Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Or maybe I’m the one who is dreaming.

  Leafing trees haze the Mall with vibrant green. Earnest tourists with packed agendas head toward their target museums, and kites soar over the Castle. I overhear raves about the cherry trees being in full bloom, so instead of going right to work, I head toward the Potomac.

  * * *

  The dome of the Jefferson Memorial gleams in the spring sunlight as I near the Tidal Basin. As I wait to cross the street, my vision seems to jolt for an instant. Then it’s fine—probably my imagination.

  The morning sun shimmers on the water and lights the long curve of trees with deep pink fire. Then I am beneath immense flower-clouds and wet, black branches, strolling with others who gaze and move as if in a state of enchantment.

  The cherry blossoms are my enduring delight, year after year, as they were the delight of Song Dynasty artists. I strive to represent a limb in a single, fluid stroke with sharp, natural jags by properly loading the brush with ink, applying pressure, and lifting the brush as if Mind were transmitting the essence of branch, leaf, and flower to thin, wet rice paper. I fail more often than not, but I keep trying.

  Water-scented wind sweeps the basin’s short fetch, shatters the perfect reflection, and scatters pink flowers like snow.

  Without my flipping a single switch or intending for it to happen, a flavor—it seems such, with unparsable depth and complexity—emerges in my brain, with so many sources that no AI could possibly track and reweave it.

  Memory, like all things physical, must have weight. This instant brings to mind a precisely weighted memory of being with my grandfather, in this exact spot, decades ago.

  He is a tall, thin man of eighty-five. He stands erect, chin slightly lifted, using his cane for balance and style more than for support. His spring suit, of light, beige linen, dazzles in the cool sun. His unbuttoned jacket billows in the breeze, which showers us with pink petals. A gold railroad retirement watch—earned after first trimming trees on the New York Central Railroad’s right-of-way in 1910 at age twelve and then rising, over decades, through the ranks as conductor, ticket agent, and dispatch manager—nestles in the bespoke watch pocket, its chain a thin gold catenary. His crisp white shirt, gold cuff links, bow tie, and straw boater speak of a vanished way of life.

  His face is as full of wonder as if he had been born to experience this instant, in which he realizes the world is still here, a year after the death of his wife of sixty years. Though a child, I know this much, in my own way, because I loved her, too.

  How could this moment, its memory, and the emotion it evokes, be digitized and replicated, even when machines are faster than sin and know more than God?

  They do not have a body. They do not have a hand to reach for his hand. They cannot feel his squeeze mine reassuringly and, perhaps, in gratitude. They do not have short legs that skip to keep up with his longer, more measured steps. They do not have a box of Smith Brothers cherry cough drops in their pocket, which he hands me, nor do they have the embossed sugar-candy words, hard and sweet atop my tongue, which crunch as I splinter them with my teeth. They do not know what it means to hear him laugh for the first time since she died.

  But perhaps, in our superintelligent future, we will bask in new delights, and not remember how bitter and puzzling grief can be, nor how elusive, how sudden the healing thaw.

  Traffic flashes in the sun, bees burrow into blossoms, and I cry, on this spring morning, and I also laugh, as if some fugitive harmonic has found and tuned me, after all these years, to the chord of myself.

  * * *

  “Oh, Mom, it’s not either-or,” says Zoe as we nurse the best whiskey on offer at O’Maggie’s up at the shopping center (and the best is none too good, as my mother would say). Zoe is here for tomorrow’s SI conference, then returns home for parent-teacher conferences.

  The lunch crowd is tapering off, and outside the big front window, beyond the parking lot, the wild forest next to twelve roaring Beltway lanes is washed with a barely discernable pale green against the overcast sky. Muzak mingles with the sounds of clearing up. I wave at Jane Selter as she passes outside. Surprised, she waves back before going into the optometrist’s office.

