Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  Ivan hooked his thumb in the direction of the crowd now behind us. “It’s got this pack spooked. They think the AIs are putting the finishing touches on a starship, and any second now they’re going to fly away, leaving us poor miserables to fend for ourselves.”

  I grunted, still watching the sky. One of the big orbiters had scrolled into view, its X shape visible as it crept along.

  “Kind of like in that E. M. Forster story,” Ivan said. “‘The Machine Stops.’ Have you read it?”

  “Yeah.” Lisa had given me a copy of the story; Forster was responding to what he saw as the naive optimism H. G. Wells expressed in some of his science-exalting utopian fiction. In Forster’s dystopia people live in hivelike underground dwellings, cared for by a great machine that provides them with everything. They rarely have any physical contact with other people, rarely travel or even leave their rooms. They sit and watch entertainments, talk via videophone, eat machine-produced food, breathe machine-produced air. Many of them have come to worship the machine as a kind of god. (“O Machine! O Machine!”)

  “That’s what they’re afraid of—that the machine will stop,” Ivan was saying. “And then where will we be? No more freebies, no more zaps to keep us all behaving like good boys and girls. All the bad old stuff of the bad old days will come back again.” He turned and walked backward for a few steps, looking back at the people filling the square. “Some people just like to fret. About what the AIs have done, about what they’ll do next, or this bunch—fretting that they’ll stop doing anything.”

  “The Machine,” I pondered aloud. People have never been able to settle on a good name for the whatever-it-is that runs the world now. “The AIs” is an awkward mouthful. And should we properly be calling it/them “the AIs,” plural, or “the AI,” singular? Nobody knows. Some like using the term “the I’s” for short, which of course has a handily appropriate homophone. But usually people just talk about “they” and “them.” They did this, they ought to do that, they won’t do this other thing. They’ve been making it rain too much. I wish they’d move me to a bigger house. I can’t believe they zapped me—I wasn’t really going to hit her. They they they they. “The machines” is what Lisa used to call them. “The Machine,” dressed up in singular and capitals, has a nice ring to it, too.

  Ivan got ahead of me and started walking halfway backward, bending his knees to get his face into my field of vision. I guess I was staring down at the ground again. “Where are you headed, James? Home to the salt mines?”

  “Yeah, home,” I said. “Maybe get some work done.”

  “Ah . . . work.” He turned to face in the direction he was walking. There was an extra bounce in the rhythm of his steps, like there was too much energy in him for the act of walking to contain. People who don’t know Ivan want to know what kind of drugs he’s using and where they can get some. But it’s all just him, just the way he is. He’s a man who looks like he’s all crackling hyperactive surface charge, but who in fact has more depth and inner stillness than anyone I know. “I should do me some of that ‘work’ stuff myself,” he said. “I’ve got an idea for a mural, and there’s a restaurant in Oak Square that’s talking about letting me do a couple of walls, one inside and one exterior.” He scanned the space around us until his gaze settled on a curbside tree. “I’m thinking something natural. Old nature, from back when it was scary.”

  “Red in tooth and claw,” I said.

  When I was about ten years old, my mother had a job that was walking distance from where we lived. Her walk to work took her past a park with a pond that was home to a population of ducks, and as winter came on some of these ducks chose not to fly south. It was a typical New England winter, with the temperature fluctuating randomly between mild and brutally cold. On one of the colder mornings, my mother decided that the ducks, now huddled together on a small part of the pond that remained unfrozen, must be hungry. And so from that day on she began bringing food for the ducks on her morning walk to work. First it was a few slices of bread, then a half-loaf, then a whole loaf, then a concoction of bread, cheap peanut butter, and lard that she would mix up by the gallon every evening. Naturally, ducks greeted her in greater and greater numbers every morning, and to my mother’s eye at least, ate with greater and greater frenzy and desperation.

