by Neil Clarke
“When we ventured out among the stars, we found other worlds where civilizations had built sentient machines. Everywhere were lifeless machine worlds, temples dedicated to abstract calculation. On some, the machines had destroyed their makers. On the rest, the makers had merged with their machines, dissolving their minds into vast seas of calculation capacity. Now we roam the stars, searching for young civilizations and saving them from the allure of machines that can think.”
Saving them? I thought of the allure that the technarion had for Kellard, Flemming, and until mere minutes ago, myself. Our scientists, engineers and mathematicians would fall over themselves to build more technarions, if they knew how.
What happens if the people of a world refuse to destroy their technarions? I wondered.
“We bomb those worlds down to the bedrock from our spacefaring warships. We cannot afford to let the machine worlds gain allies.”
She can read my mind, I realized.
“For such a clever young man, you are sometimes a little slow,” said Elva.
She managed a smile, and for a moment she became my sweetheart again, holding my hand and talking about a brighter future for the poor wretches in Spitalfields. Ruthless alien warrior or not, I could not help but love Elva.
“And I love you too, Lewis. Even after nine hundred years of living on this world, you are the only man I have truly loved. Now I am going to mingle our blood, it will not hurt at all.”
She splashed whiskey on two rubber tubes with hypodermic needles at either end. Next she lifted my wrist and pushed the needles in, then did the same to herself.
“I’m going to die now, Lewis, best not to make a fuss. Please, continue my work. The medical devices from my blood will make you almost immortal, and the mentor behind your ear will give you advice when you need it. When your strength returns you will have ten minutes to get clear before my locket explodes and annihilates this factory. Save your world, Lewis. Kill anyone who tries to build another technarion.”
I made my decision, framed the thought carefully and clearly, and meant every unspoken word. Elva lay down beside me, squeezed my hand and whispered her thanks.
Brunton and six of his bullyboys were in the street outside when I opened the door to the factory.
“Brunton, come inside!” I called.
“But Mr. Kellard said—”
“Damn what Kellard said. Get inside! Now!”
Brunton actually vomited when he caught sight of the carnage in the technarion hall, but I took him by the arm and pushed him in the direction of the stairs.
“That was Kellard,” I said as we stepped over the skeleton and fluids at the door to Kellard’s office.
“The Landers woman!” said Brunton as he caught sight of Elva’s body.
“She was a spy, she killed everyone in here with some electrical weapon. I managed to shoot her before she got me too. Now open Kellard’s safe.”
“What? I don’t have the key.”
I pointed to a key on a chain around the neck of the skeleton.
“Yes you do, now open it.”
As I suspected, Kellard kept emergency cash in the safe. There were five thousand pounds in banknotes, along with some gold. We divided it between us.
“Why are you sharing this?” Brunton asked as he stuffed the money into his pockets. “You could have had it all to yourself.”
“I’ve made you my accomplice, Mr. Brunton, so you will tell the same lies to the police as me. Now hurry, we have ninety seconds.”
“Ninety seconds? Until what?”
“Until this factory explodes in the biggest fireball that London has ever seen.”
We reached the front door with thirty seconds to spare. Two policemen were speaking with Brunton’s bullyboys.
“They’re just regular flatfoots, on patrol,” hissed Brunton.
“Let me do the talking, stay calm,” I whispered as we walked across to them.
“Stay calm, he says,” muttered Brunton, glancing back at the factory.
“I say, constables!” I called. “How may I contact an asylum for the insane?”
“An asylum, sir?” responded one of the police.
“The owner of the factory behind me suffered a disastrous financial loss today. He’s upstairs, holding a gun and babbling about it all being over soon.”
“We think he intends to blow his brains out,” added Brunton.
“My fiancé is still in there, trying to keep him calm.”
“This is very serious, sir,” said a constable, taking out his notepad. “We must—”
The factory erupted behind us like a grenade tossed into a vat of paraffin.
Whatever Elva had rigged up inside the factory burned out the core of the technarion, then brought down the roof and walls on what remained. Being the surviving managers, Brunton and I had to deal with police, firemen, and even newspaper reporters until well after midnight.
By the time I got back to my rooms and examined the scar behind my ear, there was nothing to see. Elva’s microscopic devices did their work quickly.
“There’s so much to do and I have no idea where to start,” I said as I stared at my face in the mirror. “Where is the other technarion? Should I destroy it?”
There is no other technarion.
The voice was Elva’s. It was as if she were whispering into my ear.
“Elva?”
More or less. Some of me exists in the mentor that I implanted in your head. Ask another question.
“Where did the instructions to build the technarion come from if there is no other technarion?”
Until recently my own people did not know that. Young civilizations seemed to develop calculation machines much faster than other technologies. Too fast. When we discovered your world, nine hundred years ago, we decided to investigate. A dozen members of our space warship’s crew were left on Earth to watch how machine intelligence developed. Accidents, wars, and natural disasters claimed the others. I alone survived.
