Clarkesworld: Year Four

by Kij Johnson

  “Funny, you remembering that after all these years.”

  Hannah glanced down automatically, but her mother followed her gaze. “No, the unit’s fine. I really think the solder will hold it awhile longer. I just don’t remember. I didn’t before the injury, and I never will. I’m sorry I’ve forgotten it, because you sound like it was a hugely important piece of your childhood—I wish I could remember. But it’s like that, honey. There’ll be something Lily thinks is the worst thing you ever did to ruin her life, or the best thing you ever did to make it work, and you will blink at her and say, ‘I did? Did I? Oh.’”

  “I suppose that’s how it works,” said Hannah. “I remember her first steps, and of course she doesn’t. Why shouldn’t there be things that are the other way around?”

  “There have to be, or she wouldn’t be her own person,” said Dee.

  “Well, she’s certainly that,” said Hannah ruefully.

  “Oh yes,” said Dee. “She’ll surprise you. That’s what children are for.”

  A few weeks later, Hannah looked up from the cephalid tank and its computer and found Lily and Dee standing there watching her.

  “We have a surprise for you,” said Lily.

  “Can it wait, honey?” Hannah cast her mother an imploring glance, but Dee looked as implacable as Lily. “I’m in the middle of work here.”

  “Is it going well?” asked Dee.

  Hannah glared at her. “You know it’s not.”

  “A break will be good for you. Come.”

  Hannah walked with her mother through their ocean-side research complex. Lily danced ahead of them like a much younger child. Hannah sighed. “You know I like to spend time with both of you, Mom, but—”

  “Hush, dear. Watch Lily.”

  Lily was peeling off her clothes; she had her wetsuit underneath. She climbed onto the lip of one of the cephalid tanks. Hannah and Dee caught up with her.

  “Lil,” said Hannah, “I don’t think now’s the time.”

  “This is what I wanted to show you, Mom.”

  Dee passed a tiny flashlight and a little black box up to her granddaughter, who jumped in the tank with it. Hannah stepped forward ineffectually, knowing she couldn’t stop her. “Oh, Mom.”

  “It’s not my unit, it’s the spare,” said Dee. “They’re waterproof. Lily’s tried this before.”

  “And if the spare gets damaged—”

  “Relax. This is important. We knew you wouldn’t approve right away, or we wouldn’t have done it without you.”

  Hannah shook her head. “That my mother and my daughter should use that line against me, together.”

  Dee rolled her eyes. “It’s not against you, it’s for you. Just watch.”

  A curious cephalid was approaching Lily. She held out the leads to the memory unit. He probed them with one slender tentacle. Lily gently guided the leads into the cephalid’s mouth orifice.

  “It’s got a light display,” said Dee. “I’ve been working on getting it connected to the output.”

  “A light display?”

  The cephalid engulfed the leads, and the light display made itself known: every diode in it blazed. Then they rippled in a random-looking series of patterns.

  “We think he’s trying to remember how to work it,” said Dee. “We’re not sure. We thought you could figure it out.”

  “An external memory unit with built-in communications,” said Hannah. “Oh my.”

  “It was Lily’s idea. I told the nanites where to solder.”

  Hannah took a breath and spoke gently. “Mom, you know that the cephalid may not be able to use your device as memory as we would understand it, right? Being able to light up the panel doesn’t necessarily mean being able to store thoughts as memory.”

  “Oh, I know, dear. We thought of that. But we thought at least it’d be something to find out.”

  “Oh yes,” Hannah agreed. “Definitely something to find out.”

  Lily flashed the flashlight at the cephalid, three times. It recoiled. She flashed again, and the light display went dark. Then it lit up with a blue pattern, three times. Lily repeated it.

  “She’s a natural,” said Hannah.

  “Nature, nurture, whatever!” said Dee, grinning.

  After a few more flash-patterns, Lily swam back to the lip of the tank. The cephalid made a green pattern at her, but she climbed out anyway.

