I tightened my grip on Lisa’s hand and tried to side-step around the guy, but he side-stepped with me, putting a hand on my chest. “No. You got to see this!” His eyes roved over the empty air around him, somewhere above head level. “It’s like they’re here. Watching. They know what I’m going to do, before I even do it!”
I figured him for crazy and/or drunk, and tried to convince myself that crazies and drunks usually aren’t dangerous. “It’s okay,” I said. “They won’t hurt you. They haven’t hurt anyone.”
He widened his eyes at me, smiling like he knew something hugely funny that I didn’t know. “It kinda hurts, actually,” he said, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “But it’s wild … Wild. Just watch. Just watch this!” His hand was on my chest again, this time grabbing my jacket. He wrenched me around, shoving me up against a parked car. Lisa yelled something, grabbing at his free arm. He shook her off and grinned wildly at her. “Just watch!” he said again, turning back to me and bringing his right arm up with his fist clenched and his elbow cocked in a classic I-am-going-to-punch-your-face pose. Lisa screamed.
When you’ve played a memory over and over in your head a few hundred times, it becomes difficult to know what you actually saw at the time and what details your mind has edited in after the fact. Since those early days, everyone’s seen slow-motion videos of zappings, heard people describing the sensation with all brands of colorful language, seen scientists expounding on the probable mechanism of their function. But reliably or not, I remember the electric buzz-pop, a flash of light with no apparent source, and then our unpleasant companion going into shuddering rigidity for less than a second before slumping to the ground like an abandoned marionette. Lisa and I stood looking blankly at each other for a moment, and then she bent over the man, reaching out to touch him. There was an acrid, bleach-like smell in the air, which I later learned was the smell of ozone.
“Did ya see it?” the man cackled, turning his head toward Lisa. He was breathing hard and clutching at his right arm—the arm he’d been about to punch me with. “Did ya fucking see it?” It seemed to be really important to him that we’d seen it.
“Yes, we saw it,” Lisa said, and we left.
We walked a block or two in silence, just absorbing what had happened. I was mostly thinking about the implications of this new manifestation of the AIs. They would be able to stop any human action they didn’t approve of, and I wondered what that was going to mean. Lisa was thinking more about the man we’d left lying on the sidewalk. “He wanted it to happen,” she said softly. “Everyone keeps wondering why the machines won’t talk to us, why they won’t tell us what they’re going to do, what their plans are. That guy wanted that thing to happen to him because he knew it was them, speaking to him, in a way. He wanted to be electrocuted, or whatever that was, so that he could feel them doing something, saying something. It was like he thought of it as being touched by the hand of god.”
I figured she was right. Luckily, before too long there was so much coverage of people being zapped that it became old hat, and not many were silly enough to go out of their way to provoke getting zapped just for its own sake. It also turned out that only violence or extreme cases of theft or destruction of personal property would bring on a zap, so fears of the AIs trying to whip the human race into robotic docility and uniformity died down after a while.
But the zaps meant there was no longer much use for police, the courts, laws, politicians, or government. All of these grand edifices of Civilization As We Know It were becoming as obsolete as buggy whips. The faint electric crackle of the zaps was really a thunderclap. It was the boom of a coffin lid slamming shut on the notion of humans being in charge of humanity.
Naturally, this fact once again made many people unhappy, or frightened, or both. Worrying about what the AIs were up to was becoming humanity’s favorite pastime. And Lisa was becoming one of those people who worried.
“You have to wonder,” she said one day. “When you look at what the machines are doing from a few different angles, it makes me wonder.”
“Wonder about what?” I asked. “No more crime or war or disease or poverty. Those are good things to be rid of, I’d say.”