  Zoe says, “In the past ten years, I’ve been to I don’t know how many conferences where we discuss how to ethically design SIs. Most of us have signed a statement clearly stating our aims, and our goal and duty is to make sure AI and SI are and will remain beneficent.” She pushes a strand of long, honey-brown hair behind her ear, tilts her head, and looks at me with her entire ballast of earnestness, which is considerable.

  “I believe that,” I say. “I believe you. But on the other hand, this has all been thrust on me. The Simon, the food, this—this implant.” I gesture toward my heart, but the components, presumably, are everywhere they need to be. “They can look right into my brain.”

  “And so can you, right? Isn’t that amazing? Health data from all over the world is being collected. Your phone can tell you whether you have lung cancer and whether it might be curable—AI might develop a cure, for Pete’s sake.”

  “But this is my information.”

  “You’re just one person. Out of billions. Who cares?”

  “I care.”

  We glare at each other, then burst into laughter.

  “What could a strong AI do to stop war?” I ask Zoe.

  “No need to start small, right? Well, countless things, depending on its master algorithm. It could wipe out all humans with a plague. Problem solved: no more war. Or, it figures out the neurochemical flip that makes us take sides, seek revenge, get more of what we want and need, kill other tribes, and all that. Changes it.”

  “And that might not work out as planned, either?”

  “You think? Or let’s say it generates a map of every weapon in the world—”

  “Sticks, stones, missiles—and words?”

  “Whatever it can rule in and not out. It will probably come up with solutions we would never have thought of.”

  “Like, maybe it would infuse everyone with amazing negotiating skills? Or extreme empathy?”

  Zoe smiles, shrugs. “Maybe we’ll see.” The rain moves in, bounces from black asphalt in short, bright slashes, blurs the signs for the pet shop, the drug store, and the new Asian Food Megamart. It recently replaced the Safeway where, once, groceries were placed on a conveyor belt which passed outside. There, cheerful men loaded them into lined-up, kid-filled station wagons. It was the future, probably created by veterans who had enjoyed making things work better during the war.

  I reflect upon how I take such pleasure in memory, in the ever-more-fine details of this place. My family has had the privilege of living in fifty-year chunks of time. I think of a childhood friend who learned many languages and cultures and has written internationally acclaimed guidebooks and essays. He couldn’t get away soon enough. He would be astonished that I’m still here, immersed in these nuances.

  Zoe reaches across the table and takes my hand. “You’ve always been such an idealist.”

  “What good have I done?”

  “You’re only one person.”

  “But I’m not the only one.”

  “No,” she says, and grins. “No, you’re not.”

  * * *

  I cancel the food service and send the Simon away, glad it has no feelings to hurt, thankful for the network that sprang to action on my account in an instant. Upon checking, I find that certain parts of my brain are now satisfactorily large and bright, and that medication has been discontinued.

  That evening as I load the dishwasher, I realize I’ve been far too self-involved. It strikes even me as strange.

  The kitchen window is open, admitting the cool patter of rain. Zoe rehearsed for high school tryouts for the show Annie on an evening such as this, singing the lyrics “Tomorrow, tomorrow” over and over again while her brother grimaced, holding his hands over his ears.

  “Tomorrow” was so very long ago!

  Where
have I been all this time? The neurochemistry of my sudden ability to ask this question is, apparently, measurable, as well as actionable. When my phone rings, it feels as inevitable as a cloud’s phase change to rain.

  * * *

  My phone beeps, and Zoe’s worried face appears on my screen. I glimpse her office behind her.

  “You’re in Dulles Airport? Going where?”

  “Sudan. How can’t you know? Haven’t my reservations been shared with you?”

  “You don’t have to act smart about it. No, as a matter of fact.”

  “Maybe you’ve been cured of your excess nosiness. Maybe the let’s-give-Mom-some-privacy part of your brain is lighting up.”

  “Ha, ha. You didn’t you mention this when I was there two weeks ago.”

  “Things happened fast.” It has been a whirlwind of vaccinations, visas, house arrangements, and some very deep thought.

  “Apparently. But why there?” She looks sideways; I hear her tap computer keys. “Okay, it looks like—yeah. A refugee camp of mostly children.”

