Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  “How’s job going?” Med divided her attention between John and whatever she was previewing.

  “Pretty good. I keep hooking up with Michael, but he’s starting to annoy me.”

  “I can’t even keep track of your hookups. Which one is Michael, again?”

  “Dinosaur hair guy.”

  “Oh yeah!” Med stopped streaming and took her hand off the charging pad. “He sounded nice?”

  “He’s nice but he’s just … I dunno. He asks too many boring questions.”

  “Like what?”

  John tried to come up with a good way to explain it. “He asked about my brand. Which—why would you ask somebody about that after fucking them? So rude.”

  Med didn’t pick up on his sarcasm, or she chose to ignore it. “I can see why he might be curious. Why do you keep it if you don’t want to talk about it?”

  “Why do you tell people that you’re a bot if you don’t want them to make snotty comments about it?” His voice rose in anger he hadn’t intended to express.

  “You know why. Because fuck those fuckers.” Delivered utterly without sarcasm. John had to laugh. She put a hand on his arm, and he felt an unexpected, shocking surge of love for her. Her skin felt just as soft and warm as a human’s, but beneath the biological tissues were metal actuators and processors. He liked knowing that she wasn’t human all the way through. Looking into her face, he never flashed back to the faces of his masters.

  Yet he was still terrified. She was going to disappear. He’d wake up from this dream of student life in Saskatoon to find himself adrift with that psycho who bought him in Vegas, starving in the cargo hold of a boat whose engines were always on the verge of death. Tied up if he refused to go quietly to his master’s bedroom. Or maybe he’d awaken to discover that Med hadn’t made it out of the lab alive after shoving him out the door.

  He needed to banish those thoughts. His skin was prickling. Med still had her hand on his arm, and a badass snarky look on her face.

  “Med, why don’t you ever hook up with anybody?”

  The bot shrugged. “I haven’t installed any programs related to sexual desire.”

  “Why not?”

  “Just not interested. A lot of my siblings installed them, and they seem happy. But it never caught my attention.”

  “So you could install them now and start wanting to have sex?” John was fascinated.

  Med looked a little annoyed. “As I said before about learning Japanese, it’s not like a bot can just instantly know something or feel something. You have to interact to get context.”

  This was starting to sound kind of sexy. John wrapped his hand around Med’s arm, so that they gently gripped each other’s wrists. “You should do it. We should do it.”

  “I just said I wasn’t interested.”

  “How can you know you’re not interested if you’ve never tried it?”

  She removed her hand and scooted back a few centimeters. “Can you explain why you don’t like that series Evolution’s Dark Road but you do like Ouran High School Host Club? It’s a matter of taste. Sexual desire just isn’t my taste. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you.”

  “You love me?” John’s heart was pounding all of a sudden, in a way that was both amazing and terrifying.

  “I wasn’t planning on blurting it out like that, but yes. Yes.”

  He thought he was going to cry, and then he thought maybe he wasn’t going to be able to stop himself from kissing her. “I’m pretty sure I love you too.”

  Illuminated by dim, white light from the text menu on the wall, they looked like artificial versions of themselves. John crumpled his hands into fists and jammed them against his thighs uncomfortably. He wasn’t sure what to do next.

  “So you can be in love but you don’t want to try having sex?”

  She chuckled. “I’m not a media history major, but even I have watched enough media to know that love and sex aren’t the same thing.”

  Of course that was true, and he’d had plenty of sex that didn’t involve love. But how could she be feeling the same way he was, if she didn’t want to grab him hard and throw him down and just … take him? A feeling this strong had to be translated into something physical. It begged for literalization.

  “I just don’t understand. Do you mean the kind of love you would have for a brother? Or for a super good friend?”

