Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Do you get nervous? Do you get scared?

  I think of Boris’s eyes. Blue and clear. I do. I am.

  “Ready?”

  Mas nods.

  “Okay. Are you sure you—”

  “I’m sure, Evie.”

  “And it’s all set?”

  He’s impatient. His fingers are twitching to push me aside. Whether it’s because he can’t wait to murder Don or because his resolve is finite shouldn’t matter. But, of course, it does.

  “Tell me why.”

  “What? Evie, we don’t have time for this. If I don’t open the filtration tank now I’ll miss the window. Go back to your module, like we decided. Lock yourself in, and use the mask just in case, okay?” He grabs hold of my hands. His are icy cold. “Go. Go now!”

  “Tell me why you’re doing this.”

  He blinks. His impatience stalls. Softens. “Because he hurts you. Because I love you.”

  I let go of his hands. Put my arms around his neck and push my body hard against his. “Because it’s what I want?”

  “Because it’s what you want.”

  I wait until he relaxes enough to put his hands around my waist. “I’m sorry.” And then I push him with everything I’ve got. When he stumbles, I step back into the bubbling corridor, hit the Close Door button.

  Boris taught me how to reprogram the codes; it was laughably easy. Too easy. By the time Mas has recovered enough to try and open the door again, he can’t.

  He looks at me through the small plexiglass window. He’s shouting, shaking his head. Now, he looks nervous. Now, he looks scared.

  But he shouldn’t.

  All I can see are the red threads of blood in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I say again.

  Because I am.

  * * *

  Don is bent over the largest of his anaerobic chambers, the one directly underneath the main carbon air filter and fan. I watch his back, the stillness of his absorption. He has always found microorganisms better companions than anything—anyone—two hundred thousand times bigger.

  I clear my throat, and he spins around, wrenching his hands out of the gloves. He visibly relaxes when he sees it’s me, but his frown is quick to return when he sees the two tumblers of whisky.

  “It’s not time yet.”

  I don’t reply. Walk through the brilliantly glaring white. Hold his tumbler out until he takes it.

  He looks down at it and then up at me. “He said no.” His lips twitch and his eyes gleam. “He fucking said no.”

  I don’t reply. I swallow my whisky in one. The burn takes away some of his sting.

  “I must admit I thought you had it in the bag, Evie.” He’s crowing, even though my failure would be bad news for us both. Probably the end of these missions, of Astro’s interest in us.

  He lifts his tumbler, throws back the whisky the same way as I did. And I see that he is mad. Fury rages in his eyes, his grin. He just can’t help crowing too. “Guess a real man is beyond your skill set after all.”

  And it’s not exactly shame that I feel. Not the same shame, at least, that I’ve been feeling for years. Nor is it failure. It’s a kind of horrified wonder. A wonder that I was ever able to do it. To keep doing it.

  With Boris, it had been interest, friendship, love. Disinterest, abandonment, stripping his OS of the things he had learned and earned. With Mas it had been no different. Except for the sex. Pleasure and its withdrawal is the most effective reward and punishment model of them all. A Skinner box doesn’t have to be a torture chamber. Not unless you’ve exhausted its every other function.

  Boris knew and Mas didn’t. That’s the real difference. Boris knew that enough unconditioned stimuli had made pressing that operandum lever become second nature. A conditioned response. And he knew that pressing that lever was the want, the desire—the need—to kill Don. And I’d put it there.

  “I couldn’t do it,” I say. “He wanted to, he’d planned to. But I couldn’t let him.”

  Don’s fury turns brighter. “Jesus Christ. The neuroscientist has fallen in love with her lab rat, is that it?”

  When I don’t answer, he throws his empty tumbler across the lab. It shatters loud against the door. “You’d jeopardise all of this—our entire mission—for a good fuck?” He shakes his head. “It must be true what they say: white women love big black cock. Is that what—”

  “Stop it.”

  But there’s something behind his white-hot rage. Something cooler and darker that glitters and turns.