I discovered that the machine worlds have seeded invisible watchers to orbit promising worlds such as yours. They can detect the faint radiative discharge from a telegraph key at a distance of tens of thousands of miles. Once they detect the development of electrical technology, they learn your codes and languages, then start transmitting instructions to build simple calculation machines. When Flemming began experimenting with his radiative telegraph, he detected such instructions.
“How can I fly high enough to destroy the machine watcher?” I asked. “Flying three or four miles high in a balloon is difficult enough.”
No need. The machine worlds don’t want us to know about their watchers, lest we send warships to hunt them down. Once electronic calculation is firmly established, the watcher probably ignites its engines and flies into the sun. Using the technarion, I sent a message that machines millions of times bigger than the technarion had been built. The watcher sent a test calculation. I sent back the right answer. Its signal ceased last night. I assume that the watcher decided its work was done, and flew off to destroy itself.
“But how did you get the right answer?”
I calculated it, Lewis. Computing machines are a lazy path to progress. My people changed themselves to be better at machine tasks than machines. You can guess the rest. I ruined Kellard, and killed his key engineers. His stokers tried to stop me. They died too.
“But you murdered two dozen people! Innocent people—well, mostly.”
Skills cannot be unlearned. My people’s fleet will arrive here in 2020, Lewis. In one hundred and fifty-five years this world must not be dominated by networks of calculation machines, or humanity will be deemed beyond salvation and annihilated. In the next century and a half you must go on to kill thousands of brilliant, gifted mathematicians and scientists to prevent that.
Elva had been just in time. A decade later, Heinrich Hertz developed the experimental device that we now call a radio, but there was no longer a signal from space for him to hear. The developmen
t of computing was set back by over half a century.
The night the technarion was destroyed, I made my decision. If Elva was an example of what humanity could become, then I was on her side. I began killing to slow the advance of what became computing technology, and since then I have killed hundreds of very fine men and women. All of that was in vain. I failed humanity, although I like to think that it was humanity that failed humanity.
It is now 1992. I was imprisoned in a Soviet labor camp in 1945, for assassinating Soviet engineers and mathematicians engaged in computing research. I was tortured, and because I had no colleagues to betray, I said nothing. I was kept alive to be tortured further, but in time the KGB lost interest in me, and I was locked away to await death. Thanks to Elva’s mechanisms in my blood, I survived.
With the patience of a near-immortal, I cosmetically aged myself, all the while awaiting my chance to kill a guard, take his uniform, and escape. Instead, the Soviet Union collapsed. By then records of my trial had been lost or destroyed, so I was freed, taken back to Moscow, and even paid a little compensation.
Now I am standing in a London street, gazing in horror at a window display jammed solid with personal computers. The accursed things are everywhere, and they are universally desired, admired and trusted, and there are only twenty-eight years before Elva’s people arrive in their fleet of all-powerful starships.
I have two tasks left. One is to build a quantum state beacon that will broadcast my position to a scout ship that the fleet will send to pick me up, so I can deliver my report. That will be easy. The other is to turn humanity away from computers and artificial intelligence before 2020. In today’s terminology, that is in the don’t bother trying basket. The mentor in my head has no record of any species becoming so absolutely besotted with using computers as humans.
Through Elva, I have seen that intelligent species really can have a better destiny than merely being eggshells that will be cracked, broken and discarded when machine worlds are born. From the evidence before me, however, I am sure that humanity will become the staunchest possible ally of the machine worlds. People like I used to be would gladly turn Earth into an ocean of calculation power, then willingly drown themselves in it. Elva’s people will take drastic action to stop that happening. As far as I am concerned, they will be right.
Thus I shall do nothing to slow the spread of computing on Earth, and for me 2020 cannot arrive fast enough. I may sound like a monster, but then I am not a typical human.
First published in Interzone #248, September-October 2013.
About the Author
Sean McMullen quit scientific computing to become a full time author in 2014. Prior to that, as an after-hours author, he established his international reputation with his pioneering steampunk novel Souls in the Great Machine, which was published in over a dozen languages, and won fifteen awards. He also came runner-up in the 2011 Hugo Awards with his novelette “Eight Miles.” His six book children’s fantasy series, The Warlock’s Child, was jointly written with Paul Collins and published in 2015. He is currently a judge for the Norma Hemming Award.
Daddy’s World
Walter Jon Williams
One day Jamie went with his family to a new place, a place that had not existed before. The people who lived there were called Whirlikins, who were tall thin people with pointed heads. They had long arms and made frantic gestures when they talked, and when they grew excited threw their arms out wide to either side and spun like tops until they got all blurry. They would whirr madly over the green grass beneath the pumpkin-orange sky of the Whirlikin country, and sometimes they would bump into each other with an alarming clashing noise, but they were never hurt, only bounced off and spun away in another direction.
Sometimes one of them would spin so hard that he would dig himself right into the ground, and come to a sudden stop, buried to the shoulders, with an expression of alarmed dismay.
Jamie had never seen anything so funny. He laughed and laughed.
His little sister Becky laughed, too. Once she laughed so hard that she fell over onto her stomach, and Daddy picked her up and whirled her through the air, as if he were a Whirlikin himself, and they were both laughing all the while.
