Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  He believed the lie. His face paled. Then he staggered sideways and nearly fell, catching himself awkwardly on the doorjamb. Beverly threw him a look of deep and total disgust, pushed past him, and strode out of the room.

  I stayed a long time beside Elizabeth’s bed, watching the mite-sized spiders work. I couldn’t quiet my mind. Then I told Kurt to cancel my afternoon appointments, let the nurses see any walk-ins, and page me for any emergencies. I signed out a rover and drove to the Warren bungalow.

  AM ELIZABETH DiPortio. æ my ▽. . It will be .

  ANYBODY WHO SAYS that we understand human motivation, that we can formulate simple and clear reasons for why people what they do, is either lying or naïve. Standing in the Warrens’ neat bungalow, surrounded by photos of Elise and a pre-cocooned Brent, I thought that I would give everything I had to never see the inside of the DiPortio’s bungalow. A deep, heartfelt, completely irrelevant thought.

  “Gina, Ted, I need to ask you some things, and I want you to trust me when I say that the questions are important. You’ve heard the rumors about moths?”

  Ted said, “We’re not discussing that, Nora.” “If we don’t, we may all die.”

  His eyes widened. I had planned it this way, to compel his attention and, I’d hoped, his compliance. But Ted Warren was not an easy man to compel. He said, “You’ll have to explain that.”

  “I don’t want to yet, because I’m not sure. Could you just—”

  “It’s Colonel Jamison, isn’t it?” Gina said. A look passed between her and Ted, one of those married-couple looks that say so much more than outsiders can discern. She followed it with, “We’ll tell you anything you want to know, provided you agree to not tell anyone—anyone at all—without our say-so.”

  “Yes,” I said, and wondered how much this lie would cost me in the future. “Have you heard the rumors about moths?”

  “Of course,” Gina said. And then again, hands clasped together so tightly that the knuckles bulged blue, “Of course.”

  Everyone had heard the rumors. A moth, a former engineer, supposedly had appeared to a miner taking an ill-advised walk outside the mining camp. The moth pantomimed falling; the next day, a section of mine collapsed, destroying two expensive bots. But . . . the strolling miner had been on recreational drugs. A moth had supposedly stood in the road between the mine and spaceport, stopping a loaded ore transport. Nobody knew what to do, so the tableau froze while the drivers argued: Run her over? Inch forward and hope she moves? She did, after five minutes. The transport reached a bridge five minutes after the bridge had collapsed. There were more stories, but most could be coincidences; a lot of the narrators were unreliable; pantomime is not a precise method of communication; some “pre-cognitive warnings” could be after-the-fact interpretations.

  Rumors. Factions. An amateur evolutionary biologist—the outpost didn’t yet have the real thing—offered the theory that, once, all humans had pre-verbal awareness of the near future, as a survival mechanism. That had disappeared with the Great Leap Forward, the sudden, still unexplained spurt of human culture forty to fifty thousand years ago on Earth’s vanished savannahs. Increased creativity and rationality had replaced the ability to sense the future that, like a river, always flowed toward us, its rapids heard before they could be seen. But the ability, latent, was still locked in our genes. Massive genetic alteration could free it.

  Did I believe this theory? I didn’t know. A doctor is a scientist, committed to rationality. But I also knew that ideas of “the rational” were subject to change. The list of things once derided as irrational included a round Earth, germs, an expanding universe, and quantum mechanics. HQ thought that moths’ pre-cognition deserved at least minimal investigation.

  I said, as gently as I could, “Gina, has Brent ever told you anything that later came true?”

  Ted made a motion as if to stop her, but said nothing. Gina said, “Yes.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “We . . . we went to see him. At the usual place by the river. While we were visiting, Brent suddenly pushed us all back into the rover. He was frantic. We got in and he ran off into the woods. Then one of those big animals like a rhinoceros came out of the woods and charged the rover. It almost knocked it over. We barely got away alive.”

  “Could Brent have heard or smelled the animal?”

