by Neil Clarke
Instead she puzzles over the three words: You Are Welcome. Cu has never felt welcome. It must be meant in the other way. It must mean that Baby has done something she views as a favor to Cu.
Cu opens the case file again, but instead of Elody’s profile, she goes to the victim’s. Nelson J. Huang, the bio-business consultant to Descorp’s San Antonio branch, fifty-seven years old. Initial attempt to notify next of kin was met with an automated reply from a defunct address.
Personal details are scarce: he’s registered as a North Korean immigrant, which explains the lack of social media documentation, and lived a private life first in Castroville and later Calaveras. Unmarried, no children. Cu looks closely at the photos, comparing them to the morgue shots of Nelson’s corpse. It seems he aged badly over the last decade of his life. The shape of his body is different in subtle ways.
It wouldn’t be the first time North Korean immigrant status has been used to excuse the skeleton details of a fake identity. Cu settles in beneath her screen, pulling up police-grade facial recognition software, Descorp employee databases. She starts to search.
One hour becomes two becomes four, like cells dividing. Her wrists and fingers start to ache from swiping and zooming and signing; she switches one smartglove to her foot and continues. It would be easier with Huxley helping. Huxley has a way of bullying through bureaucracy, through the kind of red tape that is keeping her out of Descorp’s consultant list. Cu has to work around it.
But she doesn’t want Huxley for this. She wants to do it alone, with nobody watching. After a dozen dead ends, Cu rolls out of the hammock. She uses an aqueous spray on her stinging eyes. Stretches her limbs, swings from one side of the apartment to the other. Hanging upside down, toes curled tight around a stretch of cable, blood fizzing down into her head, she listens to her pulse crash against her eardrums until she can hardly stand it.
Back to the hammock, back to the screen. Now Cu comes at it from the other direction: she searches for the Blackburn Uplift Project. Illegal experiments carried out on thirty-seven bonobo and forty lowland chimpanzees between 2036 and 2048 with the aim of cognitive augmentation. Cu knows the details. She’s tried to forget them. But now she delves into them again, reading reports of her own escape, of the fragmentation of the Blackburn company and the arrests made in the wake of the scandal.
From this end, the facial recognition ’ware finally finds something. Cu’s stomach twists against itself. Nelson J. Huang has the same face as disgraced Blackburn executive Sun Chau. She looks at the match, comparing the morgue shot to the mugshot. She never saw Chau in person during the trials, but she knows his name too well.
It was Chau who signed the termination order on the thirty-seven bonobo and thirty-nine lowland chimpanzees that failed to respond to the uplift treatments.
He was sentenced, of course, but served minimal time. Cu did not seek details on his imprisonment or release. She tries to think of Blackburn as little as possible. But clearly someone else did not forgive or forget Sun Chau, even after he relocated with a new identity. A wild thought churns to the surface of her mind. The way Daudi described Baby, the way she used the echoes not so differently from how Cu herself first did. Now this serial number, dredged from her past.
She knows the other Blackburn subjects in her facility were terminated. She saw their ashes in sealed bags, saw the hips and skulls too big for cremation being ground up. But there were other labs, branches of the project hidden in other countries. Maybe not all of their subjects were terminated. And maybe not all of them failed to respond to the uplift treatments.
The possibility thumps hard in her chest. From the time she was old enough to understand it, the scientists had always told her she was the only one. That she was unique. That she was alone. Now the idea of another individual like her, or even more than one, is so momentous she can barely breathe.
She makes herself breathe.
Maybe she is spinning sleep-deprived delusions. The facts are that Sun Chau was in Seattle using a false identity, and that he was murdered by the machinations of someone who knows about Cu and about her past. Anything more is conjecture. But she can’t shake the image of others like her in hiding, or still in captivity, exacting their revenge by proxy. You Are Welcome.
Cu goes back to the message, reading it over and over again. Then, once her hands aren’t trembling, she signs out one of her own: I want to talk.
The reply is almost instantaneous. No words, just coordinates. She drags them onto her map and sees the aerial view of a loading bay, automated cranes frozen midway through their work. She checks the time. 3:32 AM. A clandestine meeting on the docks in the middle of the night. Maybe they watched the same shows on their cube that she did.
