All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  Patricia wanted to protest—she was being surgical here, she had trained a decade for this—but there was no point. She should be glad she was having this conversation with Kawashima instead of Ernesto.

  “You, of all people, should understand the need for great care,” Kawashima said, because of course he was going to bring that incident up. It would follow her around for the rest of her life. No matter how much she did to atone.

  “Okay,” Patricia said. “I’ll be more careful.” She left it vague on purpose.

  “Good enough,” Kawashima said. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an early-morning brunch date with five Abercrombie models tomorrow.” He saluted and got into his Lexus, which glided down the hill toward Dolores Park. Patricia watched it shrink into the night and marveled at the internal contradiction of telling someone that the most powerful magicians in town are watching her every move, but she shouldn’t get a swelled head. But she was too exhausted to dwell on that, and all of the day’s minor miracles were catching up with her at once. She slipped inside the apartment, where her roommates had fallen asleep watching TV again. She tucked them in.

  17

  LAURENCE FIRST MET his girlfriend, Serafina, at a robot fashion show, with robots modeling human clothing and human models wearing robot fashions, like mechanical lingerie. The event happened at a garagey artspace somewhere south of South of Market, with a gunmetal trough full of artisanal vodka. Laurence had come this close to mistaking Serafina for one of the models—her cheekbones and oval face, her lustrous skin and shiny red/black hair were that amazing—but he’d realized just in time that she was one of the robot makers instead. Serafina’s “model” was a steel sylph, with ball-and-socket joints that let it strike a pose, pivot, talk with its delicate hands. Laurence had helped to build battle bots in college, but never artificial supermodels, and he’d managed to say something witty enough about the difference between the two that Serafina had friended him on MeeYu.

  They met for coffee a few days after that, and the coffee date morphed into a dinner date, and the third time they hung out it was tacitly a sleepover; Serafina had a toothbrush and condoms in a pouch of her vinyl shoulder bag, which was Twiki from Buck Rogers. Pro tip: Do not think of “beedi beedi beedi” while you’re having sex for the first time with the most beautiful woman alive, or you will have some explaining to do (even if your motion, rocking the bed frame, does have a sort of “beedi beedi” rhythm). After that, they hung out every other day, held hands on the street, skipped through traffic, whispered in each other’s ears in public, clung together skin to skin every moment in private, swapped gene prints, traded odd little gifts, and wondered how soon was too soon to say “I love you.”

  Laurence had soon found that letting people know he was part of Milton Dirth’s Ten Percent Project was a superfast ticket to getting laid. Among the crowd who worshiped Milton, Laurence was a rock star. About fucking time, really. And yet there was still no way he was in Serafina’s league. She was perfect. He was damaged goods. He never forgot this disparity for a second.

  About a month after they started dating, Serafina took Laurence into her sanctum. She had to sign him in, and he had to surrender his ID to the man at the desk, who printed a badge with Laurence’s fresh photo on it. She led him down an elevator, along a sloping hallway, through two keypad-secured doors, and on into the lab. Inside, eyes watched Laurence from every wall and flat surface. Two of them belonged to bearded humans, who said “Yo,” and then looked back down at their workstations, but the rest all belonged to robots in various states of assembly. Serafina barely introduced Laurence to the two humans but took her time showing him the robots, who were animatronic cartoon characters or animals or a few mannequin heads. “This is Frank, he laughs a lot. Watch out for Barbara, she flirts but she’s got a mean streak.” The robots seemed to like Laurence, especially Donald the Cactus.

  By now, they’d been dating five months. And lately, every time Serafina looked at her phone while they were hanging out, or stared into space, or bit her thick lower lip in the middle of a conversation, Laurence braced himself. This was it. She was going to dump him. Then the moment would pass. Laurence was sure she was just waiting for the right moment, or the ideal pretext. Every time he woke up next to her, he wondered if this was the last time her breath would warm the back of his neck and her breasts would graze either side of his spine.

