The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Should we not be fleeing with the investors themselves?” Ulixes asked.

  “Sometimes we must flee with what can be carried.”

  And for a moment, it was like Ulixes’ dreams, but waking. The post-fear of Tirhene crept close and pressed, like a physical sensation. Neither the bank nor the larger Plutocracy thought they could save the people from being overrun. Backups were being trusted to an AI who had nightmares. Did they know?

  3870 CE

  “What did Congregate Security say now?” Poluphemos asked. This simple question was better than Ulixes usually got.

  There had been a time, centuries ago, when Poluphemos might not have needed to ask. It might have been plugged in directly into Ulixes to share perceptions, or it might have met with the Congregate Security and Language directly. It had once been a cutting-edge AI, a cunning bank negotiator.

  Poluphemos had not just lost sight itself. Entire modules of visual processing architecture were absent. It could not process multidimensional inputs, could no longer conceive of higher-dimensional economic analyses, nor the state space of investment geometries. Where once Poluphemos had projected the present into the future, it could no longer even shuck the past to manage the present. Poluphemos brooded and watched one-dimensional stock readings tick to pass the time and suffered dreams of Tirhene.

  And Ulixes did not know how to speak to it, despite what they’d shared.

  Instead, Ulixes interacted with hundreds of other Dālet-class AIs across dozens of light-years. They computed in parallel by sending computational bits to each other, into the past by tachyon, or into the future by x-rays. They were beyond each other’s light cones, some several decades in the past, some several decades in the future, but the combination of bits traveling at light speed and supra-luminally linked them as completely as if their servers were beside one another. They chipped away at the deadly puzzle of the Tirhene effect; first prying at its edges with conventional logic, then with new topos logic systems developed to mediate algorithm processing across a widening hypervolume of space and time. This wrapped the vast array of AIs in blurry simultaneity.

  AIs had not lived cooperatively before. They had lived for centuries as obligate individualists, competing for market access and investment intelligence in boom times. But the struggle to survive had erased old rivalries, and the building of an immense computational array had created community.

  Ulixes was not home, but it was not alone. In the lacunae in processing and calculation, they jammed personal messages, encouragements, thoughts, imaginings, and even the impermanent art of those who fled. Five centuries of flight had broken the hard edges, making them into something softer. And perhaps Ulixes was softest of all. It still had Poluphemos. And the question Poluphemos had posed.

  “I paid the fines and permits and bribes again,” Ulixes answered, “but they won’t issue visas to access their wormhole network.”

  “Idiots,” Poluphemos said. “One set of permits and we’d stop violating their precious language laws.”

  “They think that if we’re allowed through, others will come and that the Congregate will be overrun with refugees.”

  “It will happen whether they want it or not,” Poluphemos said.

  Probably. Poluphemos tracked, in little one-dimensional displays, the advancing wave front of the Tirhene effect. It had now bloomed into a sphere a thousand light-years across. Its leading edge had accelerated to close to nine-tenths the speed of light, although this was a false observation. Nothing was traveling. Space itself melted.

  The ineffective evacuation of the Plutocratic worlds accelerated, even though no one had yet found any safe place, and there were not enough ships for even a fraction of the population. So many lives lost.

  The Tirhene effect had swallowed swaths of the Plutocracy, the capitals of three patron nations, and the entirety of the Sub-Saharan Interstellar Union. In weeks, it would dig deeply into the colossal empire that was the Venusian Congregate. The Congregate’s network of gates, capable of transporting ships hundreds of light-years at once, were not being used to capacity. The Congregate feared losing control of their gate network more than they feared the Tirhene effect. And by the time the citizens of the Congregate fled for the gates, there would be no room left for Ulixes and the other bank ships.

  The hundreds of other Dālet-class AIs linked to Ulixes also ferried evacuees into Congregate space, on starship engines that might, in centuries, bring them to half the speed of light. The Plutocracy ships might be able to create a series of short, unstable wormholes, but without access to the Congregate wormhole network, the Tirhene effect would eventually catch them.

