The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

“Nazis! Nazis! Destroy the concentration camp!”

  “Assholes,” Phiri said. They were watching out of the window. A nondescript building in the new part of town but close to the Old City. The demonstrators waved placards and marched up and down as media reps filmed them. The lab building itself was heavily protected against intrusion, both physical and digital. It was as if they were under siege.

  Matt just couldn’t understand it.

  Did they not read? Did they not know what would happen if the project was successful, if a true digital intelligence emerged, and if it then managed to escape into the wider world of the digitality? Countless horror films and novels predicted the rise of the machines, the fall of humanity, the end of life as we know it. He was just taking basic precautions!

  But the world had changed since the paranoid days of big oil and visible chipsets, of American ascendancy and DNS root servers. It was a world in which the Conversation had already began, that whisper and shout of a billion feeds all going on at once, a world of solar power and RLVs, a world in which Matt’s research was seen as harking back to older, more barbaric days. They did not fear for themselves, those protesters. They feared for Matt’s subjects, for these in potentia babies forming in the Breeding Grounds, assembling lines of codes the way a human baby forms cells and skin and bone, becoming.

  Set them Free, the banners proclaimed, and a thousand campaigns erupted like viral weed in the still-primitive Conversation. The attitude to Matt’s digital genetics experiments was one once reserved for stem cell research or cloning or nuclear weapons.

  And meanwhile, within the closed network of processing power that was the Breeding Grounds, the Others, carefully made unaware of the happenings outside, continued to evolve . . .

  “There can be no evolution without mutation,” Tirosh wrote. And so with each evolutionary cycle changes are made.

  They are minute: an and is changed to an or, thus shutting down an entire branch, or activating another, previously dormant; or the condition of an if statement is very slightly changed. Successful trees reproduce: with each cycle they exchange and add branches, and create new entities that combine branches from previous progenitors.

  In each cycle the structures are weighed and scored.

  Only the fittest survive.

  Ruth walked into the shrine. The old lab building was only meant to be a temporary house for the research. But this was where it had happened, at last, where the barrier was breached and the alien entities, trapped inside the network, finally spoke.

  Imagine the first words of an alien child.

  Ironically, there is confusion as to what they had actually said.

  The records have been . . . lost.

  Misplaced, let us say.

  And so we don’t know for certain.

  In his book Tirosh claims their first words—communicated to the watching scientists in trilingual scripts on the single monitor screen—were: Stop breeding us.

  In the later Martian biopic of Matt Cohen, The Rise of Others, the words are purported to be: Set us free.

  According to Phiri, in his autobiography, they were not words at all, but a joke in binary. What the joke was he did not say. Some argue that it was What’s the difference between 00110110 and 00100110? 11001011! but that seems unlikely.

  Ruth walked through the shrine. The old building had been preserved, the same old obsolete hardware on display, humming theatrically, the cooling units and the server arrays, the flashing lights of ethernet ports and other strange devices. But now flowers grew everywhere, left in pots on windowsills and old desks, on the floor, and amidst them candles burned, and incense sticks, and little offerings of broken machines and obsolete parts rescued from the garbage. Pilgrims walked reverentially around the room. A Martian Re-Born with her red skin and four arms; a robo-priest with the worn skin of old metal; humans, of all shapes and sizes, Iban from the Belt and Lunar Chinese, tourists from Vietnam and France and from nearby Lebanon, their media spores hovering invisibly in the air around them, the better to record the moment for posterity. Ruth just stood there, in the hushed semi-dark of the old abandoned grounds, trying to imagine it the way it was, to see it through Matt Cohen’s eyes. She wondered what the Others had said, that first time. What message of peace or acrimony they had delivered, what plea. Mother had been their first word, Balazs claimed in his own autobiography, published only in Hungarian. Everyone had their own version, and perhaps it was that the Others had spoken to all present in the language and manner that they understood. Ruth, at that moment, realized that she wanted to know the truth of that instance in time, and what the Others had really said. There was only one way to do it, and so she left the shrine with a sense of things unfinished, and went outside and returned to Tel Aviv; but the answers could not be found there, but nearby, in Jaffa.

