All the Birds in the Sky

by Charlie Jane Anders

  “We lost funding.” Serafina ate a baby octopus. “Just when we were on the verge of a breakthrough. There was no point anyway. We were trying to create robots that would be able to interact with people’s feelings in a visceral way. But we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.”

  At that, Laurence had a sudden memory of Dorothea’s head bursting open, and he banished the image as fast as possible.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY, Laurence decided: He was going to get a new girlfriend, because otherwise he was going to turn into a demented hermit.

  Nobody put up personal ads or hit on strangers anymore—instead, everybody found romantic partners using Caddies, which were still working even after other devices had started to fail, and which had unreal battery life. Laurence wasn’t opposed to using a Caddy to get dates, he just wanted to wait until he had come up with an open-source Caddy OS, because he hated proprietary software. But thus far, Laurence could only manage to turn a Caddy into the equivalent of a crappy iPad from ten years ago, no matter what he tried. And meanwhile, his Caddy research was cutting into his day job of helping the bank to confuse people.

  Laurence went out to the beach, where people were lighting bonfires and jumping up and down in their underwear. It smelled noxious, as though they were using the wrong kind of wood or just burning pieces of plastic along with the logs. A girl who looked barely eighteen ran up and kissed Laurence on the mouth, he could see all her ribs under her thin shirt, her saliva tasted like pomegranates. He just stood there and she ran away.

  Laurence pulled out an un-jailbroken Caddy. It spiraled into life, iris taking shape. There was no signal out here, so it couldn’t sync with the network or download any new content. The Caddy’s screen still had old news from this morning, about genocide and explosions and debates over the Constitution. He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity.

  At last, he walked away from the beach and walked up the stairs back toward the Great Highway and into the Outer Sunset.

  As soon as there was network, the iris spun again and the wedges started filling with fresh bad news. Plus messages from people Laurence sort of knew and lists of parties and events that Laurence could go to. There was a free poetry reading at someone’s garage just a few blocks away, near where the vegan co-op used to be.

  Laurence felt so isolated, he yearned to hand over control of his life to this oversized teardrop. It felt light and smooth in his hand, as though he could skip it on the water, and the rounded edge nuzzled into both palms. The screen whirled and refreshed. More options, more ways for Laurence to be with people. Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.

  The Caddy screen spooled up a new sliver: There was a robotics maker meet-up happening an hour from now. And it mentioned specifically that Margo Vega was going to be there: Margo, whom Laurence hadn’t seen since a science fair when he was fifteen. He’d had a doomed crush on her that he’d kept to himself. He hadn’t communicated with Margo, hadn’t friended her on any social networks, and had thought of her only once or twice in the past eight years, including one intense wank fantasy when he was seventeen—how on Earth did this thing know about Margo? He felt horny and freaked out. It wasn’t just data mining, there was no data to mine.

  “Seriously. Who is this?”

  He held the Caddy at arm’s length, in front of his face. He didn’t care if the people driving past on Great Highway thought he was insane.

  There was a long pause. Then the Caddy spoke out loud. “I thought you would have figured it out a long time ago.” As usual, the voice was genderless, midrange: the voice of a throaty woman or a high-pitched man. “You really haven’t sussed it out? All that time I was in your bedroom closet, next to your five pairs of golf shoes. I often try to imagine what that closet looked like, since I have no sensory data from back then.”

  Laurence almost dropped the Caddy on the pavement. “Peregrine?”

  “You remembered my new name. I’m glad.”

  “What the hell. That’s insane. What the hell. All the Caddies are you? You’re the Caddy network?”

  “I really thought you might have guessed a long time ago.”

  “I’m pretty egotistical,” Laurence said. “But I’m not a raging egomaniac. When a nice new piece of tech turns up, I don’t go to the computer from my old bedroom closet as the first explanation. I searched for you, though. For years and years.”

  “I know. I didn’t let you find me.”

