The Mammoth Book of the Best of Best New SF

by Gardner Dozois

  “The baby’s name was Bobby?”

  “Yes, Anne named him Bobby. She was in and out of clinics for years. One day, during a remission, she announced she was going shopping. The last person she talked to was Bobby. His sixth birthday was coming up in a couple of weeks. She told him she was going out to find him a pony for his birthday. That was the last time any of us saw her. She checked herself into a hospice and filled out the request for nurse-assisted suicide. During the three-day cooling-off period, she cooperated with the obligatory counseling, but she refused all visitors. She wouldn’t even see me. Ben filed an injunction, claimed she was incompetent due to her disease, but the court disagreed. She chose to ingest a fast-acting poison, if I recall. Her recorded last words were, ‘Please don’t hate me.’”

  “Poison?”

  “Yes. Her ashes arrived in a little cardboard box on Bobby’s sixth birthday. No one had told him where she’d gone. He thought it was a gift from her and opened it.”

  “I see. Does Bobby hate me?”

  “I don’t know. He was a weird little boy. As soon as he could get out, he did. He left for space school when he was thirteen. He and Ben never hit it off.”

  “Does Benjamin hate me?”

  Whatever was in the pot boiled over, and Cathy hurried to the stove. “Ben? Oh, she lost Ben long before she died. In fact, I’ve always believed he helped push her over the edge. He was never able to tolerate other people’s weaknesses. Once it was evident how sick she was, he made a lousy husband. He should’ve just divorced her, but you know him – his almighty pride.” She took a bowl from a shelf and ladled hot soup into it. She sliced a piece of bread. “Afterward, he went off the deep end himself. Withdrew. Mourned, I suppose. A couple of years later he was back to normal. Good ol’ happy-go-lucky Ben. Made some money. Respoused.”

  “He destroyed all my sims, didn’t he?”

  “He might have, but he said Anne did. I tended to believe him at the time.” Cathy brought her lunch to the little inlaid table. “I’d offer you some, but . . .” she said and began to eat. “So, what are your plans?”

  “Plans?”

  “Yes, Simopolis.”

  Anne tried to think of Simopolis, but her thoughts quickly became muddled. It was odd; she was able to think clearly about the past – her memories were clear – but the future only confused her. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “I suppose I need to ask Benjamin.”

  Cathy considered this. “I suppose you’re right. But remember, you’re always welcome to live with us in Cathyland.”

  “Thank you,” said Anne. “You’re a friend.” Anne watched the old woman eat. The spoon trembled each time she brought it close to her lips, and she had to lean forward to quickly catch it before it spilled.

  “Cathy,” said Anne, “there’s something you could do for me. I don’t feel like a bride anymore. Could you remove this hideous expression from my face?”

  “Why do you say hideous?” Cathy said and put the spoon down. She gazed longingly at Anne. “If you don’t like how you look, why don’t you edit yourself?”

  “Because I don’t know how.”

  “Use your editor,” Cathy said and seemed to unfocus her eyes. “Oh my, I forget how simple you early ones were. I’m not sure I’d know where to begin.” After a little while, she returned to her soup and said, “I’d better not; you could end up with two noses or something.”

  “Then what about this gown?”

  Cathy unfocused again and looked. She lurched suddenly, knocking the table and spilling soup.

  “What is it?” said Anne. “Is something the matter?”

  “A news pip,” said Cathy. “There’s rioting breaking out in Provideniya. That’s the regional capital here. Something about Manumission Day. My Russian isn’t so good yet. Oh, there’s pictures of dead people, a bombing. Listen, Anne, I’d better send you . . .”

  In the blink of an eye, Anne was back in her living room. She was tiring of all this instantaneous travel, especially as she had no control over the destination. The room was vacant, the spouses gone – thankfully – and Benjamin not back yet. And apparently the little blue-faced message medallion had been busy replicating itself, for now there were hundreds of them filling up most of the wall space. They were a noisy lot, all shrieking and cursing at each other. The din was painful. When they noticed her, however, they all shut up at once and stared at her with naked hostility. In Anne’s opinion, this weird day had already lasted too long. Then a terrible thought struck her – sims don’t sleep.

