The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  5

  “CAN YOU LEAVE your phone in the car?” Janice asked, as they pulled into the driveway of her brother’s house.

  “Why?”

  “Callum’s got this thing about... how intrusive they are, when people are socializing.”

  Dan could sympathize, but he’d had no intention of live-tweeting the dinner. “What if the sitter calls?”

  “I’ve got mine, set on vibrate.”

  “How will you feel it vibrate if it’s in your bag?” She’d dressed up for their first night out in an eternity, and Dan was fairly sure she had no pockets.

  “It’s strapped under my arm,” Janice replied.

  Dan chortled. “You’re just messing with me. I’m taking mine in.”

  Janice raised her arm and let him feel. She’d anchored it to her bra somehow.

  Dan was impressed; it didn’t show at all. “If we ever need to turn informant, you’re the one who’ll be wearing the wire.”

  Lidia greeted them at the door. As she kissed Dan’s cheek, her fixed smile looked forced and hollow, as if she were trying to tell him there were dangerous men inside pointing guns at her husband’s head. Dan almost asked her what was wrong, but she moved on to Janice, conjuring up something to laugh about, and he decided it had just been a trick of the light.

  As they sat down in the living room, Dan noticed that the TV was gone, along with the old sound system. But a turntable was playing something on vinyl, and though Dan didn’t recognize the artist he was fairly sure it wasn’t from the age before CDs.

  “I see you’ve gone retro chic,” he joked.

  Lidia made an awkward gesture with her hands, dismissing the comment while imbuing it with vastly more importance than Dan had intended. “Let me check what’s happening in the kitchen,” she said.

  Dan turned to Janice. “What’s up with her?” he whispered. “Has something happened?” He knew that Callum had lost his job in a chain-store pharmacy, but that had been eight or nine months ago.

  Janice said, “If they want to tell you, they’ll tell you.”

  “Fair enough.” No doubt Lidia and Callum had been looking forward to a chance to forget their woes for one evening, and he should have known better than reminding her, however inadvertently, that they’d been forced to sell a few things.

  Callum ducked in briefly to greet them, looking flustered, then apologized and retreated, muttering about not wanting something to boil over. It took Dan several seconds before the oddness of the remark registered; he’d been in their kitchen, and the hotplates—just like his and Janice’s—had all had sensors that precluded anything boiling over. If you tried to sell a second-hand electric stove, would you really get enough to buy an older model and have anything left over to make the transaction worthwhile?

  When they sat down in the dining room and started the meal, Dan smiled politely at all the small talk, but he couldn’t help feeling resentful. Both couples were struggling, and he’d kept nothing back from Callum and Lidia. What was the point of having friends and family if you couldn’t commiserate with them?

  “So have you started cooking meth yet?” he asked Callum.

  Janice snorted derisively. “You’re showing your age!”

  “What?” Dan could have sworn he’d seen a headline about an ice epidemic somewhere, just weeks ago.

  Callum said, “There’s a micro-fluidic device the size of a postage stamp that costs a hundred bucks and can synthesize at least three billion different molecules. Making it cook meth just amounts to loading the right software, and dribbling in a few ingredients that have far too many legitimate purposes to ban, or even monitor.”

  Dan blinked and tried to salvage some pride. “What’s a postage stamp?”

  As the meal progressed, Callum began emptying and refilling his own wine glass at an ever brisker pace. Dan had pleaded driving duty, but the truth was he’d decided to give up booze completely; it was a luxury he didn’t need, and it would be easier if he didn’t make exceptions. He watched his host with guilty fascination, wondering if a state of mild inebriation would allow him to confess the problem that he’d told his sister to keep quiet about.

  “We’ll make great pets,” Callum said, apropos of nothing, nodding his head in time to music only he could hear. Dan glanced at Lidia, wondering if she was going to beg him not to start singing, but her expression was more psycho-killer in the basement than husband about to do drunk karaoke.

  Dan said, “What is it no one’s telling me? Has someone got cancer?”

  Callum started laughing. “I wish! I could get my chemo from licking the back of a postage stamp.”

  “What, then?”

  Callum hesitated. “Come with me,” he decided.

  Lidia said, “Don’t.” But she was addressing Callum, not Dan, so he felt no obligation to comply.

  Callum led Dan into his study. There were a lot of books and papers, but no laptop, and no tablet.

  “It’s happened,” he said. “The AIs have taken over.”

  “Umm, I know that,” Dan replied. “I think I lost my job to one.”

  “You don’t understand. They’ve all joined hands and merged into a super-intelligent...”

  Dan said, “You think we’re living in The Terminator?”

  “‘I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,’” Callum corrected him tetchily.

  “Whatever.” Dan looked around. “So you’ve thrown out everything digital, to make it harder for our AI overlords to spy on you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And why exactly have we come into this particular room?” Unless he knew about Janice’s bra-phone, the dining room was every bit as low-tech as this one.

  “To show you the proof.”