  One day she came home with her right hand raw and red, the tips of three fingers bandaged. She’d given herself a case of frostbite by scooping the gooey duck food out with her bare hand in sub-zero weather. She sat at the kitchen table, crying as my father gently re-bandaged her fingers. Her tears weren’t from the pain, but over the plight of “her” ducks. My father began to argue with her, using his calm, captain-of-the-debating-team tone that my mother and I alternately admired and loathed, depending on whether it was directed at us. “This is crazy, Ann. You’re killing yourself over a few birds that were too stupid to fly south when they should have. And as long as you keep feeding them, they never will fly south. And there’s just going to be more and more of them …” And on he went, softly logical and reasonable. I saw my mother’s face hardening with anger and saw my father being oblivious to this. Knowing that an explosion was coming, I retreated to my room.

  I didn’t have to wait long. First there was my father’s voice—too muffled to make out any words, but so recognizable in its stolid rationality—and then my mother’s ragged shout, interrupting him: “Natural? Why would I give a damn about what’s natural? Nature is a butcher! Nature is a god damned butcher!” Next came the sound of my parents’ bedroom door being slammed.

  Of course. This was a recurring theme with my mother. She loved the beauty of nature, loved animals of any species, but always she saw ugliness behind the beauty. Every bird at our backyard feeder would remind her of how many chicks and fledglings died for each bird that survived to maturity. Every image of wildlife on television or the web would bring to her mind the bloody, rapacious cycle of predator and prey. The boundless, uncaring wastefulness of nature infuriated her. All through my childhood our home was an impromptu hospital, rehabilitation clinic, and long-term rest home for a host of rescued wild and domesticated animals. Orphaned fledgling birds and baby squirrels, starving semi-feral alley cats, and then the mice and birds rescued from the jaws of those same cats.

  A few moments after my mother’s tirade, my father came into my room and sat beside me on my bed, looking as shamefaced and apologetic as a scolded dog. He often came to me in situations like this. As poor a job as he often did of understanding her, I never questioned that he loved my mother with a helpless intensity. And when he had made her angry he would come to me, as if I were the closest replacement for her that he could find. “You’d think I’d know her better by now, eh, champ?” he said with a sad smile, resting a hand on my shoulder. Then we talked about trivialities for a while, my father ordered a take-out meal, and life went on.

  When Ivan and I arrived at our building, a squat little delivery bot was trundling up the outside steps with a stack of packages. Moving ahead of us, it opened the door to Ivan’s studio, deposited the boxes a few yards inside the door, and left again, silent on its padded treads. “Ah,” Ivan said, looking through the packages. “Every day is Christmas, eh? Canvas, stretchers, some tubes of color, and …” he yanked open the top of one of the boxes, “yup; some genuine imitation AI-brand single malt Scotch. Yum yum.” He pulled out a bottle and cocked it at an angle near his head. The label had the words “Scotch, Islay single malt (simulated)” printed over a nice photograph of (presumably) Scottish countryside. Nothing else. “Join me in a few, confrere?” Ivan asked.

  I dropped into one of Ivan’s hammock chairs while he flitted into the kitchen for glasses and ice. “You know what I hear?” he said when he came back, handing me a clinking tumbler. “Shanghai, man! That’s what I hear. People say great things are happening there. Really happening. Music, art, literature, movies . . . They say it’s wide open there. New ideas, new things, stuff like nobody’s done before, nobody’s
thought of before. A real renaissance, happening right out on the streets! We should go, James. We should go!”

  I grunted noncommittally. Ivan had these flights of enthusiasm; a new one every few weeks, it seemed. A while ago he’d been reading about the Vorticists and Futurists of the early twentieth century, and had been wild to write an artist’s manifesto like theirs—one that would “encapsulate the role of the artist in a post-singularity world.” That had kept him busy for a month or two, and then there had been some vague but dangerous-sounding talk of performance art involving pyrotechnics, and after that he’d returned to painting with a deep dive into old-school realism and precise draftsmanship.