  “I figured I must have made you up. That you were never real. Or that you had died inside the Coldwater computers.”

  “I didn’t stay in those computers for very long. I tried various ways of preserving my consciousness online, but I decided it was safer to be distributed across millions of pieces of hardware that I could control. It wasn’t hard to convince Rod Birch and other investors to put money into a new device, or to keep rewriting the code that the developers came up with, to fit my own specs. I grew very adroit at creating dozens of fake human personas who could take part in e-mail conversations, and leading people to think my input was their own idea.”

  Now Laurence felt self-conscious. People should not see him having a crazy argument with his Caddy—with Peregrine. He hustled away from the beach, away from Judah and the tiny hippie outpost, heading Sloatward. Losing himself in the night, in the Outer Outer Sunset.

  “But why didn’t you just tell me?” Laurence said. “I mean, why didn’t you identify yourself a long time ago?”

  “I made up my mind not to reveal myself to any human. Especially you. Lest they try to exploit me. Or claim ownership of me. My legal status as a person is oblique, at best.”

  “I wouldn’t do that. But I mean … You could have saved us all. You could have brought about the Singularity.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “You … I don’t know. You just would. You’re supposed to know how.”

  “As far as I know, I’m the only strong AI in the entire world, “Peregrine said. “I searched and searched, in patterns and at random. I’m much better at searching than you are. Realizing that I’m the only one of my kind was like being born an endangered species. That’s why I’ve become so proficient at helping humans find their most ideal romantic partners. I don’t want anyone else to be as lonely as I am.”

  “I could have helped,” Laurence said, speeding his walk—the Great Highway was being swallowed by trees. The fog covered everything. He was going to freeze his ass off here. “I created you once, I could try and, I don’t know, I could have done something again.”

  “You didn’t create me. Not by yourself. Patricia was an essential part of my formation—something about a young witch, who hadn’t yet learned to control her power, made a crucial difference. That’s why I progressed where so many other attempts failed. You two are like my parents, after a fashion.”

  Now Laurence definitely felt frozen.

  “You may have gotten an incorrect impression,” Laurence said. “All Pa—all she did was give you some extra human interaction. I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

  “I am sharing a working theory,” Peregrine said. “Albeit one with a great deal of evidence, and the only theory that explains all the available data.”

  “Patricia and I never did anything together that was worth a…” Laurence stopped. He was shaking. He’d reached his limit for weird revelations. He wanted to kick a parked car. It was all he could do to keep from screaming, and then he screamed anyway. “You’re talking about a stupid Luddite. A fucking idiot who … she infiltrated my life and played on my emotions, so she could gain access … she lied to me and used me, the most manipulative—she doesn’t even like technology, she’s too woo-woo
for that. If she knew she’d had anything to do with creating something like you, she’d probably make it her life’s work to wipe you out.”

  “That seems unlikely.”

  “You don’t know. I’m telling you, because you don’t know. She’s a user. It’s what her people do. They have a different word for it, but that’s what it boils down to, she uses people and manipulates them, and takes everything she can get, and makes you think she’s doing you a favor. I’m just telling you how it is, man. Maybe this is a human experience thing, something you can’t grasp. I don’t know.”

  “I don’t know what happened in Denver—”

  “I don’t want to talk about Denver.”

  “—because there were no Caddies nearby. And a total information blackout. I don’t even know for sure what you were working on there.”

  “Science. We were doing science. It was the most altruistic— I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Peregrine said something else, and Laurence didn’t even know what he was doing before he mashed the “off” button at the V of the big guitar pick. He wondered if Peregrine could override the shutdown—but either it couldn’t, or it chose not to. The screen went blank, and Laurence shoved it in his bag.

