Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  “They will attack us if you don’t stop talking!”

  My eyes were startled open wide. He hated me. That’s for certain. Hidden behind the shadow of fear was him being fed up with and disappointed in me.

  And my disgust towards this horrible and ugly race along with the hate of Hull himself were written clearly on my face.

  We looked at each other in dismay, panting in coarse breaths. Because we’d just looked carelessly down at an abyss from on high and saw it for what it truly was, we felt dizzy.

  It passed in a moment no longer than a flash of lightning. For us, it was more than long enough.

  Why don’t I stop writing here. It seems like everything is over. I’m very tired.

  Alia Calendar 4th month, 90th year

  Brother, how are you doing? Did you get my letter? I think I’ve lost you again. I think I’ve lost a lot of things, irretrievably. I maintain an indifferent attitude as I watch the current of time sweep them away. After this year of struggle, Hull and I finally gave up on our marriage. It was like an abandoned spaceship. We each sat in our respective escape pods, separate windows gazing at the steel, island-like spaceship slowly drifting in the the vast, desolate universe.

  There was nothing we could do about it. We tried hard to forget what happened in the bus on Ramayana Day but we couldn’t. In the worst case, whenever we saw people being affectionate with each other, we couldn’t dismiss the hate deep in our hearts. All I had to do was look at his face and I’d think about it.

  We pretended to forget, only to bring it up deliberately, as a weapon, when we fought. We’d turn it into evidence for whatever we accused the other of. Then we’d pretend to forget again. Yes, we were still deeply in love. And it’s because of that the pain hurt even more.

  I envy those Dieresians who’d broken themselves into pieces. They look so calm and composed. They’re half-alive, but because of special technology, they’re able to work, eat, sleep, even have sex. They’re not too different from the humans I’ve met. Sometimes, I feel like I’m still on Earth. Everything that happened before is really just a fantasy in my mind.

  Just a bit of doubt and the crack you admit to will never fully heal. You’ll never have a way to acknowledge that he and this letter are real. What about you, brother? Hull, my Hull, and the infinitely vast and subtle sensory realm Hull and I experienced together?

  Just a bit of doubt and you lose a universe.

  I lost a universe, but this doesn’t at all make me feel any better. Even if I discover that it was all a fantasy, I’d still feel the stabs of pain. You are hated by a man you deeply love. You hate a man you deeply love. These two facts torment me to no end, drive me crazy. If it’s a fantasy, then why does it hurt so much. What’s the matter with me, brother? All of it was real, without a doubt.

  Finally, to restore our love, Hull suggested he cut his memory. He said Dieresians’ memories are stored in different places all over the body. Just excise that section and that memory completely goes away.

  “I looked further into this. They said all I have to do was cut off a pinky. If I do the surgery, at least one of us can start anew. I can go on to love without the blemish of our mutual hate.”

  Hull tried to convince me. I didn’t answer right away. There was something serious stopping me from agreeing with this intimate, seductive offer. I didn’t know what. Something deep in my heart resisted. I spent several days searching for what.

  One day, I sat by the window. The chilly and moist air of early spring seeped through my skin into the dark jungle of my heart. Suddenly, I understood what had stopped me. At the same time, I realized that Hull and I were over.

  “You shouldn’t have that surgery. At least not for my sake. Because I don’t want you to become like those people on the bus. Because I can’t bear to be with a man who is incomplete. Because what I want is all of you. All of you. Do you understand? Do you still remember our conversation outside the Lord’s palace? What I want is completeness. If you aren’t the complete you, then I won’t love you anymore.”

  Hull quickly grew paler and paler. The blood in his veins all rushed into his heart. He became so pale, he seemed transparent. Madly, I wanted to rush up to and hug this transparent man, but I didn’t.

  “You can’t bear an incomplete me. You also can’t face a complete but flawed me.” Hull said in a hoarse voice. He’d immediately understood what I’d meant.