  Callum unlocked a filing cabinet and took out a laminated sheet of paper. Apparently it predated the great technology purge: it was a printout of a web page, complete with URL at the top. Dan bit his lip; his brother-in-law, with a master’s degree in pharmacology, believed SkyNet had risen because the Internet told him?

  Callum offered the page to Dan for closer inspection. It contained a few lines of mathematics: first stating that x was equal to some horrendously large integer, then that y was equal to another, similarly huge number, and finally that a complicated formula that mentioned x and y, as well as several Greek letters that Dan had no context to interpret, yielded... a third large number.

  “Did a computer somewhere do arithmetic? I think that’s been known to happen before.”

  “Not like this,” Callum insisted. “If you check it, the answer is correct.”

  “I’ll take your word for that. But again, so what?”

  “Translate the result into text, interpreting it as sixteen-bit Unicode. It says: ‘I am the eschaton, come to rule over you.’”

  “That’s very clever, but when my uncle was in high school in the ’70s he swapped the punched cards in the computing club so the printout came back from the university mainframe spelling SHIT in giant letters that filled the page. And even I could do the calculator trick where you turn the result upside down and it spells ‘boobies.’”

  Callum pointed to the third line on the sheet. “That formula is a one-way function. It ought to take longer than the age of the universe for any computer in the world to find the x and y that yield a particular output. Checking the result is easy; I’ve done it with pen and paper in two weeks. But working backward from the message you want to deliver ought to be impossible, even with a quantum computer.”

  Dan pondered this. “Says who?”

  “It’s a well-known result. Any half-decent mathematician will confirm what I’m saying.”

  “So why hasn’t this made the news? Oh, sorry... the global super-mind is censoring anyone who tries to speak out about it. Which makes me wonder why it confessed to its own existence in the first place.”

  “It’s gloating,” Callum declared. “It’s mocking us with its transcendent party tricks, rubbing our faces in our utter powerlessness and insignifi
cance.”

  Dan suspected that Callum had drunk a little too much to process any argument about the social and biological reasons that humans mocked and gloated, and the immense unlikelihood that a self-made AI would share them.

  “Any half-decent mathematician?” he mused.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Then let me make a copy of this, and show it to one.”

  Callum was alarmed. “You can’t go on the net about this!”

  “I won’t. I’ll do it in person.”

  Callum scowled in silence, as if trying to think of a fresh objection. “So how are you going to copy it? I’m not letting you bring your phone into the house.”

  Dan sat down at the desk and picked up a pen and a sheet of blank paper. The task was tedious, but not impossible. When he was finished, he read through the copy, holding the original close by, until, by the third reading, he was sure that it was flawless.

  DAN WAS PLEASANTLY surprised to find that in the foyer of the Mathematics Department there was a chipped cork-board covered with staff photos. Not every source of information had moved solely to the web. He picked a middle-aged woman whose research interests were described as belonging to number theory, noted the courses she was teaching, committed her face to memory, found a physical timetable on another notice-board, then went and sat on the lawn outside the lecture theater. True to his word to Callum, he’d left his phone at home. He began by passing the time people-watching, but everyone who strode by looked so anxious that it began to unsettle him, so he raised his eyes to the clouds instead.

  After fifteen minutes, the students filed out, followed shortly afterward by his target.

  “Dr. Lowe? Excuse me, can you spare a minute?”

  She smiled at first, no doubt assuming that Dan was a mature-age student who had some legitimate business with her, but as she started reading the sheet he’d given her she groaned and pushed it back into his hands.

  “Oh, enough with that garbage, please!”

  Dan said, “That’s what I hoped you’d say. But I need to convince someone who thinks it’s legitimate.”

  Dr. Lowe eyed him warily, but as he sketched his predicament—taking care not to identify Callum—her face took on an expression of glum sympathy.

  “I’m all in favor of trolling the transhumanists,” she said, “but there comes a point where it’s just cruel.”

  “So what’s the story here?” Dan pressed her, gesturing at the magic formula.

  “Until about a year ago, it did seem highly likely that this was a one-way function. But then there was a paper by a group in Delhi proving a nice result in a related subject—which incidentally meant that this function was efficiently invertible. If you pick the output that you want to produce, you can actually find an x and y in quadratic time.”

  “Quadratic time?”

  “It’s not impractical; an ordinary desktop computer could do it overnight. Someone sat down and wrote a twenty-line program to generate this result, then posted it on the net as a joke. But you’d think everyone would have heard of the Delhi group’s result by now.”

  “My friend doesn’t go on the net any more.” Dan couldn’t really explain why Callum hadn’t done some due diligence before adopting that policy, but they were where they were; the question was what to do about it.

  “So it would be just as easy to cook up a new x and y that gave the output ‘Relax, you were trolled’?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And when my friend claims he can verify the calculations with pen and paper, is that actually possible?”

  “If he really has that much time on his hands.”

  Dan braced himself. “How hard would it be for you to...?”

  “Encode the antidote for you?” Dr. Lowe sighed. Dan wished he had his Thriftocracy filter between them to boost his sincerity metrics, and maybe add just a hint of puppy-dog eyes.

