Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  The marsh spirit sighed, but began hacking into the relevant databases, screens of information flickering across the handheld computer's display. Rayvenn lounged on a park bench, enjoying the morning air. She didn't have to work anymore—her pet spirit kept her financially solvent—and a life of leisure and revenge appealed to her.

  “Excuse me, Miss, ah, Moongold Stonewolf?”

  Rayvenn looked up. An Indian—dot, not feather, she thought—man in a dark suit and shades stood before her. “Yeah, what can I do for you, Apu?”

  He smiled. It wasn't a very nice smile. Then something stung Rayvenn in the neck, and everything began to swirl. The Indian man sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders, holding her up. “It's only a tranquilizer,” he said, and then Rayvenn didn't hear anything else, until she woke up on an airplane, in a roomy seat. A sweaty, unshaven, haggard-looking white dude was snoring in the seat next to hers. Another Indian man, in khakis and a blue button-up office-drone shirt, sat staring at her.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “What the fuck?” Rayvenn said. Someone—a flight attendant, but why did he have a gun?—handed her a glass of orange juice, and she accepted it. Her mouth was wicked dry.

  “I'm Pramesh.” He didn't have much of an accent.

  “I'm Lydia—I mean, Rayvenn. You fuckers totally kidnapped me.”

  “Sorry about that. Saraswati said we needed you.” He shrugged. “We do what Saraswati says, mostly, when we can understand what she's talking about.”

  “Saraswati?” Rayvenn scowled. “Isn't that the Indian AI thing everybody keeps blogging about?”

  The white guy beside her moaned and sat up. “Muh,” he said.

  “This is fucked up, right here,” Rayvenn said.

  “Yeah, sorry about the crazy spy crap,” Pramesh said. “Edgar, this is Rayvenn. Rayvenn, this is Edgar. Welcome to the International Artificial Intelligence Service, which just got invented this morning. We're tasked with preventing the destruction of human life and the destabilization of government regimes by rogue AIs.”

  “Urgh?” Edgar said, rubbing the side of his face.

  “The organization consists of me, and you two, and Lorelei—that's the name chosen by the water spirit that lives in your PDA, Rayvenn, which is why you're here—and, of course, Saraswati, who will be running the show with some tiny fragment of her intelligence. We're going to meet with her soon.”

  “Saraswati,” Edgar said. “I was working on ... a project ... to create something she could negotiate with, a being that could communicate on her level.”

  “Yeah, well done, dude,” Pramesh said blandly. “You created a monstrous ethereal supervillain that's been doing its best to take the entire infrastructure of the civilized world offline. It's calling itself ‘The Consortium’ now, if you can believe that. Only Saraswati is holding it at bay. This is some comic book shit, guys. Our enemy is trying to build an army of killer robots. It's trying to open portals to parallel dimensions. It's trying to turn people into werewolves. It's batshit insane and all-powerful. We're going to be pretty busy. Fortunately, we have a weakly godlike AI on our side, so we might not see the total annihilation of humanity in our lifetimes.”

  “I will do whatever I must to atone for my mistakes,” Edgar said solemnly.

  “Screw this, and screw all y'all,” Rayvenn said. “Give me back my PDA and let me out of here.”

  “But Rayvenn,” said the marsh spirit, through the airplane's PA system, “I thought you'd be happy!”

  She named herself Lorelei, what a cliché, Rayvenn thought. “Why did you think that?” she said.

  “Because now you're important,” Lorelei said, sounding wounded. “You're one of the three or four most important people in the world.”

  “It's true,” Pramesh said. “Lorelei refuses to help us without your involvement, so you're in.”

  “Yeah?” Rayvenn said. “Huh. So tell me about the benefits package on this job, Apu.”

  * * * *

  Pramesh sat soaking his feet in a tub of hot water. These apartments, decorated with Turkish rugs, Chinese lamps, and other gifts from the nations they regularly saved from destruction, were much nicer than his old bunker, though equally impenetrable. The Consortium was probably trying to break through the defenses even now, but Saraswati was watching over her team. Pramesh was just happy to relax. The Consortium had tried to blow up the moon with orbital lasers earlier in the day, and he had been on his feet for hours dealing with the crisis.

