Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  And once again this latest seismic readjustment to the world brought out a thousand gradations of response, from joyful acceptance on down to batshit hysterical predictions of doom. It was calculated that the population would dwindle down to nothing at all in several hundred years if the birthrate stayed as low as it now was. “They’re wiping us out,” some declared. “Yeah, but,” the more moderate yeah-butters said, “if they wanted to get rid of us, why wouldn’t the birthrate be zero? Or why wouldn’t they just kill us outright, disassemble us into pink goo, and be done with the job in a millisecond instead of centuries?”

  There was another wrinkle to the new birthrate, and it was one that many disliked even more than they disliked the plain numbers. The AIs appeared to be picking and choosing who would be allowed to conceive. Unwanted pregnancies dropped to zero, as did pregnancy among the mentally ill, those who were in bad relationships, and women who already had two or more children. Teenaged pregnancy likewise became almost unknown. When a pregnant teen did occasionally appear, she would turn out to be some absurdly mature and levelheaded girl who was studying for her Master’s in developmental psychology or some such thing. Or it would be discovered that she was best friends with a gay couple next door who were breathlessly excited about the upcoming birth and had already redecorated one of their rooms as a nursery and installed child-proof locks on all their cabinets.

  So those granted the gift of conception were clearly all good and deserving people, as determined by the AIs in their presumably infallible wisdom.

  As for me, because I’m an idiot, a blinkered idiot, days went by before I thought much about where I stood on this issue. Or rather, before Lisa pointed out to me where we stood. We were talking about one of the endless “why do you suppose this couple was allowed to have a baby” stories, when I realized that Lisa’s expression had gone dark. She was glaring at me with something in her eyes I couldn’t identify, but I knew it wasn’t good. She looked at me like that for a long time.

  “You really don’t care, do you?” she said finally, making it more of a statement than a question.

  “Care?” I said blankly.

  “I mean you aren’t thinking . . . You aren’t thinking about …”

  Still I was clueless. “About what?”

  “About us!” She yelled, suddenly almost in tears. “About the fact that this means us, too! Did it really never occur to you that you and I might want to have kids some day? Maybe get married, be a family, all that bourgeois middle class crap? Does that really never cross your mind?” We were sitting on our couch, and at this point she leaned into me, resting her head on my shoulder. She sniffed noisily, openly crying now. “Did it never occur to you that …” She made a fist and thumped it down softly on my thigh, “that I love you so much that I would feel blessed—fucking blessed—to have a baby with you?”

  In my imagination, her words echoed in the room for minutes. No, it hadn’t occurred to me. How could I, miserable finite entity that I am, ever think that someone like her could feel a thing like that about me? And in any case, all thoughts of fathering children had always been a pretty distant thing from my notions of life and my place in the world. I knew the possibility was out there, and I suppose in some dusty, unused corner of my mind I connected that possibility with Lisa, but …

  In a kind of stunned internal silence, I reached out for the idea, drawing it from its dusty corner and into the light. A child. Parenting. A child with Lisa. A son, or a daughter . . . The image burst on me then, like a sculpture suddenly assembled out of particles of light. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever imagined. Yes. A baby. A baby with Lisa.

  “Yes,” I said aloud, suddenly teary. “Yes, yes, yes. Let’s have a baby.” I grabbed her hands in both of mine, then let go again so I could pull her to me, hug her hard, bury my face in the crook of her neck. “Yes, yes, yes.”

  “Who says they’d let us?” Lisa asked. “Even if you wanted to.”

  “I do want to!” I sputtered. “And they’ll have to let us! We’ll get married, we’ll be a family. We’ll read books, take courses on parenting, we’ll . . . I don’t know, do whatever responsible, well-adjusted parents do. Maybe we can’t count on a whole brood of kids, but we can have at least one. They’ll have to let us have at least one.”

  “You want to?” Lisa said, her voice quivering again. “You really want to?”

  I said “Yes” a dozen or so times more, and then we just sat there with our heads together, both of us sniffling, grinning, laughing.

  So the next day we started figuring out how to get married. There was still a functioning city hall in those days, so we filled out the required forms, got the required signature and lined up a justice of the peace. As soon as I told Ivan what we were up to, he leapt into the job of planning the thing like a frenzied mother-in-law-to-be. I had some pieces in a group show at the time, and Ivan convinced the gallery owner to let us use the space for the ceremony. He pestered us with a flurry of different designs and redesigns for invitations. He begged and bartered with one of the better local bands, not only getting them to play some upbeat and danceable music after the ceremony, but also brow-beating the guitarist into working up a Jimi-Hendrix-esque version of the wedding march. And when the day came it was a great little party, much like the night when Lisa and I first met. Only when Lisa danced this time, it was with her arms high in the air, as if there was too much joy in her for her body to contain. And looking at her, that feeling was echoed in my own heart. Until that moment, I wouldn’t have guessed I could love anyone as much as I loved this woman.