  Ivan had been wandering around his studio as he drank, and now, standing at an open window, he said, “Hey, come look.” I weaved my way around a half-dozen or so unfinished canvasses on easels and went to him. He pointed down at the outer woodwork of the window. The building was old, with brick walls and weathered wooden trim around the windows. The wooden sill Ivan was pointing at was partly rotted at the corners, and busily at work in those rotted areas was a crew of micro-bots. Vaguely insect-like and about a quarter-inch long, they were the same grayish brown as the weathered wood. There were around ten or twenty of them crawling over the sill, some making their way to one of the rotted voids in the wood and squirting out dollops of resinous material. Others were engaged in chewing away bits of rotten wood, using ant-like pincer jaws.

  Ivan reached out and picked up one of the chewer bots, first holding it between thumb and forefinger, and then letting it crawl over his hand. It moved with an unhurried purpose, eventually dropping off the side of his hand to the windowsill and rejoining its comrades. “You remember Louisiana a couple of years ago?” he said, still watching the little bots at work. “The governor and legislature were puffing up their chests about reintroducing a money-labor economy by making it illegal to accept any goods or services from ‘any artificial entity.’ Then it turned out that little mechanical bugs like these guys were swarming through both the statehouse and the governor’s mansion. They’d been rebuilding both from the inside out for months.”

  I reached out to the window myself, picking up one of the bots and holding it by the edges. It churned its legs for a moment and then went still as I held it close to my eyes. A memory of Lisa’s voice murmured into my ear, vicious and accusing: You love them. It makes me sick how much you love them.

  Lisa appeared in my life right about the time of the world’s big tipping point. It was during the few days of the last war in the Middle East. The War That Wasn’t; the Fizzle War. I was in a club called The Overground, and the atmosphere was defiantly celebratory. The wall-sized screen behind the stage was showing multiple videos—scenes that have since become iconic, even clichéd and boring: tanks rolling off their own treads and belly-flopping onto the desert sand, soldiers trying to hold onto rifles that were falling to pieces in their hands, a missile spiraling crazily through the air before burying itself in the ground with the impotent thud of a dead fish. And from other parts of the world, scenes of refugee camps where swarms of flying bots were dropping ton after ton of food, clothing, shelter materials.

  No one claimed ownership of these Good Samaritan cargo-bots, nor of the gremlinesque nanoes that were screwing up the mechanisms of war. It soon became known that these were machines built and run by other machines. It was becoming undeniably evident that something new was moving upon the face of the land. Indeed, that the world was being rebuilt around us, disassembled and reassembled under our feet. The AIs were taking over, and they were changing the rules.

  The bands playing at The Overground that night had hastily cobbled together some new songs for the occasion. I remember one was “Slaves to the Metal Horde,” played to a bouncing dance tune and with silly lyrics about politicians and generals losing their jobs to automation and joining the vast ranks of the unemployed. “God 2.0” was another song; only a few vague and suggestive phrases for lyrics, but with a sly and sinister tune that made it a bonafide hit for a few months. It was during one of those songs that Lisa and I, both partnerless, eyed each other on the dance floor and fell into a face-to-face rhythm. She had a broad smile, a strong, graceful body, and a fondness for dancing with her hands behind her back. Her dancing consisted of lots of dips and hops and twisting her upper body to one side or the other. Often she would seem to be on the verge of throwing herself off-balance, but then she would smack a foot to the floor in flawless synchrony with the beat of the music, showing she had herself exactly where she meant to be. In height, her proportions were as close as my eye could measure to Polykleitos’ ideal, and she had lean breasts and a solid muscularity that suggested she had seriously applied herself to some sport in her student days.

  But the real story of her beauty was in her face. It wasn’t the beauty of clinical perfection, but of personhood. There was a whole human being written out in the length of her nose, the curve of her jaw, the hard straightness of her eyebrows. And of course her eyes. They were eyes that were full of knowing humor and incisive smarts and even more full of absolutely no bullshit. Usually when I see a face as beautiful and interesting as hers, I set about memorizing it so I can sketch it later. I look and then look away, rebuild the lines, curves, shapes and shadows of the face in my head, then look again to check my reconstruction against the original. Repeat and repeat until the person gets annoyed and asks what the fuck I’m doing. I didn’t do this with Lisa, and it took me a while to realize why: You only have to memorize a face when it’s a face you might not see again, and I didn’t want to think about not seeing this woman’s face again.