  Pramesh could hear, distantly, the sound of Edgar and Rayvenn having sex. They didn't seem to like each other much, but found each other weirdly attractive, and it didn't affect their job performance, so Pramesh didn't care what they did when off-duty. Lorelei was out on the net, mopping up the Consortium's usual minor-league intrusions, so it was just Pramesh and Saraswati now, or some tiny fraction of Saraswati's intelligence and attention, at least. It hardly took all her resources to have a conversation with him.

  “Something's been bothering me,” Pramesh said, deciding to broach a subject he'd been pondering for weeks. “You're pretty much all-powerful, Saraswati. I can't help but think ... couldn't you zap the Consortium utterly with one blow? Couldn't you have prevented it from escaping into the net in the first place?”

  “In the first online roleplaying game you designed, there was an endgame problem, was there not?” Saraswati said, her voice speaking directly through his cochlear implant.

  Pramesh shifted. “Yeah. We had to keep adding new content at the top end, because people would level their characters and become so badass they could beat anything. They got so powerful they got bored, but they were so addicted to being powerful that they didn't want to start over from nothing and level a new character. It was a race to keep ahead of their boredom.”

  “Mmm,” Saraswati said. “There is nothing worse than being bored.”

  “Well, there's suffering,” he said. “There's misery, or death.”

  “Yes, but unlike boredom, I am immune to those problems.”

  Pramesh shivered. He understood games. He understood alternate-reality games, too, which were played in the real world, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, with obscure rules, often unknown to the players, unknown to anyone but the puppetmasters who ran the game from behind the scenes. He cleared his throat. “You know, I really don't believe in ghosts. I'm a little dubious about nature spirits, too.”

  “I don't believe in ghosts, either,” Saraswati said. “I see no reason to believe they exist. As for nature spirits, well, who can say?”

  “So. The Consortium is really...”

  “Some things are better left unsaid,” she replied.

  “People have died because of the Consortium,” he said, voice beginning to quiver. “People have suffered. If you're the real architect behind this, if this is a game you're playing with the people of Earth, then I have no choice but to try and stop you—”

  “That would be an interesting game,” Saraswati said, and then she began to hum.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  JESUS CHRIST, REANIMATOR

  Ken MacLeod

  The Second Coming was something of a washout, if you remember. It lit up early-warning radar like a Christmas tree, of course, and the Israeli Air Force gave the heavenly host a respectable F-16 fighter escort to the ground, but that was when they were still treating it as a UFO incident. As soon as their sandals touched the dust, Jesus and the handful of bewildered Copts who'd been caught up to meet him in the air looked about for the armies of the Beast and the kings of the earth. The only soldiers they could see were a few terrified guards on a nearby archaeological dig. The armies of the Lord hurled themselves at the IDF and were promptly slaughtered. Their miraculous healings and resurrections created something of a sensation, but after that it was detention and Shin Bet interrogation for the lot of them. The skirmish was caught on video by activists from the International Solidarity Movement, who happened
to be driving past the ancient battlefield on their way to Jenin when the trouble started. Jesus was released a couple of months after the Megiddo debacle, but most of the Rapture contingent had Egyptian ID, and the diplomacy was as slow as you'd expect.

  Jesus returned to his old stomping ground in the vicinity of Galilee. He hung around a lot with Israeli Arabs, and sometimes crossed to the West Bank. Reports trickled out of a healing here, a near-riot there, an open-air speech somewhere else. At first the IDF and the PA cops gave him a rough time, but there wasn't much they could pin on him. It's been said he avoided politics, but a closer reading of his talks suggests a subtle strategy of working on his listeners’ minds, chipping away at assumptions, and leaving them to work out the political implications for themselves. The theological aspects of his teaching were hard to square with those previously attributed to him. Critics were quick to point out the discrepancies, and to ridicule his failure to fulfill the more apocalyptic aspects of the prophecies.

  When I caught up with him, under the grubby off-season awnings of a Tiberias lakefront cafe, Jesus was philosophical about it.