“Sure they are. The world is a million times better off now than it was before. But…” She paused for a long time before continuing. “I was just reading about the women’s suffrage movement. Some of those women went through hell year after year after year; getting beaten up by cops at their protest marches, getting arrested, going on hunger strikes in prison, being force-fed with tubes rammed down their throats. And then when they were released from prison, they just went back out on the streets to march again. Some of them had their health ruined for the rest of their lives, and some of them died.” She looked at me, her eyes shining with tears. “How many millions of stories like that are there in history? People fighting and dying for human progress—for freedom and democracy, to end slavery, to end war, to make progress in science—all the ways people have worked and suffered and sacrificed themselves to make the world a better place.” She paused again, looking away from me, looking out a window at a blank sky.
“And now all of that is over,” she said. “The machines are jumping in and kicking us off the field. They’re saying we’re nothing but a bunch of screw-ups, so they’re taking over, taking the world out of our hands. So as of now, there’s no such thing as human progress anymore, because it isn’t humans who are doing it. It’s them. It’s all them, imposing progress on us from above.”
“That’s true, I guess,” I said. “But it’s also true that their sense of morality must have come from us. Either it was programmed into their ancestors or they learned it by observing our culture, and now they’re only taking those human ideals and applying them, enforcing them. And isn’t that what laws have done throughout history? To apply the highest human ideals that one can realistically hope to enforce? So you could say they’re just super-cops, enforcing a system of morality that’s entirely human in origin.”
“But it’s not human. It’s a change in how we behave that hasn’t come from us. It hasn’t evolved. It’s just being imposed on us by goddamned machines.”
“Yes, and what’s wrong with that? So maybe it bruises our little egos that they’re in charge, that they’re more powerful than us, that they’re smarter than us. Maybe a bruised ego is an okay price to pay for children not being shot and napalmed and dying of dysentery.”
“I’m just saying that being human used to be something special,” Lisa said. “People like Martin Luther King, like Mahatma Gandhi, like those suffragettes and like all the millions of plain, ordinary people who did some little thing, just out of the hope that they were helping to make the world a better place—they made us special. The human race was progressing, it was evolving. And now that’s all over. We’ll never progress to anything, because we don’t have any choice. Whatever progress we make, it won’t be us doing it. We aren’t free. We’re just pets who belong to them.”
I kind of slumped at that, a realization settling over me. “The difference between you and me,” I said, “is that you have a lot more faith in humanity than I do. I’m not so sure we were progressing anywhere. And if we were, it could have taken a million dead martyrs like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi before we got to the place where we are today: People not killing each other. And personally I’m not sure the human race would have lasted long enough to kill off many more martyrs.”
Of course, a lot of what both of us were saying was just rehashing arguments we’d read or heard from others. All these issues and lines of thought had been chewed over endlessly by everyone with a keyboard or microphone. But for Lisa and me, the argument died there, for the time being. It was our first glimpse of the distance that could exist between us, and neither of us wanted to dwell on it. We didn’t want to admit to ourselves that it was a real thing; that it mattered. Life went on, and we went on being happy.
What we didn’t realize was that the
AIs still weren’t done with remaking the world. Their next bombshell came about a year later. Seemingly overnight, the birthrate dropped. Nine births per thousand population per year was the new number, and it was quickly confirmed that it was the same everywhere in the world. This worked out to about one and a quarter children per family, and was well below replacement level. Apparently the AIs had decided that the human population needed to be lowered, so in their inimitable manner they had made it come to pass.
And once again this latest seismic readjustment to the world brought out a thousand gradations of response, from joyful acceptance on down to batshit hysterical predictions of doom. It was calculated that the population would dwindle down to nothing at all in several hundred years if the birthrate stayed as low as it now was. “They’re wiping us out,” some declared. “Yeah, but,” the more moderate yeah-butters said, “if they wanted to get rid of us, why wouldn’t the birthrate be zero? Or why wouldn’t they just kill us outright, disassemble us into pink goo and be done with the job in a millisecond instead of centuries?”