  “I do love my siblings, but this is not that kind of love. I mean, I can’t be sure it’s exactly the same thing you would call love, but it’s a feeling of…” She paused for a moment and went still, as if she were streaming data. Then she spoke slowly. “It’s like there’s some part of you that fits perfectly inside my consciousness. It’s a feeling that goes beyond trust or friendship. Some kind of emotional infrastructure. Even if I were to isolate every single utility and program I use to think about you, I don’t think I could explain all the ways you occupy my mind. It’s … an emergent and ongoing process. Does that make sense?”

  John wiped his eyes and looked at her openly, following the lines of her neck and cheeks, the perfect lab-grown pink of her lips. But she’d given him permission to look beyond that.

  “Is there something we could do together … something you’ve always wanted to do with somebody who loves you? Not sex, obviously, but something like that? Or not like that? I don’t know…” He trailed off and Med looked bemused. “Please don’t say watch videos.” They both laughed.

  Med put a hand on top of one of his fists, and he laced his fingers into hers.

  “Actually there is something.”

  “Holding hands?”

  “No, although that’s nice too.” She let out a nervous titter. “I’ve always wanted to try sleeping.” She dropped her eyes and shifted uncomfortably, as if she’d just revealed some secret, transgressive kink.

  “I didn’t know you could sleep.”

  “I mean, I can go into sleep mode, or I can shut down. I can crash. There are a lot of sleep levels, but you’re not really supposed to go into them unless it’s an emergency or you need maintenance.”

  “Why aren’t you supposed to do it?”

  “Well sometimes it can damage memory to crash unexpectedly, but honestly I think the sleep taboo is mostly about security. Humans might steal a sleeping bot.”

  John understood that fear all the way down to the most inaccessible parts of his consciousness. “Nobody can get you here. Not in our apartment. It’s completely safe.” His words came out hot and intense, the same way they sounded in his mind.

  “Do you want to try it?”

  He said yes and let her lead him to the bedroom.

  They lay down on their sides facing each other, giggling as they found comfortable positions in the awkwardly small space. “Okay, so I’m going to try. I should wake up in four hours so I can get to work in the morning. Are you ready?”

  She looked so beautiful that John thought his heart would crack open like the space eggs in a kaiju movie, full of lava and lightning and life forms that had never walked the Earth. He took one of her hands. “I’m ready.”

  Her eyes closed, and she shuddered slightly. Then her hand relaxed in his. He listened to her breathe. He looked at the shape of her skin over the carbon alloy of her bones. He wondered if she was dreaming. He thought of all the questions he wanted to ask her about everything. He almost started to cry again when he remembered what they’d been through last year, after they’d escaped. After they’d almost died. If he were ever going to talk about all that shit, Med would be the only person he’d want listening.

  Watching her sleep for a while made him sleepy too. She never shifted around or made noises like a human, and it was deeply comforting.

  John rolled onto his back and closed his eyes. He was still kind of horny, partly from the emotional overload with Med, and partly just from life. At least he was working in the shop tomorrow, so there would definitely be an interlude or two with Michael in the back room. Also, maybe he would ask out that librarian
from his Social Media History class. He wasn’t sure he could love anyone else, but there were definitely a lot of people he liked in a sexual way. That wasn’t a bad thing.

  As he drifted off, his thoughts began to buzz pleasantly with half-feelings and fragments of the day’s noise. Just before he joined Med in full sleep mode, he saw a flickering image of Haruhi in her host boy clothes, the subject of a desire that existed only in the lacy cracks that form at the edge of what we’re taught is acceptable. Even after a century of storage on media devices whose sophistication far outstripped the technologies that hosted her birth, she was still radiating beauty into the world.

  About the Author

  Annalee Newitz writes fiction and nonfiction about the intersection of science, technology and culture.

  Currently she is an editor at large for Ars Technica, and previously she was the founding editor of io9, and the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo. Her book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember was nominated for the LA Times Book Award. She has also written for publications including Wired, Popular Science, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Slate, Washington Post, Smithsonian Magazine, and more. She has published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows.

  She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley.