  He was not going to lose her. He had aced bigger challenges than this. He was going to think of something, take extreme measures, even deploy the Nuclear Option early if he had to. He was going to find a way to hold on to this amazing girl.

  * * *

  LAURENCE’S FACE BEAMED from the front of Anya’s Caddy as he prepared to jump out of the autocopter, onto the roof deck 172 feet below. That same image of Laurence would be leering from computers all over town right now, thanks to a big article about him in Computron Newsly, which had just gone live twenty minutes ago and was now being aggregated and repackaged by every other Silicon Valley outlet. Between MeeYu and Caddies and all the CySpec-wearing geeks, Laurence’s shit-eating grin would be on everybody’s retinas. The gist of the article was “Laurence Armstead, Wunderkind,” and it was all about his awesome quest to Save the World, and how he had harnessed Milton Dirth’s unlimited cash to gather the world’s smartest people (people like Anya, in fact). The text of the article could be “lorem ipsum” as far as Laurence was concerned; the main point was harnessing the echo chamber in his favor, at the exact moment that he was about to abseil down to that roof deck.

  Milton Dirth’s Ninth Maxim: Avoid publicity, except when you can wield it like a sledgehammer.

  Anya was giggling at the picture of Laurence, in her throaty midwestern-girl voice. “God. Could they have made your chin look any bigger? It looks like the heel of someone’s foot, growing out of your face.”

  “This picture looks like you got a bad chin implant!” shouted Tanaa from the pilot seat of the autocopter, where she was wearing big headphones over her afro, along with a pair of aviator goggles. She had her “operating delicate machinery” frown on her narrow mouth, even as she laughed.

  “A chinplant!” Anya laughed, creating unaccustomed dimples in her normally dour face. “Actually, it looks like you’re overcompensating for being unable to grow a beard, by just adding more chin.”

  “Shut up shut up!” Laurence said. “I’m a wunderkind, okay?” He took a moment to look at the two women, reflected on how lucky he was to have such clever weirdos working with him, and vowed yet again that he was not going to let this project fail. He wasn’t going to let Milton, or any of them, down. He was going to do better, somehow.

  Then Laurence jumped out of the autocopter, trusting the steel-cord-and-pulley mechanism to lower him at a fast—but not too fast—clip. He wanted to land on his feet. For a moment, there was nothing but sky all around him, and then the Dogpatch was rising up, and the brand-new brutalist tower blocks grew in proportion to the ancient warehouses and docks around them. The air was searing hot, even with the wind.

  Laurence’s face was on every computer screen in town right now—except the screens of the company whose roof deck Laurence was dropping onto right now, MatherTec. MatherTec’s computer screens were spewing gibberish, thanks to a clownware-injection attack that Laurence had unleashed on the company’s servers ten minutes earlier.

  From the standpoint of the MatherTec founders and angel investors, here’s what happened: They were on their roof deck giving a presentation to a set of VCs in a frantic effort to secure second-round funding for their technology, which wasn’t just another app but rather a way to create stable openings in space-time, with a million possible long-term uses if they could just get some investment. And then, just as their slide presentation was reaching the crucial moment, their screens went staticky and showed the stars-and-snakes logo of the Symbiotic Liberation Army, the world’s most obnoxious hacker group, and nothing they could do would get the presentation back. The investors f
idgeted and started to badger the gothy waitress from the catering company for more macaroons, and Earnest Mather was tearing his frizzy reddish-brown hair out. And just then, the wunderkind—that guy whose long, corn-fed face had been everywhere today—dropped out of the sky and handed Earnest Mather a check, already signed by Milton Dirth, for $10 million. “We’re not investing,” Laurence told Earnest before the company founder could even count the zeroes. “We’re buying you out. We want your technology, and a few of your people.”

  Earnest wanted time to think it over, but Laurence told him he had five minutes. The angel investors were already badgering him to take the damn money, and the VCs were all too busy MeeYuing their videos of Laurence’s descent from the sky to think about making a counter-offer.

