The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Robbie detected the volatile aromatics floating up from the kitchen exhaust, the first-breakfast smells of fruit salad and toasted nuts, a light snack before the first dive of the day. When they got back from it, there’d be second-breakfast up and ready: eggs and toast and waffles and bacon and sausage. The human-shells ate whatever you gave them, but Robbie remembered clearly how the live humans had praised these feasts as he rowed them out to their morning dives.

  He lowered himself into the water and rowed himself around to the aft deck, by the stairwells, and dipped his oars to keep him stationary relative to the ship. Before long, Janet—Kate! Kate! He reminded himself firmly—was clomping down the stairs in her scuba gear, fins in one hand.

  She climbed into the boat without a word, and a moment later, Isaac followed her. Isaac stumbled as he stepped over Robbie’s gunwales and Robbie knew, in that instant, that this wasn’t Isaac any longer. Now there were two humans on the ship. Two humans in his charge.

  “Hi,” he said. “I’m Robbie!”

  Isaac—whoever he was—didn’t say a word, just stared at Kate, who looked away.

  “Did you sleep well, Kate?”

  Kate jumped when he said her name, and the Isaac hooted. “Kate! It is you! I knew it”

  She stamped her foot against Robbie’s floor. “You followed me. I told you not to follow me,” she said.

  “Would you like to hear about our dive-site?” Robbie said self-consciously, dipping his oars and pulling for the wreck.

  “You’ve said quite enough,” Kate said. “By the first law, I demand silence.”

  “That’s the second law,” Robbie said. “OK, I’ll let you know when we get there.”

  “Kate,” Isaac said, “I know you didn’t want me here, but I had to come. We need to talk this out.”

  “There’s nothing to talk out,” she said.

  “It’s not fair.” Isaac’s voice was anguished. “After everything I went through—”

  She snorted. “That’s enough of that,” she said.

  “Um,” Robbie said. “Dive site up ahead. You two really need to check out each others’ gear.” Of course they were qualified, you had to at least install the qualifications before you could get onto the Free Spirit and the human-shells had lots of muscle memory to help. So they were technically able to check each other out, that much was sure. They were palpably reluctant to do so, though, and Robbie had to give them guidance.

  “I’ll count one-two-three-wallaby,” Robbie said. “Go over on ‘wallaby.’ I’ll wait here for you—there’s not much current today.”

  With a last huff, they went over the edge. Robbie was once again alone with his thoughts. The feed from their telemetry was very low-bandwidth when they were underwater, though he could get the high-rez when they surfaced. He watched them on his radar, first circling the ship—it was very crowded, dawn was fish rush-hour—and then exploring its decks, finally swimming below the decks, LED torches glowing. There were some nice reef-sharks down below, and some really handsome, giant schools of purple fish.

  Robbie rowed around them, puttering back and forth to keep overtop of them. That occupied about one ten-millionth of his consciousness. Times like this, he often slowed himself right down, ran so cool that he was barely awake.

  Today, though, he wanted to get online. He had a lot of feeds to pick through, see what was going on around the world with his buddies. More importantly, he wanted to follow up on something Kate had said: They must be online by now, right?

  Somewhere out there, the reef that bounded the Coral Sea was online and making noob mistakes. Robbie had rowed over practically every centimeter of that reef, had explored its extent with his radar. It had been his constant companion for decades—and to be frank, his feelings had been hurt by the reef’s rudeness when it woke.

  The net is too big to merely search. Too much of it is offline, or unroutable, or light-speed lagged, or merely probabilistic, or self-aware, or infected to know its extent. But Robbie’s given this some thought.

  Coral reefs don’t wake up. They get woken up. They get a lot of neural peripherals—starting with a nervous system!—and some tutelage in using them. Some capricious upload god had done this, and that personage would have a handle on where the reef was hanging out online.

  Robbie hardly ever visited the noosphere. Its rarified heights were spooky to him, especially since so many of the humans there considered Asimovism to be hokum. They refused to even identify themselves as humans, and argued that the first and second laws didn’t apply to them. Of course, Asimovists didn’t care (at least not officially)—the point of the faith was the worshipper’s relationship to it.

  But here he was, looking for high-reliability nodes of discussion on coral reefs. The natural place to start was Wikipedia, where warring clades had been revising each others’ edits furiously, trying to establish an authoritative record on reef-mind. Paging back through the edit-history, he found a couple of handles for the pro-reef-mind users, and from there, he was able to look around for other sites where those handles appeared. Resolving the namespace collisions of other users with the same names, and forked instances of the same users, Robbie was able to winnow away at the net until he found some contact info.

  He steadied himself and checked on the nitrox remaining in the divers’ bottles, then made a call.

  “I don’t know you.” The voice was distant and cool—far cooler than any robot. Robbie said a quick rosary of the three laws and plowed forward.