Afterwards, they heard the dinner bell, and Daddy said it was time to go home. After they waved goodbye to the Whirlikins, Becky and Jamie walked hand-in-hand with Momma as they walked over the grassy hills toward home, and the pumpkin-orange sky slowly turned to blue.
The way home ran past El Castillo. El Castillo looked like a fabulous place, a castle with towers and domes and minarets, all gleaming in the sun. Music floated down from El Castillo, the swift, intricate music of many guitars, and Jamie could hear the fast click of heels and the shouts and laughter of happy people.
But Jamie did not try to enter El Castillo. He had tried before, and discovered that El Castillo was guarded by La Duchesa, an angular forbidding woman all in black, with a tall comb in her hair. When Jamie asked to come inside, La Duchesa had looked down at him and said, “I do not admit anyone who does not know Spanish irregular verbs!” It was all she ever said.
Jamie had asked Daddy what a Spanish irregular verb was—he had difficulty pronouncing the words—and Daddy had said, “Some day you’ll learn, and La Duchesa will let you into her castle. But right now you’re too young to learn Spanish.”
That was all right with Jamie. There were plenty of things to do without going into El Castillo. And new places, like the country where the Whirlikins lived, appeared sometimes out of nowhere, and were quite enough to explore.
The color of the sky faded from orange to blue. Fluffy white clouds coasted in the air above the two-story frame house. Mister Jeepers, who was sitting on the ridgepole, gave a cry of delight and soared toward them through the air.
“Jamie’s home!” he sang happily. “Jamie’s home, and he’s brought his beautiful sister!”
Mister Jeepers was diamond-shaped, like a kite, with his head at the topmost corner, hands on either sides, and little bowlegged comical legs attached on the bottom. He was bright red. Like a kite, he could fly, and he swooped through in a series of aerial cartwheels as he sailed toward Jamie and his party.
Becky looked up at Mister Jeepers and laughed from pure joy. “Jamie,” she said, “you live in the best place in the world!”
At night, when Jamie lay in bed with his stuffed giraffe, Selena would ride a beam of pale light from the Moon to the Earth and sit by Jamie’s side. She was a pale woman, slightly translucent, with a silver crescent on her brow. She would stroke Jamie’s forehead with a cool hand, and she would sing to him until his eyes grew heavy and slumber stole upon him.
“The birds have tucked their heads
The night is dark and deep
All is quiet, all is safe,
And little Jamie goes to sleep.”
Whenever Jamie woke during the night, Selena was there to comfort him. He was glad that Selena always watched out for him, because sometimes he still had nightmares about being in the hospital. When the nightmares came, she was always there to soothe him, stroke him, sing him back to sleep.
Before long the nightmares began to fade.
Princess Gigunda always took Jamie for lessons. She was a huge woman, taller than Daddy, with frowzy hair and big bare feet and a crown that could never be made to sit straight on her head. She was homely, with a mournful face that was ugly and endearing at the same time. As she shuffled along with Jamie to his lessons, Princess Gigunda complained about the way her feet hurt, and about how she was a giant and unattractive, and how she would never be married.
“I’ll marry you when I get bigger,” Jamie said loyally, and the Princess’ homely face screwed up into an expression of beaming pleasure.
Jamie had different lessons with different people. Mrs. Winkle, down at the little red brick schoolhouse, taught him his ABCs. Coach Toad—who was one—taught him field games, where he raced and jumped and threw against various people and animals. Mr. McGilli
cuddy, a pleasant whiskered fat man who wore red sleepers with a trapdoor in back, showed him his magic globe. When Jamie put his finger anywhere on the globe, trumpets began to sound, and he could see what was happening where he was pointing, and Mr. McGillicuddy would take him on a tour and show him interesting things. Buildings, statues, pictures, parks, people. “This is Nome,” he would say. “Can you say Nome?”
“Nome,” Jamie would repeat, shaping his mouth around the unfamiliar word, and Mr. McGillicuddy would smile and bob his head and look pleased.
If Jamie did well on his lessons, he got extra time with the Whirlikins, or at the Zoo, or with Mr. Fuzzy, or in Pandaland. Until the dinner bell rang, and it was time to go home.
Jamie did well with his lessons almost every day.
When Princess Gigunda took him home from his lessons, Mister Jeepers would fly from the ridgepole to meet him, and tell him that his family was ready to see him. And then Momma and Daddy and Becky would wave from the windows of the house, and he would run to meet them.
Once, when he was in the living room telling his family about his latest trip through Mr. McGillicuddy’s magic globe, he began skipping about with enthusiasm, and waving his arms like a Whirlikin, and suddenly he noticed that no one else was paying attention. That Momma and Daddy and Becky were staring at something else, their faces frozen in different attitudes of polite attention.
Jamie felt a chill finger touch his neck.
“Momma?” Jamie said. “Daddy?” Momma and Daddy did not respond. Their faces didn’t move. Daddy’s face was blurred strangely, as if it been caught in the middle of movement.
“Daddy?” Jamie came close and tried to tug at his father’s shirt sleeve. It was hard, like marble, and his fingers couldn’t get a purchase at it. Terror blew hot in his heart.