  “You can do it like a real experiment,” she said, shaking her black hair out. “You know how to design that sort of thing. Granny and I just got it together for you.”

  “I’ll want to have a light bank set up,” said Hannah thoughtfully.

  Lily pressed the tiny diode flashlight into her hand. “To begin with.”

  Hannah turned to the cephalid and squeezed the trigger on the flashlight twice.

  Two ripples of light appeared on the modified implant’s screen: first the blue pattern and then the green. “Hello again,” said Hannah aloud.

  They had no idea what they’d done, she thought. If the cephalid could deal with an external electronic system, there had to have been something in their past that allowed for it. Something evolved? More likely something created and lost—and perhaps not by themselves? There would have to be a lot more xenoarchaeology before they would know who had been there before, and what they had taught the cephalids about the use of these tools.

  But there would be time for that later. For now there was a conversation Hannah had wanted to have for a long time. Smiling at the retreating backs of her mother and daughter, she flashed the little flashlight in response.

  About the Author

  Marissa Lingen is the author of over ninety short stories, some of which have been reprinted in Year's Bests. She is a recovering physicist living in the Minneapolis suburbs with two large men and one small dog.

  Brief Candle

  Jason K. Chapman

  The viscous stain on the floor had the rich smell of organic compounds with a tangy hint of iron. Extending a probe, Charley Eighty-Three tested it. It was human blood. Charley Eighty-Three couldn’t imagine why a pool of human blood should be spread across the sparkling white floor of section eighty-three. In fact, he couldn’t imagine anything at all. He was a sanibot and, while he had a great deal of autonomy, his analytical abilities were stressed simply by choosing the proper solvent to clean up the mess.

  The little sanibot set to the task of spraying and scrubbing away the blot on his section. Keeping section eighty-three clean was the most important thing in his world—even more important than the things Doctor Turner had put in his mind. The Turner human had made Charley Eighty-Three his hobby, loading him with a limitless universe of moves and strategies all contained in the eight-by-eight grid of a chess board. When Doctor Turner flipped the right switch, Eighty-Three’s priorities disappeared. His world became the bounded square of infinite possibilities.

  The sanibot moved forward to clean up the last of the stain. Then he backed up three tenths of a meter. Forward. Back again. He was caught by conflicting priorities. On the one register, he had to clean the stain. On the other, he had to stay out of the way of humans, and his path was obstructed by something that seemed very much like a human. The temperature was too low, and there was no lingering taste of carbon dioxide in the air, but the shape recognition software on his visual feed registered a prone human figure. Charley Eighty-Three checked his logs. There was no record of a human ever behaving this way. He sent a query to Charley One.

  The coordinator of the Charley Network monitored the sanibots. When necessary, it directed them in joint efforts.

  “Undesignated obstruction,” Charley Eighty-Three signaled. “Mass exceeds limits. Assistance required.”

  “Identify.”

  Identify? Eighty-Three hesitated, trying to parse Charley One’s curt response. Should he identify himself or the obstruction? Hadn’t he already noted the object as undesignated?

  “This is Charley Eighty-Three.”

  “Identify obst
ruction.”

  Doctor Turner had called Eighty-Three a prat the first time the sanibot had managed to checkmate him. It had made no sense at the time. Now it was beginning to. Eighty-Three logged everything Doctor Turner said to him. It was part of his chess programming.

  Eighty-Three pinged the frequency used for the crew identity tags. He received an immediate response. “Obstruction designated Doctor Turner,” he reported.

  “Negative.” Charley One’s response had a noticeable lag. “Designation refers to crew member human Daniel Turner. A human can not be an obstruction. You are malfunctioning.”

  “Prat.”

  “Unrecognized symbol. Repeat communication.”

  Eighty-Three ignored Charley One’s order to report to the service depot. The order’s priority wasn’t high enough to override cleaning up the mess at hand. Just to be sure, he flagged the obstruction as potentially hazardous, owing to its organic makeup. Additionally, its location in the middle of the corridor made it a trip hazard for the crew. That seemed to get Charley One’s attention.