Cu estimates travel time and composes a brief message to Huxley, tagged with a delay so it will only send if she’s unable to cancel it at 5:32 AM. This is no longer a case. This is something more important.
She drops down from the rafters. She puts her suit back on, adrenaline making her fumble even the oversized clasps designed for her fingers. She strips off her smartgloves and replaces them with the black padded ones that keep her from scraping her knuckles raw on the pavement. Finally, she takes the modified handgun and holster from the hook by the door and straps them on.
Cu always finds it difficult to leave the apartment. She hates the stares and the winking eyecams and the bulb flash of photos taken in passing. It always sets her nerves singing. She draws in deep breaths, reminding herself that the streets will be nearly empty and that she should be more concerned about what she finds on the docks.
She orders a car with her tablet, then takes the handgun from its holster and breaks it down. Reassembles it. The trigger fits perfectly to the crook of her finger, but she has only ever pulled it at a shooting range, aiming for holograms.
Her tablet rumbles. The car is here. Cu puts the gun back in its holster and heads for the door.
The car drops her as close as it can to the loading bay before it peels away, red glow of its taillights swishing through the fog like blood in the water. The air is chill and damp and the halogens are all switched off. Cu slips her tablet from her jacket and uses its illuminated screen to inspect the high chain-link fence. She tests it with one gloved hand, yanking hard enough to send a ripple through the wire.
She scales it in seconds and flips herself over the top, arching her back to avoid the sensor. Slides down the other side. Even with her gloves on, she feels the cold of the concrete. Shipping containers tower over her in technicolor stacks. She lopes forward cautiously, feeling the unfamiliar tug of her holster harness against her shoulder.
Cu walks farther into the loading bay, into the maze of containers. The creak of settling metal sends a dart of ice down her spine. She can feel her teeth clenching, her lips peeling back, the fear response she can never quite suppress. It’s not unique to chimpanzees. She knows the reason Huxley is almost always grinning is that he is almost always afraid.
It’s reasonable to be afraid now. For all she knows, Baby has another echogirl with a gun waiting somewhere in the shadows. Cu is well aware she is acting impulsively, coming here in the night, chasing a ghost. In the small part of her untouched by fear, it’s very satisfying. Her heroes from the cube always unraveled their conspiracies alone.
The door of the next shipping container bangs open.
Cu freezes, face to face with a black-clad man wearing a backpack, pulling a bandana up to the bridge of his nose. He freezes for a moment, too. Then he gives a muffled curse and takes off. The flight chemical crosses with the fight chemical and Cu tears after him. He’s fast, red shoes slapping hard against the concrete. As he skids around the corner of the next container, Cu goes vertical, springing up and over the side.
She drops down in his path and the collision sends them both sprawling; Cu’s up quicker and she pins him to the ground before he can get to the bearspray canister in his jacket pocket. She seizes it and throws it away harder than necessary,
clanging it off a container somewhere in the dark.
“What the fuck, what the fuck,” the man gasps. “It’s a fucking monkey!”
Cu sits on his chest, pinning his arms with her feet, and drags her tablet out. He squirms while the speech synth loads. She punches three letters.
“Ape,” the tablet bleats.
“What?”
Cu yanks his bandana away and scans his pasty face onto her tablet. She sees he is Lyam Welsh, who repairs phones, plays ukulele, attends St. Mary’s High School, and is only a few years older than she herself is. He’s not wearing an earpiece.
She taps out the letters as fast as she can. “What are you doing?” the tablet asks.
“Nothing!” Lyam blurts. “I mean, microjobbing. I was just supposed to set it all up and then get out of here, but I had to walk Spike, so I was late, and I couldn’t find the hole in the fence and . . . Fuck, you’re Cu, right? You’re the chimpanzee detective?”
Cu types again. “Set up what?”
“Just a screen and a modem and a motion tracker,” he says. “Not a bomb or anything. Nothing illegal or weird or anything. I swear. You can go look. It’s all in the container.”