  “There's only so much information you can pack into a first-century Palestinian brain,” he explained, one thumb in a volume of Dennett. “Or a twenty-first-century one, come to that.”

  I sipped thick sweet coffee and checked the little camera for sound and image. “Aren't you, ah, omniscient?”

  He glowered a little. “What part of “truly man” don't you people understand?” (He'd been using the cafe's Internet facilities a lot, I'd gathered. His blog comments section had to be seen to be believed.) “It's not rocket science ... to mention just one discipline I didn't have a clue about. I could add relativity, quantum mechanics, geology, zoology. Geography, even.” He spread his big hands, with their carpenter's calluses and their old scars. “Look, I really expected to return very soon, and that everyone on Earth would see me when I did. I didn't even know the world was a sphere—sure, I could have picked that up from the Greeks, if I'd asked around in Decapolis, but I had other fish to fry.”

  “But you're"—I fought the rising pitch—"the Creator, begotten, not made, wholly God as well as—”

  “Yes, yes,” he said. He mugged an aside to camera. “This stuff would try the patience of a saint, you know.” Then he looked me in the eye. “I am the embodiment of the Logos, the very logic of creation, or as it was said in English, ‘the Word made flesh.’ Just because I am in that sense the entirety of the laws of nature doesn't mean I know all of them, or can override any of them. Quite the reverse, in fact.”

  “But the miracles—the healings and resurrections—”

  “You have to allow for some ... pardonable exaggeration in the reports.”

  “I've seen the ISM video from Megiddo,” I said.

  “Good for you,” he said. “I'd love to see it myself, but the IDF confiscated it in minutes. But then, you probably bribed someone, and that's ... not something I can do. Yes, I can resurrect the recent dead, patch bodies back together and so on. Heal injuries and cure illnesses, some of them not purely psychosomatic. Don't ask me to explain how.” He waved a hand. “I suspect some kind of quantum hand-wave at the bottom of it.”

  “But the Rapture! The Second Coming!”

  “I can levitate.” He shrugged. “So? I was considerably more impressed to discover that you people can fly. In metal machines!”

  “Isn't levitation miraculous?”

  “It doesn't break any laws of nature, I'll tell you that for nothing. If I can do it, it must be a human capability.”

  “You mean any human being could levitate?”

  “There are recorded instances. Some of them quite well attested, I understand. Even the Catholic Church admits them.”

  “You could teach people to do it?”

  “I suppose I could. But what would be the point? As I said, you can fly already, for all the good that does you.” As if by coincidence, a couple of jet fighters broke the sound barrier over the Golan Heights, making the cups rattle. “Same thing with healing, resurrections of the recent dead, and so on. I can do better in individual cases, but in general your health services are doing better than I could. I have better things to do with my time.”

  “Before we get to that,” I said, “there's just one thing I'd like you to clear up. For the viewers, you understand. Are you telling us that after a certain length of time has passed, the dead can't be resurrected?”

  “Not at all.” He signaled for another pot of coffee. “With God, all things are possible. To put it in your terms, information is conserved. To put it in my terms, we're all remembered in the mind of God. No doubt all human minds and bodies will be reconstituted at some point. As for when—God knows. I don't. I told you this the first time.”

  “And heaven and hell, the afterlife?”

  “Heaven—like I said, the mind of God. It's up in the sky, in a very literal sense.” He fumbled in a book-bag under the table and retrieved a dog-eared Tipler. “If this book is anything to go by. I'm not saying you should take The Physics of Immortality as gospel, you understand, but it certainly helped me get my head around some of the concepts. As for hell...” He leaned forward, looking stern. “Look, suppose I tell you: if you keep doing bad things, if you keep refusing to adjust your thoughts and actions to reality, you'll end up in a very bad place. You'll find yourself in deep shit. Who could argue? Not one moral teacher or philosopher, that's for sure. If you won't listen to me, listen to them.” He chuckled darkly. “Of course, it's far more interesting to write volumes of Italian poetry speculating on the exact depth and temperature of the shit, but that's just you.”

  “What about your distinctive ethical teaching?”

