Automatic Reload
Page 29
“Wait here.” She holds her palms flat, placating me. “Maybe she needs help in the kitchen.”
“You be a guest!” Mama says.
“I’m not a guest, I’m family!” Silvia screams back in a commanding shout I have never heard from her before. “Hang on. I’ll find out what’s going on.”
“Shoot me,” I whisper. She kisses me on the forehead.
I watch the television, trying to screen out the commotion in the kitchen. The news has become a fascinating game these days, if you know where to pay attention.
I mean, first off, there’s the unsettling way in which the massive police showdowns I got into were somehow redirected to poor dead Donnie, even though the facts never quite matched up. There were seven murdered cops—and though I tell myself I reprogrammed the not-IAC to run according to my fabulous principles, I remain highly aware that my new buddy had slaughtered without conscience up until five weeks ago.
I don’t know what I would have done—no, that’s a lie, I do. I would have looked at the shitty options the former IAC had left the new-and-ethical IAC, and decided the old techniques of “quash the news, alter the evidence, and bribe who’s bribable” worked equally well for justice’s sake.
I suppose I should be glad my ass isn’t in jail. The not-IAC has assured me those cops’ families will never have financial troubles again. Yet watching seven cops’ lives erased to fit in with a nicer story?
I don’t know if anyone should have that power. Even me.
Though I brighten at today’s top headline—because if you pay attention, the news time devoted to “basic income” has crept up over the last month or so. News hosts are starting to debate the topic—the conservative commentators are, predictably, resisting the idea of some welfare queen making off with their hardworking money, but there’s been a quiet sea change in how basic income is discussed.
We’re starting to ask whether we’ve automated too much.
We’re starting to ask whether the people serve the economy, or the economy serves the people.
And if you look closely, the polls in the last five weeks have ticked up .3 percent in favor of what’s being called “economic reform.” The approval ratings for basic income are still abysmal, natch, but we’re asking what we should do when humans don’t need to work.
There’s even subtler changes if you dig close. Small-town politicians with once-crazy ideas are getting quiet donations from anonymous sources. Clickbait headlines are leading to nuanced discussions, rewarding the media for publishing deeper stories. Unflattering revelations about corrupt corporations are floating to the surface.
The former IAC isn’t ramming the idea down our throats—because I wouldn’t have—but they are changing the dialogue. Floating the truth to the top. Encouraging people to ask the right questions.
I don’t know everything the not-IAC’s up to. I suspect their dirty work would revolt me. Monsters to fight monsters.
Yet I wonder: there was a time when humans believed computers were incapable of transcribing audio. They thought computers couldn’t drive a car better than a person. They thought computers would never be able to practice law better than the lawyers; they thought computers would never be able to read X-rays better than radiologists; they thought computers could never program better than the programmers.
They beat us. They beat us at everything.
Now we get to see whether computers can be more ethical than humans. And even though I suspect the former IAC will usher in a far, far better world than messy humanity could ever manage, I still tremble to think of our last obsolescence.
“Sweetie?” Silvia stands in the doorway, clutching her hands to her breast.
Behind her, Mama’s adjusting the forks on the table, Vala bringing out a soup tureen. There’s so many dishes on the table, enough to feed an army; they must have been cooking all day.
Mama gives me a stern look—I am the man her daughter has unwisely chosen to fall in love with. Even though I saved Silvia’s life and rescued them from computerized captivity, that does not mean I am good enough to date her daughter. My every bite will be analyzed to see whether I appreciate the meal, all my intents towards her precious daughter will be interrogated.
“It’s not too late,” Silvia whispers, leaning in. “We can find a gunfight somewhere.”
“No.” I take her hand. “Let’s do this.”
Works Cited
Act 1: Eva Dou and Olivia Geng, “Humans Mourn Loss After Google Is Unmasked as China’s Go Master,” The Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2017.
Act 2: Dawn Chen, “The AI That Has Nothing to Learn From Humans,” The Atlantic, October 30, 2017.
