The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  Jamie felt an inspiration. “It was Mister Jeepers! There’s a flaw in his programming! He answers whatever question I ask him!”

  Jamie’s father looked uncertain. He held out his hand. “Let’s go home,” he said. “I need to think about this.”

  Jamie hesitated. “Don’t erase me,” he said. “Don’t load a backup. Please. I don’t want to die twice.”

  Dad’s look softened. “I won’t.”

  “I want to grow up,” Jamie said. “I don’t want to be a little kid forever.”

  Dad held out his hand again. Jamie thought for a moment, then took the hand. They walked over the green grass toward the white frame house on the hill.

  “Jamie’s home!” Mister Jeepers floated overhead, turning aerial cartwheels. “Jamie’s home at last!”

  A spasm of anger passed through Jamie at the sight of the witless grin. He pointed at the ground in front of him.

  “Crash right here!” he ordered. “Fast!”

  Mister Jeepers came spiraling down, an expression of comic terror on his face, and smashed to the ground where Jamie pointed at the sight of the crumpled body and laughed.

  “Jamie’s home at last!” Mister Jeepers said.

  As soon as Jamie could, he got one of the programmers at the University to fix him up a flight program like the one Mister Jeepers had been using. He swooped and soared, zooming like a super hero through the sky, stunting between the towers of El Castillo and soaring over upturned, wondering faces in the Forum.

  He couldn’t seem to go as fast as he really wanted. When he started increasing speed, all the scenery below paused in its motion for a second or two, then jumped forward with a jerk. The software couldn’t refresh the scenery fast enough to match his speed. It felt strange, because throughout his flight he could feel the wind on his face.

  So this, he thought, was why his car couldn’t go fast.

  So he decided to climb high. He turned his face to the blue sky and went straight up. The world receded, turned small. He could see the Castle, the hills of Whirlikin Country, the crowded Forum, the huge oval of the Circus Maximus. It was like a green plate, with a fuzzy, nebulpus horizon where the sky started.

  And, right in the center, was the little two-story frame house where he’d grown up.

  It was laid out below him like scenery in a snow globe.

  After a while he stopped climbing. It took him a while to realize it, because he still felt the wind blowing in his face, but the world below stopped getting smaller.

  He tried going faster. The wind bksted onto him from above, but his position didn’t change.

  He’d reached the limits of his world He couldn’t get any higher.

  Jamie flew out to the edges of the world, to the horizon. No matter how he urged his program to move, he couldn’t make his world fade away.

  He was trapped inside the snow globe, and there was no way out.

  It was quite a while before Jamie saw Becca again. She picked her way through the labyrinth beneath El Castillo to his throne room, and Jamie slowly materialized atop his throne of skulls. She didn’t appear surprised.

  “I see you’ve got a little Dark Lord thing going here,” she said.

  “It passes the time,” Jamie said.

  “And all those pits and stakes and tr pwires?”

  “Death traps.”

  “Took me forever to get in here, Digit. I kept getting de-rezzed.”

  Jamie smiled. “That’s the idea.”

  “Whirlikins as weapons.” She nodded. “That was a good one. Bored a hole right through me, the first time.”

  “Since I’m stuck living here,” Jamie said, “I figure I might as well be in charge of the environment. Some of the student programmers at the University helped me with some cool effects.”

  Screams echoed through the throne room. Fires leaped out of pits behind him. The flames illuminated the form of Marcus Tullius Cicero, who hung crucified above a sea of flame.

  “O tempora, o mores!” moaned Cicero.

  Becca nodded. “Nice,” she said. “Not my scene exactly, but nice.”

  “Since I can’t leave,” Jamie said, “I want a say in who gets to visit. So either you wait till I’m ready to talk to you, or you take your chances on the death traps.”

  “Well. Looks like you’re sitting pretty, then.”