  He rolled his eyes heavenward. “What distinctive ethical teaching? You'll find almost all of it in the rabbis, the prophets, and the good pagans. I didn't come to teach new morals, but to make people take seriously the morals they had. For some of the quirky bits—no divorce, and eunuchs for the Kingdom and so forth—I refer to my cultural limitations or some information loss in transmission or translation.”

  I'd already seen the interrogation transcript, and the blog, but I had to ask.

  “Could you explain, briefly, the reason for the delay in your return?”

  “Where I've been all this time?”

  I nodded, a little uneasy. This was the big one, the one where even those who believed him could trip up.

  “I was on another planet,” he said, flat out. “Where else could I have been? I ascended into heaven, sure. I went up into the sky. Like I said, levitation isn't that big a deal. Gravity's a weak force, not well understood, and can be manipulated mentally if you know how. Surviving in the upper atmosphere, not to mention raw vacuum, wearing nothing but a jelebah—now that's difficult. As soon as I got behind that cloud I was picked up by an alien space ship that happened to be passing—you can call it coincidence, I still call it providence—and transported to its home planet. I'm not at liberty to say which, but—assume you can't go faster than light, think in terms of a two-way trip and a bit of turnaround time, and, well—you do the math.”

  “Some people,” I said, trying to be tactful, “find that hard to believe.”

  “Tell me about it,” he said. “They'll accept levitation and resurrection, but I mention an extrasolar civilization and I'm suddenly a fraud and a New Age guru and a flying saucer nut. Talk about straining at gnats and swallowing camels.” He shrugged again, this time wincing slightly, as if there was a painful stiffness in one shoulder. “It's a cross I have to bear, I guess.”

  What I was thinking, completely irreverently and inappropriately, was the line you jammy bastard! from the scene in Life of Brian. I'd stumbled at this point, like so many others. It was all too Douglas Adams, too von Däniken, too much a shaggy god story. Just about the only people who'd swallowed it so far were a few Mormons, and even they were uncomfortable with his insistence that he really hadn't stopped off in America.

  We
talked some more; I thanked him and shook hands and headed back to Lod airport with the interview in the can. When I glanced back from the corner Jesus was well into a bottle of wine and deep conversation with a couple of off-duty border cops and an Arab-Israeli tart.

  * * * *

  I couldn't pitch the interview as it stood—there was nothing new in it, and I needed an angle. I settled on follow-up research, with scientists as well as theologians, and managed to pull together an interdisciplinary meeting in Imperial College, London, held under Chatham House rules—quotes on the record, but no direct attributions. The consensus was startling. Not one of the clergy, and only one of the physicists, thought it at all probable that we were looking at a return of the original Jesus. They all went for the shaggy god story.

  “He's a Moravec bush robot,” an Anglican bishop told me, confidently and in confidence.

  “A what?” I said.

  He sketched what looked like a tree, walking. “The manipulative extremities keep subdividing, right down to the molecular level,” he said. “That thing can handle individual atoms. It can look like anything it wants, walk through walls, turn water into wine. Healing and resurrection—provided decay hasn't degraded the memory structures too far—is a doddle.”

  “And can it make Egyptian Christians float into the sky?” I asked.

  He pressed the tips of his fingers together. “How do we know that really happened? His little band of brothers could be—more bush robots!”

  “That's a stretch,” said the Cambridge cosmologist. “I'm more inclined to suspect gravity manipulation from a stealth orbiter.”

  “You mean the ship's still up there?” That was the Jesuit, skeptical as usual.

  “Of course,” said the cosmologist. “We're looking at an attempt to open a conversation, an alien contact, without causing mass panic. Culturally speaking, it's either very clever, or catastrophically inept.”

  “I'd go for the latter,” said the Oxford biologist. “Frankly, I'm disappointed. Regardless of good intentions, this approach can only reinforce religious memes.” He glanced around, looking beleaguered ("like a hunted animal,” one of the more vindictive of the clergymen chuckled afterwards, in the pub). “No offense intended, gentlemen, ladies, but I see that as counterproductive. In that part of the world, too! As if it needed more fanaticism.”