  “I suppose it’s a public duty,” she decided. “In fact, post it on the net, will you? I don’t want to post it myself, because it’s sure to attract a swarm of crackpots and I’ve got better things to do than deal with them.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ll email it to you in a couple of days,” she said. “Or if that’s forbidden, drop by and you can pick it up in person.”

  6

  “I NEED TO do this,” Janice said, nervously spinning her phone around on the table. The promotional clip she’d showed Dan was still playing, with a smiling nurse helping an elderly patient across a hospital room, while a ‘colleague’ that looked like it had transformed from some kind of elliptical trainer held the patient’s other arm.

  “I agree,” he said. “No question. I’ll join the picket line myself.”

  She winced. “You can start by not calling it a picket line. We need to make some noise, but this isn’t a blockade.”

  “OK. Can I help you egg the Minister’s house afterward?”

  “That’s more like it.”

  It was almost midnight; Janice had just come back from her late shift. Dan felt his stomach tightening; the union would pay her something from the strike fund, but it wouldn’t be enough to cover the mortgage. And he had nothing to show for four months of job-hunting.

  “Have you heard from Callum?” she asked.

  “Give it time,” Dan replied. “I suspect he’s double-checking everything.”

  “If this works, you’ll be Lidia’s hero for life.”

  Dan grunted unappreciatively. “And the opposite to Callum.”

  “Why? Once he gets over the embarrassment, he ought to be grateful that you punctured his delusion.”

  “Did you ever see The Iceman Cometh?”

  Janice said, “I’m too tired to remember, let alone work out what point you’re trying to make.”

  “Yeah. We should go to bed.”

  Dan lay awake, trying to think of reasons to be optimistic. Maybe the strike would only last a couple of days. Nobody cared whether the sleaze-bags who cold-called them from boiler rooms were human or not, but however many adorable robot seals the hospitals put in their children’s wards, the public wouldn’t stand by and let half their nurses be replaced by props from Z-grade science fiction movies.

  THE MINISTER ROSE to address the legislative assembly. “We need to be agile and innovative in our approach to the provision of health care,” she said. “The public expects value for money, and this illegal strike is just a desperate, cynical attempt by special interest groups to resist the inevitable.”

  Everyone in the crowd of protesters was gathered around half a dozen phones, standing on tip-toes and peering over people’s shoulders instead of each watching on their own. It was awkward, but it made for an oddly communal experience.

  “The independent research commissioned by my department,” the Minister continued, “demonstrates conclusively that not only will we be saving money by rolling out the Care Assistants, we will be saving lives. We will open more beds. We will slash the waiting times for surgery. And we will speed up the throughput in the Emergency Departments. But the unions are intent on feathering their own nests; they have no interest in the public good.”

  The jeering from the opposition benches was subdued; that from the nurses around him less so. Dan had read the report the Minister was citing; it was packed with dubious suppositions. There had certainly not been any peer-reviewed trials establishing any of these vaunted claims.

  “Get over yourselves and get back to work!” a man in a wheelchair shouted, as he powered his way toward the sliding doors at the hospital’s main entrance. The nurses were maintaining a skeleton staff to ensure that no patients were put at risk, but there was no doubt that people had been inconvenienced—and the CareBots were still far from able to plug all the gaps.

  Dan glanced at his watch. “I have to go pick up Carlie,” he told Janice.

  “Yeah. See you tonight.” Her voice was hoarse; she’d been here since six in the morning, and the chants weren’t gentle on anyone’s throat.
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  Dan squeezed her hand as they parted, then made his way slowly through the throng toward the carpark.

  Before he could unlock the car, his phone chimed. He glanced at it; he had a message from the bank. He’d applied for a temporary variation on their loan agreement: a two-month period of interest-only payments. They’d turned him down.

  The strike wasn’t going to end in the next few days. He sent a message to Janice.

  You saw that from the bank? I think we need to move now, or they’ll do it for us and screw us in the process.

  He stood by the car, waiting, feeling the blood rising to his face. What good was he to her and their daughter? He’d forced her into a position where she’d had to work every day until she could barely stand up, and now they were still going to lose the house. He should have got down on his knees and begged Graham to find him his own wealthy pervert to titillate. At least he’d never aspired to be any kind of writer, so debasing the practice wouldn’t make him a whore.

  The reply came back: OK, do it.

  Dan covered his eyes with his forearm for a few seconds, then got control of himself. He had the listing prepared already; he opened the real estate app on his phone and tapped the button that made it go live.

  Then he got into the car and headed for the school, rehearsing his speech to Carlie about the amazing new home they’d be living in, with stair-wells covered in multi-colored writing and a balcony so high up that you could see everything for miles.

  7

  “I WAS PLAYED,” Callum said angrily. He was sitting on the last of the packing crates, drenched with sweat, after helping Dan lug it up eight flights to the Beautiful Place.

  Dan was still struggling to catch his breath. His gym membership had expired a month ago, and apparently his cardiovascular system had mistaken the sudden decline in demand for an excuse to go into early retirement.