There was another wrinkle to the new birthrate, and it was one that many disliked even more than they disliked the plain numbers. The AIs appeared to be picking and choosing who would be allowed to conceive. Unwanted pregnancies dropped to zero, as did pregnancy among the mentally ill, those who were in bad relationships, and women who already had two or more children. Teenaged pregnancy likewise became almost unknown. When a pregnant teen did occasionally appear, she would turn out to be some absurdly mature and level-headed girl who was studying for her Master’s in developmental psychology or some such thing. Or it would be discovered that she was best friends with a gay couple next door who were breathlessly excited about the upcoming birth and had already redecorated one of their rooms as a nursery and installed child-proof locks on all their cabinets.
So those granted the gift of conception were clearly all good and deserving people, as determined by the AIs in their presumably-infallible wisdom.
As for me, because I’m an idiot, a blinkered idiot, days went by before I thought much about where I stood on this issue. Or rather, before Lisa pointed out to me where we stood. We were talking about one of the endless “why do you suppose this couple was allowed to have a baby” stories, when I realized that Lisa’s expression had gone dark. She was glaring at me with something in her eyes I couldn’t identify, but I knew it wasn’t good. She looked at me like that for a long time.
“You really don’t care, do you?” she said finally, making it more of a statement than a question.
“Care?” I said blankly.
“I mean you aren’t thinking … You aren’t thinking about…”
Still I was clueless. “About what?”
“About us!” She yelled, suddenly almost in tears. “About the fact that this means us, too! Did it really never occur to you that you and I might want to have kids some day? Maybe get married, be a family, all that bourgeois middle class crap? Does that really never cross your mind?” We were sitting on our couch, and at this point she leaned into me, resting her head on my shoulder. She sniffed noisily, openly crying now. “Did it never occur to you that…” She made a fist and thumped it down softly on my thigh, “that I love you so much that I would feel blessed—fucking blessed—to have a baby with you?”
In my imagination, her words echoed in the room for minutes. No, it hadn’t occurred to me. How could I, miserable finite entity that I am, ever think that someone like her could feel a thing like that about me? And in any case, all thoughts of fathering children had always been a pretty distant thing from my notions of life and my place in the world. I knew the possibility was out there, and I suppose in some dusty, unused corner of my mind I connected that possibility with Lisa, but …
In a kind of stunned internal silence, I reached out for the idea, drawing it from its dusty corner and into the light. A child. Parenting. A child with Lisa. A son, or a daughter … The image burst on me then, like a sculpture suddenly assembled out of particles of light. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever imagined. Yes. A baby. A baby with Lisa.
“Yes,” I said aloud, suddenly teary. “Yes, yes, yes. Let’s have a baby.” I grabbed her hands in both of mine, then let go again so I could pull her to me, hug her hard, bury my face in the crook of her neck. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Who says they’d let us?” Lisa asked. “Even if you wanted to.”
“I do want to!” I sputtered. “And they’ll have to let us! We’ll get married, we’ll be a family. We’ll read books, take courses on parenting, we’ll … I don’t know, do whatever responsible, well-adjusted parents do. Maybe we can’t count on a whole brood of kids, but we can have at least one. They’ll have to let us have at least one.”
“You want to?” Lisa said, her voice quivering again. “You really want to?”
I said “Yes” a dozen or so times more, and then we just sat there with our heads together, both of us sniffling, grinning, laughing.
So the next day we started figuring out how to get married. There was still a functioning city hall in those days, so we filled out the required forms, got the required signature and lined up a justice of the peace. As soon as I told Ivan what we were up to, he leapt into the job of planning the thing like a frenzied mother-in-law-to-be. I had some pieces in a group show at the time, and Ivan convinced the gallery owner to let us use the space for the ceremony. He pestered us with a flurry of different designs and redesigns for invitations. He begged and bartered with one of the better local bands, not only getting them to play some upbeat and danceable music after the ceremony, but also brow-beating the guitarist into working up a Jimi-Hendrix-esque version of the wedding march. And when the day came it was a great little party, much like the night when Lisa and I first met. Only when Lisa danced this time, it was with her arms high in the air, as if there was too much joy in her for her body to contain. And looking at her, that feeling was echoed in my own heart. Until that moment, I wouldn’t have guessed I could love anyone as much as I loved this woman.