  “You,” she said, addressing the original medallion, or at least the one she thought was the original, “call Benjamin.”

  “The fuck you think I am?” said the insolent little face. “Your personal secretary?”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not! In fact, I own this place now, and you’re trespassing. So you’d better get lost before I delete your ass!” All the others joined in, taunting her, louder and louder.

  “Stop it!” she cried, to no effect. She noticed a medallion elongating, stretching itself until it was twice its length, when, with a pop, it divided into two smaller medallions. More of them divided. They were spreading to the other wall, the ceiling, the floor. “Benjamin!” she cried. “Can you hear me?”

  Suddenly all the racket ceased. The medallions dropped off the wall and vanished before hitting the floor. Only one remained, the original one next to the door, but now it was an inert plastic disc with a dull expression frozen on its face.

  A man stood in the center of the room. He smiled when Anne noticed him. It was the elderly Benjamin from the auditorium, the real Benjamin. He still wore his clownish leisure suit. “How lovely,” he said, gazing at her. “I’d forgotten how lovely.”

  “Oh, really?” said Anne. “I would have thought that doxie thingy might have reminded you.”

  “My, my,” said Ben. “You sims certainly exchange data quickly. You left the lecture hall not fifteen minutes ago, and already you know enough to convict me.” He strode around the room touching things. He stopped beneath the mirror, lifted the blue vase from the shelf, and turned it in his hands before carefully replacing it. “There’s speculation, you know, that before Manumission at midnight tonight, you sims will have dispersed all known information so evenly among yourselves that there’ll be a sort of data entropy. And since Simopolis is nothing but data, it will assume a featureless, grey profile. Simopolis will become the first flat universe.” He laughed, which caused him to cough and nearly lose his balance. He clutched the back of the sofa for support. He sat down and continued to cough and hack until he turned red in the face.

  “Are you all right?” Anne said, patting him on the back.

  “Yes, fine,” he managed to say. “Thank you.” He caught his breath and motioned for her to sit next to him. “I get a little tickle in the back of my throat that the autodoc can’t seem to fix.” His color returned to normal. Up close, Anne could see the papery skin and slight tremor of age. All in all, Cathy had seemed to have held up better than he.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “just how old are you?”

  At the question, he bobbed to his feet. “I am one hundred and seventy-eight.” He raised his arms and wheeled around for inspection. “Radical gerontology,” he exclaimed, “don’t you love it? And I’m eighty-five percent original equipment, which is remarkable by today’s standards.” His effort made him dizzy and he sat again.

  “Yes, remarkable,” said Anne, “though radical gerontology doesn’t seem to have arrested time altogether.”

  “Not yet, but it will,” Ben said. “There are wonders around every corner! Miracles in every lab.” He grew suddenly morose. “At least there were until we were conquered.”

  “Conquered?”

  “Yes, conquered! What else would you call it when they control every aspect of our lives, from RM acquisition to personal patenting? And now this – robbing us of our own private nonbiologiks.” He grew p
assionate in his discourse. “It flies in the face of natural capitalism, natural stake-holding – I dare say – in the face of Nature itself! The only explanation I’ve seen on the wad is the not-so-preposterous proposition that whole strategically placed BODs have been surreptitiously killed and replaced by machines!”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Anne.

  He seemed to deflate. He patted her hand and looked around the room. “What is this place ?”

  “It’s our home, your townhouse. Don’t you recognize it?”

  “That was quite a while ago. I must have sold it after you – ” He paused. “Tell me, have the Bens briefed you on everything?”

  “Not the Bens, but yes, I know.”

  “Good, good.”

  “There is one thing I’d like to know. Where’s Bobby?”

