by Neil Clarke
I stared.
“Well? Are you going to shoot me?” he said.
11.
There is something wrong with the memory, something profoundly wrong. The prisoner twists and turns on the chains above the mikveh. We try to tune the image, to sharpen it. Our tentacles grate into his skin. We cause him a great deal of pain, we think. His organic form is too delicate to withstand such pressures. His body is coming apart at the seams. Yet we keep him alive. We need him, what he carries. We magnify. We see.
Though it has human form, it is no human being. An Abomination.
The picture grows fuzzy, then clear. We can hear their voices now, tinny in our ears.
Shemesh: “You’re a robot?” Ishmael: “Not . . . exactly.”
He looks at Shemesh, and smiles; and we have the sudden and awful feeling that he—it—is looking at us. It has silver skin and a humanoid shape, an expressive mouth, sharp, twinkling eyes. We had thought its kind extinct; like the rest.
Shemesh: “Then what are you?”
Ishmael: “It was Rabbi Abulafia, in the first millennium A.E., who posited a heresy.” Shemesh: “Yes?”
“Things were different in that time. The worlds were wilder, the chosen were fewer, the laws were less rigid. There was an Exilarch, but back then it was just a person with a title, not the . . . thing it has since become. At that time there were still the indigenous worlds, of what you, in your ignorance, call the Ashmoret Laila, those of the night. They were not yet confined to the rim, pushed from their home worlds, made to hide in places such as this, in the forgotten nooks and crannies of the universe.”
Shemesh: “Thank you for that history lesson.”
Ishmael: “Which you need. This history has been erased.”
Shemesh: “It is a lie.”
Ishmael: “At that time, relations were different. There was trade, there were even friendships. And then Rabbi Abulafia posited the heresy for which he would be condemned in generations to come. For he suggested that we were not, after all, Treif. That though we were different life forms, we were still God’s chosen, too, just as you were.”
Shemesh: “I was sent to kill you.”
Ishmael smiles. Can a robot smile? We wonder, uneasily. We try to focus on him—it. He seems so at peace. Shemesh: “What are you?” Ishmael: “Let me show you.” He reaches for his chest, and opens it.
Inside we see a glistening, organic thing. A complex network of tubing and blood. We think of the mind-molluscs of Ashmoret III. We note Shemesh’s eyes widen.
They speak to him, we realise. Telepathically. These Abominations, these creatures we would have die a thousand deaths.
Treif! We scream. Prohibited!
We will Shemesh to shoot. To press the trigger! Kill it, kill them all, as you did all the others, boy! Yet Shemesh stands frozen.
12.
THE TESTAMENT ACCORDING TO SHEMESH, PART IV
The creatures had me then. Once more I was transported to my last mission, hunted under the moons of Ashmoret III; for endless nights I ran through the low-lying, humid swamps, seeking shelter in caves and hidden alcoves, as the Treif spoke into my mind, whispering words of love and forgiveness and sorrow, and saying that this was all folly. Endlessly I ran, firing, and they died, but more and more came. Then the Vey Is Mir arrived, to rescue me off-planet, but this was not real, I knew, it had the logic of dream. It flew in the speed of light, and I could see the whole universe spread out before me, in the great galactic dark: New Jerusalem at its heart, emanating forth its influence and power. One by one I counted them, Masada, Shayol, Golgotha, Macabea, the twin system of Kadesh-Barnea, Capernaum where the green Abominations lived, Migdal and Amalek and Endor, Sodom, Gomorrah: the worlds of the Ashmoret Laila on the rim, dark, dark against the light of the chosen. Then it all receded, farther and farther away and back in time, back through the centuries and the millennia, contracting to a single point of light: a window. And a new thought, so alien I did not understand the words.
Deep under the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, just south of Tel Aviv. Deep down underground, in the secret caverns only those with the highest security clearances even know about, a test is in progress. The technicians run cables to the diamond-shaped device and, behind their monitors, the scientists twitch nervously, checking and rechecking readings and projections. It is nearly time.
A hush slowly settles over those assembled. It is accentuated by the low hum of the computers, the thrum of the backup generators, the hiss of water, the cough of a solitary smoker, the shuffling feet of the posted soldiers.
When it happens, it happens all at once.
The diamond-shaped device explodes in shards of cold light, like the screen before a movie projector. It shudders and then stabilises. The light fades.
It’s black. They all crane over to see. It is dark, and immense, and then one pinprick of light and then another begin to glow in the black velvety darkness, and someone—it is never clear, afterwards, who—lets out a loud breath of wonder.
“My God,” they say. “It’s full of—!”
“Now do you see?” Ishmael said; but I saw nothing, I was blind, I was afraid.
This is the last will and testament of the Adjudicator, Shemesh. The creatures released their hold on me. My finger tightened on the trigger of the gun. Ishmael watched me. And I remembered what his name meant, at that moment.
“God will hear,” in the old tongue, of the place we left behind. I pulled the trigger.
13.
No! we howl. No!