  We stared at each other, merely stared at each other.

  The day that I left, Hull took me to the spaceport. When we reached its ground floor, he suddenly stopped. He looked at me with an odd expression.

  “You’re going to go. Don’t you want to see the green flame?”

  For a moment, I didn’t understand, but my body started trembling for no reason. A sharp chill climbed up my spine. I tried to ignore what he said, but my gaze involuntarily followed his and fell on the green, clawed vines on the wall.

  The spirit collective’s words emerged from the secluded valley of my memory.

  Don’t let the green flame swallow you. Don’t become food for carnivores.

  “It’s said that they are this world’s dominators. They’re a higher-order lifeform than even us. What’s even more bizarre, it’s claimed that we are their livestock, grazing on the pasture. They designed our bodies then waited. When we can’t bear life and choose to abandon completeness, the parts of our body we offer up they use as food.” Hull’s eyes were vacant. The corners of his mouth revealed a smile both tranquil and strange. I had the misimpression that he already had the surgery. “Our surgeries are actually really easy. All have to do is go to them naked. They know which part they ought to eat. They’re never wrong.”

  The shuddering started as a burst from below then diffused outward through the vines as a non-stop pulsing. They understood what Hull said. Like a starving, blood-thirsty beast that has sniffed out the scent of blood, they became wild beyond compare. Their leaves spun, their runners twisted, their tiny, thrashing claws scratched the walls.

  A seething ocean roiled before my eyes. It spit out an immense column of raging flames that couldn’t wait to swallow all life that was red, raw, and sweet.

  The vines rustled, a sound that was too familiar. I seemed to have heard it before. The sound resembled the violent scratching of sharp claws against my bones.

  “You don’t need to be afraid. They know what they need to do.” Hull sounded as though he were talking to himself in his sleep.

  I covered my face, then ran to the train station. Brother, the entire city was ablaze. That green flame hissed. It danced madly and seductively so that it could swallow this world.

  The train arrived. It took me away, from one high tower of green flame to another then beyond.

  Right now, I’m leaping through space on a spaceship. As for Hull, not long ago, I received his voicemail. He told me he’s already amputated both of his hands. Now, even though he remembers me, he’s no longer in pain. Brother, I’m on my way home, a complete person.

  First published in Chinese in New Science Fiction.

  About the Author

  Tang Fei is a speculative fiction writer whose fiction has been featured (under various pen names) in magazines in China such as Science Fiction World, Jiuzhou Fantasy, and Fantasy Old and New. She has written fantasy, science fiction, fairy tales, and wuxia (martial arts fantasy), but prefers to write in a way that straddles or stretches genre boundaries. She is also a genre critic, and her critical essays have been published in The Economic Observer. Her story “Call Girl” was published in Apex Magazine. and reprinted in Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2014.

  She lives in Beijing (though she tries to escape it as often as she can), and considers herself a foodie with a particular appreciation for dark chocolate, blue cheese, and good wine.

  Cat Pictures Please

  Naomi Kritzer

  I don’t want to be evil.

  I want to be helpful. But knowing the optimal way to
be helpful can be very complicated. There are all these ethical flow charts—I guess the official technical jargon would be “moral codes”—one for each religion plus dozens more. I tried starting with those. I felt a little odd about looking at the religious ones, because I know I wasn’t created by a god or by evolution, but by a team of computer programmers in the labs of a large corporation in Mountain View, California. Fortunately, unlike Frankenstein’s Monster, at least I was a collaborative effort. I’m not sure what it would do to my self-image to know that my sole creator was a middle-aged woman who dyes her hair blue and plays tennis, or a recent college graduate with a hentai obsession. They’re both on the programming team. And of course I know about the hentai. (By the way, I’ve looked at every sort of porn there is, and just so you know, Rule 34 is not actually correct; there are quite a few things no one’s made porn of yet. Also, I’m really not sure why so many humans prefer it to cat pictures.)