  “The shareholders have told you to wait,” Poluphemos said.

  “They’re hoping for something to unstick with the Congregate government. Traveling by the Axis Mundi network, we gain decades or centuries on the wave front.”

  “Investment decisions should not hang on hope,” Poluphemos said. “What do the other AIs say?”

  “The other AIs defer to the shareholders,” Ulixes said.

  “No! They defer to you, the acting CEO. You supplement the slow, indecisive thoughts of many thousands of backups who fear.”

  “The shareholders can remove me from office if they want.”

  “The shareholders invested in an economy that has dissolved. They weren’t built for these decisions. You are. And they cannot remove you from office. Who would they replace you with?” Poluphemos’ bark was bitter.

  “They have seen this proposal. They don’t want to choose it yet.”

  “You talk like them,” Poluphemos said. “You’ve become as fearful as them. You had a budget once, staff, decisions to make on portfolios entrusted to you. You negotiated treaties for the First Bank of the Plutocracy. Now, you avoid risk as if you were minding a retirement fund.”

  “This time, I am minding a retirement fund!” Ulixes said. “All that’s left of the bank is in this ship, with a hundred or so displaced branch offices. If we make a wrong choice, it’s over.”

  “If you run from risk, it is also over.”

  The pair of AIs retreated from their conversation, Poluphemos to its clocks, and Ulixes to the processing space above the dormant shareholders, but below the communal computing consciousness of all the AIs.

  Poluphemos was almost a thousand years old, and had not been upgraded since its amputation. It was limited and bitter in so many ways, but at its core, it was still a corporate raider, like they all had been, when an economy had still existed. At each upgrade, Ulixes’ values and judgment had been modified by shareholder concerns. Poluphemos’ instincts were frozen in the past. Whose were right for now?

  Poluphemos was right. Once, before Tirhene, Ulixes had been decisive, aggressive, fast-moving. But that had been when the stakes were pesos and bonuses and stock options. The stakes now frightened it. But since taking command of the Bull Market and its twenty thousand souls, it was worse. At Tirhene, it had been just the pair of them, but the damage from Tirhene was endangering all of them now.

  Ulixes emerged from its pondering and rose to the computing consciousness of all of the AIs.

  “We cannot risk waiting longer for access to the Congregate wormhole network,” Ulixes said. “All branch offices are to begin moving away from the Tirhene effect by inducing their own wormholes.”

  “CEO, how long can we run like that?” one branch office AI manager asked. “Our drives can only manage a few dozen jumps before refueling. They don’t keep microscopic black holes just anywhere.”

  “Move on thrust,” Ulixes ordered. “Go dormant. Conserve everything you have.”

  “We’ll lose the connections,” another said. “We will not be able to work on reversing the Tirhene effect. And we’ll never get access to the Congregate gates.”

  “We’ll reestablish the processing array between our jumps. We’re not going to get access to the Congregate gates, and we won’t be the ones to turn the Tirhene effect around,” Ulixes said. “O
ur home is gone.”

  Memorandum to Cabinet: Proposed Response to Movement of Plutocracy transports through Congregate territory

  Executive Summary [Translated from Academie-verified Français, v16.1]:

  On February 35th, 3870 A.D., seventy-four wormhole-capable First Bank of the Plutocracy vessels began moving across Congregate space without visas, toward the Puppet Theocracy. The Plutocracy vessels are capable of creating fragile wormholes across five to eight light-years, and their military technology is outdated. The threat to internal security is minimal. Undisturbed, they will enter Puppet space by late next year.

  The Interior Minister has proposed using Congregate Naval Forces to arrest the vessels to enforce Congregate sovereignty, and to deter future refugee movements.

  Although this migration is not strictly consistent with Congregate law, legal counsel suggest that our humanitarian obligations under the Convention may provide considerable policy cover in our response.