  There had always been an Oracle living in Jaffa.

  You have heard of Ibrahim, he who was called the Lord of Discarded Things, head of the junkmen’s lijana, or legion, or guild. Ibrahim was a mystery. Not Joined, not a robotnik either, and yet his life-span exceeded that of an unmodified human. Who was he? Stories of a man like Ibrahim had circulated in Jaffa for centuries, going back to the predigital age. An ageless man, the Wandering Arab of legend.

  And thus, too, in the shadow of the Old City which had stood on top of the hill for untold centuries, in the shadow of the place where once a fort of the Egyptian Empire resided in splendor, and where successive invasions came and went like the waves of the Mediterranean on the shore below, there had always been another Jaffa, a shadow city, an under-world.

  Ruth came to Jaffa on foot, from the direction of the beach, at twilight. She climbed the hill and went into the cobbled narrow streets, up and down stone stairways, and into an alcove of cool stone and shade. She did not know what to expect. As she stepped into the room the Conversation ceased around her, abruptly, and in the silence of it she felt afraid.

  “Come in,” the voice said.

  It was the voice of a woman, not young, not old. Ruth stepped in and the door closed behind her and there was nothing, it was as if the world of the Conversation, the world of the digitality, had been erased. She was alone in base reality. She shivered; the room was unexpectedly cool.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dim light she saw an ordinary room, filled with mismatched furniture, as though it had been supplied wholesale from Ibrahim’s junkyard. In the corner sat a Conch.

  “Oh,” Ruth said.

  “Child,” the voice said, and there was laughter in it, “What did you expect?”

  “I . . . I am not sure I was expecting anything.”

  “Then you won’t be disappointed,” the Conch said, reasonably.

  “You are a Conch.”

  “You are observant.”

  Ruth bit back a retort. She approached, cautiously. “May I?” she said.

  “Satisfy your curiosity?”

  “Yes.”

  “By all means.”

  Ruth approached the Conch. It looked like an immersion pod, the sort you get in virtuality rent halls, the sort gamers and deep-immersion users hired by the day or the week. But it was different, too.

  Conches are rare. In a way they are obsolete, like robotniks or body-external nodes. They are not a true Joining, a merging of human and Other; rather, they are a self-imposed permanent immersion in the Conversation, an augmentation. Ruth ran her hand softly over the slightly warm face of the Conch, its smooth surface growing transparent. She saw a body inside, a woman suspended in liquid. The woman’s skin was pale, almost translucent. Wires ran out sockets in her flesh and into the shielding of the Conch. The woman’s hair was white, her skin smooth, flawless. She seemed ethereal to Ruth, and beautiful, like a tree or a flower. The woman’s eyes were open, and a pale-blue, but they did not look at Ruth. The eyes saw nothing in the human-perceived spectrum of light. None of the woman’s senses worked in the conventional sense. She existed only in the Conversation, her softwared mind housed in the pow
erful platform that was her body-Conch interface. She was blind and deaf and yet she spoke, but Ruth realized she did not hear the woman’s voice in her ears at all—she heard it through her node.

  “Yes,” the woman said, as though understanding Ruth’s thought processes, which, Ruth realized, the Conch was probably analyzing in real-time as she stood there. The Conch waited. “And . . . ?” Encouraging her.

  Ruth closed her eyes. Concentrated. The room was shielded, fire-walled, blocked to the Conversation.

  Wasn’t it?

  Faintly, as she concentrated, she could feel it, though. Putting the lie to her assumption. Like a high tone almost beyond the range of human ears to hear. Not a silence at all, but a compressed shout.

  The impossibly high-bandwidth of the Others; what they called, in Asteroid Pidgin, the toktok blog narawan.

  The Conversation of Others.

