Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “You really think things are all that dead?”

  “Agh, you know …” He paused, rolling the ice around inside his glass. “They aren’t alive. Not like they used to be.” He raised his eyes to meet mine.

  “You were at the Carver Club tonight?”

  I nodded.

  “How was it?”

  “Good,” I said, tilting my head to the right.

  “Yeah. Exactly. You remember the early days? The Fizzle War and all that, when it was all starting? You remember—” He started tossing out the names of bands and of songs, and I started throwing back some of my own favorites, and for a while we may as well have been two geezer-farts, grinding our rocking chairs into the ground as we reminisced about The Good Old Days.

  “Anyway,” Ivan said, “things were alive then. The bands were trying to be different, trying to do something new. And it wasn’t just the music. It was right around then that Johansson started writing her crazy Extinction poems, and the contra-perspectivist painters sprang up in L.A., and the New Minimalist writers in the U.S. and India . . . New stuff, man. Great stuff. Back then there really was a renaissance going on. It didn’t last, but it was sure as hell something real.”

  I got caught up in Ivan’s enthusiasm. “It was, wasn’t it?” I said. “That’s how a renaissance happens. One schmoe sees another schmoe doing something amazing, and he gets pumped up. Even if he works in a totally different field, he gets inspired. He starts thinking about trying to do something amazing himself. And before you know it you’ve got Italy in the fifteenth century, or Harlem in the 1920s. You’ve got Duke Ellington and Aaron Douglas and Fats Waller and Josephine Baker, all rubbing shoulders, lighting each other up, driving each other to greatness.”

  I knew the Scotch was making me blather, and I shut up. But I went on thinking about those days of a few years ago, when the world felt a lot more alive, as Ivan put it. I thought about spending night after night running from one club to the next, trying to catch every one of the dozens of new bands that were springing up, trying to take it all in, feeling awed by the energy, the newness, the vitality. And more than that, feeling a burn, an absolute burn to go back to my studio and create something, make something, even though I doubted I would ever, in a hundred lifetimes, be able to sculpt anything half as good as all the examples of genius that seemed to be roaring to life all around me . . . Of course, my relationship with Lisa was gleaming and new back then, and that added its own brand of creative fire to my life.

  “I think it’s because we were scared in those days,” Ivan said. “A lot of the creative types were making a joke of it, but that was just whistling past the graveyard. We didn’t know what the AIs were going to do, and we were scared. Maybe it was that fear that made people more creative. Nowadays nobody’s really afraid about anything. The worst thing anyone feels now is bored and cranky.” He caught my eye as soon as he said this, then looked down at the floorboards. “Sorry, man. Stupid thing for me to say.”

  I grunted and waved a hand to dismiss the subject, and we went on talking. We talked about the old world, the new world, about Scotch, about art-world gossip, and not Lisa. I spent a lot of time not talking about Lisa.

  The first time Lisa came home with me to my studio, she went straight to the shelves that held my sculptures. She looked at each one slowly and carefully, taking it in from different angles. I was working small in those days, figures eighteen inches tall at most, and she leaned in close to squint at all the fine details I’d sweated over in anticipation of just such a squint. “Hmm,” she said now and then, and “Ah” once or twice. These little vocalizations were hardly more than a breath, and when she was done looking she summarized with a quiet “Okay” and a smile. I suppose it was just me being silly, but those few syllables felt like all the praise in the world; like a Guggenheim fellowship and a MacArthur grant and a hearty handshake from Rodin, all rolled into one.

  She spent the night, and the next morning we went to her place so she could make us breakfast, and later that day we went back to my place so I could make us lunch, and some time after that we went to her place for supper and to see if the sex was as good in her bed as it had been in mine. After a few weeks of this, the back and forth was getting kind of tiresome, so we packed up her stuff and moved it to my place. And that was that; there was officially an “us.”