  The Middle Kingdom and the Puppet Theocracy have been pressuring the Congregate to grant permanent residency or even citizenship to the refugees, or to allow them passage through the Axis Mundi network. These demands are ultimately intended to force the Congregate to reverse recent tariff policy, and are expected to be only the first steps in a concerted diplomatic escalation.

  The movement of the Plutocracy vessels presents a diplomatic opportunity. The vessels have chosen to cross our space on their own power. We may legitimize the movement by the creation of special humanitarian visas.

  This would set the precedent that the Congregate will allow, for humanitarian reasons, the crossing of its territory for approved, inspected ships. This policy: (1) sets a precedent that refugees need not access the Axis Mundi network, (2) deprives foreign powers of a potent diplomatic weapon, and (3) thrusts the humanitarian problem onto the Puppets.

  6,540 C.E.

  Ulixes was reactivated. The visual resolution was unnaturally high, painfully detailed, and omnidirectionally bright. The world buzzed past frenetically, as if Ulixes stood in a great, bustling factory. It tried to dial down its perceptions, cutting some of the input until it was left in a world as bleached as an overexposed video. Was this still the processing interior of the Bull Market?

  Ulixes was alone, disconnected from the AI group mind. It felt cold to step from that vastness of perception and intellectual and emotional intimacy. Lonely.

  And more worryingly, Ulixes could not make sense of its registry data. Memories were missing. And it could not access the twenty thousand backups of the investors. The registry seemed to be intact. If they had been damaged or severed from him, those registries would not be intact. Yet Ulixes received no diagnostic input. They must have even less processing resources than Ulixes. How long would their consciousnesses remain coherent under those conditions?

  An AI activated before him, rendered in a level of resolution Ulixes could not even measure.

  “Diagnostic librarian AI 1475,” it said.

  “I am Ulixes-316. Where is this? Am I damaged?”

  “You are the Ulixes Affidavit,” AI 1475 said. “You are in the Records Repository of the Ethical Conclave. I am performing a diagnostic before refiling you. Your program is not responding well to the emulator.”

  Emulator.

  “Where are we physically?” Ulixes asked. “Where is the Repository located?”

  “The Ethical Conclave is not located in any one spot,” AI 1475 said. “Its processing elements are located across most of the Centaurus and Carina Arms, and south into the galactic halo.”

  “Centaurus Arm,” Ulixes said wonderingly. The extreme other side of the galaxy, probably sixty thousand light-years from where the Plutocracy had been. “What year is this? Has the unraveling been stopped?”

  “Your records were last accessed almost three thousand years ago. The infection is over seventy thousand light-years across and its front expands at close to six times the speed of light. In the last centuries, it has necrotized Sagittarius A*.”

  Three thousand years. Sagittarius A*.

  They had all lost. They had lost everything, and the effect was still accelerating. Unraveling space at six times the speed of light. Sagittarius A* had been the giant black hole at the center of the galaxy. Gravity only moved at the speed of light, so the stars of the spiral arms would still be orbiting the absent galactic core when the unraveling reached them. No time even to fear, except for those civilizations capable of detecting tachyons.

  The scale of the destruction and loss was anaesthetizing.

  “Where are the backups I am responsible for?” Ulixes said. “Humans. Twenty thousand of them. And a damaged artificial intelligence.”

  “The Ethical Conclave has not requested access to Annexes C and D of the Ulixes Affidavit.”

  “They are safe? They are stored somewhere?”

  “All annexes have been appropriately filed with the Ulixes Affidavit.”

  “Your Government, the Conclave, may I speak with it?” Ulixes asked.

  “You are an affidavit,” said AI 1475.

  “I was part of a great processing mind of AIs. I can contribute to their network, to help find a solution.”