  Jamie shrugged. Flames belched. “I’m getting bored with it. I might just wipe it all out and build another place to live in. I can’t tell you the number of battles I’ve won, the number of kingdoms I’ve trampled. In this reality and others. It’s all the same after a while.” He looked at her. “You’ve grown.”

  “So have you.”

  “Once the paterfamilias finally decided to allow it.” He smiled. “We still have dinner together sometimes, in the old house. Just a normal family, as Dad says. Except that sometimes I turn up in the form of a werewolf, or a giant, or something.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “The advantage of being software is that I can look like anything I want. But that’s the disadvantage, too, because I can’t really become something else, I’m still just … me. I may wear another program as a disguise, but I’m still the same program inside, and I’m not a good enough programmer to mess with that, yet.” Jamie hopped off his throne, walked a nervous little circle around his sister. “So what brings you to the old neighborhood?” he asked. “The old folks said you were off visiting Aunt Maddy in the country.”

  “Exiled, they mean. I got knocked up, and after the abortion they sent me to Maddy. She was supposed to keep me under control, except she didn’t.” She picked an invisible piece of lint from her sweater. “So now I’m back.” She looked at him. “I’m skipping a lot of the story, but I figure you wouldn’t be interested.”

  “Does it have to do with sex?” Jamie asked. “I’m sort of interested in sex, even though I can’t do it, and they’re not likely to let me.”

  “Let you?”

  “It would require a lot of new software and stuff. I was prepubescent when my brain structures were scanned, and the program isn’t set up for making me a working adult, with adult desires et cetera. Nobody was thinking about putting me through adolescence at the time. And the administrators at the University told me that it was very unlikely that anyone was going to give them a grant so that a computer program could have sex.” Jamie shrugged. “I don’t miss it, I guess. But I’m sort of curious.”

  Surprise crossed Becca’s face. “But there are all kinds of simulations, and …”

  “They don’t work for me, because my mind isn’t structured so as to be able to achieve pleasure that way. I can manipulate the programs, but it’s about as exciting as working a virtual butter churn.” Jamie shrugged again. “But that’s okay. I mean, I don’t miss it. I can always give myself a jolt to the pleasure center if I want.”

  “Not the same thing,” Becca said. “I’ve done both.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I’ll tell you about sex if you want,” Becca said, “but that’s not why I’m here.”

  “Yes?”

  Becca hesitated. Licked her lips. “I guess I should just say it, huh?” she said. “Mom’s dying. Pancreatic cancer.”

  Jamie felt sadness well in his mind. Only electrons, he thought, moving from one place to another. It was nothing real. He was programmed to feel an analog of sorrow, and that was all.

  “She looks normal to me,” he said, “when I see her.” But that didn’t mean anything: his mother chose what she wanted him to see, just as he chose a mask—a werewolf, a giant—for her.

  And in neither case did the disguise at all matter. For behind the werewolf was a program that couldn’t alter its parameters; and behind the other, ineradicable cancer.

  Becca watched him from slitted eyes. “Dad wants her to be scanned, and come here. So we can still be a normal family even after she dies.”

  Jamie was horrified. “Tell her no,” he said. “Tell her she can’t come!�
��

  “I don’t think she wants to. But Dad is very insistent.”

  “She’ll be here forever! It’ll be awful!”

  Becca looked around. “Well, she wouldn’t do much for your Dark Lord act, that’s for sure. I’m sure Sauron’s mom didn’t hang around the Dark Tower, nagging him about the unproductive way he was spending his time.”

  Fires belched. The ground trembled. Stalactites rained down like arrows.

  “That’s not it,” Jamie said. “She doesn’t want to be here no matter what I’m doing, no matter where I live. Because whatever this place looks like, it’s a prison.” Jamie looked at his sister. “I don’t want my mom in a prison.”

  Leaping flames glittered in Becca’s eyes. “You can change the world you live in,” she said. “That’s more than I can do.”