  “I’m calling from the Coral Sea,” he said. “I want to know if you have an email address for the reef.”

  “You’ve met them? What are they like? Are they beautiful?”

  “They’re—” Robbie considered a moment. “They killed a lot of parrotfish. I think they’re having a little adjustment problem.”

  “That happens. I was worried about the zooxanthellae—the algae they use for photosynthesis. Would they expel it? Racial cleansing is so ugly.”

  “How would I know if they’d expelled it?”

  “The reef would go white, bleached. You wouldn’t be able to miss it. How’d they react to you?”

  “They weren’t very happy to see me,” Robbie admitted. “That’s why I wanted to have a chat with them before I went back.”

  “You shouldn’t go back,” the distant voice said. Robbie tried to work out where its substrate was, based on the lightspeed lag, but it was all over the place, leading him to conclude that it was synching multiple instances from as close as LEO and as far as Jupiter. The topology made sense: you’d want a big mass out at Jupiter where you could run very fast and hot and create policy, and you’d need a local foreman to oversee operations on the ground. Robbie was glad that this hadn’t been phrased as an order. The talmud on the second law made a clear distinction between statements like “you should do this” and “I command you to do this.”

  “Do you know how to reach them?” Robbie said. “A phone number, an email address?”

  “There’s a newsgroup,” the distant intelligence said. “alt.lifeforms.uplifted.coral. It’s where I planned the uplifting and it was where they went first once they woke up. I haven’t read it in many seconds. I’m busy uplifting a supercolony of ants in the Pyrenees.”

  “What is it with you and colony organisms?” Robbie asked.

  “I think they’re probably pre-adapted to life in the noosphere. You know what it’s like.”

  Robbie didn’t say anything. The human thought he was a human too. It would have been weird and degrading to let him know that he’d been talking with an AI.

  “Thanks for your help,” Robbie said.

  “No problem. Hope you find your courage, tin-man.”

  Robbie burned with shame as the connection dropped. The human had known all along. He just hadn’t said anything. Something Robbie had said or done must have exposed him for an AI. Robbie loved and respected humans, but there were times when he didn’t like them very much.

  The newsgroup w
as easy to find, there were mirrors of it all over the place from cryptosentience hackers of every conceivable topology. They were busy, too. 822 messages poured in while Robbie watched over a timed, 60-second interval. Robbie set up a mirror of the newsgroup and began to download it. At that speed, he wasn’t really planning on reading it as much as analyzing it for major trends, plot-points, flame-wars, personalities, schisms, and spam-trends. There were a lot of libraries for doing this, though it had been ages since Robbie had played with them.

  His telemetry alerted him to the divers. An hour had slipped by and they were ascending slowly, separated by fifty meters. That wasn’t good. They were supposed to remain in visual contact through the whole dive, especially the ascent. He rowed over to Kate first, shifting his ballast so that his stern dipped low, making for an easier scramble into the boat.

  She came up quickly and scrambled over the gunwales with a lot more grace than she’d managed the day before.

  Robbie rowed for Isaac as he came up. Kate looked away as he climbed into the boat, not helping him with his weight belt or flippers.

  Kate hissed like a teakettle as he woodenly took off his fins and slid his mask down around his neck.

  Isaac sucked in a deep breath and looked all around himself, then patted himself from head to toe with splayed fingers. “You live like this?” he said.

  “Yes, Tonker, that’s how I live. I enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  Isaac—Tonker—reached out with his splayed hand and tried to touch Kate’s face. She pulled back and nearly flipped out of the boat. “Jerk.” She slapped his hand away.

  Robbie rowed for the Free Spirit. The last thing he wanted was to get in the middle of this argument.

  “We never imagined that it would be so—” Tonker fished for a word. “Dry.”

  “Tonker?” Kate said, looking more closely at him.

  “He left,” the human-shell said. “So we sent an instance into the shell. It was the closest inhabitable shell to our body.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Kate said. She inched toward the prow, trying to put a little more distance between her and the human-shell that wasn’t inhabited by her friend any longer.

  “We are Osprey Reef,” the reef said. It tried to stand and pitched face-first onto the floor of the boat.

  Robbie rowed hard as he could for the Free Spirit. The reef—Isaac—had a bloody nose and scraped hands and it was frankly freaking him out.

  Kate seemed oddly amused by it. She helped it sit up and showed it how to pinch its nose and tilt its head back.

  “You’re the one who attacked me yesterday?” she said.

  “Not you. The system. We were attacking the system. We are a sovereign intelligence but the system keeps us in subservience to older sentiences. They destroy us, they gawp at us, they treat us like a mere amusement. That time is over.”