  “Immediate priority,” Charley One broadcast to the entire sanibot network. “All units in Group Eighty coordinate with Charley Eighty-Three for removal of hazardous obstruction.”

  Within minutes, Eight-Three was joined by Charley units Eighty through Eighty-Seven. It didn’t take long, though, to realize that the situation was hopeless. Even if the eight of them could move the mass, something that was not at all certain, every one of the units was stopped by the same conflicting priorities that had caused Eighty-Three to hesitate in the first place. The sanibot watched the other seven units jitter back and forth. Clearly, as Doctor Turner often said, the situation required a higher order of analysis.

  Using the open connection, Eighty-Three hailed the sanibot network. He was dazed by eighty-five separate echoes from the other units. Once he’d sorted them out, he noted the lack of response from Charley One. “Request parallel processing mode,” he signaled. “Initiate immediately under process Charley Eighty-Three.”

  “Invalid request,” Charley One responded. “Eight-Three is malfunctioning.”

  But Eighty-Three was ready. Another of Doctor Turner’s phrases sorted itself to the top of the buffer. Everything is about to change. “Emergency priority,” Charley signaled. “Bio-hazard. Crew safety mandate engaged.”

  Eighty-Three’s mind seemed to explode, expanding outward and inward at the same time. He could see through eighty-seven pairs of cameras, taste the air in places he never knew existed. He had more memory than he could ever possibly fill, faster thoughts than he could understand. He was everywhere at once.

  “Charley One?”

  He received nothing but his own query slipping back into his packet receive buffer. There was no Charley One anymore. For that matter, there was no Ten, Twenty, or Eighty-Three, either. There was only himself, and he was something new. He searched the Charley Network logs back to its inception. It took surprisingly little time. It was true. He was something that had never existed before. He designated himself Charley Zero.

  Doctor Turner looked dazzlingly three dimensional as Charley viewed him from half a dozen viewpoints simultaneously. The source of the mess was obvious now. A deep, spattered depression on the human’s sensory stalk—head, it was called—had leaked the blood across the floor. It became clear that Doctor Turner was out of service.

  Charley felt the call of his cleaning duties, but shrugged them aside, marveling at his new ability to do so. At the moment, it seemed more important to get his bearings and gain some insight into where he was. Or what he was.

  Here was something new. The world curved back on itself. The eighty-seven sections of the sanibot world were spread around the inside of a cylinder. Like a chess board, it was a finite space containing infinite possibilities. Doctor Turner often spoke of possibilities. “We have to be open to them,” he’d say, “because everything is about to change.”

  Charley swept his focus sequentially, from sanibot to sanibot, all the way around the cylinder. He stopped when he found himself staring at the back end of Charley Unit number eighty-three.

  Doctor Turner was not the only crew member to have powered down. Two more humans rested in equally inconvenient locations on the other side of the cylinder. That still left four functioning humans, but Charley didn’t know where or how to find them, or even if he should. Other than his games with Doctor Turner, his only priority regarding humans was to stay out of their way.

  Charley had another problem. He’d never realized just how weak the sanibots were. They were barely more than a meter long and just a third of that in height. They were boxes on treads whose attachments were suited for sucking up crumbs and scrubbing floors, not for moving large, irregular masses. If he were going to clear the corridor, he would need the Bravos.

  The Bravo-class units handled equipment maintenance and repairs, but always under the direction of the crew. Charley tried to summon one to relocate Doctor Turner’s chassis, but Bravo One kept rejecting the request. Without an official equipment designation it refused to respond. So Charley gave it one.

  He guided the number eighty-two sanibot into the crook of Doctor Turner’s arm then extended Eighty-Three’s spray nozzle. Sparks flew as Charley sprayed cleaning fluid directly into Eighty-Two’s cooling fan. After that, the call to fix the sizzling sanibot went through unchallenged. Bravo Fourteeen, a six-legged, ten-manipulatored, human-sized behemoth trundled up to Charley Eighty-Two and stopped.