Act 3: Peter Heine Nelson. 2017. “Chess.” Facebook, December 6, 2017. https://facebook.com/chess/posts/10156037915519571.
Afterword
They say that all books are a conversation with each other. In this case, Automatic Reload is very specifically a word I’m having with K. C. Alexander.
Don’t worry, though. It’s a good word.
See, I read K. C. Alexander’s cyberpunk novel Necrotech, and in it they had a marvelously violent female cyborg who exuded a steady stream of don’t-give-a-fucks. And because K. C.’s prose is so sharp and evocative, I kept watching their heroine Riko and her artificial limb wake up in garbage-smeared alleyways and lice-filled jailbeds and all manner of disgusting places …
And while I loved following Riko around, I kept asking one question:
When does she field-strip and clean that damn thing?
I mean, Riko kept landing in slimy, gunky situations and her artificial limb never seized up. And while I was waiting for the scene where Riko had to spend the day oiling and tightening her neglected limb, I started imagining my own “maintenancepunk” novel where I had a guy who did some serious tuning.
That thought experiment turned into Automatic Reload. So if you liked this but maaaybe wanted a little less maintenance and a little more mayhem, you could do worse than to throw K. C. a buck or two.
(Ironically, K. C. wound up blurbing this book, so I’m glad they enjoyed it. If we’re gonna be having a conversation through novels, it might as well be a cordial one.)
* * *
Before I get into all the people I gotta thank for this book, lemme tell you a story:
I was in Manhattan, doing drinks with my editor—which is not a commonplace occurrence for me, believe you me. (I have yet to meet my agent in the flesh. I live online. You have no proof that I’m not an AI.)
And I was feeling quite fancy, because Diana Pho had just purchased my book The Sol Majestic, and I was going to have drinks with my editor, and I had never felt so fancy.
So Diana sits down next to me and my partner, and we discuss my book, and she tells me that what she loved about The Sol Majestic was that it was so cozy, that it was just a sweet, slow-paced story that you could curl up in, and it had this gentle tone she’d fallen in love with …
At which point, I blurted out, “… My next book has a fifty-page car chase sequence!”
I never write the same book twice, apparently. It’s a failing.
But the point is that Diana bought this book-that-was-not-cozy, this flickering tension-line of fast bullets and faster processing power, so let us all thank Diana for giving me platforms for my whacky rides.
And the other point is that if you didn’t like this book, you might like The Sol Majestic, and if you didn’t like The Sol Majestic, you probably should read this book. Though hopefully you’ll love both of ’em. Yeah, let’s go with that.
(And while we’re at it, let’s all thank the fine people at Tor who helped this book along—Callum Plews, Tim Campbell, MaryAnn Johanson, and Desirae Friesen. And thanks to my agent, Evan Gregory, who may be an AI himself!)
Now, if you’ve read my usual afterwords, you’d know this is where I thank all of my beta readers by name, often pointing out a specific place where they helped me out. But as I’m writing this, I have spent a solid week att
empting to get my old laptop—the one where I stored all my old emails before, reluctantly, migrating to the cloud—up and running, and it is dead. (Blame the IAC. They do not want you to know.)
So alas, I can’t bring up the names in time for this deadline. I encourage you to visit my site www.theferrett.com/automatic_thanks, where I will have them listed by name there.
Thanks go to my usual Anxiety Cuddle Squad—Shakira, Aileen, Kalita, and Laura, who helped hold me down when I was about to freak out about Book. Thanks to my, uh, best friend Angie, who now has a new kidney so she’s a little bit cyborg herself.
Thanks to my mom, dad, and Uncle Tommy—but especially my dad, who brought me to Pitney Bowes when I was a kid to show me how all the ticker-tape and punch-card machines work, the now-antique but then-big-hardware computing technology that dazzled me and still does.
Thanks be to God. I prayed a lot while I was writing this. It helped.
But as always, there’s one woman who is to thank above all else for this. As I type this, we are preparing to head out on a massive vacation to celebrate our twentieth anniversary—a meandering, nine-day van trip to Yellowstone which we are calling our “Vanniversary.”