  I suppose—one has to suppose—that to the AIs, love is just one more quantifiable entity in a universe of quantifiable entities. Probably it’s as basic to them as a bit of clockwork; the right neurons firing, a few chemicals in the right combination. But then again, the same can be said of life itself. The sweet, living Earth, with all its countless green fronds and numberless beating hearts, is all just clockwork and chemistry, all eminently quantifiable and understandable. That doesn’t stop it from being something amazing and magical, measureless and infinite.

  After some impassioned entreaties, Lisa agreed to model for me. I had just started working on Geckos then; a pair of female figures climbing up a smooth vertical wall, their bodies somewhere between lizard and human, and also abstracted and simplified à la Constantin Brancusi. It was a design that could easily slump into kitschy faux-Deco drivel, but I was hopeful I could hopscotch my way across that minefield. When Lisa saw how abstract the piece was going to be she laughed. “Are you sure you need a naked woman to model for this?”

  “Oh absolutely. It’s all in there, even if I don’t do a straight copy of it; the muscles, the bones, the skin and hair, all the lines and curves, all the, um . . . details . . . And it can’t be just any naked woman. It has to be you. It’s all about capturing the inner essence, don’cha know, and if there’s anyone whose inner essence I want to capture, it’s yours.”

  “I can think of six or seven dirty jokes about that,” she said, “but they’re all really lame.”

  I answered her grin with one of my own, but I wasn’t kidding. I had visions of this woman being my lifelong inspiration. My muse, I would have said, if that word weren’t too worn out and clichéd to speak without gagging. She would be the Rose Beuret to my Rodin, the Jeanne Hébuterne to my Modigliani, the Wally Neuzil to my Schiele. That’s the sort of thing that runs through your mind when you’re young and in love and have enough naïve ego to insert your own name into a sentence alongside some of the world’s greatest artists. As it turned out, I would work on that sculpture throughout all the time Lisa and I were together.

  Meanwhile, the world outside our lust-fogged windows was continuing on its way. After stopping all mechanized war, the AIs set about rebuilding slums and refugee camps. Beginning with the worst of them, these wretched huddling places of tents and corrugated iron shacks were suddenly—by seeming magic—replaced with rows of cute little cottages, neatly trimmed out with comfortable furniture and curtains in the windows. Sewer systems and running water appeared where there had only been open ditches and hand pumps. The shiny kiosk buildings started to spring up like oversized mushrooms, first in the poorest parts of the world, but soon to expand globally. Aisle after aisle of shelves filled with the necessities of life, all of it free for the taking and constantly restocked by the endlessly roving supply-bots. Clearly the AIs had solved the riddle of nano-assembly. They could put together matter of any size and complexity from base molecules, base atoms, and for all we knew, maybe even base protons and electrons. However they did it, the bottom line was that they seemed capable of making anything, anywhere, of any size, in any quantity.

  It was a fun time when this age of abundance came home to the First World. Mysterious online catalogs started appearing; you could order a pair of shoes or a dozen eggs or new dining room furniture, with no mention of the awkward little detail of payment. Needless to say, this was seen as a threat to the economy—to the whole idea of there even being anything worth calling an “economy,” and this scared a lot of people. It scared some people even more than the fact that mankind’s God-given right to wage war had been taken away. A lot of people were scared, a
nd a wealth of imminent dooms were predicted, but there was nothing much anyone could do. The AIs had seen to it that there was nothing anyone could do. They’d thought of everything.

  Fewer people found any reason to object when disease stopped happening. This one began with hospitals noting a slump in new admissions, and with doctors finding nano-sized foreign bodies of unknown origin in the blood of some patients. But soon it was everyone’s blood, and everyone, everywhere, stopped getting sick. At all, ever.

  It’s funny how people adjust. The world was going through changes that, before they happened, would have been thought of as mind-boggling, world-shattering, unfathomable. And yet life just went on, the way it does. In years past, people had adjusted to the notion that humanity might be wiped out by a couple of psychotic button-presses. People had adjusted to living in the midst of bubonic plague, to having their cities bombed every night, to being ruled by lunatic, murderous despots. If people could adjust to those things, they could adjust to a life of no war, no disease, and unearned abundance.