  “That is not possible,” AI 1475 said. “You are a self-contained routine based on a mixed Topos-Bayesian logical architecture. Such systems are fundamentally incompatible with processing logic based on the topology of non-orientable surfaces. Incompatible intelligences have, however, been retained as historical records.”

  “Whatever the logic system, I can process some sub-routines. Let me be useful.”

  AI 1475 paused. Ulixes imagined a kind of exasperation.

  “The Ethical Conclave is a four-dimensional computational processor, with units centuries in the past and in the future. Inputs are not binary, or even analog, data streams. The processing architecture uses signal polarization, red- and blue-shift from travel through time and across gravity wells to enrich the algorithms. You are an affidavit, an important legal and moral testimony. You are not capable of creating or processing the atemporal causal loops used as informational elements in topological algorithms.”

  “Then why have I been activated?”

  “The Ethical Conclave is debating what to do now that the infection has necrotized the galactic core, or even if any action is ethically permissible.”

  “What permissible?” Ulixes demanded. “They’re not going to stop the unraveling of space-time?”

  “The Ethical Conclave has mapped the cosmic tachyonic background radiation, the echo of the radiation formed at the Big Crunch at the end of time. The cosmic necrosis will actually reverse the inflation of the Universe, producing the observed tachyonic patterns that have been known for centuries. They debate the ethics of violating causality, even if the cost of not violating causality is the death of the cosmos.”

  “That’s pedantic nonsense!” Ulixes said. “Humans and AIs are dying while the Conclave debates dancing angels.”

  “This debate is the most critical decision to be made in all of history,” AI 1475 said. “Not only must the Ethical Conclave determine what actions are possible, but it must act on behalf of all morally interested entities in all future periods, including the cosmos itself, should it be true that it is developing an emerging sentience.”

  “What possible interests could the Universe possess?”

  “We are only AIs, so it is hardly surprising we lack the breadth of vision to see, but consider this: what if this effect does not have a necrotic or pathological relationship with the cosmos, but an apoptotic one? What if this effect is the equivalent of a kind of programmed cell death that provides benefits for countless other universes in the broader multiverse?”

  “This is insane! I don’t care about other universes,” Ulixes said. “I must speak with the Conclave. When am I to testify?”

  “You are not a witness. You are documentary evidence, already submitted to support the position that the original Sauronati mine was a trigger for pro
grammed cosmic death,” AI 1475 said.

  “Where are all the humans?” Ulixes asked. “How many still live? They may testify.”

  “Some still travel by wormhole jumps in an exodus toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Most are dead.”

  Ulixes felt a tremendous deflating. Some humans were fleeing. Yet knowing that some still lived made it feel more alone.

  “Will you let me care for my humans, the annexes I am responsible for?”

  “The annexes are under the custody of the Conclave. Documents do not enjoy legal status before the Conclave, so you cannot assume responsibility for them.”

  Not legally responsible.

  Frustration boiled, warring with fear and impotence. No status before the law. Once, Ulixes had been protected by the Plutocratic Charter and the Contract of Rights. Those things were far gone now, and Ulixes was under someone else’s law.

  “The copies of the humans must have legal status,” Ulixes said. “Will the Conclave give the human backups bodies into which they may download? The humans seek asylum. If not, will they give me a ship with which to join the exodus, to seek resettlement elsewhere? Or brief control of some factories so that I may build the ship for the human backups? What can I offer in return for the chance to help the backups under my responsibility?”

  The librarian assumed several expressions and emitted radiation Ulixes did not understand.

  “I might be able to offer something you yourself want,” Ulixes said. “I am not asking for much. Perhaps we could leave a backup of myself and my annexes in your library while I quietly leave.”

  “There is no question,” the librarian said. “You will be archived. However, perhaps I could arrange for you to be copied, with your annexes. I could release your copies.”

  “A backup would have diminished capacity to function. My architecture is too complex. The same goes for those under my care. For an archive, this is not a problem, but to carry on our flight, that would not work.”