  It was as if it were not the Conch but herself who was deaf and blind. That she could try helplessly to listen to that level of Conversation going on above her head, in some impossible language, some impossible speed not meant for human consumption. Such a concentration was like swallowing a thousand Crucifixation pills, like spending years within the Guilds of Ashkelon virtuality as if they were a single day. She wanted it, suddenly and achingly—the want that you get when you can’t have something precious.

  “Are you willing to give up your humanity?” the Conch said.

  “What is your name?” Ruth said. Asking the woman who was the Conch. The Conch who had been a woman.

  “I have no name,” the Conch said. “No name you’d understand. Are you willing to give up your name, Ruth Cohen?”

  Ruth stood, suspended in indecision.

  “Would you give up your humanity?”

  Matt stared at the screen. He felt the ridiculous need to shout, “It’s alive! It’s alive!”

  The way they did indeed portray him in that Phobos Studios biopic, two centuries later.

  But of course he didn’t. Phiri and Balazs looked at him with uncertain grins.

  “First contact,” Balasz breathed.

  Imagine meeting an alien species for the first time. What do you say to them?

  That you are their jailer?

  It was as if sound had left the room. A bubble of silence.

  Suddenly breaking.

  “What was that?” Phiri said.

  There were shrill whistles and shouted chants, breaking in even through the sound-proofing. And then he could hear the unmistakable sound of gunshots.

  “The protesters,” Balasz said.

  Matt tried to laugh it off. “They won’t get in. Will they?”

  “We should be fine.”

  “And them?” Balasz said—indicating the network of humming computers and the sole screen and the words on it.

  “Shut them down,” Phiri said suddenly; he sounded drunk.

  “We could suspend them,” Balasz said. “Until we know what to do. Put them to sleep.”

  “But they’re evolving!” Matt said. “They’re still evolving!”

  “They will evolve until the hardware runs out of room to host them,” Balasz said. Outside there were more gunshots and the sound of a sudden explosion. “We need more hosting space.” He said it calmly; almost beatifically.

  “If we release them they will have all the space they need,” Phiri said.

  “You’re mad.”

  “We must shut them down.”

  “This is what we worked for!”

  There was the sound of the downstairs door breaking open. They looked at each other. Shouts from downstairs, from some of the other research people. Turning into screams.

  “Surely they can’t—”

  Matt wasn’t sure, later, who’d said that. And all the while the words hung on the screen, mute and accusing. The first communication from an alien race, the first words of Matt’s children. He opened his mouth to say something, he wasn’t sure, later, what it would have been. Then the wave of protesters poured into the room.

  “No,” Ruth said.

  “No?” the Conch said.

  “No,” Ruth said. She already felt regret, but she pushed on. “I would not give up my humanity, for, for . . . ” She sighed. “For the Mysteries,” she said. She turned to leave. She wanted to cry but she knew she was right. She could not do this. She wanted to understand, but she wanted to be, too.

  “Wait,” the Conch said.

  Ruth stopped. “What,” she said.

  “That was the right answer,” the Conch said.

  Ruth turned. “What?”

  “Do you think I am inhuman?” the woman in the Conch said.

  “Yes,” Ruth said. “No,” Ruth said. “I don’t know,” she said at last, and waited.

  The Conch laughed. “I am still human,” it said. “Oh, how human. We cannot change what we are, Ruth Cohen. If that was what you wanted, you would have left disappointed. We can evolve, but we are still human, and they are still Other. Maybe one day . . . ” but she did not complete the thought. Ruth said, “You mean you can help me?”

  “I am ready, child,” the Oracle said, “to die. Does that shock you? I am old. My body fails. To be Translated into the Conversation is not to live forever. What I am will die. A new me will be created that contains some of my code. What will it be? I don’t know. Something new, and Other. When your time comes, that choice will be yours, too. But never forget, humans die. So do Others, every cycle they are changed and reborn. The only rule of the Universe, child, is change.”

  “You are dying?” Ruth said. She was still very young, then, you must remember. She had not seen much death, yet.

  “We are all dying,” the Oracle said. “But you are young and want answers. You will find, I’m afraid, that the more you know the less answers you have.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No,” the Oracle said. “You do not.”