As of now, I don’t know how that trip will go. (If you want to find out, follow my blog at www.theferrett.com or my Twitter feed at @ferretthimself, but you’ll have to look back to October 2019.)
But I know I’ve traveled with this woman for twenty years, and wherever she goes, I will follow.
I love you, Gini.
Arf.
Ferrett Steinmetz
@ferretthimself on Twitter
www.theferrett.com
Read on for a preview of
THE SOL MAJESTIC
Ferrett Steinmetz
Available now from Tom Doherty Associates
A Tor Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-250-16819-1
Copyright © 2019 by Ferrett Steinmetz
2
After Sixty Minutes on Savor Station
Kenna sucks on a plastic bead as he follows the eight-year-old girl around Savor Station, trying to work up the nerve to mug her.
She’s pudgy, dressed in a little blue uniform, a kid wandering through the crowded hallways like she’s in no danger at all. The tracker tag on her wrist makes Kenna think maybe she isn’t. She cruises to a stop to watch some cartoon advertisement on the overhead monitors, reaches into an oil-stained bag of meat jerky to chew on it absently. Kenna hates her for the way she can eat without paying attention; put jerky in his mouth, and it would fill his whole world.
He sucks harder on the bead. More saliva. Fools the stomach into thinking something’s on the way, which of course it isn’t unless he mugs this little girl.
He pushes past tourists consulting overhead maps, edging close enough to grab the bag. He should. He has to.
Kenna hesitates again.
The girl moves on, wandering into the glassine cubicles of merchant’s stalls, darting between shoppers’ legs. She passes a shop heaped with tubs of fresh fish, flopping as they’re released from expensive time-stasis cubes; the salt-ocean smell makes Kenna wipe drool from dry lips even though he’s straying dangerously close to the tawdry commerce areas. He steps towards the fish, like a man in a dream—and as he stumbles forward, the security cameras whirr to focus on him. The merchant senses Kenna’s stray-cat approach, quietly shifts his body to deny him access.
Could he beg the merchant for scraps? Kenna takes another dazed step forward, reaching out plaintively. The merchant’s lips tense as he readies well-worn excuses: if I give scraps to one boy then I will be swarmed by beggars, a purveyor of quality goods cannot be seen surrounded by hobos, I’m sure you understand.
Kenna turns away, knowing exactly what the merchant will say before he utters a word. He’s dodged many embarrassments by intuiting potent visions extracted from body language, and Kenna has paid dearly the few times he’s ignored his instincts.
Yet he’s glad the stalls don’t have jobs posted. He’d sell his labor for a fish. Mother and Father would never talk to him again, of course—you don’t learn a trade, your Philosophy is your trade. They have left Kenna behind in the common areas while they negotiate meetings with Savor Station’s visiting politicians, hunting for an opportunity to lend their wisdom to powerful legislators. But though Kenna tries to remember his parents’ lectures on providing insights so profound that leaders will pay to hear them, his growling belly drowns out their voices.
They’ve been Inevitable for so long they’ve forgotten how to fear death. They hesitate whenever they lecture him, squinting with the effort of attempting to translate their enlightened experience into Kenna’s debased state; the only time he’s seen them falter is when they try to explain how they unlocked their Inevitable Philosophy. You find strength in the suffering of others, Mother intones, or Father tells him Once you realize what’s truly at stake, you come to realize how little you matter.
But Kenna’s felt his heart stuttering from malnutrition, and once again his nascent Philosophies fall away when survival calls.
The girl ambles on, waving cheerful hellos as she strolls between the stalls; Kenna scans the market for better targets. The other shoppers, maybe? No. They’re big. Healthy. His hands shiver from malnutrition. They’d yell for security right away, he’d get jailed, shaming Mother and Father.