  “I don’t think so. We sat in the rover talking for at least fifteen minutes before the animal arrived. Elise wasn’t with us and I was crying.”

  Ted said, “It might have been coincidence.” His face said he didn’t believe it.

  I said, “Were there other times?”

  Gina said, “One other time. We—”

  Ted cut her off. “We’ve been straight with you, Nora, because we trust you. Now you trust us. What’s happening with Jamison?”

  “I don’t know for sure. But I think HQ will do anything to stop what they see as a possible epidemic of cocooning. Jamison sees moths as a dire threat to what it means to be human, and he’s making the decision. The only way to sway him is to show that people like Brent have potential value to the Army. A battalion accompanied by a moth who can see what an enemy will do in the future would be—”

  “No,” Ted said.

  “Ted, I think he might destroy all the—”

  “Let him try. Our boy and the others can take care of themselves. They know how to live off the wilderness and it’s a big, unexplored planet! Plus, they might know in advance when the Army would strike.”

  It was almost unbearable to say my next words. “Jamison knows that. He knows that if HQ wants to destroy the moths, they would have to destroy all of us and quarantine the planet.”

  Ted and Gina stared at me. Gina finally said, “They wouldn’t. You said this was only speculation on your part. And if they quarantined the planet, there wouldn’t be any need to destroy the humans on it.”

  “If we all become moths and later another expedition comes to Windsong—”

  “More speculation!” Ted snapped. “But I’ll tell you what isn’t speculation—what they’ll do to Brent if we give him up to ‘save’ ourselves. They’ll take him to HQ and examine him in ways that . . . it would be torture, Nora. Maybe even murder, to see what makes his brain so different.”

  “The alternative is that maybe we all die.”

  “I doubt that,” Ted said, and Gina nodded.

  They wanted, needed, to doubt it.

  As I left, Ted said, “Remember, you promised to keep all of this to yourself. Everything we said. You promised.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I did.”

  AM ELIZABETH DiPortio. æ my ▽. . It .

  I SAT IN my office at the clinic, in the dark. No one was on duty; we had no patients except Elizabeth and there was nothing any of us could do for her. Moonlight from Windsong’s larger moon, delicate and silvery as filigree, flowed through the window. It was light enough to see my untouched glass of expensive, Earth-exported Scotch.

  Time as a river. I saw Brent and the other moths standing on its banks, just beyond a bend, looking into water the rest of us could not yet see. I remembered how Jamison had deliberately alienated the Warrens before they could say anything positive about Brent. I saw Jamison’s revulsion at the sight of Brent and Elizabeth. It wasn’t even revulsion but something deeper, some primitive urge to so completely destroy a perceived enemy that they could never rise again: the urge that made Romans salt all the fields of Carthage, Hitler try to exterminate all the Jews. I saw the base and the mining camp burning and cratered, reduced to smoking rubble by weapons fired from space. I saw myself as wrong for thinking all this: melodramatic, building a case purely on speculation. I saw the decision I had to make as two roads, both shrouded in mist, and both leading to tragedy. I saw—

  Something moved in the hallway.

  I rose quietly, heart hammering, and crept in the dark toward the door.

  am . æ ▽. It .

  ELIZABETH—POST-COCOONED ELIZABETH, who should not h
ave emerged for another day—stumbled along the hallway. I turned on the light. Her round, inhuman face showed no emotion. She extended an unsteady arm and, her movements in her altered body not yet coordinated, took my hand and tugged me along the hallway to the clinic’s back door.

  Why did I let her? Was there some faint, latent pre-cognitive ability in my brain, too? Later, I would ponder that, without answers.

  We went out the back door just as Peter DiPortio reached the front. From where Elizabeth and I hid in the rover shed, locking it behind us, we heard his crowbar smashing against the door. We heard his drunken shouts that he would kill the thing that had been his daughter. He was, in demeanor and temperament and appearance, the opposite of Colonel Terence Jamison. Yet he was the same.