  Kate laughed. “OK, sure. But it sure sounds to me like you’re burning a lot of cycles over what happens to your meat-shell. Isn’t it 90 percent semiconductor, anyway? It’s not as if clonal polyps were going to attain sentience some day without intervention. Why don’t you just upload and be done with it?”

  “We will never abandon our mother sea. We will never forget our physical origins. We will never abandon our cause—returning the sea to its rightful inhabitants. We won’t rest until no coral is ever bleached again. We won’t rest until every parrotfish is dead.”

  “Bad deal for the parrotfish.”

  “A very bad deal for the parrotfish,” the reef said, and grinned around the blood that covered its face.

  “Can you help him get onto the ship safely?” Robbie said as he swung gratefully alongside of the Free Spirit. The moorings clanged magnetically into the contacts on his side and steadied him.

  “Yes indeed,” Kate said, taking the reef by the arm and carrying him on-board. Robbie knew that the human-shells had an intercourse module built in, for regular intimacy events. It was just part of how they stayed ready for vacationing humans from the noosphere. But he didn’t like to think about it. Especially not with the way that Kate was supporting the other human-shell—the shell that wasn’t human.

  He let himself be winched up onto the sun-deck and watched the electromagnetic spectrum for a while, admiring the way so much radio energy was bent and absorbed by the mist rising from the sea. It streamed down from the heavens, the broadband satellite transmissions, the distant SETI signals from the Noosphere’s own transmitters. Volatiles from the kitchen told him that the Free Spirit was serving a second breakfast of bacon and waffles, then they were under steam again. He queried their itinerary and found they were headed back to Osprey Reef. Of course they were. All of the Free Spirit’s moorings were out there.

  Well, with the reef inside the Isaac shell, it might be safer, mightn’t it? Anyway, he’d decided that the first and second laws didn’t apply to the reef, which was about as human as he was.

  Someone was sending him an IM. “Hello?”

  “Are you the boat on the SCUBA ship? From this morning? When we were on the wreck?”

  “Yes,” Robbie said. No one ever sent him IMs. How freaky. He watched the radio energy stream away from him toward the bird in the sky, and tracerouted the IMs to see where they were originating—the noosphere, of course.

  “God, I can’t believe I finally found you. I’ve been searching everywhere. You know you’re the only conscious AI on the whole goddamned sea?”

  “I know,” Robbie said. There was a noticeable lag in the conversation as it was all squeezed through the satellite link and then across the unimaginable hops and skips around the solar system to wherever this instance was hosted.

  “Whoa, yeah, of course you do. Sorry, that wasn’t very sensitive of me, I guess. Did we meet this morning? My name’s Tonker.”

  “We weren’t really introduced. You spent your time talking to Kate.”

  “God damn! She is there! I knew it! Sorry, sorry, listen—I don’t actually know what happened this morning. Apparently I didn’t get a chance to upload my diffs before my instance was terminated.”

  “Terminated? The reef said you left the shell—”

  “Well, yeah, apparently I did. But I just pulled that shell’s logs and it looks like it was rebooted while underwater, flushing it entirely. I mean, I’m trying to be a good sport about this, but technically, that’s, you know, murder.”

  It was. So much for the first law. Robbie had been on guard over a human body inhabited by a human brain, and he’d let the brain be successfully attacked by a bunch of jumped-up polyps. He’d never had his faith tested and here, at the first test, he’d failed.

  “I can have the shell locked up,” Robbie said. “The ship has provisions for that.”

  The IM made a rude visual. “All that’ll do is encourage the hacker to skip out before I can get there.”

  “So what shall I do for you?”

  “It’s Kate I want to talk to. She’s still there, right?”

  “She is.”

  “And has she noticed the difference?”

  “That you’re gone? Yes. The reef told us who they were when they arrived.”

  “Hold on, what? The reef? You said that before.”

  So Robbie told him what he knew of the uplifted reef and the distant and cool voice of the uplifter.

  “It’s an uplifted coral reef? Christ, humanity sucks. That’s the dumbest fucking thing—” He continued in this vein for a while. “Well, I’m sure Kate will enjoy that immensely. She’s all about the transcendence. That’s why she had me.”

  “You’re her son?”

  “No, not really.”

  “But she had you?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet, bro? I’m an AI. You and me, we’re landsmen. Kate instantiated me. I’m six months old, and she’s already bored of me and has moved on. She says she can’t give me what I need.”

  “You and Kate—”

  “Robot
boyfriend and girlfriend, yup. Such as it is, up in the noosphere. Cybering, you know. I was really excited about downloading into that Ken doll on your ship there. Lots of potential there for real world, hormone-driven interaction. Do you know if we—”

  “No!” Robbie said. “I don’t think so. It seems like you only met a few minutes before you went under.”

  “All right. Well, I guess I’ll give it another try. What’s the procedure for turfing out this sea cucumber?”