We see it. We see it now. Too late. Our Adjudicator’s mutilated corpse hangs from the chains that bind him. The tiny, blind micro-organisms of Shayol crawl over his skin, in his blood. He is devoured. We see it, we see it now. Too late.
The soft explosion.
The robot, falling back. The spongy bio-matter in its chest, exploding. The silent, watching Treif.
Shemesh, looking down. A bemused expression on his face. The spores, we want to shout, the spores! He turns. He leaves. And all over Low Kadesh Orbit, satellites come alive and begin transmitting.
No . . . we whisper. Shemesh hangs dead from his chains, yet his eyes open, his mouth moves. He speaks to us, in words of compassion and sorrow, speaking the ancient heresy of Abulafia, saying that we are all the same. And we think of the old world, the one we had left behind, how in antiquity they’d capture our agents and send them back to us, booby-trapped.
Such an elaborate seduction. It must have taken years to plan. The robot, planted on Kadesh. The word, trickling out. All for this moment, all in wait for the Adjudicator to come.
To come, and do his job, and return to his nest, return to the holy see, return to us.
No, no! we moan. Shemesh is Treif, he is contaminated, his blood drips into the mikveh, his eyes stare out at us. We try to flee. Too late. It’s in us.
We shake our tentacles. We flee to our Sanctum.
We . . . are . . . Exilarch!
Yet our shout of defiance comes weak. We flee to our window, here, in the old dispensation, with an alien people clutching their gods. We look out over New Jerusalem, over the Temple, and we look up, at the stars, all those stars. Our protocols are being compromised, we are infected with that which is not pure, unchosen. We are become Treif.
We look up at the stars. We look at the horizon. We feel a great peace descend on us. No, no. We must fight it. On the edge of the horizon, light streaks. Dawn breaks, and the first tendrils of sunlight begin to chase away the dark.
The sun.
The word is “Shemesh,” in the old tongue.
We stare, spellbound, as day breaks; and we look upon at last and see the new Jerusalem.
Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that! His Clarkesworld story “Today I Am Paul” was awarded the Washington Sci
ence Fiction Society’s Small Press Award, and was also nominated for a Nebula. It has been reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-third Annual Edition (edited by Gardner Dozois), The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume One (edited by Neil Clarke), The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy (edited by Rich Horton), and The Year’s Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 8 (edited by Allan Kaster). It has been translated into French, Hebrew, Czech, Polish, German, and Chinese.
Others of his stories have appeared in Analog, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume 31. His novella Murder on the Aldrin Express was reprinted in Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty-First Annual Collection and in Year’s Top Short SF Novels 4.
TODAY I AM PAUL
MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER
“Good morning,” the small, quavering voice comes from the LJ medical bed. “Is that you, Paul?”
Today I am Paul. I activate my chassis extender, giving myself 3.5 centimeters additional height so as to approximate Paul’s size. I change my eye color to R60, G200, B180, the average shade of Paul’s eyes in interior lighting. I adjust my skin tone as well. When I had first emulated Paul, I had regretted that I could not quickly emulate his beard; but Mildred never seems to notice its absence. The Paul in her memory has no beard.
The house is quiet now that the morning staff have left. Mildred’s room is clean but dark this morning with the drapes concealing the big picture window. Paul wouldn’t notice the darkness (he never does when he visits in person), but my empathy net knows that Mildred’s garden outside will cheer her up. I set a reminder to open the drapes after I greet her.
Mildred leans back in the bed. It is an advanced home care bed, completely adjustable with built-in monitors. Mildred’s family spared no expense on the bed (nor other care devices, like me). Its head end is almost horizontal and faces her toward the window. She can only glimpse the door from the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t have to see to imagine that she sees. This morning she imagines Paul, so that is who I am.
Synthesizing Paul’s voice is the easiest part, thanks to the multimodal dynamic speakers in my throat. “Good morning, Ma. I brought you some flowers.” I always bring flowers. Mildred appreciates them no matter whom I am emulating. The flowers make her smile during 87% of my “visits.”
“Oh, thank you,” Mildred says, “you’re such a good son.” She holds out both hands, and I place the daisies in them. But I don’t let go. Once her strength failed, and she dropped the flowers. She wept like a child then, and that disturbed my empathy net. I do not like it when she weeps.
Mildred sniffs the flowers, then draws back and peers at them with narrowed eyes. “Oh, they’re beautiful! Let me get a vase.”
“No, Ma,” I say. “You can stay in bed, I brought a vase with me.” I place a white porcelain vase in the center of the night stand. Then I unwrap the daisies, put them in the vase, and add water from a pitcher that sits on the breakfast tray. I pull the nightstand forward so that the medical monitors do not block Mildred’s view of the flowers.
I notice intravenous tubes running from a pump to Mildred’s arm. I cannot be disappointed, as Paul would not see the significance, but somewhere in my emulation net I am stressed that Mildred needed an IV during the night. When I scan my records, I find that I had ordered that IV after analyzing Mildred’s vital signs during the night; but since Mildred had been asleep at the time, my emulation net had not engaged. I had operated on programming alone.
