The Wellstone

Appendix C. The fax wars

The very first thing the Fax Wars revealed was the deep-seated desire of every human being to be larger. Not larger in the abstract, with respect to the environment, but larger in relative terms, with respect to his or her peers, on account of the latent genetic programming that equated height, and to a lesser extent muscle mass, with social status.

Simply scaling up the human form was quickly shown to be an unhealthy—and in some cases fatal—oversimplification. You couldn’t get more than about ten percent larger without major problems of bone diameter and systolic versus diastolic pressure coming into play. Not that this stopped everyone—among the eighty % of humanity who could afford fax access, average height increased overnight by about fifteen percent, and body mass by around thirty percent and we can only assume that each individual found a balance point between the pain and fatigue of gigantism, and the psychological distress of watching everyone else get larger.

The next wave began in the following year, with the first of many morphing filters that permitted intelligent, systemic changes to the human form under little more than voice command. The enormous mathematical complexity of these filters—which operated on the quantum waveforms themselves—are a testament to the cruel severity of the Old Moderns’ dysmorphic yearnings. Once again the change occurred abruptly, with some twenty percent of travelers exiting the system in body forms that could barely fit through the print plate, and most others opting for at least another ten to twenty percent height or mass increase.

The third wave followed close behind, with a series of conformal filters that bent the knees and elbows and neck just so, arranging the human body for optimal packing without major redesign of the ligature system. Soon, even larger giants were rolling out of the public faxes in a tight fetal crouch. And then of course came the ligature changes that allowed for tighter packing still.

At this point, regional and national governments (such as they were) applied pressure to the makers and operators of fax hardware, who were themselves greatly troubled by what they had wrought. Hard limits were imposed on the mass of a faxed human being, with no exceptions made even for the natural giants and willful corpulents who still existed here and there in the world. What followed was a brief but intense flurry of exotic body styles designed to circumvent the restrictions: bird-boned women towering over their stocky peers, and men with hollow sacs beneath their falsely bulging muscles.

This was solved with equally inflexible limits on height and volume, and later the ratio between them. As a result, some people refused to travel through the public networks at all, preferring to retain their ill-gotten glamour by traveling the long way around, in vehicles or on foot. However, the rapid disappearance of highways, airports, and other travel infrastructure—no doubt encouraged by the bribes of the early Fax Lords⁶—made such a lifestyle choice increasingly difficult and austere. And because it was also associated with religious extremism—the Murder-Me-Not crowd who believed their souls would be imperiled by the physical destruction of their original bodies—the practice was never particularly fashionable.

So for another couple of years, the complaint was that everyone in the world looked exactly the same: a bland uniformity of height and weight and physical type. And the world was too small for these half-giants anyway; what a bore it was to be constantly bumping your head, knocking your knees, fitting through spaces nobody had had the time to redesign for larger humans.

So the wheel of fashion turned, and soon the true individualists of the world were turning out in short or skinny or even midget forms, and everyone was cutting back at least a little. “Grow your home: shrink yourself!” became the battle cry, and eventually the maximum-height types found themselves the butt of good-natured humor and even, in some cases, less-than-good-natured suspicion. What good was a tall politician? A burly contract negotiator? Just what were they trying to pull?

Around this same time, it began to dawn on the general populace that they could make copies of themselves. This quickly resulted in “xeropollution,” with some individuals creating as many as ten thousand independent instantiations, literally overrunning certain urban areas— most notably Dallas, Texas, the home of the Plural Five. Governmental and corporate powers took a dim view of this practice and reacted with harsh measures, including a three-month, near-total moratorium on faxation, and the sanctioned mass murder of key individuals to reduce their numbers. This led—again, primarily in Dallas—to a number of armed skirmishes that represent the only “hot” conflict of the Wars, with a definite and easily measured death toll of 325 individuals. (The mortality rates for instantiations of these individuals is less well known.)

Fortunately, the rapid development of the Lodney Re-convergence Filter permitted human copies to be merged back into single individuals, with all memories and subjective experience intact. Strict limits were soon enthusiastically and bloodlessly enforced, first on total number of copies, and later, more fairly, on aggregate copy-hours over predefined periods of time.

These transient waves took a long time to settle out, and in some sense continued through the Queendom-era fashions of hair color, skin pigmentation, and self-plural cooperation. But for practical purposes, the Fax Wars were over a decade after they had begun, with the vast majority of human beings choosing modest plurality and the convenience of death and rebirth, over the theological virtues of singletonism and walking. And choosing, yes, to embrace their unique physical attributes as symbols of their heritage and identity.

“Clothe thyself in beauty if thou must,” the playwright Wenders Rodenbeck instructs us in his satirical classic, Uncle Lisa’s Neutron. “ ’Tis charm we find in dreadful short supply.”