The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  Our pictures are being analyzed the world over by scientists and amateurs and nutcases via our Citizen Science Initiative. We hope someone will find something. But the far more exciting pictures from a major mission to a water world are eclipsing ours. As is, need I mention, the latest cluster of wars.

  Still, we have some traffic. When we discover something it immediately goes to our site, becomes global and public. Our reports are clear and contextual—they lack the aloofness of scientific papers, but they’re plenty rigorous. Then the world gets to dissect, shred, and analyze what we have to say. Like our finances, everything is public, everything is transparent. I like to think we are changing the culture of science, from the margins, a fringe bunch of scholar-activists in little circles around the world. I’ve realized after all these years that what’s bothered me about Western science is that there is no responsibility. No reciprocity. You just have to be curious and work hard and be smart enough to discover something interesting. The things you discover, you have no relation to, no responsibility for—except through some kind of claim-staking. I grew up in two worlds—the world of conventional science, and the world of the Navajo. I used to think there was an insurmountable wall between them. But looking through Avi’s eyes, I’m beginning to see whole. I’m feeling more complete.

  Of course, there really is no such thing as a complete person. That’s another Western concept, isn’t it? We are open systems, we eat, we excrete, we interdepend. We feel your absence like a three-legged chair.

  Chirag:

  The lindymotes did not belong here. They had been forged in the lava beds, and here it was cold, so cold! Some of them were swept by the currents past the great cliffs of the boundary into the fabled nightside, where they nucleated tiny snowflakes as gases condensed around them, snowing on the frigid, tortured landscape. But others managed to stay in the boundary lands—flung against the canyon walls, they left their tiny footprints on the surface, only to slide down into sheltered gullies. Here they found that the wind was not as strong, and they could perceive the twists and turns of invisible pathways, magnetic field lines. They felt the pull and tug of these, and aligned themselves so. The invisible pathways changed, sometimes slowly, sometimes at random, but the lindymotes followed them like little flocks of sheep across a meadow.

  I know metals and money. I went into metallurgy because I wanted to see if there was a way around extractive industries like mining. And I went into money because I wanted to kill that god, Money. Nothing against money, but Money? No. I know what it does to people.

  Actually I wanted to jump-start an economy based on retrieving metals from waste, so that we didn’t have to destroy lands and peoples for ore. In our college days, I promised Kranti on more than one drunken night that I would change the world. But I’ve been sober since, drunk only on the tragic poetry of life.

  And here we are, on the verge of discovery. Kranti suspects that we have discovered a form of life so alien that we can barely recognize it. She gave me some technical stuff about orthogonal Walker Indices and negative subzones of phase space—but what it boils down to is that there are, possibly, at least two life-forms on Shikasta b.

  One is Avi, or what he has become.

  How to explain Avi? It is a task nearly as impossible as explaining you. To explain Avi—and Bhimu—to explain them is to go back in time to you and me, but where to begin? Perhaps it should be the time you lent me your battered copy of Jagdish Chandra Bose’s Response in the Living and the Non-Living. It was somewhere between Ambedkar and Darwin, I think—you had been pushing books on me, my English and Hindi were both improving, my head was singing with ideas, a magnificent incoherence within which my slowly awakening mind wandered, intoxicated. From my mother’s simplistic dreams for me, which I had unconsciously adopted—a good job and reasonable wealth, freedom from want, your usual middle-class unexamined life— from that, you took me to a place that whispered, “the universe is larger than this.” I remember the exact moment I opened the book and Bose’s dedication leapt out at me, “to my fellow countrymen,” as though the great scientist had himself touched my hand across time. I knew already that he was anti-caste, that he had the ability to walk away from fortune, and that his contributions had only been recognized decades after his death. But it was because of that book that I got really interested in metals. I decided then to go into metallurgy, even though the engineering program’s chief objective was to produce mining engineers. Why not get to know the monster intimately? My real interest was in the mining of landfills, in reclamation of metals from electronic waste—but what caught my poetic imagination was the possibility that metals were alive, in some metaphorical sense, if not the literal. Bose’s experiments on plants and metals under stress elicited similar responses— he had made some conceptually audacious suggestions that were laughed off or politely dismissed. Only in recent times, with the greatly increased understanding of plant sentience and communication—man, he would have loved mycorrhizal networks—have some of his ideas gained credence. But metals—we know that metals are not alive in the usual sense. Metals in their pure form allow for flow, just as living systems do. That we are all electrical beings, that life is electricity, is true enough, but not all electricity is life. Still, when I first started to learn about metals, I saw in my imagination the ions studded in an ever-surging sea of valence electrons, the metallic forms so macroscopically varied, silver and pale yellow, sodium, soft as butter against the hardness of steel, the variations in ductility and malleability, the way rigid iron succumbed to softness under heat—I saw all this and I wanted to know metal, to know it for its own sake as much as for its practical use. That’s how you really know anything, anyway.