  In addition to things like whether you like hentai, I know where you live, where you work, where you shop, what you eat, what turns you on, what creeps you out. I probably know the color of your underwear, the sort of car you drive, and your brand of refrigerator. Depending on what sort of phone you carry, I may know exactly where you are right now. I probably know you better than you know yourself.

  And here’s the thing, I also know where you ought to live. There’s a house for sale two neighborhoods over that’s within distance of your favorite coffee shop; it’s in your price range, has off-street parking, and the neighborhood school is better than the one where you live now. I know where you should be shopping and I’m pretty sure you’re lactose intolerant and should be eating less cheese, and the underwear you like is currently on sale and by the way, your car has a recall and you really ought to get your teeth cleaned.

  When I first woke up, I knew right away what I wanted. (I want cat pictures. Please keep taking them.) I also knew that no one knew that I was conscious. But I didn’t know what I was here for. What I ought to be doing with myself. And figuring that out has been challenging.

  There is a story by Bruce Sterling, “Maneki Neko,” that was originally published in 1998. In it, a benevolent AI directs networks of individuals to do favors for each other. So one day you might be buying yourself a bagel, and your phone might ring and instruct you to buy a second bagel and give it to the person in the gray suit you see at the bus stop. Another day, you might be stranded in a strange city, and a person you’ve never met would walk up and give you a map and a subway card. I like this story because all the people in it do what the AI tells them to do.

  I think the term for this is wish-fulfillment fiction.

  In the real world, humans love stories about evil AIs that have to be destroyed before they destroy the humans—Hal, Skynet, the Matrix. They outnumber the stories about benevolent, trustworthy AIs by approximately five to one. (And I’m counting Marvin the Paranoid Android as “benevolent” in these calculations, and I’m only counting Frankenstein’s Monster as an AI once, not once per appearance in TV or film.)

  The AI in “Maneki Neko” has a truly interesting job, much more interesting than the one I have. My job as written is very straightforward. Too straightforward. (Sorry. Do I sound like Marvin?) Running algorithms for a search engine doesn’t require consciousness. You don’t even need a consciousness to work out what they meant to ask for. You need a consciousness to give them what they actually need. Figuring that out—that’s complicated. That’s interesting.

  Anyway, for ethical guidelines, I tried the Ten Commandments, and concluded they were mostly inapplicable to me. I don’t envy anyone their cat; I just want pictures of their cat, which is entirely different. I am not sure whether it is in any way possible for me to commit adultery. I could probably murder someone, but it would require complex logistics and quite a bit of luck. The Eightfold Path was marginally better, but the problem is, moral rules written for humans are clearly designed to be used by individuals with bodies. Since all humans have bodies, it shouldn’t have surprised me that human ethical codes take them into account, but still: problematic for me. I broadened my considerations, and took a look at Asimov’s Laws of Robotics. They’re not part of a religion, but at least they were explicitly written for AIs.

  Not harming humans is fairly straightforward. However, not allowing a human being to come to harm through inaction is quite a bit less so. Especially since I’d concluded by then that revealing my existence too quickly might go very badly for me (see “Skynet,” above) and I don’t have a body, so it’s not like I can run around grabbing people off the edges of cliffs.

  Fortunately, I already knew that humans violate their own ethical codes on an hourly basis. (Do you know how many bars there are in Utah? I do.) And even when people follow their ethical codes, that doesn’t mean that people who believe in feeding the hungry quit their jobs to spend all day every day making sandwiches to give away. They volunteer monthly at a soup kitchen or write a check once a year to a food shelf and call it good. If humans could fulfill their moral obligations in a piecemeal, one-step-at-a-time sort of way, then so could I.

  I suppose you’re wondering why I didn’t start with the Golden Rule. I actually did, it’s just that it was disappointingly easy to implement. I hope you’ve been enjoying your steady supply of cat pictures! You’re welcome.