  I made my decision. It was not a choice between Brent or Elizabeth, not between the force of a promise or the force of reason, not between the good of the many or the good of the few. It was something far more primitive than that, something arising from my hindbrain.

  Survival against a perceived enemy.

  “I DON’T BELIEVE YOU,” Jamison said.

  “I know you don’t,” I said. “That’s why I’ll give you Brent Warren. On New Eden you can . . . ‘test’ him to determine exactly how and when moths can see the near future.”

  We stood in the Spartan living room of the Corps guest bungalow, surrounded by the decorations of war: antique crossed swords on the wall, a cast-iron statue of the SPUSC logo on a table. I don’t know who decorated the place. Jamison’s deferential, rabbit-like manner had completely disappeared.

  “No,” he said.

  “Colonel, I don’t think you understand. I’m offering to bring you Brent Warren, to . . . trap him for you, so Army scientists can find ways to use the moths’ pre-cognitive ability. They can—”

  “There is no ability.”

  I gaped at him. “Haven’t you been listening? I saw it. It’s real. Elizabeth DiPortio—”

  “There is no ability. You’re lying, in order to save these inhuman abominations you’re so unaccountably fond of. There is no ability.”

  I said slowly, “Is that what you’re going to report to HQ?”

  “I already have.”

  “I see.”

  “What will they—”

  “I don’t know. I just make the report, doctor. But you should think about this: Suppose this dehumanization spreads to the other six planets? To Earth? To the Corps?”

  “I will think about it,” I said and moved toward him, taking my hand from my pocket.

  IN THE ROVER, I force myself to think calmly. I have maybe twelve hours until the Corps begins to wonder why Jamison has not contacted them. I don’t know how much time will be left after that. I don’t know how many other Corps soldiers on Windsong will believe me, or will rate their loyalty to the Corps above everything else. I don’t know how long it will take to spread the word to 6,500 people. I will start with the Warrens. I am on my way to their place now.

  Twelve hours. In that time, a great many people can escape into the wilderness, can fan out into small groups hard to track, can get into the planet’s numerous caves or beyond the range of space weapons concentrated onto two small settlements. They cannot eradicate everybody. People can carry supplies until we learn to live off this planet. We have few old or sick. Brent will help us, and maybe more moths will, too. Some of us will become moths. That is inevitable. But we will be alive.

  There are all kinds of cocoons. Time is one. Rigid organizational rules are another. But the most deadly cocoon may be the limitations of what humans consider human. Perhaps it’s time to emerge.

  Twelve hours. I don’t know how many people I can save in that time. But I do know this: twelve hours is enough for the spiders to begin work on Jamison’s body, held immobile by a nonfatal dose of ketamine from my syringe, in the ditch where Elizabeth and I dumped him.

  I hope to meet him again someday.

  MACHINE LEARNING

  Ethan slipped into the back of the conference room in Building 5 without being noticed. Fifty researchers and administrators, jammed into the room lab-coat-to-suit, all faced the projection stage. Today, of course, it would be set for maximum display. The CEO of the company was here, his six-foot-three frame looming over the crowd. Beside him, invisible to Ethan in the crush, would be tiny Anne Gonzalez, R&D chief. For five years a huge proportion of the Biological Division’s resources—computational, experimental, human—had been directed toward this moment.

  Anne’s clear voice said, “Run.”

  Some people leaned slightly forward. Some bit their lips or clasped their hands. Jerry Liu rose onto the balls of his feet, like a fighter. They all had so much invested in this: time, money, hope.

  The holostage brightened. The incredibly complex, three-dimensional network of structures within a nerve cell sprang into view, along with the even more complicated lines of the signaling network that connected them. Each line of those networks had taken years to identify, validate, understand. Then more time to investigate how any input to one substructure could change the whole. Then the testing of various inputs, each one a molecule aimed at the deadly thing near the center of the cell, the growing mass of Moser’s Syndrome. All this hard work, all the partnering with pharmaceutical companies, in order to arrive at Molecule 654-a, their best chance.

  So far, no one had noticed Ethan.