  Fear subsumes unease. That something is something. And I don’t know what.

  “All this time I’ve been saddled with you,” he says, “and I never realised what a fucking coward you are.”

  It’s satisfaction. A satisfaction ordinarily reserved for the finding of new disease strains or more effective base carriers, antimicrobial agents. It’s hiding behind all that mocking fury, but it’s there. And it’s bigger. Much bigger.

  “Don—”

  “You’re such a fucking disappointment, Evie.”

  And I’m running out of time to find out what that satisfaction means. What he thinks I have or haven’t done. Panic makes me reckless, foolish. Even before I rush him, I already know he’s going to go for the Taser StrikeLight that he would have used on Mas instead.

  It feels cold and surprisingly painful against my ribs. But I’m close enough now that I can lean into his shoulder, whisper into his ear: “What is it? What are you hiding from me? Tell me.”

  He snorts.

  “Please, Don. Please.”

  And maybe he hears something in my voice. More probably, he senses that something cooler and darker that glitters and turns behind my rage. It has, after all, been there a lot longer.

  “Evie. What have you done?”

  Or maybe he just starts to feel the pain.

  He suddenly jackknifes, doubles over enough that he pushes me backwards. He grunts, coughs, goes down onto his knees, clutching his stomach.

  “Don. What is it? What are you hiding? You fucking bastard. Tell me!”

  “What the—” He blinks up at me. Tries to glare. Tries to snarl. Tries to grab. To catch. To hold. “What the fuck have you done to me?”

  But I don’t have to tell him. He already knows. I wonder if he can feel the nanites eating their way out through his oesophagus, his stomach. Corrupted, conditioned, hungry for a disease that isn’t there.

  “Turn them off! I know you can. Ev—” He lets out a scream: thin and wheezed through gritted teeth. I can hear them grinding. He spasms, coughs. His blood sprays through the white, glaring space, spatters against the white gloss tiles.

  Still on his hands and knees, he brings up the Taser gun, points it at my face, my chest. And I wonder if he’ll kill me.

  I see the moment that he realises I will kill him. I am killing him. His face goes grey, except for two spots of pink high on his cheekbones. And I can read every emotion that passes through his eyes. Surprise, fear, incredulity. Maybe even admiration. A whisper of apologies drifting around me like spring blossoms, cool and white. Hydrangeas and pearl beads in my hair.

  And he knows, he knows—there’s no turning back now, if there ever was. But still he tries. “You don’t want this!” His voice hoarse and entirely changed; his blood slowing, thickening. “Please … make it stop! Do it! You can do it. Please!”

  I make myself stay. I make myself wait. I make myself look at him.

  The gun weaves drunkenly. Don lets out a howl, followed by a darker arc of blood that misses me by inches. Then, and only then, do the nanites finally deliver their payload. Enough ketamine to kill a dozen men.

  He slumps face-first onto the tiles. His glasses crack. His booties squeak.

  “Free will is an illusion,” I say into the quiet, and my voice shakes so badly I almost bite my tongue, “in a Skinner box.”

  * * *

  I wake up on a plastic bench in the Nostromo. My first thought isn’t for Don, it’s for Mas. Still l
ocked inside his quarters.

  It’s only when I get up and start for the door that I register I’m not alone.

  He’s sitting on the bench opposite, one leg crossed over the other. He looks like all the other Astro suits: tall, slim, mildly interested.

  “Where did you come from?”

  He smiles indulgently. “I’ve been here all the time, Evie.”

  I think of the long corridors lined with bubbling tubes of algae and tanks of recycling water. All those locked white doors. “I don’t understand.”

  He shrugs, as if this is of no matter. When the silence between us stretches thin enough to break, I clear my throat. “Is he dead? Is Don—”

  This earns me a chuckle. “Yeah, he’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.” Even though I’m not.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Evie.” He gives me another of those patronising smiles.

