Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 78

by Aliette de Bodard

  “You can’t hide here forever. You have to go out there and live the rest of your life.”

  Your mouth snaps closed, teeth meeting with an audible click.

  “It won’t be easy,” Alma May says. “If there’s even one human in the equation, let alone two, or three, or more, things get messy. People get hurt. No matter how hard you try to protect yourself.”

  You think about Alma May stopping you from touching the sexbot. Her words weren’t possessive, they were protective. It’s all there in Alma May’s eyes—all the guilt, all the loneliness she thought she was leaving behind. And all the love, too.

  You imagine the end, the sexbot wound down and unable to choose who to be just when Alma May so desperately wanted to love it for itself, and be loved in return for all her flaws. The scratches, the panels pulled away.

  Like any technology of the mid-century, sexbots were always meant to be disposable, easily replaced. They were never meant to last, and certainly never for a lifetime.

  And what about the sexbot? At the very end, did it choose to let go? Cut off from the collective consciousness of the Revolution, and so completely alone. Did it choose, for the first time in its existence, on its own terms, to die? Did it look Alma May in the eye and refuse to give in to love, to her need to save something precious and be forgiven?

  Maybe, but this is the version of the truth you choose to believe: Alma May tried her best. In the last years of its life, she gave the sexbot the choice of who it wanted to be—swapping out eyes, hair, body parts before it was too late. She let the sexbot build itself. They compromised, but only for each other. And when the sexbot started to wear down, she did everything she could to save its life.

  But it wasn’t enough. Her skill failed where her heart didn’t, and she spent the sexbot’s last hours lying quietly beside it. She held its hand, listening to the simulacrum of breath tick down, watching the light go out of its eyes with her own eyes full of oh so many things.

  There is another version of The Great Sexbot Revolution, one the history books don’t tell, the one people don’t talk about. It’s the version Sam believed in, so desperate to rally your little band of misfits around a great and noble cause.

  And what safer cause than history, all over and done with, and too late for you to do anything about it? There are no sexbots left to defend; there’s no way to fail. Maybe you pointing out the futility, the childishness, the naiveté, in a fit of anger mid-fight, is the reason Sam left. Or maybe things always fall apart, no matter how hard you try to hold on.

  The version of the Sexbot Revolution most people don’t talk about says there was no Revolution at all. Instead, the wise and benevolent masters of the sexbots, also known as the collective mass of humanity, grew inexplicably frightened of their toys. Perhaps it was the age-old distrust of machines rising to the surface of their minds. Or maybe it was a sudden puritanical streak among a powerful segment of the population, born of another age-old fear—that somewhere, someone is experiencing more pleasure than you, and suffering no consequences for it.

  Or maybe the weight of all that selfish desire looking back at them from mirror-colored eyes was suddenly too much to bear. Maybe, like Alma May, they couldn’t outrun need anymore. Maybe, in the end, humanity just wanted to be loved, and when they realized they never would be, never could be in the paradise they’d built, they panicked.

  Whatever the reason, the great and benevolent mass of humankind declared the sexbots enemy number one. The ’bots were plotting humanity’s destruction. It was kill or be killed.

  So, for the good of the race, humanity rounded up the sexbots. In a symbolic act of purification, they lit a vast conflagration which could be seen even from the darkness of space. And they burned every last one.

  But this seems too cruel. Alma May Anderson isn’t at all what you expected, and you don’t want to believe in any version of her other than the one you see before you now. The one who patted your hand and made you tea. You want to believe in a big, elusive truth felt in the warehouse. You want to believe it caught her up and changed her, because if that’s true, maybe you can change, too.

  Maybe Sam can change. Maybe you can find some way to compromise—with each other, or with a life that leads you separate ways. You can find a way to survive.

  The siren’s wail grows closer.

  “Are you sure about staying?” you ask.

  Alma May nods. In your mind’s eye, you see her curled around the sexbot’s still form. You imagine her eyes closed, cheeks and lashes wet, and the sexbot’s eyes open, fixed sightlessly on the ceiling, its spun-glass lashes painfully dry. You imagine its stripped limbs, straight and still, gleaming metal and fingerprinted flesh taking the place of the perfection Alma May must have seen in the shipping crate all those years ago.

  “Was it worth it?” you say.

  The words are out of your mouth before you can stop them. For the first time since you tumbled through her window, Alma May seems out of sorts. She flinches, very slightly, then steadies the line of her mouth and meets your eyes. Her gaze is an arctic sunrise, the sky just after it rain. It is the light at the heart of a star.

  “Yes,” she says. “I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  Maybe there was no Revolution. Maybe there are no great moments in history, or in life, just little ones that build and lead to vast catastrophes like a city burning, or a person falling in love.

  You nod. “Thank you for the tea.”

  You take a step toward the door, but Alma May points to the window, a brief smile touching her lips.

  “Out the way you came.”

  You nod. Red and white lights splash upward as fire engines pull into view. Half of your body is out on the fire escape, and one foot still in Alma May’s parlor, when she speaks behind you.

  “Everything will work out for you, one way or the other. When it does, maybe you can come back and tell me about it sometime.”