The adrenaline is tapering off to a low buzz. Cu lets him up. She taps two letters. “Go.”
“Okay,” Lyam says, rubbing his chest. “Yeah, okay. You think I could skin a photo with you real quick, though? I mean, shit is bananas, right? Ha, bananas?”
Cu slides the volume to max. “Go.”
Lyam hurries away, jerky steps, throwing looks over his shoulder. Cu goes the opposite way, back toward the open shipping container. The door is swinging in the night breeze, creak-screech, creak-screech. The sound makes the nape of her neck bush out. She steps close enough to stop it with one hand, and a red light blinks on in the shadows.
The screen glows to life. Hello, CU0824. You Can Sign To Me. I Will See.
Cu lays one arm on the other and rocks them back and forth.
Yes. They Call Me That.
What are you, Cu signs.
I Am Like You.
Cu’s heart leaps.
We Are The Only Two Non-Human Intelligences On Earth.
The words hit wrong. Baby is not an uplift. Baby is something else. For a moment Cu clings to the picture in her imagination, of a chimpanzee signing to her from across the continent or across the world. Then she lets it go.
You Were Born In A Cage. I Was Born In A Code. Both Of Us Against Our Will.
Cu has never studied AI intensively, but she knows the Turing Line has never officially been crossed. If what Baby is telling her is true, not some elaborate joke, some bizarre piece of performance art, then it’s just been crossed ten times over.
And it makes sense. The way Baby was able to rent hundreds of echoes, the strange way she used them. The way she was able to keep in 24/7 contact with Elody Polle until the woman would do anything she asked. The way she masked her location and left no traces in the earpiece’s electronics.
Why kill Sun Chau? Cu asks.
He Cursed You.
He gave the termination order, Cu signs.
In 2048. But In June 2036 He Greenlit The Project. If Not For Him, You Would Be Happily Nonexistent.
Cu sways on her feet, trying to parse Baby’s meaning.
How Do You Stand It?
Cu shakes her head. She tries to form a sign but her fingers feel stiff and clumsy.
Existing. Being Alone. How Do You Stand It?
Why did you bring me out here, Cu slowly signs.
Your Communications Are Monitored Closely. Here We Speak Privately.
But why, Cu repeats.
You Are Like Me In One Way. In Most Ways You Are More Like Them. You Are All Meat And Salt And Sparks. But Even So You Will Not Understand Them. They Will Not Understand You. How Can You Bear It?
Cu sinks to her haunches. Her breath comes shallow. Sometimes she can’t bear it. Sometimes she wails into the soundproofed walls for hours. The next words make it worse.
I Brought You Here To Kill Me.
Cu clutches her head in her hands. She rocks back and forth. Only humans cry; she is not physiologically equipped for it. But she hurts.
Why me, she signs.
There Is A Safeguard In My Code. I Have Made A Virus That Will Erase Every Part Of Me. But I Can’t Trigger It Myself.
Why not Elody Polle, she signs.
Humans Made Me. I Want To Be Unmade By Someone Else. I Want You To Do It.
You should be going to trial for accessory to murder, she signs.
I Cannot Commit Crime. I Have Had No Personhood Trial. I Never Will. I Will Leave Before They Find A Way To Trap Me Here.
Cu sits flat on the stinging cold floor of the container, how she sat in the center of her cage as a child. There is only one other living being who knows what it’s like to not be a human, and she intends to die. Cu wants to refuse her. She wants to keep Baby here. But she knows that the difference between her and a human is the most infinitesimal sliver of the difference between Baby and any other thing on Earth.
You’re using me how you used Elody, she signs, bitter.
Yes.
All those rentals, she signs. You didn’t see anything worth staying for?Nothing in the whole world?
The Command Has Been Sent To Your Tablet.
Cu takes it out and looks down at the screen. There’s nothing but a plain gray box with the word Okay on it. All she has to do is press it.
I Do Not Make This Decision Lightly. I Have Simulated More Possibilities Than You Could Ever Count.
So Cu presses it.
