to think about their existence any more than your toaster thinks about heating bread. The human hits the switch and the machine operates according to its function. The only difference is that the human does not have to touch the toaster, or any other machine in order to operate them. The human does not even have to be in the same place as that device. If a human is already operating that device, then the Big Sis regulates control with a first come, first serve basis, although there are ways to subvert that control.
Another crucial function of the Big Sis is that rather than oppressing individuality, it preserves it. I did not want a massive hive mind for my future humanity. I wanted my characters as individuals that make up communities in the same way that humans do in 2025. In this way every brain-computer is as unique as an individual brain is today, and will protect itself from outside intrusion just like our bodies do with foreign invaders.
The final piece of the Big Sis is that it had to be available to everyone. In my future universe having a brain-computer is a human right and in main society every human child is fitted with a brain-computer at one year old. There are rare exceptions of humans that desire to live outside the Big Sis and to illustrate this I wrote Narsinyx: Asteroid City of Sorrow, a four part tragedy of two brothers that did not have brain-computers and how difficult it made their existence.
I set my future stories three hundred years from now, but there are devices today that hint at computerized brains becoming a reality much sooner than that. Get ready for the Big Sis humans.
Original Literature 