  Copyright © 2019 by Annalee Newitz

  Art copyright © 2019 by Soufiane Mengad

  More Real Than Him

  Silvia Park

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  He opens his eyes and is named Yohan. Yohan looks up the name, filled with wonder at who he could be. Yohan, it turns out, is a name with Hebrew roots. It means, “God is gracious.” Yohan tests his gratitude. Yes, he feels it toward his Creator. He turns his head to thank Morgan Ito, who cringes and says, “God no, people will think I’m an effing stalker.” She waves her hand. “I’ll think of another name.”

  So Yohan he isn’t.

  On his third day, Morgan names him Stephen. Stephen doesn’t look up his name, now cautious of losing it. He plans to cherish this name from afar until it quietly becomes his. He waits for the day he’ll be given his remaining limbs. For now, he remains a torso. Morgan walks him through the Twelve Steps of Consciousness. Stephen discovers Ko Yohan is a Korean actor. Stephen looks just like him. He was designed to.

  * * *

  On the night of her twenty-sixth birthday, Morgan pulled off her greatest and most accidental heist. She purchased a late-night screening of The Dispossessed at the Metrograph, a vintage theater in Cheongdam with posh, uncooperative seats and grainy VR screenings, so she could insert herself into the heroine and feel the physical caress of Ko Yohan, culminating into a kiss-before-death that was so orgasmic, she spilled her natto popcorn on her lap.

  As Morgan left the theater, reeking blissfully, she received a message from Imagine Friends, ordering her to approve the Nurturing Nurses proposal for Client Family. She picked up another bottle of soju.

  In the lobby of Imagine Friends, Morgan, waiting for the elevator, flipped through her social media for last-minute happy birthdays, just an hour before midnight. After liking her father’s lukewarm “Happy Birthday to my daughter,” she not-so-accidentally wandered into her mother’s account. It was locked. Morgan was shocked. She hadn’t looked up her biological mother since college when she had fashioned a fake account under the name Ian Wright to keep tabs on how unfulfilling the woman’s life was. After discovering her mother was no longer with the North Korean man she’d run off with, Morgan had decided, in all her munificence, to forgive her.

  So why was this bitch’s account now locked?

  Morgan sent a friend request as Ian Wright. She swigged her soju and waited. The bottle sloshed just about empty by the time she reached the twenty-seventh floor. As she stepped off, her Scopes pinged. She yanked up the screen, but it was just an alert from the Official Ko Yohan Fan Club.

  KO YOHAN IN MILITARY SERVICE

  NO CELEBRITY ACTIVITY FOR TWO YEARS

  THIS IS ALL TRUE!!!

  Well, yes? Ko Yohan was already twenty-three. The Koreas were still stitching themselves together, but rebellions broke out like pimples that needed a good squeeze. Pushing off his military duty would have made it worse; weaseling out of it would have made it unforgiveable. Morgan sneered at these pathetic girls who had no lives outside of Ko Yohan. She’d loved Ko Yohan since his first film, starring him at age seven as a city boy, forced to live with his grandmother north of Pyongyang, unravaged by technology or war. How he’d wept, so bitterly, when he discovered there was no fried chicken in northern North Korea!

  Morgan gasped, hand over mouth, when she read Ko Yohan had already been in the army for three months. Instead of throwing a farewell parade at the airport, he must have quietly shaved his head and joined as a no-name soldier, exempt from celebrity privileges. So humble. So upstanding.

  Morgan began to weep as she trudged past the receptionist, Blue, who had been sitting alone in the dark, eyes glowing like a pair of forgotten headlights. “Good morning, Morgan Ito. Thank you for coming in to work today.”

  Morgan told Blue to shut up as she dragged herself to the nearest computer cell.

  It turned out to be occupied.

  * * *

  The morning after, Morgan woke with the taste of loss in her mouth. Her bedroom greeted her with “Good morning, Morgan” in Ko Yohan’s soothing voice, which she dismissed with a wristless flick. She blinked, sandy-eyed, thinking gingerly. Then she remembered Ko Yohan was gone. For almost two years, he’d be in the army and out of commission. He might as well be dead.