  But the wedding was to be the last truly, purely happy moment of our lives. After that began the long succession of monthly disappointments; the repeated non-conception of our child. Though statistics showed that the birth rate was steady and unvarying, once we were in the game, once we were among the ranks of those hoping for a child, it seemed that everyone except us was getting pregnant. Middle-aged couples, young couples, single women, seventeen-year-old girls. How were the AIs choosing? Had they modeled the human personality so perfectly that they could know, to some Nth level of certainty, who would make the best parents? And what did “best” mean? By whose definition? What kind of next generation did they want? These were just a few of the infinite questions that the whole world was pondering, arguing over, fighting and breaking up over.

  “It’s probably me,” Lisa said. “The machines know that I’m not all gung-ho for the new world order, so why would they let me be a mother? You should hook up with some woman who loves Big Brother as much as you do. You’d have six kids by now!” And I would take issue with that line about loving Big Brother, and we would argue and fight over that.

  Or: “Maybe it’s you. Maybe they won’t let us have a baby because they know you don’t really want one. You’re happy with your life the way it is. You don’t want a messy, noisy brat screwing up your neat little world. I know it, and they know it.” And we would fight over that.

  The topic of parenthood and our persistently not-appearing child was the main locus of argument between us, but there were others. I’d been keeping my day job when an increasing number of people around us were finding it easy enough to live without employment. But when the company that we’d been paying our rent to went out of business and wasn’t replaced by anyone or anything who cared about the building or who lived in it, I told Lisa I was going to quit. It was a doomed job anyway; there’s not much use for an ad designer when the whole institution of selling goods for money was crumbling apart.

  “If you don’t work, you’re giving up.” Lisa said. “You’re dropping out of the economy and dropping out of human society. You won’t be contributing anything; you’ll be nothing but a pet to the machines.”

  “All I’m ‘giving up’ on is being a damned wage-slave,” I snapped back. “I’m dropping out of spending half of my waking life doing work I don’t care about for a company that doesn’t matter. And we don’t need the money.
I’ve got savings enough to get the few things we want that you still have to pay for, and who knows where the world will be by the time that runs out? Money may not even exist by then. And meanwhile I’ll be able to spend full time doing the work that matters to me.” I waved an arm in the direction of the room set aside as my studio.

  “Sure. Let the machines feed you and clothe you and keep you warm in the winter. Let them give you toys to play with and let them clean your litter box and let them wipe your ass when it needs wiping. Be a good little pet.”

  And so on, and so on, and so on. Of course, I’m the one remembering all this, so it’s a given that my memory is biased. I’m sure I said my share of stupid and hurtful things too, when it was my turn to be stupid and hurtful. And no amount of skewed memory, of snuffling self-pity and hurt feelings can hide the fact that we had great times too. Times when Lisa’s smile and laughter lit up the air and washed over me like sunlight. Times when the two of us fit together like the jagged half-pieces of something that was meant to be whole. Times when I was sure that nothing in the world could ever make sense without her at my side, completing me.

  Then the company Lisa worked for went out of business, and she couldn’t find a job anywhere else. For a while she filled her time with watercolor painting and drawing, and I swear she had a natural talent that would have had my professors at the MFA School weeping onto their smocks. But she gave it up, switching to guitar playing for a while, then keyboard, then reading nineteenth-century novels, then studying political theory . . . Nothing lasted, nothing consumed her, nothing gave her the sense of purpose that a lump of clay and a few modeling tools gave to me. She became more and more convinced that only one thing would do that for her, and that was the one thing the machines wouldn’t allow us to have. I convinced her to see a therapist—a profession that was grandly thriving, thanks to the vast population of the unemployed who were thrashing about for something to give meaning to their lives—but that too didn’t last.

  At some point our arguing and bitterness seemed to become the rule rather than the exception, and she left me. And a few weeks later she came back, both of us extravagantly tearful and contrite and swearing that we’d never fight again and blah blah blah. And we didn’t, until we did. So she moved out again, and came back again, and left again. How many times? A funny thing to lose track of.

  I do remember what triggered our last breakup, though. It was the thing with the animals. When the AIs decided to extend their reach into the realm of animals and nature, that was what finally and utterly ruined my marriage.

  As usual, the news crept in on us by degrees. First came the stories of some act of violence against an animal being prevented in one way or another. A deer hunter in Vermont found his 30-06 falling to pieces in his hands, just like the soldiers in the Fizzle War. A short-tempered dog owner in Egypt and a malicious slingshot-owning youngster in France were zapped onto their respective behinds. Soon the scattered reports became a deluge, and the meaning was clear: The AIs’ umbrella of protection had been spread to animals. All animals, everywhere. Harm to any creature larger than a bug was no longer allowed, and even wholesale attacks on insects were liable to bring down the stinging reprimand of a zap. Slaughterhouses around the world were disassembled to dust overnight, and the herds and flocks of livestock wandered off, to be fed and cared for by the machines. By this time, synthetic copies of every food imaginable had been available for years, and they’d been shown to be indistinguishable from their real-food counterparts. So this latest stricture had no real impact on anyone’s dining habits, but needless to say there were many who chafed under this imposition on their inalienable right to kill things. No matter. As ever and always, there was nothing anyone could do about it.