He imagines justifying this crime to them. They had food already; I didn’t. She didn’t need that food; I do. Yet he’s already heard them whispering consultations with each other, fretting how all the Princes of old had their Wisdom Ceremony before they were fifteen. Kenna’s sixteenth birthday was a month ago, and now Mother and Father’s muttered discussions have taken on the panicked hiss of monarchs debating whether Kenna can continue to be the Inevitable Prince if he does not shape his Inevitable Philosophy.
Being arrested might be his final fall from grace.
Kenna should hate them. Instead, he envies their Inevitability. Mother and Father’s bottomless compassion gets them up in the morning; their love keeps them moving when Kenna wants to curl up and die. They’re waiting in some old politician’s lobby, chasing flickering embers of power. Once Father’s Inevitable Philosophy convinces the right potentates, he’ll lead his people out of darkness.
When Father chants I will lead my people out of darkness!, Kenna can feel the limitless strength bound in those words—yet though Kenna spends hours meditating upon the revolutionary changes that should be made for the benefit of all, the best philosophies Kenna can muster are pleasant platitudes that crumple into guilt whenever Kenna’s stomach growls.
Kenna has no people. He has no compassion. He has no Philosophy. All he has is a girl with a bag of meat jerky—a girl skipping into Savor Station’s main arteries.
Kenna follows her, chest hitching with self-loathing.
It’s more crowded here, his every footstep blocked by bag-toting porters and gawking tourists and miniature forklifts ferrying crates. Though this curved ring is wide enough to hold hundreds of passengers, the space is all elbows and bulkheads, which makes sense; each square inch cost thousands of dinari to build, a sliver of safety constructed in pure vacuum by brute labor.
Kenna creeps closer. The girl babbles at a porter, discussing some show; he sidles up, sliding his fingertips across the bag’s tantalizing oiliness.
All he has to do is clench his fingers, and yank, and run.
He imagines the girl’s shocked face as he tugs the jerky from her hands, that little-girl shock of discovering that anyone can take anything from you if they’re big enough, and he realizes this is what it would take to survive:
He would have to become a bully.
Kenna howls. Startled, the girl drops her jerky, but Kenna does not notice; he’s pushing people aside, fleeing. He cannot stop crying, but he can move so fast that no one has time to notice his tears. He wants so badly to throw all this honor aside to stuff his mouth with meat and be happy and shivering …
… but he is no
t a thief.
Oh, how he envies thieves.
Do you have to be so dramatic, Kenna? he can hear Mother chiding him. But she’s carved away everything that doesn’t advance her Philosophies—she’s whittled herself down to perfect postures, to primly smoothed robes, to unceasingly polite rules of etiquette.
If he had an Inevitable Philosophy, he would never lose control. But he does not, so he runs.
His legs spasm. Kenna collapses by a long line of people—Savor Station is criss-crossed with lines, lines of people getting passports, lines to get on ships, lines to fill out job applications, lines to—
DO YOU LOVE FOOD? a sign flashes.
The sign itself is written in a flowing, sugary goodness, a message in frosting. It writhes like a dancer pulling veils across herself, highlighting a carved wood booth crammed into a corner.
Wood, Kenna thinks. What madman hauls wood across solar systems to put it in a lobby? He knows vandals; on the transit-ship, this would have been carved to pieces.
Yet even in the elbow-to-ass room of Savor Station, people make space for this little alcove, as if the dark wood booth is an ambassador from some great kingdom. It has a confessional’s solemn pall—but the people lined up before it have the expectant looks of lottery contestants, chatting eagerly about their chances and wringing their hands as they fantasize about winning. A stiff pressed linen curtain gives privacy as each new person steps into the booth, muttering well-practiced speeches. The line’s end is nowhere in sight.
The sign contorts, bowing, then unfolds into a new set of letters: THE SOL MAJESTIC.
Kenna has no idea what that means, but he longs to be a part of it already.
The sign is whisked away as though by a breeze; smaller words float across the empty space like lotus blossoms drifting across a lake. THE MOST EXCLUSIVE RESTAURANT IN ALL THE GALAXY. ONLY EIGHTEEN TABLES. RESERVATIONS MUST BE MADE TWO YEARS IN ADVANCE.