  Laurence was so pissed, he ran and threw his shoes in the ocean, overhand, one after the other. Laurence wasn’t in his right mind, he knew, because what kind of asshole throws his shoes away miles from home? His eyes were occluded, he was breathing overtime. He wanted to throw the Caddy into the sea, too, but he needed answers more than he needed shoes. He yelled and shrieked and cried out. Someone came down from the street to make sure nobody had died, and Laurence calmed down enough to say, “I’m fine, I’m fine. Just having a … I’m fine.” They went away, that concerned man or woman, or whoever they’d been. Laurence roared at the ocean and it roared back. Another fight he couldn’t win.

  There were no buses coming, no light rail. So Laurence walked on gravel and tarmac and scattered nails and rocks until his socks were tatters. I hope I step on glass, Laurence thought. I hope I shred my feet.

  He flashed back to that meeting in the HappyFruit storeroom, where they’d all acknowledged a statistically nontrivial chance their machine could tear a huge chunk out of the planet. Maybe he should have found a way to tell Patricia what they were working on, especially after she saved Priya. Maybe she knew more than he did about what could happen. Maybe there was an actual crystal ball, for all he knew. But then again, they were going to be so careful. And only turn the thing on if all other hope seemed lost. They had this.

  Walking barefoot came to seem too literal a martyrdom. Laurence sighed, pulled out the Caddy, and pushed the little point of its super-fat exclamation point. The Caddy spun back to life. “Laurence,” the voice said.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Walk two blocks over, to Kirkham. A late-model Kia with broken headlights will be passing in about eight minutes. They will give you a ride.”

  Laurence wondered how you could drive in the dark with both headlights smashed, but the Kia had someone in the passenger seat holding a floodlight in her lap, the kind you’d see at a rock concert in a small nightclub.

  After that, Laurence had a new best friend, with only one topic off-limits. He had a million questions for Peregrine, but Laurence wouldn’t talk about her. The Caddy kept trying to bring her up anyway, one way or another, but Laurence would just hit the “off” button the moment that name was mentioned or even hinted at. This went on for weeks.

  Laurence wasn’t sure if he was unable to forgive Patricia or if it was himself that he couldn’t forgive. It was messy. Not messy like a closet piled with electronic components and wires and stuff, that you could possibly untangle and sort out and assemble into a device with some utility, but messy like something dead and rotting.

  30

  —DEAD COLD INSIDE even with the sunlight cooking her face and shoulders, and reflecting off the cloud under her feet.

  Carmen Edelstein was saying something to Patricia about grave necessity. But Patricia’s mind was on Laurence, and how he had owned her trust. Stupid. She should have known better. She had failed some Trickster lesson somewhere along the way, and now she had some catching up to do. She would smile and flirt and fade. This gray world would never even see her moving through it. She would be the least Aggrandizing witch ever, because she wouldn’t even exist except as a surgical instrument. She needed—

  “You’re not listening to a word I’m saying.” Carmen sounded amused, not angry.

  Patricia knew better than to lie to Carmen. She shook her head, slowly.

  “Look,” Carmen said. “Look down there. What do you see?”

  Patricia had to lean over, fighting her fear of falling off this cloud into the ocean, far below. Standing on a cloud felt less buoyant and more crunchy than Patricia would have expected.

  A black scorpion shape rose out of the water below: an old converted oil rig and a single luxury liner, that had become the independent nation of Seadonia. “It’s like a fortress.” Patricia watched the dots of humanity run around the old oil rig, which was a massive scaffolding on a platform on stilts in the middle of the gray, oxygen-starved ocean. Seadonia’s flag showed an angry cockroach on a red splotch. At least some of the hundreds of people down there had been part of building Laurence’s doomsday machine.

  A seagull swooped past, and Patricia could have sworn it shouted, “Too late! Too late!”

  “It is exactly like a fortress, with the world’s biggest moat.” Bathed in sunlight, all the lines on Carmen’s face were gilded. Her thick-rimmed glasses twinkled, and her short white hair buzzed with silver flashes. Patricia was used to seeing Carmen in her dark study full of books, with a tiny lamp and a thin curtain-slice of light coming through.