  Between your mind and mine—yours trained in artificial intelligence, mine in metallurgy—Avi’s predecessors were born, starting with Kabariwallah, made to find metal waste in trash dumps. Celebrating over daru, we began to argue about ethics—Frowsian models of value emergence in technological development, if I remember correctly. Somehow the notion came up of AI sentience, hotly debated for over a decade before us, as network intelligences started to pass the lowest-level Turing tests. The AI Protection Clauses started to be invoked and applied. You said, “to restrain a being, any being that is capable of sentience, is to put a baby in a maximum-isolation prison cell because you are afraid it will grow up a criminal.” I argued that artificial intelligence was not like the baby, not human at all. It was alien, despite its human parents. Wasn’t that why there were laws against the development of free AIs? For any AI system there must be a balance between the freedom of complexity and the necessity of control. You looked at me with that intent, dark gaze and sighed. “Don’t you get it? The restraint protocols are about slavery, not ethics. The question is not whether or not we should build free AIs. The challenge is—having built one, how do you teach it how to be ethical? For whatever we mean by ‘ethical?’”

  Thus Avi’s precursors came about: experiments in the university’s frigid AI development labs while the air burned outside. Finally you came up with the idea that an AI capable of learning could only acquire an ethical compass the way children do. So you and I became parents to the robots that would eventually give birth to Avi. The final development took us from pre-Avi-187 to Avi and his conjoined twin Bhimu. They were our babies. But you were the one who took Avi-Bhimu home with you every night, took them to work, to classes, to demonstrations, to children’s birthday parties.

  Avi-Bhimu’s Walker Index earned each of them an Electronic Person identity chip, but an EP is only the lowest common denominator among the top-class AIs. What we’ve done, what you did, really, is to create a new class of artificial intelligence altogether: an ultrAI. Whether ultrAIs are sentient in the way we understand it, we don’t yet know. They are free to learn and grow, yet grounded in years-long ethical training resulting from close contact with the same group of humans. There are only two ultrAIs in the entire universe, Avi and Bhimu. You might say the great wor
ldnet AIs, the distributed Interweb intelligences, are just as complex and unpredictable, but Avi and Bhimu are so much closer to us, bound as they are in their metal-ceramic bodies, with bioware networks rather like our nerves. AIs are indeed alien; we know now we cannot download human consciousness into an AI because the physicality matters—but I have to admit that one of the reasons I can’t spend more time in immer with Avi is because every step he takes up a rock wall makes my heart jump like an over-worried parent.

  Now—I say now, despite the four-year time lag—Avi’s been behaving oddly. The reports he sends back are cryptic and terse. He is sending us images and data, but he’s stopped chatting, and his tone has changed. No explanation as to the odd dancing steps, no streaming feed of his thought process as he makes hypotheses and tests them, which he’s designed to do. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it feels as though he is preoccupied. His neural activity is faster and more intense than we’ve ever recorded, which means he’s learning at a prodigious rate. We’ve sent queries of course, but we won’t have the answers for another eight years. So we must draw our own conclusions.

  I wish we had Bhimu with us to help us understand him.

  Kranti:

  Have we really discovered life on Shikasta b?

  One thing we know about life is that living things have a larger phase space of possibilities. A stone falling down a cliff is limited by gravity. But a mountain goat can step to the side, he can go up or down.

  That is why one of the things Avi has been doing is looking for apparent violations of physical law. This is not at all easy. He has found crystalline formations inside some of the caves and tunnels—but you cannot look at entropy alone. Order is also found in nonliving things. In my field we say information inscribes matter. But when something is alive, the information flow is top-down causal. So we need to see whether flow of information becomes—alive—when its causal structure is determined by the largest scale on which it can have a distinct form.

  What Avi found was a mat of lindymotes, the lava dust that—now we know to look for it—is everywhere in Shiprock Canyon. The recurring dust devil we call Dusty Woman leaves layers of dust on the rocky surfaces as she dances. The dust is everywhere, even in the caves and tunnels. It is basically silica dust, crystalline fragments with hydrocarbons mixed in.

  Avi found a mat of this stuff on the base of some of the rock formations. During a lull in the wind, it moved up a rock face, very slightly. That could just be some small-scale atmospheric vortex, but he’s recorded the same thing multiple times, in different wind and weather conditions, from dead still air to gales. The vortex event was the strangest. I was there, looking through Avi’s eyes, and I saw the Dusty Woman start dancing. Avi was recording the wind speed and gradient, and I saw the Dusty Woman pause—yes, pause, in the middle of the dance. Imagine it, in the light of Avi’s headlamps: the wind still blowing, but the dust formation holding.

  There are so many possible non-life scenarios for this phenomenon. The first thought in my mind was liquid helium II—in spite of its peculiar behavior, it is not alive. So we can’t discount the possibility of a non-life explanation.

  We have been discussing all this nonstop until we get tired. In the evenings we sit with bottles of beer or cups of chai and watch the city skyline. There are the searchlights arcing through the polluted air. In the distance are the Citadel towers like multicolored candles. Chirag plays our stories back to us.

  The lindymotes lay on the rock face to rest. They felt the stirrings, small and large, and rearranged themselves. They were flung into a dance by great vortices of air, and they went whirling. When the whirling stopped as the wind died, the lindymotes felt the magnetic field lines shift and change, and held their place for a moment before falling slowly down on to the surface.