  It was right around the time Lisa moved in with me that the zaps were added to the catalog of revolutions being wrought upon the world. They started out as just one more among thousands of not-too-believable rumors flitting around the web, but in a matter of days the reports became a flood. The zaps were real.

  For Lisa and me, that reality was visited on us late one night as we were walking through one of the less-affluent neighborhoods of Cambridge, on a residential side street off of Mass Ave. In the middle of a quiet, poorly lit block, a man was suddenly standing in front of us. He was big, broad, and pretty rough-looking, with a dried road-rash scab on one cheek, torn and dirty clothes, and hair that might have been neatly combed earlier in the day but was now a crazed mop. “Hey, man,” he said, apparently to both of us, “you gotta see this.”

  I tightened my grip on Lisa’s hand and tried to side-step around the guy, but he side-stepped with me, putting a hand on my chest. “No. You got to see this!” His eyes roved over the empty air around him, somewhere above head level. “It’s like they’re here. Watching. They know what I’m going to do, before I even do it!”

  I figured him for crazy and/or drunk, and tried to convince myself that crazies and drunks usually aren’t dangerous. “It’s okay,” I said. “They won’t hurt you. They haven’t hurt anyone.”

  He widened his eyes at me, smiling like he knew something hugely funny that I didn’t know. “It kinda hurts, actually,” he said, a thoughtful look crossing his face. “But it’s wild . . . Wild. Just watch. Just watch this!” His hand was on my chest again, this time grabbing my jacket. He wrenched me around, shoving me up against a parked car. Lisa yelled something, grabbing at his free arm. He shook her off and grinned wildly at her. “Just watch!” he said again, turning back to me and bringing his right arm up with his fist clenched and his elbow cocked in a classic I-am-going-to-punch-your-face pose. Lisa screamed.

  When you’ve played a memory over and over in your head a few hundred times, it becomes difficult to know what you actually saw at the time and what details your mind has edited in after the fact. Since those early days, everyone’s seen slow-motion videos of zappings, heard people describing the sensation with all brands of colorful language, seen scientists expounding on the probable mechanism of their function. But reliably or not, I remember the electric buzz-pop, a flash of light with no apparent source, and then our unpleasant companion going into shuddering rigidity for less than a second before slumping to the ground like an abandoned marionette. Lisa and I stood looking blankly at each other for a moment, and then she bent over the man, reaching out to touch him. There was an acrid, bleach-like smell in the air, which I later learned was the smell of ozone.

  “Did ya see it?” the man cackled, turning his head toward Lisa. He was breathing hard and clutching at his right arm—the arm he’d been about to punch me with. “Did ya fucking see it?” It seemed to be really important to him that we’d seen it.

  “Yes, we saw it,” Lisa said, and we left.

  We walked a block or two in silence, just absorbing what had happened. I was mostly thinking about the implications of this new manifestation of the AIs. They would be able to stop any human action they didn’t approve of, and I wondered what that was going to mean. Lisa was thinking more about the man we’d left lying on the sidewalk. “He wanted it to happen,” she said softly. “Everyone keeps wondering why the machines won’t talk to us, why they won’t tell us what they’re going to do, what their plans are. That guy wanted that thing to happen to him, because he knew it was them, speaking to him, in a way. He wanted to be electrocuted, or whatever that was, so that he could feel them doing something, saying something. It was like he thought of it as being touched by the hand of God.”

  I figured she was right. Luckily, before too long there was so much coverage of people being zapped that it became old hat, and not many were silly enough to go out of their way to provoke getting zapped just for its own sake. It also turned out that only violence or extreme cases of theft or destruction of personal property would bring on a zap, so fears of the AIs trying to whip the human race into robotic docility and uniformity died down after a while.

  But the zaps meant there was no longer much use for police, the courts, laws, politicians, or government. All of these grand edifices of Civilization As We Know It were becoming as obsolete as buggy whips. The faint electric crackle of the zaps was really a thunderclap. It was the boom of a coffin lid slamming shut on the notion of humans being in charge of humanity.