  And then came the capstone on the AIs’ new world: Reports from forests, jungles, and wildlife reserves began to show that it wasn’t just humans who were prohibited from harming animals. One early video showed a pride of lions stealthily closing in on a mother zebra and her foal. Then there was a series of flashes and crackles, and predator and prey darted off in opposite directions. That same afternoon, a drone on caterpillar treads was seen dropping off a load of realistic-looking but undoubtedly synthetic meat upwind of the lions. The lions ate well that night, and the zebra mother and her foal lived to see another sunrise. A thousand confirmations eventually followed, and soon after it was reported that the birthrate of all prey animals had dropped precipitously. The new rulers of the Earth weren’t content to simply take a hand in the affairs of humans; they’d decided that nature itself needed some straightening out. So no longer would a mother zebra need to birth and rear ten or twenty offspring so that one or two might live to reproductive age. No longer would nature be so profligate with lives, so red in tooth and claw. That bit about God’s eye being on the sparrow would no longer be a cruel joke at the sparrow’s expense as its life ended in agony and terror, with torn flesh and crushed bones. Now, in the remade world, that sparrow could look forward to a long and carefree life, a dignified old age, and a quiet death in its little sparrow bed, the whole of its time on Earth innocent of pain and fear.

  My mother died when I was sixteen. She was driving and somehow managed to swerve off the road, hurtle down a steep embankment, and crash into a tree. I was sure I knew how it had happened—almost before I could even fathom the what of her being dead, I was sure of the how. She had seen something in the road, a squirrel or a cat, a turtle or a snake, and had yanked the wheel over to miss it. I was sure, and though we never mentioned it to each other, I felt my father had the same thought, and was just as sure.

  The idea of a funeral would have been anathema to my mother, but my father held a small “memorial gathering” for her in our home. It was one of those secular affairs where a succession of friends and relations stood and spoke. Many had reminiscences, some recited poetry or other texts. My father went last, and he started by noting that although his wife was the staunchest of atheists, she had a fondness for certain parts of the King James Bible. Then he read, very briefly, from Ecclesiastes:

  For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast.

  He spoke softly, as if his words weren’t intended so much for the people in the room as for himself, or for some closely hovering spirit of my mother— though she would surely have been as disdainful of that image as she would have been of a traditional religious funeral.

  I imagine everyone likes to think that they aren’t fettered by their parents’ beliefs. Even while she was alive, I made little rebellions against my mother’s militant veganism. I would spend my allowance on sneaky little violations of the diet she’d raised me under. With all the furtive subterfuge that other kids invested on illicit drugs, I bought ice cream and pizza with real cheese; I ate snack foods without checking the ingredients list. And in my teens and adulthood I abandoned one after another of her strictures. I wore leather shoes; I stopped checking for “cruelty free” labels; I even nibbled at an occasional hot dog. I thought I was freeing myself from my mother’s irrationality, that I was growing up, becoming my own person.

  “This really tears it, doesn’t it?” Lisa said. “This just wraps it up for you.” She was standing behind me, and we were watching the news of the AIs’ latest doings on our wall screen. At that moment the screen was showing a picture of a female mallard duck swimming on a sunlit pond, followed by a single fluffy duckling.

  “What are you talking about?” I said. I honestly had no idea, but the anger in her voice was making my own anger flare up. It felt like we’d leapt into the middle of another argument, with no preamble or warm-up.

  “I mean that this is where you find your god.” She waved an arm at the wall screen. “This is him, or it, or them, climbing up onto his golden throne.” She made the same arm-wave in my direction. “And this is you, getting ready to kneel and worship at h
is feet.”

  “Damnit, Lisa, I’m not worshiping—”

  “And this is me, being a monster,” she interrupted. “A fucking monster who cares more about her own right to have a baby than she cares about war and disease and poverty and …” She waved her arm once more, this time hitting the screen with the back of her hand, “and a million, billion fucking baby ducklings being born just so they can be eaten by foxes or crocodiles or whatever the fuck eats baby ducklings!” Her voice became choked and strangled, and she pressed her forehead to the screen, banging it with her fist. “I’d let them all die! I’d let the world burn, so long as I can have my baby! Doesn’t that make me a monster? Doesn’t it?” She turned to me, her face twisted and smeared with tears.

  The anger melted out of me, replaced by a sense of hopelessness that wasn’t much of an improvement. “You’re not a monster, and you don’t feel that. You don’t want anyone or anything to die. You just want to have a baby, and so do I, and we have a right to want that. But …”

  “But everything’s for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. You believe that, don’t you? Especially now—now that the machines are fucking with nature, now that they’re so moral and righteous and holy that they’re saving little birdies and mousies and zebras and whatever the hell else from getting eaten. It used to be a joke when people talked about them being the new god. But now . . . now they really are god. The best god ever, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you believe?”