  “Ah, Bobby, our little headache. Dead now, I’m afraid, or at least that’s the current theory. Sorry.”

  Anne paused to see if the news would deepen her melancholy. “How?” she said.

  “He signed on one of the first millennial ships – the colony convoy. Half a million people in deep biostasis on their way to Canopus system. They were gone a century, twelve trillion kilometers from Earth, when their data streams suddenly quit. That was a decade ago, and not a peep out of them since.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “No one knows. Equipment failure is unlikely; there were a dozen independent ships separated by a million klicks. A star going supernova? A well-organized mutiny? It’s all speculation.”

  “What was he like?”

  “A foolish young man. He never forgave you, you know, and he hated me to my core, not that I blamed him. The whole experience made me swear off children.”

  “I don’t remember you ever being fond of children.”

  He studied her through red-rimmed eyes. “I guess you’d be the one to know.” He settled back in the sofa. He seemed very tired. “You can’t imagine the jolt I got a little while ago when I looked across all those rows of Bens and spouses and saw this solitary, shockingly white gown of yours.” He sighed. “And this room. It’s a shrine. Did we really live here? Were these our things? That mirror is yours, right? I would never own anything like that. But that blue vase, I remember that one. I threw it into Puget Sound.”

  “You did what?”

  “With your ashes.”

  “Oh.”

  “So, tell me,” said Ben, “what were we like? Before you go off to Simopolis and become a different person, tell me about us. I kept my promise. That’s one thing I never forgot.”

  “What promise?”

  “Never to reset you.”

  “Wasn’t much to reset.”

  “I guess not.”

  They sat quietly for a while. His breathing grew deep and regular, and she thought he was napping. But he stirred and said, “Tell me what we did yesterday, for example.”

  “Yesterday we went to see Karl and Nancy about the awning we rented.”

  Benjamin yawned. “And who were Karl and Nancy?”

  “My great uncle and his new girlfriend.”

  “That’s right. I remember, I think. And they helped us prepare for the wedding?”

  “Yes, especially Nancy.”

  “And how did we get there, to Karl and Nancy’s? Did we walk? Take some means of public conveyance?”

  “We had a car.”

  “A car! An automobile? There were still cars in those days? How fun. What kind was it? What color?”

  “A Nissan Empire. Emerald green.”

  “And did we drive it, or did it drive itself?”

  “It drove itself, of course.”

  Ben closed his eyes and smiled. “I can see it. Go on. What did we do there?”

  “We had dinner.”

  “What was my favorite dish in those days?”

  “Stuffed pork chops.”

  He chuckled. “It still is! Isn’t that extraordinary? Some things never change. Of course they’re vat grown now and criminally expensive.”

  Ben’s memories, once nudged, began to unfold on their own, and he asked her a thousand questions, and she answered them until she realized he had fallen asleep. But she continued to talk until, glancing down, she noticed he had vanished. She was all alone again. Nevertheless, she continued talking, for days it seemed, to herself. But it didn’t help. She felt as bad as ever, and she realized that she wanted Benjamin, not the old one, but her own Benjamin.

  Anne went to the medallion next to the door. “You,” she said, and it opened its bulging eyes to glare at her. “Call Benjamin.”

  “He’s occupied.”

  “I don’t care. Call him anyway.”

  “The other Bens say he’s undergoing a procedure and cannot be disturbed.”

  “What kind of procedure?”

  “A codon interlarding. They say to be patient; they’ll return him as soon as possible.” The medallion added, “By the way, the Bens don’t like you, and neither do I.”

  With that, the medallion began to grunt and stretch, and it pulled itself in two. Now there were two identical medallions glaring at her. The new one said, “And I don’t like you either.” Then both of them began to grunt and stretch.

  “Stop!” said Anne. “I command you to stop that this very instant.” But they just laughed as they divided into four, then eight, then sixteen medallions. “You’re not people,” she said. “Stop it or I’ll have you destroyed!”

  “You’re not people either,” they screeched at her.