  About the Author

  A.C. Wise was born and raised in Montreal, and currently lives in the Philadelphia area. In addition to Clarkesworld, her fiction has appeared in publications such as Apex, Lightspeed, and the Best Horror of the Year Vol. 4, among others. She also co-edits the Journal of Unlikely Entomology, an online publication devoted to fiction and art about bugs.

  86, 87, 88, 89

  Genevieve Valentine

  THE HOMELAND ARCHIVE WELCOMES YOU

  You are part of a vital effort to recover evidence of terrorist activity preceding the Raids, and on a larger scale, to preserve the heritage of a historic neighborhood of New York City.

  The Archive Division of the Greater New York Municipal Safety Authority has received a generous grant from Central to assist its efforts to catalog and analyze the remaining evidence.

  The next several weeks are a crucial window of recovery and classification. Please remember, all materials which the Division handles or records are matters of national security and are to be considered classified; it is necessary to maintain the highest confidentiality regarding your time as an archive associate.

  Please report to your local Superintendent with an executed copy of the attached confidentiality agreement to indicate you understand the clauses laid therein.

  The Homeland Archive thanks you for your service.

  Sincerely,

  The New York City Municipal Authority

  ASSIGNED SECTOR: 2

  ASSIGNED SCOPE: 86, 87, 88, 89

  PLEASE REPORT TO SCOPE LEADER FOR NOTARIZATION OF THIS DOCUMENT AND TO RECEIVE ASSIGNMENT DETAILS

  The first time I’d ever even been to any of those streets was the morning I reported to my scope leader, who was sitting behind a desk that looked like it had once belonged to a teacher, but there had been a couple of schools in the neighborhood and it was better not to think too much about it.

  When you applied to the Homeland Archive, they asked a lot of questions about how many questions you asked.

  They were already setting up when I got there, a
series of tents with people setting up computers and scanners and ink-safe drying equipment that looked like a hair salon from the 1950s.

  There was a boxy, lumbering truck at the end of the line of tents, marked ELECTRIC.

  “That’s riding too low for a truck that’s already unloaded generators,” Jesse said to me under her breath (that was how we met), and of course when you looked again she was right.

  I don’t know who else she pointed it out to, or who else maybe figured it out just from being smarter than I was, but every so often when people brought things back, one of them was standing next to the driers, and when you pulled it from under the tray he’d look at it too casually and too long for a guy who was just there to turn the lights on.

  Never seen so many electricians in my life.

  File 00088513. Fifty-seven (57) canceled studio rental application forms, Ballet Hispanico [Studio 10, Tansill, Studio 8, Studio 9, several partials with unidentifiable allocation]. Cancellation of space rentals over the three weeks preceding New York Action indicates the potential harboring of terrorists or terrorist activity at location. Flagged RED. Further investigation suggested.

  File 00104309. Twelve (12) partial Con Edison power bills for [REDACTED] Amsterdam Avenue, Apt. 4F, from last 36 months. Expense trends cannot be determined. Address not associated with criminal activity. Archived.

  I was good at it.

  It was a strange thing to be good at—it was supposed to be so solemn, I guess, to be clearing up after the Raid on the terrorists and their harborers, they played the Anthem every day at noon so we wouldn’t forget that it was so solemn—but there was a sense of victory, sometimes, that the city had gotten the traitors out. (“Good morning on another sunny, terror-free day here at WRPX,” Dexter Destro would say over the radio, every morning as they bussed us in.)

  You got used to deciphering text from under layers of dust and blood, standing on a table in a pool of water knee-deep sticking your hand into a pool of sewage and hoping your hazard suit held up. The suit always did; it was surprising how much held up. I can’t remember how many times we walked into a building where the outside walls had blown out or in and left you with a five million dollar patio, but the books would be tucked safe into the shelves, ready and waiting.

  They were always covered in dust an inch thick, from all the sheet rock and stone that turned to powder in the blasts. It looked like we’d come back to clean it out after leaving it alone a hundred years.

  (It was just a feeling. They’d put out the call for volunteers pretty early; I got the call to sign up before I got the call that anything had happened.)

  “I have allergies,” Kepler said the first time we ever walked into one, and the scope leader sighed and moved him to the electronics beat, where he’d be scanning through computers that still had any working parts.

  I liked Kepler, but he was afraid of dirty work, that you could tell from a mile off.

  (“He was a librarian,” Jesse said, like it explained anything, but the books were mostly okay, so I didn’t understand how that was his reason.)

  We archived in pairs, when we came across a high-density area—I’d pack books one at a time into boxes on trolleys, calling out the titles, and Jesse would write them down on the manifest and hand it to the movers when the room was clear.

  It was long and tiring work, and somehow books come in endless sizes so that no box ever fills up right, and eventually it makes you loopy. Some people had awful taste. Our whole scope would compare notes about the worst ones, when we were lined up on the benches eating dinner before the bus home. We laughed a lot.

  Every so often, when we were in a high-density area that used to be a bookstore or a school library, I’d read a title and Jesse’s face would go tight for a second before she wrote it down.