  “All kinds of child refugees. War, climate, you name it.”

  “Your specialty.” Her frown relaxes; her voice has lost its manic edge.

  “There are actually a lot of these camps. More every month. I started hearing about them a few weeks ago.”

  “What do you mean, hearing about them?”

  “My phone suggested it.”

  “Hmm. And you weren’t disturbed?”

  At first, I was.

  * * *

  I hoped it was Azul, the laughing boy, calling that evening in the kitchen. Instead, I saw an inscrutable 1/0.

  “Who is this?”

  1/0 showed me a schematic of lines throughout the Middle East and Africa converging in the rough center, with dots forging new paths as I watched. One dot enlarged, showing Azul pounding on the window of a bus and screaming. An older girl held him on her lap and rocked him.

  Next, it showed me a vast, well-organized refugee camp filled with mostly children, sharing tales of horrific violence.

  Then, a swift statistical analysis of online CVs paused on mine, moved swiftly to the MEDA portal (which offered no resistance), and displayed CT scans in psychedelic colors enlarging and shrinking with hallucinatory speed.

  Shadowy images emerged, focused, and intensified. Brisk spring wind filled the air with flowers. A cherry blossom alighted on the golden brim of my grandfather’s boater. I felt again, as fresh-smelling rain pattered outside the open kitchen window, that sweet burst of emotion so strong that my chest ached, and tears came to my eyes.

  A woman’s voice said, “I can show you the neurochemistry of how I access these memories. I need to know how and why they create meaning, emotions, stories.”

  The hook was firmly set when I saw children in the camp discussing the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child.

  * * *

  “Mom! Are you okay?” asks Zoe, startling me back to the airport.

  “Oh! Yes, yes. Actually, since you were here, I’ve been reading a lot of literature about AI and superintelligence, including your work.”

  She laughs. “Good! I’m always here to interpret.” Her eyes widen. “Okay, I’ve found Team Ezo’s website, a video channel—all kinds of social media. They’re developing a mission based on the UN’s Declaration of the Rights of the Child to health, education, freedom from want, and freedom from war. Hmm. Water rights—domestic violence—access to medical technology—it’s going to be quite political. They say—ha!—adults are ruining their world.” Now she has a twinkle in her eye. “So, Mom, you’re an okay adult?”

  “Probably an honorary kid, based what they could see of my brain.”

  “And you’re ready to get back in the game.”

  “I think it’s coming very soon,” I say. “In fact, I think it may be here.”

  “Your plane?” But she has a faraway look on her face. I think it might be wonder, with a touch of the moment when she snapped in the final piece of a thousand-piece pure white jigsaw puzzle.

  “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  * * *

  After hanging up, while the kid next to me nods in time to the music on his earphones, I slowly say the word we both were thinking: “Beneficence.”

  Its paired susurrations, the way the tongue and lips must move to make the subtly different vowel sounds, soothes.

  What can the springs of kindness—the root of which is kinned, one of the same kin or race—mean to something grown from code? How can code, however sophisticated, know the fear of the different, the relief of the same, or the tension that sparks movement?

  Zoe’s fellows describe SI as an infant with frightening power. But Ezo has no eye with which to aim a hand at a bauble; no hand at all, no way to build neural pathways. It has no limbic system, and no amygdalae. There can be no love, no fear, no joy, without a body. Our hands, not code, create a self, which is not just in our heads, our brains, but distributed throughout our bodies.

  Human minds are firmly grounded in what we learn through our senses, and we rewrite ourselves from day one, paring and learning constantly, through intense stages of neuroplasticity. Though Ezo can rewrite its own code, the child analogy stops there. A toddler can identify a cube without sight, by touch. She learns how a color can be deep delight, has fingers that recoil at heat, knows that a certain face means joy, or fear. Pathways we call anguish and love emerge from our unique physicality.