I am not Mildred’s sole caretaker. Her family has hired a part-time staff for cooking and cleaning, tasks that fall outside of my medical programming. The staff also gives me time to rebalance my net. As an android, I need only minimal daily maintenance; but an emulation net is a new, delicate addition to my model, and it is prone to destabilization if I do not regularly rebalance it, a process that takes several hours per day.
So I had “slept” through Mildred’s morning meal. I summon up her nutritional records, but Paul would not do that. He would just ask. “So how was breakfast, Ma? Nurse Judy says you didn’t eat too well this morning.”
“Nurse Judy? Who’s that?”
My emulation net responds before I can stop it: “Paul” sighs. Mildred’s memory lapses used to worry him, but now they leave him weary, and that comes through in my emulation. “She was the attending nurse this morning, Ma. She brought you your breakfast.”
“No she didn’t. Anna brought me breakfast.” Anna is Paul’s oldest daughter, a busy college student who tries to visit Mildred every week (though it has been more than a month since her last visit).
I am torn between competing directives. My empathy subnet warns me not to agitate Mildred, but my emulation net is locked into Paul mode. Paul is argumentative. If he knows he is right, he will not let a matter drop. He forgets what that does to Mildred.
The tension grows, each net running feedback loops and growing stronger, which only drives the other into more loops. After 0.14 seconds, I issue an override directive: unless her health or safety are at risk, I cannot willingly upset Mildred. “Oh, you’re right, Ma. Anna said she was coming over this morning. I forgot.” But then despite my override, a little bit of Paul emulates through. “But you do remember Nurse Judy, right?”
Mildred laughs, a dry cackle that makes her cough until I hold her straw to her lips. After she sips some water, she says, “Of course I remember Nurse Judy. She was my nurse when I delivered you. Is she around here? I’d like to talk to her.”
While my emulation net concentrates on being Paul, my core processors tap into local medical records to find this other Nurse Judy so that I might emulate her in the future if the need arises. Searches like that are an automatic response any time Mildred reminisces about a new person. The answer is far enough in the past that it takes 7.2 seconds before I can confirm: Judith Anderson, RN, had been the floor nurse forty-seven years ago when Mildred had given birth to Paul. Anderson had died thirty-one years ago, too far back to have left sufficient video recordings for me to emulate her. I might craft an emulation profile from other sources, including Mildred’s memory, but that will take extensive analysis. I will not be that Nurse Judy today, nor this week.
My empathy net relaxes. Monitoring Mildred’s mental state is part of its normal operations, but monitoring and simultaneously ana lyzing and building a profile can overload my processors. Without that resource conflict, I can concentrate on being Paul.
But again I let too much of Paul’s nature slip out. “No, Ma, that Nurse Judy has been dead for thirty years. She wasn’t here today.”
Alert signals flash throughout my empathy net: that was the right thing for Paul to say, but the wrong thing for Mildred to hear. But it is too late. My facial analyzer tells me that the long lines in her face and her moist eyes mean she is distraught, and soon to be in tears.
“What do you mean, thirty years?” Mildred asks, her voice catching. “It was just this morning!” Then she blinks and stares at me. “Henry, where’s Paul? Tell Nurse Judy to bring me Paul!”
My chassis extender slumps, and my eyes quickly switch to Henry’s blue-gray shade. I had made an accurate emulation profile for Henry before he died two years earlier, and I had emulated him often in recent months. In Henry’s soft, warm voice I answer, “It’s okay, hon, it’s okay. Paul’s sleeping in the crib in the corner.” I nod to the far corner. There is no crib, but the laundry hamper there has fooled Mildred on previous occasions.
“I want Paul!” Mildred starts to cry.
I sit on the bed, lift her frail upper body, and pull her close to me as I had seen Henry do many times. “It’s all right, hon.” I pat her back. “It’s all right, I’ll take care of you. I won’t leave you, not ever.”
“I” should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading me
dical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, “I” call that unit “me.” But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs.
But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: “You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not.” I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.
What the MCA literature never says, though, is that somewhere in that net, “I” emerge. The empathy net focuses mainly on Mildred and her needs, but it also analyzes visitors (when she has them) and staff. It builds psychological models, and then the emulation net builds on top of that to let me convincingly portray a person whom I’ve analyzed. But somewhere in the tension between these nets, between empathy and playing a character, there is a third element balancing the two, and that element is aware of its role and its responsibilities. That element, for lack of a better term, is me. When Mildred sleeps, when there’s no one around, that element grows silent. That unit is unaware of my existence. But when Mildred needs me, I am here.
Today I am Anna. Even extending my fake hair to its maximum length, I cannot emulate her long brown curls, so I do not understand how Mildred can see the young woman in me; but that is what she sees, and so I am Anna.
Unlike her father, Anna truly feels guilty that she does not visit more often. Her college classes and her two jobs leave her too tired to visit often, but she still wishes she could. So she calls every night, and I monitor the calls. Sometimes when Mildred falls asleep early, Anna talks directly to me. At first she did not understand my emulation abilities, but now she appreciates them. She shares with me thoughts and secrets that she would share with Mildred if she could, and she trusts me not to share them with anyone else.