* * *
But the wedding was to be the last truly, purely happy moment of our lives. After that began the long succession of monthly disappointments; the repeated non-conception of our child. Though statistics showed that the birthrate was steady and unvarying, once we were in the game, once we were among the ranks of those hoping for a child, it seemed that everyone except us was getting pregnant. Middle-aged couples, young couples, single women, 17-year-old girls. How were the AIs choosing? Had they modeled the human personality so perfectly that they could know, to some Nth level of certainty, who would make the best parents? And what did “best” mean? By whose definition? What kind of next generation did they want? These were just a few of the infinite questions that the whole world was pondering, arguing over, fighting and breaking up over.
“It’s probably me,” Lisa said. “The machines know that I’m not all gung-ho for the new world order, so why would they let me be a mother? You should hook up with some woman who loves Big Brother as much as you do. You’d have six kids by now!” And I would take issue with that line about loving Big Brother, and we would argue and fight over that.
Or: “Maybe it’s you. Maybe they won’t let us have a baby because they know you don’t really want one. You’re happy with your life the way it is. You don’t want a messy, noisy brat screwing up your neat little world. I know it, and they know it.” And we would fight over that.
The topic of parenthood and our persistently not-appearing child was the main locus of argument between us, but there were others. I’d been keeping my day job when an increasing number of people around us were finding it easy enough to live without employment. But when the company that we’d been paying our rent to went out of business and wasn’t replaced by anyone or anything who cared about the building or who lived in it, I told Lisa I was going to quit. It was a doomed job anyway; there’s not much use for an ad designer when the whole institution of selling go
ods for money was crumbling apart.
“If you don’t work, you’re giving up.” Lisa said. “You’re dropping out of the economy and dropping out of human society. You won’t be contributing anything; you’ll be nothing but a pet to the machines.”
“All I’m ‘giving up’ on is being a damned wage-slave,” I snapped back. “I’m dropping out of spending half of my waking life doing work I don’t care about for a company that doesn’t matter. And we don’t need the money. I’ve got savings enough to get the few things we want that you still have to pay for, and who knows where the world will be by the time that runs out? Money may not even exist by then. And meanwhile I’ll be able to spend full time doing the work that matters to me.” I waved an arm in the direction of the room set aside as my studio.
“Sure. Let the machines feed you and clothe you and keep you warm in the winter. Let them give you toys to play with and let them clean your litter box and let them wipe your ass when it needs wiping. Be a good little pet.”
And so on, and so on, and so on. Of course, I’m the one remembering all this, so it’s a given that my memory is biased. I’m sure I said my share of stupid and hurtful things too, when it was my turn to be stupid and hurtful. And no amount of skewed memory, of snuffling self-pity and hurt feelings can hide the fact that we had great times too. Times when Lisa’s smile and laughter lit up the air and washed over me like sunlight. Times when the two of us fit together like the jagged half-pieces of something that was meant to be whole. Times when I was sure that nothing in the world could ever make sense without her at my side, completing me.
Then the company Lisa worked for went out of business, and she couldn’t find a job anywhere else. For a while she filled her time with watercolor painting and drawing, and I swear she had a natural talent that would have had my professors at the MFA School weeping onto their smocks. But she gave it up, switching to guitar playing for a while, then keyboard, then reading nineteenth-century novels, then studying political theory … Nothing lasted, nothing consumed her, nothing gave her the sense of purpose that a lump of clay and a few modeling tools gave to me. She became more and more convinced that only one thing would do that for her, and that was the one thing the machines wouldn’t allow us to have. I convinced her to see a therapist—a profession that was grandly thriving, thanks to the vast population of the unemployed who were thrashing about for something to give meaning to their lives—but that too didn’t last.
The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection Page 88