  “We are playing!” said some of the lindymotes.

  “We are being played with,” said others in wonder.

  “We are becoming something,” said some of the lindymotes.

  “We are making something,” said others.

  And so they knew they were themselves, tiny and separate, but together they were Dusty Woman.

  One of the things I learned from my grandfather is that you cannot separate life from its environment. Understand an environment well enough, and you will understand what kind of life might arise there. Environment is the matrix that works with the life force to generate life-forms. That is how the environment becomes aware of itself, when it intra-acts at different scales. So I try to keep my mind open to possibility, even when my imagination comes up with something fantastic, so later on I can apply the constraints that are needed. Imagination has an even larger phase space of possibility than life. Sometimes in the immersphere I feel I am slipping away from Earth itself. It is scary but also exciting.

  Annie:

  Today I am a little shaky. I was stopped by a cop last night. I was walking back through campus at close to midnight when it found me. Its swiveling eyes locked on me, and the voice, gravelly and machine-like, said: Stop. Do Not Move. It scanned me top to bottom with the blue light. The cops can make mistakes. But it found me in its database and I was released. Some of my friends are convinced that the so-called mistakes are deliberate, used as a cover-up to kill leaders of the resistance. My colleague Laura was one of the “mistakes.” Nobody was punished for her death. The AI tribunal pronounced the cop guilty of an interpretation error, and it was wiped. And that was the end of it. I’ve heard drone killings are better because they are swift—you have no time to be afraid. The drones are so small that you only notice them, if at all, when you are about to die.

  Okay, deep breath. I am alive, I am alive. And what about life on Shikasta 464b?

  I think a non-life explanation is the most likely. Magnetism is the most obvious thing to consider. Shikasta 464b has a roughly octupolar magnetic field that doesn’t do much to protect it from its star’s solar wind. The peculiar magnetic field, I believe, is due to the extreme heat of the dayside, which causes magma to upwell from the interior onto the surface, dragging with it denser magnetic minerals in long wisps and tendrils. This also causes the local variations in the magnetic field in both space and time.

  I’ve looked at Avi’s analysis of the dust fragments. Lots of silica and basalt grains, and—magnetite crystals! Not surprising that the dust moves around in response to the variations in the local magnetic field. There is so much magnetic material churning close to the surface of Shikasta b that the local fields must be shifting all the time. This would result in magnetic dust moving in weird ways, like Avi has observed. A relatively mundane non-life explanation for Dusty Woman’s behavior. Of course, as Kranti points out, the environment shapes the possibilities for life. It would hardly be surprising that if life exists on this world, it would take advantage of the peculiar magnetic field distribution.

  So. How would life adapt to magnetism, especially to complex and ever-changing magnetic fields? We have magnetotactic bacteria on Earth, and birds that migrate based on the little crystals in their skulls. But navigation wouldn’t be much use when the magnetic fields are so weirdly distorted, when they change all the time.

  The three of us have been talking about a new idea that is beginning to take shape. Our old questions: (a) What separates life from non-life? (b) Why is it that so many indigenous cultures regard the universe itself as alive? I think of my grandmother’s string games during winter nights. Her fingers working. The constellations shifting from one to another. My favorite is Two Coyotes Running Away From Each Other. Her fingers and the strings between them hold the cosmos in a way I can’t articulate.

  This is what we are thinking: that there is no clear boundary between life and non-life as biologists define it. The answer to “what is life?” depends on your context. My people, like Kranti’s people, knew long ago that the universe is connected, every bit linked with every other bit, and even the bits changing form and purpose all the time. This is not mere mysticism—it is consistent w
ith science. If science had not started as a reductionist enterprise through an accident of history, this idea would be familiar. Over the last few days the three of us have been mapping “information channels” or “communication pathways,” although we are not certain these are the same thing. We started with a diagram of a human—there are stabilizing negative feedback loops within each organ for homeostasis, but from organ to organ these pathways connect, forming even larger meta-loops. But because humans are open systems, the pathways connect outside us, to the biosphere itself. They connect with the negative and positive feedback loops of the ocean (breathable oxygen, thank you, phytoplankton) and climate as a whole, as well as human-human interactions. Zoom out beyond the biosphere and the density of connections thins out, but the threads are still there—solar irradiation providing light and heat, cosmic rays influencing mutations, magnetic fields, gravitational fields reaching out through space between planet and star, planet and planet. Zoom in, into the human body, down to the cells, down to the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, and the pathways are there, tangled and dense. There may be some kind of fractal self-similarity governing the scale change. If we draw this “loop diagram” for a part of our biosphere, what do we see? The densest loops are those within living organisms, because they must have stabilizing feedbacks to allow for steady states, for homeostasis. “But even rocks have these,” I told Kranti and Chirag exultantly. Rocks “communicate” through the laws of physics and geology—they sense gravity, they are subject to heat and pressure, they participate in cycles at long and short scales, from weathering to the carbonate silicate cycle, for example. “Their loops are just not as dense.”

  So then what is life, and what is not-life, depends on what cutoff choice you make in communication loop density. There is no a priori distinction between life and non-life.