  In her bathroom, Morgan found a robot slumped on the toilet seat. Three-quarters of a robot. The body was a standard Tristan-VI model, with long, knotted legs and swimmer’s feet, size 29.5, without the penis, which was usually attached last. No arms. The head, bowed, was covered in a tatty towel, like a veil for Mass. Cables sprouted from his spine in vines of multi-colored ivy, trailing dangerously on her puddled bathroom floor.

  “Okay?” Morgan said. She must have brought it? From her workplace? Did she lug it all the way home? No wonder her shoulders ached delicately. She plugged the robot into her Scopes to confirm, yes, the body was a T-6 frame. The innards, however, were something else. Morgan had to smirk. The programmer was so female. A man coded male companions to be reliable and strong, but only a woman would code devoted and chivalrous. She scrolled through the source code, leisurely at first, noting the tree neural network on TalosFlow, reinforced with Limerick Compression for memory storage, when a prickle raised the trail of hairs down her back. It was the prickle of uncertainty, the unmoored alarm when she stumbled upon a source code that was elegant as a telescope collapsing into itself, cohesive as a golden conch, code that was quite possibly brilliant, better than anything she’d ever stitched together.

  Morgan plopped onto her bathroom mat with a squelch. Whoever programmed this robot was an obsessed bitch. She wasn’t better than Morgan. She was a worker-bee, beholden to the itch in her crotch. She was, most likely, a virgin.

  Exhibit A: this bumblebee couldn’t code motion. The robot was going to walk like an epileptic freak. Morgan could fix that. She was a connoisseur of male movement. She shot up. Her head rammed into the mirror to her pill cabinet, squeezing tears from her eyes. The QueenMirror piped, “Good morning, Morgan! You’ve selected Anti-Aging Oily Skin mode. Would you like to—”

  She slammed the mirror shut, as it all came back to her. Last night, she’d found this robot abandoned in a computer cell and vowed to bring it home. It had a decent foundation. It needed a few tweaks, a good gloss, and the kinetic grace of an ice skater. She’d take what was trash and recycle it, resurrect it as Ko Yohan.

  Morgan wasn’t a fan of division of labor, particularly for a robot built to last. Factory-mades had a neutered fifteen-year lifespan befo
re it was time for a “necessary” upgrade with improved interface, enhanced empathy, and a Beauty Boost™. Ko Yohan, however, deserved to be hand-crafted, so she went about planning him like she would a Lunar New Year feast.

  At Imagine Friends, she excused herself for lunch, with a bow of apology, then skittered to the twelfth floor, hoping nobody saw her, convinced nobody ever did. She passed the counter from which Blue was gone. There had been talk for the past week about replacing Blue, who had been the receptionist for almost ten years. Something about her programming wearing thin.

  If Morgan were a robot, she’d visit the Color Cabinet every day. She’d try on swathes of buttery skyn, arranged like rolls of silk in a kimono shop, pre-silhouetted in sizes grande, tall, and petite. She would drape herself in Aurora Rose, slipping into her hairless arms like satin opera gloves. She would peruse the shelves for a daily pair of eyes, arranged as jeweled marbles in velvet rows.

  Morgan unrolled a foot of Natural Medium Beige skyn and was inspecting it for blemishes when Zhou Di waltzed inside, dressed head to sneakers in white.

  “Oh!” Di’s mouth parted, then wiggled into a smile. “Hi.”

  Zhou Di had a special spot in Morgan’s crusted little heart. Not only was she a fox-bitch who wagged her tail at every XY and Z, but she was the embodiment of everything wrong with robotics. This was Robotics pronounced with a tongue-curling “Rrr,” the superficial devolution of the most respected field in the world, which forced keyboard killers to rebrand themselves as “robot designers,” opening a floodgate of mediocre brogrammers and grrl-coders. Gone were the simple slideshows and a single Tomoki-1, waving gently from a revolving stool like a burrito in a microwave. Gone was the respect for solid code.