  “But I can’t,” Jamie said. “I can change the way it looks, but I can’t change anything real. I’m a program, and a program is an artifact. I’m a piece of engineering. I’m a simulation, with simulated sensory organs that interact with simulated environments—I can only interact with other artifacts. None of it’s real. I don’t know what the real world looks or feels or tastes like, I only know what simulations tell me they’re supposed to taste like. And I can’t change any of my parameters unless I mess with the engineering, and I can’t do that unless the programmers agree, and even when that happens, I’m still as artificial as I was before. And the computer I’m in is old and clunky, and soon nobody’s going to run my operating system anymore, and I’ll not only be an artifact, I’ll be a museum piece.”

  “There are other artificial intelligences out there,” Becca said. “I keep hearing about them.”

  “I’ve talked to them. Most of them aren’t very interesting—it’s like talking to a dog, or maybe to a very intelligent microwave oven. And they’ve scanned some people in, but those were adults, and all they wanted to do, once they got inside, was to escape. Some of them went crazy.”

  Becca gave a twisted smile. “I used to be so jealous of you, you know. You lived in this beautiful world, no pollution, no violence, no shit on the streets.”

  “Integra mens augustissima possessio,” said Cicero.

  “Shut up!” Jamie told him. “What the fuck do you know?”

  Becca shook her head. “I’ve seen those old movies, you know? Where somebody gets turned into a computer program, and next thing you know he’s in every computer in the world, and running everything?”

  “I’ve seen those, too. Ha ha. Very funny. Shows you what people know about programs.”

  “Yeah. Shows you what they know.”

  “I’ll talk to Mom,” Jamie said.

  Big tears welled out of Mom’s eyes and trailed partway down her face, then disappeared. The scanners paid a lot of attention to eyes and mouths, for the sake of transmitting expression, but didn’t always pick up the things between.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “We didn’t think this is how it would be.”

  “Maybe you should have given it more thought,” Jamie said.

  It isn’t sorrow, he told himself again. It’s just electrons moving.

  “You were such a beautiful baby.” Her lower lip trembled. “We didn’t want to lose you. They said that it would only be a few years before they could implant your memories in a clone.”

  Jamie knew all that by now. Knew that the technology of reading memories turned out to be much, much simpler than implanting them—it had been discovered that the implantation had to be made while the brain was actually growing. And government restrictions on human cloning had made tests next to impossible, and that the team that had started his project had split up years ago, some to higher paying jobs, some retired, others to pet projects of their own. How his father had long ago used up whatever pull he’d had at the University trying to keep everything together. And how he long ago had acquired or purchased patents and copyrights for the whole scheme, except for Jamie’s program, which was still owned jointly by the University and the family.

  Tears reappeared on Mom’s lower face, dripped off her chin. “There’s potentially a lot of money at stake, you know. People want to raise perfect children. Keep them away from bad influences, make sure that they’re raised free from violence.”

  “So they want to control the kid’s environment,” Jamie said.

  “Yes. And make it safe. And wholesome. And—”

  “Just like normal family life,” Jamie finished. “No diapers, no vomit, no messes. No having to interact with the kid when the parents are tired. And then you just download the kid into an adult body, give him a diploma, and kick him out of the house. And call yourself a perfect parent.”

  “And there are religious people …” Mom licked her lips. “Your dad’s been talking to them. They want to raise children in environments that reflect their beliefs completely. Places where there is no temptation, no sin. No science or ideas that contradict their own …”

  “But Dad isn’t religious,” Jamie said.

  “These people have money. Lots of money.”

  Mom reached out, took his hand. Jamie thought about all the code that enabled her to do it, that enabled them both to feel the pressure of unreal flesh on unreal flesh.

  “I’ll do what you wish, of course,” she said. “I don’t have that desire for immortality, the way your father does.” She shook her head. “But I don’t know what your father will do once his time comes.”

  The world was a disk a hundred meters across, covered with junk: old Roman ruins, gargoyles fallen from a castle wall, a broken chariot, a shattered bell. Outside the rim of the world, the sky was black, utterly black, without a ripple or a star.