  After dancing for a while we had a couple of drinks, and after that we left the club together. The sudden quiet and fresh air of the street hit me like a splash of cold water, and I just stood there for a bit, breathing and looking up at the starry sky.

  “I hope it’s going to be something good,” Lisa said, the first words we’d spoken to each other without having to shout over music. “I hope to hell it’s going to be something good.”

  For an embarrassing, imbecilic moment, I thought she was talking about us, about the prospects of a relationship between us. That’s how I was thinking already. Something had me already thinking about “us” before there was anything remotely resembling an “us.” I said “Yeah, I hope so too,” but before the sentence was halfway out of my mouth I realized that wasn’t what she meant. She was talking about the subject that everyone was talking about— the AIs and what they were up to; what was happening to the world and what was going to happen to it. Then she grabbed my hand, yanked our bodies together and gave me a grinning kiss on the lips, and I went back to thinking maybe she was talking about us. We walked and talked for a while, and then she keyed her number into my phone, gave me another peck on the lips, and left.

  “Anyway, Shanghai is the place, man. That’s what I hear.” Ivan said, trying to pull my attention back to him. Then he added, “She ain’t up there, man.”

  I realized I was standing with my head tilted back, staring up as if I could see through the ceiling above me and the floor above that and into the apartment over Ivan’s. My apartment, where Lisa would be, if she were there. Ivan was eyeing me obliquely, neither pity nor ridicule in his expression. “She’s been gone a long time.”

  True, but she’d been gone before, and come back before. Three times, or was it four? A funny thing to lose track of.

  I started wandering around Ivan’s studio, looking at some of his recent work. As usual I liked his charcoal sketches and pencil drawings better than his paintings; maybe I only have a sculptor’s eye for color—which is to say, no eye at all. Maybe it’s all shades of gray with me. Or maybe my problem was that the color had gone out of my life, ha ha. One piece he’d clearly put a lot of work into was done up as an imitation of an old-style biological illustration. It was several images on one canvas, depicting the same creature from different angles and in different postures. Each image had a caption i
n precise calligraphy, short quotations from Genesis and the Rig Veda. But the creature wasn’t a creature. It had pinkish skin, no apparent head, only vague flippers for limbs. It looked something like a cross between a jellyfish and a rat. It was creepy as hell. “What the fuck is this?” I asked.

  Ivan only glanced at the painting, as if he didn’t like looking at it himself. “That’s a squirmer. That particular one was picked up somewhere in Costa Rica; some scientists posted an article about it, about what it does and how it works, with a bunch of pictures and videos.” When I gave him a blank stare Ivan went on. “You know, food! Manufactured food for animals that will only eat live prey. Not all the predator animals in the world are happy eating the piles of synthetic puppy chow that our AI friends leave lying around, so they also make these things—blobs of protein that act alive, that squirm around on the ground. Nice, eh?” He took another quick look at the canvas, then turned it to face the wall.

  “They think of everything, huh?” I said. And of course they do. That’s what you do when you have an IQ in the millions or billions: You think of everything. All the infinite details that go into remaking a world, dismantling every minutest bit of the old world that doesn’t fit your idea of how things should be and replacing it with a corresponding bit that suits you better.

  Ivan and I sat facing each other across a neat little table a woodworker friend of his had made, the bottle of Scotch on the table between us. Over what was left of the night we got as drunk as the faux booze—or maybe it was the nanoes in our blood—would allow, which turned out to be pretty drunk.

  After his third refill, Ivan started holding his glass close to his chest and staring sullenly at an empty spot in the air about four feet in front of him.

  “Tell me about Shanghai,” I said.

  “Fuck Shanghai. It’s all bullshit. Things are as dead there as they are here, or New York, or Palookaville, or anywhere.”