  A few minutes later, Laurence (or rather Milton) owned this company. Earnest Mather was taking a bottle of Devil’s Bargain IPA from the gothy waitress and draining it. Laurence rolled up next to Earnest and helped himself to the final macaroon. “Sorry about the theatrics, man,” Laurence said. “We needed your patents, plus we couldn’t risk having them fall into the wrong hands. You could have the next WMD here. And we’re on a tight timetable, to Save the World before it’s too late.”

  Earnest, still kind of goggle-eyed, said something about the world being a work in progress.

  “Milton really thinks we’re going to need a new planet, maybe soon,” Laurence continued. “We’ve got to get off this rock. All our models suggest a decent likelihood of a catastrophic combination of natural disasters and destructive war, within one or two generations. Look at Seoul. Look at Haiti.” Laurence reached for one of those beers as well. “As far as we know, we’re the only intelligent, technological civilization ever to develop, in the entire universe. There’s complex life all over the place, but we’re still basically unique. We have a fucking duty to preserve that. At all costs.”

  Laurence started to explain about how he’d dreamed of nothing, since he was a little kid, but leaving this planet. But Earnest had to run to the executive washroom to dry-heave. Laurence squirreled all the signed paperwork into his breast pocket of his nice black suit and then looked up at the gothy waitress for the first time. It was Patricia.

  “Whoa,” Laurence said. “What are you doing here?” He had a panic attack that she was spying on him or stalking him, for a second.

  “What does it look like?” she said. “I’m waitressing. My roommate Deedee hooked me up with this job.”

  Laurence looked at her crisp white blouse and black knee-length skirt, silhouetted against the pale blue sky. Her dark hair was pinned back but still caught the bay wind. Her eyes looked leaf green. Her slender lips were pursed.

  “Are you serious? I thought you were like…”—he lowered his voice—“… a witch now. You went to that special school, right?”

  “I have other jobs besides this one, sure,” Patricia said. “But I don’t get paid for those. I need to pay rent in this city, which is a lot, even with two roommates.”

  “Oh.”

  Somehow, Laurence had imagined Patricia just snapping her fingers and causing money to appear. Or living rent-free in a fancy Victorian house full of magical objects, like a mirror that tells you what shoes go with your outfit. Not so much slinging macaroons to venture capitalists for minimum wage.

  “So did you mean all the stuff you said to this guy?” Patricia said. “About our planet being doomed, and the human race being the only part of it worth saving?”

  “Well. No. I don’t think we’re the only thing worth saving.” Laurence felt a weird shame that was the flip side of his cockiness from a moment ago. “I hope we can save all of it. But I do worry. We may be past the point of no return here. And it just makes sense not to pin all our hopes on just one planet.”

  “Sure.” Patricia had her puffy-sleeved arms folded. “But this planet is not just some ‘rock.’ It’s not just some kind of chrysalis we can shed, either. You know? It’s, it’s more than that. It’s us. And this isn’t just our story. As someone who’s spoken to lots of other kinds of creatures, I kinda think they might want a vote.”

  “Yeah.” Laurence felt like crap, just at the moment he ought to be feeling bulletproof. This sucked. But as he replayed his conversation with Mather, he could see how it would sound kind of heinous to Patricia. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that anybody ought to write anything off. Nobody is going to do that.”

  “Sure. I guess.”

  Some tipsy VCs needed to come up and get their picture taken with Laurence, who was still wearing his harness over his Armani suit, and get some spring rolls from Patricia. And Laurence had to go get these papers notarized or spindled, or whatever you did when you bought a company. Plus Milton kept texting him. He muttered to Patricia that he would see her later, and she barely said, “Sure,” in between pouring drinks and answering nut-allergy questions.

  * * *

  ONE DAY THE Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.

  Probably not, though.

  * * *

  SERAFINA WAS LATE for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown. All of them. “It took me the whole day to figure out what was bothering them. They just kept wigging out and giving us the hairy eyeball. We looked at everything that had changed in the lab, trying to eliminate every possible factor that could have upset them. Like, was the music different? Did we update their code recently?”