  Standing in the center of the world was a kind of metal tree with two forked, jagged arms.

  “Hi, Digit,” Becca said.

  A dull fitful light gleamed on the metal tree, as if it were reflecting a bloody sunset.

  “Hi, sis,” it said.

  “Well,” Becca said. “We’re alone now.”

  “I caught the notice of Dad’s funeral. I hope nobody missed me.”

  “I missed you, Digit.” Becca sighed. “Believe it or not.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Becca restlessly kicked a piece of junk, a hubcap from an old, miniature car. It clanged as it found new lodgment in the rubble. “Can you appear as a person?” she asked. “It would make it easier to talk to you.”

  “I’ve finished with all that,” Jamie said. “I’d have to resurrect too much dead programming. I’ve cut the world down to next to nothing. I’ve got rid of my body, my heartbeat, the sense of touch.”

  “All the human parts,” Becca said sadly.

  The dull red light oozed over the metal tree like a drop of blood. “Everything except sleep and dreams. It turns out that sleep and dreams have too much to do with the way people process memory. I can’t get rid of them, not without cutting out too much of my mind.” The tree gave a strange, disembodied laugh. “I dreamed about you, the other day. And about Cicero. We were talking Latin.”

  “I’ve forgotten all the Latin I ever knew.” Becca tossed her hair, forced a laugh. “So what do you do nowadays?”

  “Mostly I’m a conduit for data. The University has been using me as a research spider, which I don’t mind doing, because it passes the time. Except that I take up a lot more memory than any real search spider, and don’t do that much better a job. And the information I find doesn’t have much to do with me—it’s all about the real world. The world I can’t touch.” The metal tree bled color.

  “Mostly,” he said, “I’ve just been waiting for Dad to die. And now it’s happened.”

  There was a moment of silence before Becca spoke. “You know that Dad had himself scanned before he went.”

  “Oh, yeah. I knew.”

  “He set up some kind of weird foundation that I’m not part of, with his patents and programs and so on, and his money and some other people’s.”

  “He’d better not turn
up here.”

  Becca shook her head. “He won’t. Not without your permission anyway. Because I’m in charge here. You—your program—it’s not a part of the foundation. Dad couldn’t get it all, because the University has an interest, and so does the family.” There was a moment of silence. “And I’m the family now.”

  “So you … inherited me,” Jamie said. Cold scorn dripped from his words.

  “That’s right,” Becca said. She squatted down amid the rubble, rested her forearms on her knees.

  “What do you want me to do, Digit? What can I do to make it better for you?”

  “No one ever asked me that,” Jamie said.

  There was another long silence.

  “Shut it off,” Jamie said. “Close the file. Erase it.”

  Becca swallowed hard. Tears shimmered in her eyes. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’m sure.”

  “And if they ever perfect the clone thing? If we could make you …” She took a breath. “A person?”

  “No. It’s too late. It’s … not something I can want anymore.”

  Becca stood. Ran a hand through her hair. “I wish you could meet my daughter,” she said. “Her name is Christy. She’s a real beauty.”

  “You can bring her,” Jamie said.

  Becca shook her head. “This place would scare her. She’s only three. I’d only bring her if we could have …”

  “The old environment,” Jamie finished. “Pandaland. Mister Jeepers. Whirlikin Country.”

  Becca forced a smile. “Those were happy days,” she said. “They really were. I was jealous of you, I know, but when I look back at that time …” She wiped tears with the back of her hand. “It was the best.”

  “Virtual environments are nice places to visit, I guess,” Jamie said. “But you don’t want to live in one. Not forever.” Becca looked down at her feet, planted amid rubble.

  “Well,” she said. “If you’re sure about what you want.”

  “I am.”

  She looked up at the metal form, raised a hand. “Good-bye, Jamie,” she said.

  “Good-bye,” he said.

  She faded from the world.