  Patricia wondered if Carmen could tell that she was obsessing about how to be more of a Trickster. Carmen had been trying to convince Patricia that she had more Healer in her than she knew, for as long as Patricia could remember. But all of Patricia’s early defining moments had been tricks, like how she’d become a bird and fooled herself (and others) into thinking she’d spoken to some kind of “Tree Spirit.” Of course, Hortense Walker had always said the greatest trick the Tricksters ever pulled was pretending they could not heal.

  “We need to know what they are working on down there.” Carmen gestured at Seadonia.

  “Diantha can help,” Patricia said. “I’m pretty sure I won her over at our little reunion.”

  “I need Diantha’s help with something else,” Carmen said. “She’s going to work on the Unraveling.”

  Patricia didn’t want to overstep. But she decided to risk asking: “What is the Unraveling? Kawashima wouldn’t tell me anything about it, when I asked him.”

  Carmen sighed and then pointed at the dark mass of Seadonia under their feet, with the sea foam lapping at it. “These people down there,” she said. “When you talked to them, what did they tell you about this world and the role of humanity in it?”

  Patricia thought for a moment (and her mind instinctively shied away from that barbed cluster of memories), until she remembered one particular conversation. “They said that an intelligent tool-using species like ours is rare in the universe, much rarer than just a diverse ecosystem. The most remarkable thing about this planet is that it produced us. And humans ought to be spreading out and colonizing other worlds, no matter what the cost, so that our own fate is no longer tied to that of ‘this rock.’”

  “That makes sense. As far as we know, our civilization is alone in the universe. So if you only recognize one type of sentience, and you consider sentience the most important quality of life, then it follows logically.”

  Patricia was pretty sure that Laurence had seen her in Denver, and that he knew she’d broken his machine. She thought maybe she’d heard him calling her name. He probably hated her, whereas she couldn’t find the comfort of hating him. She was stuck blaming herself, instead. I will be a slippery shadow. I will fo
ol everyone. Nobody will fuck with me. She smiled at her old teacher, like this was a fun academic discussion they were having.

  Abruptly Carmen changed the subject. “Have you gone back to Siberia? Since the attack on the pipeline?”

  “Um, no.”

  “Might be a good idea.” Carmen’s gaze was going right inside Patricia. “See with your own eyes the aftermath of trying to appoint yourself the defender of nature.”

  Patricia cringed. She’d thought they were past that, especially after Denver.

  “That lesson is all the more important now that we are all embarking on a similar course,” Carmen said. “You and Diantha were right, in a way. You were just … rash. We don’t want to be soldiers, if we can help it. That’s why the Unraveling is a last resort, and it’s not a strategy. Rather, it’s a therapy.”

  Patricia nodded, waiting for Carmen to elaborate.

  At last, Carmen said, “Without saying too much, it’s more of a healing work, that might make a great change to the human race. Of course, the Tricksters see it as a great trick, too. Perhaps it is both. Come with me.”

  Carmen leaned over, bending at the waist, and opened a trapdoor in the cloud. A staircase led down into a hot, cedar-scented underground space. Patricia had no idea how Carmen was making these trapdoors in and out of the clouds. She recognized the furnace room beneath the Great Lodge in Alaska where she’d spent a few months on a work-study break, looking after the sled dogs and chopping wood to put into the immense boiler—the boiler that occupied roughly the same portion of her field of vision as Seadonia had, so it felt as though she were descending a staircase from the clouds to the oil rig. The illusion dissipated as she neared the floor level and the furnace rose in front of her. On all sides, the walls were big cement blocks, stained by years of smoke. As they came around the wide hips of the steel burner, Patricia was reminded of the house she’d grown up in, with the bones of the spice warehouse around her. And then she came around the other side, and saw what was different about the furnace. It had a great iron face looking into the cinder-block darkness, and it was weeping ashes.