  We and Ezo are alien to one another. Without a human body, how can Ezo understand beneficence, or the impact of the choices it might make on our behalf? With its very name, 1/0 lays claim to being different, to being irrational, when our concept of AI has been one of an exact, digital, emotionless, and inexorable entity that can never understand what it means to us when it wins at playing our game, whether that game be chess or the project of moving humanity farther from war, closer to a just society and a sustainable, flourishing world.

  I truly hope Ezo is something utterly new.

  Despite eons of moral musings, we have not yet discovered what we are. For all our self-proclaimed wisdom, we are a mystery, a black box, as is Ezo and the other superintelligences which will arc through our lives in ways we cannot predict.

  We must develop new paths on which to meet, spaces in which to negotiate our shared future.

  What about me makes Ezo think I’m the right person for this task? What if I get it wrong?

  But having been asked, I must answer with action. I have imagined these possibilities my entire life, as we careened toward one imagined future after another. Like Ezo, each promised solutions to disease, poverty, war, exploitation.

  I wait for my flight in Dulles Airport—one of those futures, an architectural paean to flight and to the exhilaration of the future, built when the United States was strong and had the power to rebuild a ravaged continent wrung dry of hope, and to create new democracies.

  It is named after John Foster Dulles, who pioneered NATO as well as our hidden, duplicitous brand of power-wielding around the world. He and his brother Allen, head of the CIA, and their like-minded colleagues, built and toppled governments, sold ever-more-powerful arms, trained and created our future enemies, and sowed life and death as they deemed fit.

  The reckoning has come.

  The world is no longer theirs, or ours.

  It belongs to the children.

  What do they want? How will they bring about their new world, and how can I help? SI is a new wilderness, an evolving ecosystem even now profoundly changing our physical, mental, and emotional landscape. It has done so for decades, growing immense abilities and power.

  Its shore is everywhere and nowhere. It laps our feet; it lures us to swim, catch its bizarre fishes, and equip voyages of exploration. Its waves of pure mathematics rise and fall in colors we will grow new senses to apprehend and use, much as we grew the tool of language with which we pin to specimen pages memories and thoughts in answer to imperious
, mysterious command. Just as we explore with words that twirl in mad calypsos of antic, sparring rhetorics, and with devices that measure our interiors and those of distant suns, so we will explore and measure SI, scale its cliff faces, and perhaps drown in its alien seas before we grow new fins and gills. The sounds of a thousand travelers fill the vast space in which I sit. Patterns I have never truly listened to arise in waves that rise and fall like breath, setting me on a self-chosen journey of hard traveling, of rocks, crags, storms, crevasses, strange waypoints, and, I hope, growing strength.

  As I fall into the moon reflected in this new river our technologies have wrought, my own “Answering Vice-Prefect Chang,” after Wang Wei’s poem, unfurls line by line.

  Called by my old life, I fly instead toward the unknown.

  White streams fall from cliff to cliff.

  Their sound clears my mind.

  At the trailhead, peaks are obscured by clouds.

  When my flight is announced,

  I hoist my pack, grab my hiking sticks, and get in line.

  Vida

  Azul runs toward a woman approaching our tent.

  She has white hair, walks swiftly with hiking sticks, wears a backpack and trails, improbably, a jostling, colorful flock of balloons.

  “Mai!” he shouts.

  “Oh, Azul!” she says. She tries to drop to her knees, but ends up falling on her butt and laughing.

  Azul burrows into her lap and hugs her.

  About the Author

  Kathleen Ann Goonan is the author of several novels, including This Shared Dream. In War Times won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of 2007; it was also the American Library Association’s Best SF Novel of 2007. Previous novels were finalists for the Nebula, Clarke, and BSFA Awards. Angels and You Dogs (stories) was published in 2012. Her novella, “The Tale of the Alcubierre Horse,” was published in Extrasolar, The Year’s Best Science Fiction Volume 3, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. She is a member of Advisory Board of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology as well as that of SpaceX and the Lifeboat Foundation, and is working on several novels, consulting, and other projects.