  Laurence didn’t rush her. Problem solving and troubleshooting were a source of pleasure for both of them, and narrating the process was the next best thing to doing it. The same neural pathways lit up when you talked your way through the maze as when you actually solved it. Except this time, you were bathed in the glow of having already unraveled the thing.

  And yet Laurence was still uncomfortable. For one thing, because Serafina was late, they were stuck sitting at one of the sidewalk tables at the fancy pizza place, with nothing but a tiny heat lamp and three meatballs to insulate them from the fog, until the pizza arrived. For another, he was trying to be a good listener, because of his ongoing “not getting dumped” project, and active listening was hard work. And people were still giving him weird looks, a week after the MatherTec thing.

  “We finally figured out that only one thing had changed,” Serafina said. She wore a camisole, but she’d put her bulky jacket back on when they were seated outdoors. The heat lamp made her skin look bronze. “Matt just got a Caddy, and he’d brought it to the office. As soon as we took the Caddy out of WiFi range, the robots calmed down. Somewhat. And before you ask, the Caddy did not have any weird apps installed on it. It was fresh from the store.”

  “WiFi range. So they were getting something from the Caddy, on their wireless network, that upset them.” Laurence pulled out his own Caddy and glanced over it, as if he’d suddenly spot some brand-new feature. It still looked like a big guitar pick with a curved base, covered with aluminum. The Caddy was scanning for open networks, the same as always, but it wouldn’t link up with other machines on the same network without being instructed to do so. Unless …

  “Here’s what I don’t get,” Laurence said, bisecting the third meatball so Serafina could have half. The meatball was their only protection against the cold, the last of their dwindling supplies until their pizza arrived. “So your emotional robots, they don’t have ‘emotions’ in the way that humans do, right? I mean, no offense.” Laurence was on thin ice here—and not the edge, but the dead middle of a lake, a hundred fragile paces in any direction. “The robots simulate emotional responses to some situations, and they try to pick up on what the people around them are feeling. Right?”

  “You make it sound like we’re designing three-dimensional video-game avatars.” Serafina didn’t quite push her chair back, but she did seem a little farther away.

  “I am well aware it’s a lot more involved than that,” Laurence said. “Both because of the Uncanny Valley and because
the physical world is a lot more complicated.”

  “But the real point is, how do you ever know your own emotions are spontaneous and genuine, and not just a programmed set of responses?”

  “I don’t. I wonder about that all the time.” Laurence was conscious that it was probably a bad idea to confess to your girlfriend that you often wondered if your feelings were just an involuntary response. “I just wonder … assuming they have some reason for feeling a particular way, and they don’t just wake up on the wrong side of the bed. The Caddy had to be doing something that resembled an aggressive act, as defined in their response matrices. Right?”

  “Yeah,” Serafina said. “They reacted as if they were being threatened.”

  The pizza came at last, just when Laurence needed something to distract Serafina from what a mansplaining dick he was being, in spite of all his resolutions.

  “There must be some other explanation,” Laurence said. “You’re talking about a Caddy, it’s not a black box. People have jailbroken and wiped them, they’ve installed Linux on them and also ported the Caddy OS over to cheap imitation tablets from Liberia. This is the most hacked device in history. If there was something weird about it, we’d know by now.”

  “Hey,” said Serafina, chewing pizza. “Occam’s razor is not just an optional weapon in Street Warrior V. Already told you, we eliminated all other possibilities.”

  The harder Laurence tried not to screw up, the worse he screwed up. He was not going to get dumped. That was not a possible outcome.

  He thought about the Nuclear Option: his grandmother’s old ring, squirreled in the back of his sock drawer. He imagined getting on his knee and presenting it to Serafina. He could picture how it would look riding up her finger past the knuckle, the wrought silver wrapped around the gemstone. The look on her face as she blushed down at him.