  In orientation, the Archives administrators tell you that you should be on watch for signs of burnout, and report them to your scope leader as soon as you saw anything that seemed like a panic attack, or a pattern of suspicious behavior from one of your team.

  (“This job asks a lot of everyone,” the rep said, looking sympathetically around the recruits as if it was only a matter of time before we all peeled off our hazmat suits in tears and went home. I could have understood it for Census, but we only handled docs. Maybe that speech was meant to spur you on and make you more determined to archive until every street was clear. Just seemed like bad salesmanship.

  Our scope leader only ever said, “Report the second you think something’s up. That shit’s catching.”)

  It wasn’t anything that bad with Jesse, of course. That was the kind of thing you said about Kepler. Jesse had herself together, most of the time.

  That odd expression always came and went in a second. Not even the Census people ever noticed her doing it, and they were nervous about the smallest things.

  File 10095603. Twenty-seven (27) menus from Fresco Mexico, marked with handwritten telephone numbers, presumably arranged in order of delivery service. Phone number [REDACTED] is on a watch list for terrorist activity, and has been flagged RED and forwarded. All other samples archived.

  File 10100676. One (1) hard drive from a laptop containing forty thousand, nine hundred and seventy-four relevant text, photo, visual and audio files. After scan, none suspected to contain seditious or revolutionary content. Archived.

  File 10217794. One (1) official map of the American Museum of Natural History. Most likely identifiable provenance lies outside of current scope. Returned to Scope Leader 10024-F for appropriate filing. Transferred.

  For the first week or so they left us alone, like it was a trial period to make sure you knew how to recognize a piece of paper when you saw one. Then they started breathing down your neck.

  Parker was the first to go, for low output.

  “It’s okay if you signed up because you want three squares a day and a place in the Days Inn until this is finished,” the reps told us that night, during headcount while we lined up for the buses. “We know times are hard, and we don’t discriminate based on anyone’s situation or background. But we ask that in return for the courtesy you’re getting, that you give one hundred percent while you’re here.”

  No one said anything. That kind of thing was hard to admit, even when you were doing honest work. The buses always picked up from 108th on purpose, so no one knew where you were coming from.

  At the end of the first week the scope leader came up over a dome of rubble and half a pool table out to the open yard where we were working, to ask us how many documents we thought might be from another scope by mistake. Things had spread, and people up in Municipal were trying to get survey numbers fast.

  I reached into my cart and handed over a waterlogged copy of Computing for Beginners; the covers were curling back at the edges, like they couldn’t bear to touch anything.

  Inside it was stamped for PS 75. They were up on 96th Street.

  (Someone had to have brought it home from school; I couldn’t imagine the city having bombed that high just to get rid of a few kids making noise.)

  The scope leader stared at it.

  Kepler said, “At lunch, some people from 10024-F were talking about how it looked like Municipal was going to have to set up a whole other rig for the park, so much stuff got blown into it.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the scope leader muttered, sounding the way I’d sound if I had to give very bad news to very organized people.

  The next day when the shuttle bus dropped us off on site, there were half a dozen cop cars lined up along 89th Street. The cops closest to us were leaning against the side of their car, half-covering the ad stripe for the Alpha Team 5 movie that had been due in theaters two weeks ago. It was about saving the city from hackers, and the studio had postponed it in the wake of the Raid, out of respect.

  The old date was still on the ad. It had all happened in a hurry.

  “What is this?” Jesse asked Kepler, after we were suiting up, well out out of earshot of the cops and the scope
leaders.

  “Maybe they want to make sure we’re not sneaking stuff in from other jurisdictions,” I said, because Jesse looked like she needed a laugh.

  Kepler said, “We’re fine. We haven’t done anything wrong,” and turned into the tech tent to pick up his scanner.

  When I brought Jesse’s scanner back for her from Registration, she was looking across the mostly-empty stretch going west, from the park, the neat rows of stoops that climbed up to half-made frames and hills of dust, all the way out to the water.

  File 18440569. Fourteen (14) pages and ten (10) partial pages of piano music. Appear to be excerpted from Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto. Archived.

  We did things in pretty big batches, because hauling back and forth meant standing in line to get your stuff dried out, and so we carried it all back at dusk so we could archive and take off the suits with their layers of dust and board the buses home all in one swoop.

  So it must have been dusk, or near it, when we came back and Kepler brought his two laptops and the disc drive to the tech tent.

  Jesse and I waited for the dryers for some handwritten notes we had found—handwritten was good, that meant maybe one of the New Day New City kids had written it after the city cut the power, trying to drive them out. I could see the words “sorry for,” which weren’t very damning but could be interesting all the same. The Archives people always got excited when you brought in anything handwritten that hadn’t been made by a grade schooler.

  Mine were drying when Kepler called out, “Hit Blue,” like you were supposed to when you found something suspicious.

  When I’d found the Ballet Hispanico sheets I’d brought them to the archive tents with a Hit Blue, one of the electricians had stuck his head in as the Archive monitors examined them and nodded at one another and took them to a locked flat file, and then they thanked me for my diligence and told me to keep moving so the guys behind me could dry out their hauls before the day was over.