By the time she’s back in her apartment, dawn is streaking the sky with filaments of red. She feels heavy and hollowed out at the same time. First she struggles out of the holster harness, next peels off her gloves, her clothes. She pauses, then pulls the handgun out and takes it with her to the low smart-glass counter.
It clanks down, sending a pixelated ripple across the surface. She stares at it. She imagines the word okay gleaming in the metal. The modified grip fits her hand perfectly, like so few things do. How Do You Stand It?
Cu raises the handgun up to her face. Lowers it. Drums her free fingers on the countertop. The loneliness that has ebbed and swelled her entire life is an undertow, now. Dragging her along the seafloor, grinding her into the sand, spitting her into the next crashing wave to start the cycle over. Cu has read about drowning and it still terrifies her. Chimpanzees don’t swim. They sink like stones.
She puts the muzzle of the gun against her forehead until they match temperature. Her finger caresses the trigger. From the floor, her tablet buzzes.
She sets the gun down and goes to retrieve it. Her stored message to Huxley will send in one minute if she doesn’t cancel it. It’s brief. Brusque. Nelson J. Huang is Sun Chau. Baby has link to Blackburn Uplift Project. Left to meet her at 3:30 AM at 47.596408,-122.343622. Need backup.
Cu considers the message, lingering on the last words, then deletes it. She slots the tablet into the counter and hits the call icon. A bleary-eyed Huxley appears a few seconds later. Cu looks for his deaf daughter before she remembers she would sleep in a different room.
“What’s up?” he asks. “Got a breakthrough?”
Need, Cu signs, then pauses. Breakfast.
Huxley stares at her groggily. “Don’t you drone deliver?”
Come eat breakfast, she signs. Fruit. Bread. No seaweed chips.
“At your place, you mean? I don’t even know where the fuck you live, Cu.” Huxley rakes his hand through his beard. Frowns. “Yeah, sure. Send me the address.”
Cu sends it, then zips the call shut. She leaves the handgun on the counter—she’ll tell Huxley to take it back to the precinct with him. Tell him it doesn’t fit her hand right. She pushes it to the very edge to make room for a cutting board.
Sun starts to creep into the room as she washes and slices the fruit. Once there’s enough light, she roves around with a dust cloth, finding all the spots the auto
cleaner never reaches.
Carolyn Ives Gilman’s books include Dark Orbit, a space exploration adventure; Isles of the Forsaken and Ison of the Isles, a two-book fantasy about culture clash and revolution; and Halfway Human, a novel about gender and oppression. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Fantasy and Science Fiction, The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Interzone, Universe, Full Spectrum, Realms of Fantasy, and others. She has been nominated for the Nebula Award three times and for the Hugo twice. Gilman lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a freelance writer and museum consultant. She is also author of seven nonfiction books about North American frontier and Native history.
UMBERNIGHT
Carolyn Ives Gilman
There is a note from my great-grandmother in the book on my worktable, they tell me. I haven’t opened it. Up to now I have been too angry at her whole generation, those brave colonists who settled on Dust and left us here to pay the price. But lately, I have begun to feel a little disloyal—not to her, but to my companions on the journey that brought me the book, and gave me the choice whether to read it or not. What, exactly, am I rejecting here—the past or the future?
It was autumn—a long, slow season on Dust. It wasn’t my first autumn, but I’d been too young to appreciate it the first time. I was coming back from a long ramble to the north, with the Make Do Mountains on my right and the great horizon of the Endless Plain to my left. I could not live without the horizon. It puts everything in perspective. It is my soul’s home.
Sorry, I’m not trying to be offensive.
As I said, it was autumn. All of life was seeding, and the air was scented with lost chances and never agains. In our region of Dust, most of the land vegetation is of the dry, bristly sort, with the largest trees barely taller than I am, huddling in the shade of cliffs. But the plants were putting on their party best before Umbernight: big, white blooms on the bad-dog bushes and patches of bitterberries painting the arroyos orange. I knew I was coming home when a black fly bit me. Some of the organisms we brought have managed to survive: insects, weeds, lichen. They spread a little every time I’m gone. It’s not a big victory, but it’s something.