  The algorithm for 654-a began to run, and in a moment the interaction combinations produced the output on the right side of the screen. Only two outputs were possible: “continued cell function” or “apoptosis.” The apoptosis symbol glowed. A second later, in a burst of nonrealistic theatrics, the cell drooped and sagged like one of Dalí’s clocks, and the lethal structure at its heart vanished.

  Cheering erupted in the room. People hugged each other. A lab tech stood on tiptoe and kissed the surprised CEO. They had done it, identified a possible cure for the disease that attacked the bodies of children, and only children, killing half a billion kids worldwide in the last five years. They had done it with molecular computation, with worldwide partnerships with universities and Big Pharma, and with sheer grit.

  Someone to Ethan’s left said, “Oh!” Then someone else noticed him, and someone after that. Ethan’s story was company-wide gossip. The people at the front of the room went on burbling and hugging, but a small pocket of silence grew around him, the embarrassed silence of people caught giggling at a wake. Laura Avery started toward him.

  He didn’t want to talk to Laura. He didn’t want to spoil this important celebration. Quickly he moved through the door, down the corridor, into the elevator. Laura, following, called out, “Ethan!” He hit the DOOR CLOSE button before she could reach him.

  In the lobby he walked rapidly out the door, heading through the rain toward his own facility. Buildings of brick and glass rose ghostly in the thick mist. MultiFuture Research was a big campus, and he was soaked by the time he reached Building 18. Inside, he nodded at Security and shook himself like a dog. Droplets spun off him. What the hell had he done with his umbrella? He couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was to get back to his own work.

  He didn’t belong at a celebration to defeat Moser’s Syndrome.

  Too late, too late. Way too late.

  Building 18 was devoted to machine learning. Ethan’s research partner, Jamie Peregoy, stood in their lab, welcoming this afternoon’s test subject, Cassie McAvoy. The little girl came with her mother every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after school. Ethan took his place at the display console.

  That end of the lab was filled with desks, computers, and messy folders full of printouts. The other end held child-sized equipment: a musical keyboard, a video-game console, tables and chairs, blocks, and puzzles. The back wall was painted a supposedly cheerful yellow that Ethan found garish. In the center, like a sentry in no-man’s-land, stood a table with coffee and cookies.

  “The problem with machine learning isn’t intelligence,
” Jamie always said to visitors. “It’s defining intelligence. Is it intelligence to play superb chess, crunch numbers, create algorithms, carry on a conversation indistinguishable from a human gabfest? No. Turing was wrong. True intelligence requires the ability to learn for oneself, tackling new tasks you haven’t done before, and that requires emotion as well as reasoning. We don’t retain learning unless it’s accompanied by emotion, and we learn best when emotional arousal is high. Can our Maip do that? No, she cannot.”

  If visitors tried to inject something here, they were out of luck. Jamie would go into full-lecture mode, discoursing on the role of the hippocampus in memory retention, on how frontal-lobe injuries taught us that too little emotion could impair decision making as deeply as too much emotion, on how arousal levels were a better predictor of learning retention than whether the learning was positive or negative. Once Jamie got going, he was as unstoppable as a star running back, which was what he resembled. Young, brilliant, and charismatic, he practically glittered with energy and enthusiasm. Ethan went through periods where he warmed himself at Jamie’s inner fire, and other periods where he avoided Jamie for days at a time.

  MAIP, the MultiFuture Research Artificial Intelligence Program based in the company’s private cloud, could not play chess, could not feel emotion, and could only learn within defined parameters. Ethan, whose field was the analysis of how machine learning algorithms performed, believed that true AI was decades off, if it were possible at all. Did Jamie believe that? Hard to tell. When he spoke their program’s name, Ethan could hear that to Jamie it was a name, not an acronym. He had given MAIP a female voice. “Someday,” Jamie said, “she’ll be smarter than we are.” Ethan had not asked Jamie to define “someday.”

  The immediate, more modest goal was for MAIP to learn what others felt, so that MAIP could better assist their learning.