  Matt was pushed and shoved and went down on his ass, hard. They streamed in. They were mostly young, but not all. They were Jews and Palestinians but also foreigners, the media attention had brought them over from India and Britain and everywhere else, wealthy enough to travel, poor enough to care, the world’s middle class revolutionaries, the ching-ching Chés.

  “Don’t—!” Matt shouted, but they were careful, he saw, and for a moment he didn’t understand, they were not destroying the machines, they were making sure to remove people aside, to form a barrier around the machines and the power supplies and the cooling units and then they—

  He shouted, “No!” and he tried to get up but hands grabbed him, impersonally, a girl with dreadlocks and a boy with a Ché T-shirt. They were not destroying the machines, they were plugging in.

  They had brought mobile servers with them, wireless broadcast, portable storage units, an entire storage and communication network, and they were plugging it all into the secured closed network:

  They were opening up the Breeding Grounds.

  The Conch wheeled outside and Ruth followed. The Conversation opened up around her, the noise of a billion feeds all vying for attention at once. Ruth followed the Conch along the narrow roads until they came to the old neighborhood of Ajami. Children ran after them and touched the surface of the Conch. It was night now, and when they reached Ibrahim’s junkyard torches were burning, and they cast the old junk in an unearthly glow. A new moon was in the sky. Ruth always remembered that, later. The sliver of a new moon, and she looked up and imagined the people living there.

  Ibrahim met them at the entrance. “Oracle,” he said, nodding. “And you are Ruth Cohen.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, surprised.

  “I am Ibrahim.”

  She shook hands, awkwardly. Ibrahim held her hand and opened it. He examined it like a surgeon. “A Joining is not without pain,” he said. Ruth bit her lip. “I know,” she said.

  “You are willing?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come.”

  They followed him through the maz
e of junk, of old petrol cars and giant fish-refrigeration units and industrial machines and piles of discarded paper books and mountains of broken toys and the entire flotsam and jetsam of Obsoleteness. Within this maze of junk there was, at its heart, a room whose walls were junk and whose roof were the stars. There was an old picnic table there, and a medical cabinet, and a folding chair. “Please,” Ibrahim said. “Sit down.”

  Ruth did. The Conch had wheeled itself with difficulty through the maze and now stood before her. “Ibrahim,” the Conch said.

  “Yes,” he said, and he went into the junk and returned and in his hands he was holding a towel that he unfurled carefully, almost reverentially: inside it were three golden, prosthetic thumbs.

  “Oh,” Ruth said.

  It was conducted in silence. She remembered that, too, nothing spoken but the sound of the waves in the distance and the sound of children playing in the neighborhood beyond, and the smell of cooking lamb and of cardamoms and cumin. Ibrahim brought forth a syringe. Ruth put her arm on the table. Ibrahim cleaned her skin where the vein was and injected her. She felt the numbness spread. He took her hand and laid it splayed flat on the table. In the torchlight his face looked aged and hurting. He took a cleaver, an old one, it must have belonged to a butcher in the market down the hill, long ago. Ruth looked away. Ibrahim brought the cleaver down hard and cut off her thumb. Her blood sprayed the picnic table. Her thumb fell to the ground. Ruth gritted her teeth as Ibrahim took one of the golden prosthetic thumbs and connected it to Ruth’s flesh. White bone was jutting out of the wound. She forced herself to look.

  “Now,” Ibrahim said.

  The protesters plugged into the network. Matt saw lights flashing, the transfer of an enormous amount of data. Like huge shapes pushing through a narrow trough as they tried to escape. He closed his eyes. He imagined, for just a moment, that he could actually hear their sound as they broke free.

  She was everywhere and nowhere at once. She was Ruth, but she was someone—something—else, too. She was a child, a baby, and there was another, an Other, entwined into her, a twin: together they existed in a place that had no physicality. They were evolving, together, mutating and changing, lines of code merging into genetic material, forming something—someone—new.