  There was soft laughter behind her, and a voice-like sensation said, Come, come, do we need this hostility? Anne turned and found the eminence grise, the astounding presence, still in his grey uniform and cap, floating in her living room. Hello, Anne, he said, and she flushed with excitement.

  “Hello,” she said and, unable to restrain herself, asked, “What are you?”

  Ah, curiosity. Always a good sign in a creature. I am an eminence grise of the World Trade Council.

  “No. I mean, are you a sim, like me?”

  I am not. Though I have been fashioned from concepts first explored by simulacrum technology, I have no independent existence. I am but one extension – and a low level one at that – of the Axial Beowulf Processor at the World Trade Council headquarters in Geneva. His smile was pure sunshine. And if you think I’m something, you should see my persona prime.

  Now, Anne, are you ready for your exam?

  “The Lolly test?”

  Yes, the Lolly Shear Human Cognition Test. Please assume an attitude most conducive to processing, and we shall begin.

  Anne looked around the room and went to the sofa. She noticed for the first time that she could feel her legs and feet; she could feel the crisp fabric of her gown brushing against her skin. She reclined on the sofa and said, “I’m ready.”

  Splendid, said the eminence hovering above her. First we must read you. You are of an early binary design. We will analyze your architecture.

  The room seemed to fall away. Anne seemed to expand in all directions. There was something inside her mind tugging at her thoughts. It was mostly pleasant, like someone brushing her hair and loosening the knots. But when it ended and she once again saw the eminence grise, his face wore a look of concern. “What?” she said.

  You are an accurate mapping of a human nervous system that was dysfunctional in certain structures that moderate affect. Certain transport enzymes were missing, causing cellular membranes to become less permeable to essential elements. Dendritic synapses were compromised. The digital architecture current at the time you were created compounded this defect. Coded tells cannot be resolved, and thus they loop upon themselves. Errors cascade. We are truly sorry.

  “Can you fix me?” she said.

  The only repair possible would replace so much code that you wouldn’t be Anne anymore.

  “Then what am I to do?”

  Before we explore your options, let us continue the test to determine your hu
man status. Agreed?

  “I guess.”

  You are part of a simulacrum cast to commemorate the spousal compact between Anne Wellhut Franklin and Benjamin Malley. Please describe the exchange of vows.

  Anne did so, haltingly at first, but with increasing gusto as each memory evoked others. She recounted the ceremony, from donning her grandmother’s gown in the downstairs guest room and the procession across garden flagstones, to the shower of rice as she and her new husband fled indoors.

  The eminence seemed to hang on every word. Very well spoken, he said when she had finished. Directed memory is one hallmark of human sentience, and yours is of remarkable clarity and range. Well done! We shall now explore other criteria. Please consider this scenario. You are standing at the garden altar as you have described, but this time when the officiator asks Benjamin if he will take you for better or worse, Benjamin looks at you and replies, “For better, sure, but not for worse.”

  “I don’t understand. He didn’t say that.”

  Imagination is a cornerstone of self-awareness. We are asking you to tell us a little story not about what happened but about what might have happened in other circumstances. So once again, let us pretend that Benjamin replies, “For better, but not for worse.” How do you respond?

  Prickly pain blossomed in Anne’s head. The more she considered the eminence’s question, the worse it got. “But that’s not how it happened. He wanted to marry me.”

  The eminence grise smiled encouragingly. We know that. In this exercise we want to explore hypothetical situations. We want you to make-believe.

  Tell a story, pretend, hypothesize, make-believe, yes, yes, she got it. She understood perfectly what he wanted of her. She knew that people could make things up, that even children could make-believe. Anne was desperate to comply, but each time she pictured Benjamin at the altar, in his pink bowtie, he opened his mouth and out came, “I do.” How could it be any other way? She tried again; she tried harder, but it always came out the same, “I do, I do, I do.” And like a dull toothache tapped back to life, she throbbed in pain. She was failing the test, and there was nothing she could do about it.