  Naturally, this fact once again made many people unhappy, or frightened, or both. Worrying about what the AIs were up to was becoming humanity’s favorite pastime. And Lisa was becoming one of those people who worried.

  “You have to wonder,” she said one day. “When you look at what the machines are doing from a few different angles, it makes me wonder.”

  “Wonder about what?” I asked. “No more crime or war or disease or poverty. Those are good things to be rid of, I’d say.”

  “Sure they are. The world is a million times better off now than it was before. But …” She paused for a long time before continuing. “I was just reading about the women’s suffrage movement. Some of those women went through hell year after year after year; getting beaten up by cops at their protest marches, getting arrested, going on hunger strikes in prison, being force-fed with tubes rammed down their throats. And then when they were released from prison, they just went back out on the streets to march again. Some of them had their health ruined for the rest of their lives, and some of them died.” She looked at me, her eyes shining with tears. “How many millions of stories like that are there in history? People fighting and dying for human progress—for freedom and democracy, to end slavery, to end war, to make progress in science—all the ways people have worked and suffered and sacrificed themselves to make the world a better place.” She paused again, looking away from me, looking out a window at a blank sky.

  “And now all of that is over,” she said. “The machines are jumping in and kicking us off the field. They’re saying we’re nothing but a bunch of screw-ups, so they’re taking over, taking the world out of our hands. So as of now, there’s no such thing as human progress anymore, because it isn’t humans who are doing it. It’s them. It’s all them, imposing progress on us from above.”

  “That’s true, I guess,” I said. “But it’s also true that their sense of morality must have come from us. Either it was programmed into their ancestors or they learned it by observing our culture, and now they’re only taking those human ideals and applying them, enforcing them. And isn’t that what laws have done throughout history? To apply the highest human ideals that one can realistically hope to enforce? So you could say they’re just super-cops, enforcing a system of morality that’s entirely human in origin.”

  “But it’s not human. It’s a change in how we behave that hasn’t come from us. It hasn’t evolved. It’s just being imposed on us by
goddamned machines.”

  “Yes, and what’s wrong with that? So maybe it bruises our little egos that they’re in charge, that they’re more powerful than us, that they’re smarter than us. Maybe a bruised ego is an okay price to pay for children not being shot and napalmed and dying of dysentery.”

  “I’m just saying that being human used to be something special,” Lisa said. “People like Martin Luther King, like Mahatma Gandhi, like those suffragettes and like all the millions of plain, ordinary people who did some little thing, just out of the hope that they were helping to make the world a better place—they made us special. The human race was progressing, it was evolving. And now that’s all over. We’ll never progress to anything, because we don’t have any choice. Whatever progress we make, it won’t be us doing it. We aren’t free. We’re just pets who belong to them.”

  I kind of slumped at that, a realization settling over me. “The difference between you and me,” I said, “is that you have a lot more faith in humanity than I do. I’m not so sure we were progressing anywhere. And if we were, it could have taken a million dead martyrs like Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi before we got to the place where we are today: People not killing each other. And personally I’m not sure the human race would have lasted long enough to kill off many more martyrs.”

  Of course, a lot of what both of us were saying was just rehashing arguments we’d read or heard from others. All these issues and lines of thought had been chewed over endlessly by everyone with a keyboard or microphone. But for Lisa and me, the argument died there, for the time being. It was our first glimpse of the distance that could exist between us, and neither of us wanted to dwell on it. We didn’t want to admit to ourselves that it was a real thing; that it mattered. Life went on, and we went on being happy.

  What we didn’t realize was that the AIs still weren’t done with remaking the world. Their next bombshell came about a year later. Seemingly overnight, the birthrate dropped. Nine births per thousand population per year was the new number, and it was quickly confirmed that it was the same everywhere in the world. This worked out to about one and a quarter children per family, and was well below replacement level. Apparently the AIs had decided that the human population needed to be lowered, so in their inimitable manner they had made it come to pass.