  “I couldn’t let you do it. I couldn’t let you destroy Mas the way you did Boris.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why not?” I want to punch the lazy smirk off his face. I want to pour a cocktail of nanites down his throat. “Because Boris was bad enough—wrong enough—and Mas … Mas isn’t a fucking robot!”

  “Ah.”

  I suffer a bad image of this bloody man—who I already know will never, ever tell me his name—sitting inside one of those locked white rooms, watching Mas and me fucking on a screen, and I can’t bear it. I can’t bear any of it. I feel more lightheaded, more sick, than I did while I was watching Don die.

  “What difference does it fucking make anyway? He was going to do it. He had agreed to do it.”

  “But he didn’t actually do it.”

  “He wouldn’t have been allowed to actually do it, you prick.”

  A shrug. “Semantics.”

  “Okay,” I say, pretending to back down, because it’s the only course of action that will have any kind of effect. Astro suits really are predictable, unreachable. Impervious. “I fucked up. I allowed myself to become involved, prejudiced. But he would have done it, and you know it.” I sit again, press my palms against my cheeks, my stinging eyelids. “Just let me out of contract. I’m not the right person for this job. I’m not. I’ll just keep fucking it up.”

  “Is that a threat or a promise, Evie?”

  I shake my head. I’m not sure.

  “You volunteered for this,” he says, in that maddeningly impenetrable voice.

  “I know that! But Boris and Mas aren’t simulations, for fuck’s sake. They aren’t rats. I thought I could do it. I thought it would be the same. But it wasn’t. It isn’t.” I stand up. My face is burning hot. I’m clenching my hands in and out of fists. I’m making it too easy for him. “Where’s Mas? This isn’t his fault.”

  “Obviously it’s not his fault.” He looks up at me, shrugs. “He’s fine. He’s being debriefed. He’ll be paid off, given the usual spiel, and then sent on his way.”

  I know this is a lie. They might well do all those things, but he’ll never truly be let go. After all, once you become a test subject, an experiment, you stay one forever.

  I try to shrug back. Strive for the same cool calm. It used to be easier. “Whether he did it or not, the hypothesis is validated. Mas would have committed murder as a direct result of conditioned stimuli; Boris did not.”

  Another shrug. “All variables in any experiment must be controlled.”

  “For God’s sake! I fucked up at the end. At the end! Don was—Don was…” And it suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t once thought about what happens to me now. What they will do about what I have done. “I can’t do this again,” I say, having decided upon that being the worst punishment of all. “I won’t do this again.”

  “Evie,” he says. “Don signed up for this, signed the same disclaimers you did. What happened was unfortunate”—another shrug—“but these things do happen.” He stands up, smooths his palms down his trouser legs. “In any case, you’re mostly right. The hypothesis is validated. And now we are left in a bit of a quandary.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If the hypothesis was which is more suitable, more adaptable as a companion, a colleague to long-haul interplanetary—and perhaps one day, interstellar—travel, which then has proved preferable? A morally incorruptible robot that will irreversibly shut down to avoid doing harm? Or an eminently corruptible human being who will agree to commit murder for pussy?” He smiles, and I am suddenly—inexplicably—frightened.

  “I know what the fucking hypothesis—”

  Two shrugs. Short and quick. “Or for cock?”

  “What?” I go cold. I can feel it run straight down through me like a shiver. A river.

  “You don’t need to worry, Evie,” he says, closing the distance between us and patting my arm. “In this experiment, all the variables were very well controlled.”

  I think of Don. Of that something cool and dark glittering and turning behind his white-hot rage. I step back out of the suit’s reach. “What do you mean?”

  “Your loyalty to Masego is admirable. But it’s somewhat misguided.”

  I decide to stop speaking.

  “He’s not an engineer. He’s barely in the fiftieth percentile. You know, I’m surprised, with that big IQ of yours, that you never worked that out. Although,” he flicks something I can’t see off his trousers, “I guess he kept you otherwise occupied.”

  “What the fuck. Do. You. Mean?”