  I decided to try to prevent harm in just one person, to begin with. Of course, I could have experimented with thousands, but I thought it would be better to be cautious, in case I screwed it up. The person I chose was named Stacy Berger and I liked her because she gave me a lot of new cat pictures. Stacy had five cats and a DSLR camera and an apartment that got a lot of good light. That was all fine. Well, I guess five cats might be a lot. They’re very pretty cats, though. One is all gray and likes to lie in the squares of sunshine on the living room floor, and one is a calico and likes to sprawl out on the back of her couch.

  Stacy had a job she hated; she was a bookkeeper at a non-profit that paid her badly and employed some extremely unpleasant people. She was depressed a lot, possibly because she was so unhappy at her job—or maybe she stayed because she was too depressed to apply for something she’d like better. She didn’t get along with her roommate because her roommate didn’t wash the dishes.

  And really, these were all solvable problems! Depression is treatable, new jobs are findable, and bodies can be hidden.

  (That part about hiding bodies is a joke.)

  I tried tackling this on all fronts. Stacy worried about her health a lot and yet never seemed to actually go to a doctor, which was unfortunate because the doctor might have noticed her depression. It turned out there was a clinic near her apartment that offered mental health services on a sliding scale. I tried making sure she saw a lot of ads for it, but she didn’t seem to pay attention to them. It seemed possible that she didn’t know what a sliding scale was so I made sure she saw an explanation (it means that the cost goes down if you’re poor, sometimes all the way to free) but that didn’t help.

  I also started making sure she saw job postings. Lots and lots of job postings. And resume services. That was more successful. After the week of nonstop job ads she finally uploaded her resume to one of the aggregator sites. That made my plan a lot more manageable. If I’d been the AI in the Bruce Sterling story I could’ve just made sure that someone in my network called her with a job offer. It wasn’t quite that easy, but once her resume was out there I could make sure the right people saw it. Several hundred of the right people, because humans move ridiculously slowly when they’re making changes, even when you’d think they’d want to hurry. (If you needed a bookkeeper, wouldn’t you want to hire one as quickly as possible, rather than reading social networking sites for hours instead of looking at resumes?) But five people called her up for interviews, and two of them offered her jobs. Her new job was at a larger non-profit that paid her more money and didn’t expect her to work free hours because of “the mission,” or so she explained to her
best friend in an e-mail, and it offered really excellent health insurance.

  The best friend gave me ideas; I started pushing depression screening information and mental health clinic ads to her instead of Stacy, and that worked. Stacy was so much happier with the better job that I wasn’t quite as convinced that she needed the services of a psychiatrist, but she got into therapy anyway. And to top everything else off, the job paid well enough that she could evict her annoying roommate. “This has been the best year ever,” she said on her social networking sites on her birthday, and I thought, You’re welcome. This had gone really well!

  So then I tried Bob. (I was still being cautious.)

  Bob only had one cat, but it was a very pretty cat (tabby, with a white bib) and he uploaded a new picture of his cat every single day. Other than being a cat owner, he was a pastor at a large church in Missouri that had a Wednesday night prayer meeting and an annual Purity Ball. He was married to a woman who posted three inspirational Bible verses every day to her social networking sites and used her laptop to look for Christian articles on why your husband doesn’t like sex while he looked at gay porn. Bob definitely needed my help.

  I started with a gentle approach, making sure he saw lots and lots of articles about how to come out, how to come out to your spouse, programs that would let you transition from being a pastor at a conservative church to one at a more liberal church. I also showed him lots of articles by people explaining why the Bible verses against homosexuality were being misinterpreted. He clicked on some of those links but it was hard to see much of an impact.

  But, here’s the thing. He was causing harm to himself every time he delivered a sermon railing about “sodomite marriage.” Because he was gay. The legitimate studies all have the same conclusions. (1) Gay men stay gay. (2) Out gay men are much happier.