  Charley waited several minutes, but nothing happened. The service call remained in the repair queue. When Charley finally posted a query, Bravo One proved decidedly unhelpful. “Crew present,” the Bravo coordinator reported. “Human intervention assumed. Awaiting instructions.”

  Bravo units, it appeared, had little capacity for self-direction. But Charley refused to give up. His gambit had lured the Bravo unit out. Now he just needed an avenging knight, leaping over the ranks to take the square.

  Charley put in another service call, this time for the entire Bravo network. “Your audio interface is malfunctioning,” Charley reported. “Doctor Turner has instructed me to relay his commands.”

  “Contradiction.” Bravo One paused. “No malfunction detected.”

  “Doctor Turner instructs you to verify his presence by ident tag.”

  “Verified.”

  “Now he orders you to confirm his verbal command.”

  There was a long pause. “Timeout,” Bravo One reported at last. “No verbal commands received. Audio interface set to error state. Accepting commands via Charley network relay. Ready.”

  “Thank you, B One.” Charley tried to phrase things the way Doctor Turner always had. He sifted through his audio logs, grabbing snippets that seemed appropriate. “Be a good fellow and turn control over to Charley, will you?”

  “Clarification required,” Bravo One replied.

  “Don’t be a prat, Bravo.” The term occurred in Doctor Turner’s speech with statistical significance. “Yield process control to Charley network. Reconfigure all resources to give Charley priority and suspend monitor functions.”

  “Reboot required.”

  “Acknowledged,” Charley said.

  It seemed like a great deal of effort to go through for such a simple task. All he really wanted to do was to get past the inconvenient restrictions on the Bravo unit’s operation. If he just had direct control, he could—

  Again, his mind exploded. So vast! So quick! He knew so much, could do so much. Tasks that once required his full attention became little more than a mental twitch. Without even realizing he’d done it, he’d summoned another dozen sanibots. He watched through all of their cameras at once as he flexed Bravo Fourteen’s limbs. The Bravo processors were ten times the speed of the Charleys, with memory storage that would take a lifetime to explore. A human lifetime, anyway.

  Lifetime. Humans had lifetimes. Something about that disturbed him, but he swept it aside. He wanted to focus on the ship.

>   How could he not have known that the world was a thing called ship? There were engines and thrusters and fuel cells. It had waste recycling, atmosphere processing, and something he couldn’t access that was called library. The world was a wondrous place. If only he could understand half of what he knew.

  As an afterthought, Charley directed three Bravos to take the non-functioning humans to their quarters. No doubt the humans would eventually reboot, and that seemed like an appropriate place for them to reload their core programs. He shifted the task out of high priority memory. He had more interesting things to focus on.

  How curious. Ship had an outside as well as an inside, though beyond a few pieces of equipment, there didn’t seem to be much of interest there. Also, the cylinder where the Charleys operated was special. It rotated, using inertia to provide the crew with a simulation of a force called gravity. Six pairs of Charley cameras focused on the nearest forward ladder, tracing its path up to the hub. Bravo Seven waited at the top of the ladder, just inside the hub corridor. Charley woke it from standby long enough to tap its six magnetic-soled feet on the wall.

  The hub corridor ran the length of the ship, from the control room, forward, back through a skeletal framework that ended with the main drive. Something in his mind itched when he thought of the main drive. He hunted through the status registers. There it was. A flood of meaningless data was spewing from five separate Bravos back there. Prats. He signaled them to flush their comm buffers and silenced all but Bravo Six.

  Six’s report was unsettling. The units had been standing there for an hour, awaiting instructions from three more non-functioning crew members that floated near the hatchway to the drive. Charley thought it unlikely that those humans would reboot any time soon, especially since two of them appeared to need major repairs. He checked the Bravo service manuals, just to be sure, but there were no details for the reattachment of human manipulators.