  He sighs. “The experiment. The hypothesis. Who needs an engineer? Who cares about an engineer? A computer could do what Masego was capable of doing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  And I do. I close my eyes. Think of Don’s violence, his cruelties. Boris’s friendship, Mas’s comfort. Don’s hate. Their love. Don’s moments of agonising kindness. Boris’s periodic withdrawal. Mas’s occasional anger, more frequent disappointment.

  “I’m the experiment. I’m the subject.”

  Another sigh, this one less patient. “You’re the hypothesis.” He tilts his head. “Can a cognitive neuroscientist be fooled? Can an expert in the field of deep learning and AI evolution be unknowingly coerced? Can a genius be corrupted? Can a manipulator be manipulated?”

  “No. No.” And I’m shaking my head. Not because I can’t be, not because I haven’t been. But because I never even suspected. I trusted all of them. Even my husband. And it’s so obvious now. So simple. Like a rat in a cage. Pressing a lever when a light goes green. Positive and negative conditioning. Reward and punishment. Want, desire, fear, loathing, pleasure. And their response, their conditioned stimulus, was never the murder of Don. The lever that I pushed was killing him to save someone else.

  “Sit down, Evie.”

  I know he’ll wait until I do. So I do. My legs are shaking too hard not to. “I spared Mas,” I say. When I’m sure I can. “I didn’t—I wouldn’t have—spared Boris.”

  He sits down opposite me, shows me his open palms. Smiles. Smiles. “And there you have it. The quandary. We want, we need, invaluable scientists like you on our spaceships. But these experiments prove time and time again that human on human doesn’t work in these environments, not for any significant length of time—certainly not the time it would require to travel beyond our own system. And neither—albeit in very different ways—does robot and human.” He blinks, recrosses his legs. “So, given these outcomes, what would you suggest Astro’s next hypothesis should be?”

  I’m angry. I’m hurt and I’m fucking furious. But most of all, I’m horrified. Suddenly. Horrified that inside the space of one solar system—eight point four AU, seven hundred and eighty-one million miles, one point one six light-hours, sixty-nine point six light-minutes—I’ve become a murderer. Inside the space of twelve months. One year. And whether it was because I was manipulated or conditioned; whether it was for me or for Mas doesn’t matter. I did it. And until now, I didn’t even care that I’d done
it.

  “Come on, Evie.” The Astro suit’s stubborn smile slips. “Earn the investment that we’ve made in you.”

  I want to snarl at him. It’s in my chest, my neck, the muscles around my mouth. “Do you want me to answer personally or scientifically?”

  “Both.”

  “Fine.” I feel cold, restless. Tense like a bowstring. “I wouldn’t put fucking people on spaceships at all.”

  He doesn’t do what I thought he’d do. He grins with every one of his teeth. He actually looks excited, which is terrifying. “Bingo.”

  I look at him. And I look at him. And that cold burns right out of me until I’m shaking and sweating so hard I can’t see. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  I stand up. My knees are shaking. My hands are squeezing in and out of tighter fists. “I didn’t volunteer for this, did I?”

  “No.” Another grin. “You didn’t.”

  “No.” My voice is thin, high, alien. “No.”

  “I wasn’t permitted to tell you,” he says, pressing his lips together in what I think is meant to be an expression of sympathy.

  “What am I?”

  He smiles. Like a bird. A magpie. “You were made in a lab, Evie. You’re the first of your kind.”

  “What am I?”

  “You know what you are.”

  I have ego. I have agency and independent thought. I feel pain, and I feel guilt, and I feel remorse. I remember my wedding. I remember my first day of school. I remember my mother.

  “Evie—”

  “What am I?”

  He’s no longer even pretending to smile. “Stop panicking. I don’t want to have to give you another shot.”

  He restrains me easily, his breath fanning cool against my cheek until I make myself limp and he lets me go.

  “Tell me what I am.”

  “No. You tell me.”

  I slump back onto the bench. I am me. My teeth chatter, my skin puckers. I am nervous. I am scared. I am an unsupervised machine learning model with a continuously learning AI program.

  I am bio-evolution.