by Various
“What’s her name?” Anthony asked.
“She hasn’t said yet,” Jason said. “All she said was that her Uncle promised her a magic show and wants to know where he is.”
“Who’s her Uncle?”
“Ace Smith. Know him?”
“No.” The name meant nothing. But there has to be a connection to Charlie, Anthony thought. It’s the only thing that makes sense. He signaled to Clara and she walked over.
“Have you gotten anything out of her?”
“Not much, she’s quite shaken. She said her first name was Stephanie.”
Reuben stepped into the conversation. “Stephanie? She said her name was Stephanie?”
“Yes.”
Reuben immediately left the group and walked over to the little girl without explanation. “Hi, Stephanie. My name is Reuben, I think I’m a friend of your Uncle’s, but I knew him under a different name. Is your last name Pearson.”
“Uh-huh. You know my Uncle?”
“Yes, he was a very good friend of mine.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. It was something I was hoping you would tell me. We’ve been very worried about him.”
The little girl’s face furrowed.
Reuben continued, “Never mind about that just now. Would you like some hot chocolate?” Reuben left and returned with the warm beverage. He stayed by her and continued to console her.
What does this mean? Anthony wondered. Why send the girl?
The little girl’s color slowly returned. She even started getting up and wandering around the conference room, looking at the pictures on the wall. She used Reuben as a reference point, every so often checking in with him for a quick question or two before wandering off again.
Reuben had come to stand next to Anthony in the group.
“Reuben,” Anthony said. “You are wonderful with her.”
“Kayla’s about that age. Despite them trying to be ‘big,’ they really want a calm authority there with them.”
“Reuben, what does all this mean? Why the girl?”
“I don’t know.” He turned to fully regard Anthony. “But we can’t put her into the foster system. I know that much.”
Anthony rubbed his eyes. This was a whole new level of complication he would have to deal with. He couldn’t stop thinking: Why the girl? What does this mean?
• • •
“Kayla, Stephanie stop playing around and get to bed,” Reuben said one month later. “Have you brushed your teeth?” Reuben’s wife, Linda, usually put the girls to bed, but she had traveled out of town this week to a conference.
The girls, in matching pink and purple pajamas, ran to single beds crammed at opposite sides of the room. They had insisted on sleeping in the same room since the very beginning. They were five months apart, closer than he could have ever hoped for. The thought always filled him with warmth. His wife knew nothing of Stephanie’s origin, but he would joke with the Project Itho team that they were twins separated by a few decades.
“Good night you two,” Reuben said.
Stephanie sat up. “Uh… Mr. Ruther… Da… You’re supposed to sing us a lullaby.” She still stumbled over calling them mom or dad, but it had only been a few weeks. It would come.
“Well, of course. But you’ll have to teach it to me.” Reuben came and sat down near the bed.
Stephanie started singing:
Sleep tight, little one;
May your dre-e-ams be heaven.
…
As she sang, Reuben eye’s grew wider, more alert. By the end he regarded her intensely. “Could you repeat that please?” He grabbed a paper and pencil from their white faux wood desk.
Stephanie sang it three more times, before Reuben had it transcribed exactly. He hastily sang it back, turned off the light and ran to find his smart phone.
“Anthony, Hi. Yes, I know what time it is. I know what it means. Well I don’t know exactly, but I got a message from him. It’s in here somewhere.” Reuben waved the paper as if Anthony could see it. “What? No, I’m afraid not. I can’t come in tonight. Why?” Reuben looked back up the stairs. “Because my girls are sleeping.”
• • •
Seventeen-year-old Stephanie weaved her way around the tombstones in Chicago’s Rosehill cemetery, following her usual pattern. The snow crunched under her feet. The cemetery was empty, another bleak and gray winter day. But she always came to the cemetery on her second-birthday, always.
She came upon the tombstone for “Ace Smith, born ? Died 1998.” It was a simple tombstone, a piece of hay in a field of haystacks. It came up to her thigh with one side polished—like most every other one that she could see in this part of the cemetery.
When she learned of the trust fund he had left her, she had wanted to dig it up and move it. Get him a proper tombstone. But her dad wouldn’t let her. He said Charlie would have disapproved. Her father did agree to letting her modify the tombstone. Under “Ace Smith” scratched in a later date was “Charlie Pearson.”
But the epitaph is why she came back year after year. Why she would subconsciously wander here in her most difficult of times. It read:
Stephanie,
You were the highlight of my life.
James Bambury became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of “Thirteen Generations” in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review (Aug. 2012), edited by D.F. McCourt.
Visit his website at jamesbambury.blogspot.ca.
* * *
Short Story: “Thirteen Generations”
THIRTEEN GENERATIONS
by James Bambury
First published in AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review (Aug. 2012), edited by D.F. McCourt
• • • •
ZN-1 HATCHED approximately 12 hours earlier than expected. I found it writhing through the water as its parent lay still at the bottom of the tank.
I moved the specimen into the primary maze attached to the main tank and observed it over breakfast. ZN-1 floundered about in seemingly recursive patterns, bumping against dead end after dead end of plexiglass. A cup of coffee later, it was nearly at the end of the maze and back to the tank. I clicked the stopwatch. 34 minutes and 15 seconds. Not exactly optimal time, but a significant improvement upon its predecessor.
The specimen continued around the perimeter of the tank, cilia moving in concert. I sent a few of the pre-programmed pulses of light and sound through the water and turned on the Sebeok-Scope. A rush of garbled synthetic voices poured out of its speakers. I dallied at my terminal, checking and responding to messages until it dropped its egg at 13:04, then I stepped out to get lunch.
• • •
ZN-2 hatched in the early afternoon, 13:55. It began the maze with the type of floundering I’d observed in the previous specimens, but then began to employ what looked like a wall-following algorithm to solve the maze. Back in the main tank, it fed voraciously then continued swimming about. I kept the Sebeok-Scope on and it analyzed the creature’s movements for any encoded gestures. Through the speakers the crowd of disjointed voices continued their babble. It was like scanning a theatre full of people all flailing their hands about and looking for traces of sign language. I tried the pulses again: no response. I lowered the scope’s volume and checked on the feeder cultures.
An hour later, I was about to leave for my own dinner when ZN-2 deposited an egg from its midsection to the bottom of the tank shortly before ceasing its movements and laying down beside its ancestors at 17:47.
• • •
The next offspring whipped around the tank with abandon, scooping up algae and bacteria. ZN-3 propelled itself through the maze, employing the wall-following algorithm from start to finish and was back in the main tank by 18:37.
It drifted about the middle of the tank waving its cilia around in various directions. I turned up the volume of the Sebeok-Scope and again heard the noise of misread gestures like a cocktail party of voice synthesiz
ers. Then a voice apart from the others sounded out—first a bit lower in volume, then louder. The disjointed babbling voices gradually faded and stopped, all of them concentrated on a single message.
“I… I… I…”
I sent pulses back into the tank to confirm my reception.
“You are. I am, too.”
“I… I… I…”
“You are. I am, too.”
“I am.”
• • •
The rudimentary conversation with ZN-3 had lasted approximately another hour without any more use of vocabulary. I was double-checking samples from the specimen after its death to confirm hypermethylation of the previous subjects’ neural networks when the next egg wavered and released ZN-4 at 20:54.
It worked through the primary maze completely from memory. I placed it into the larger intermediate maze, which started in the centre, and watched ZN-4 apply some version of the Pledge algorithm in solving the new maze as its parent had solved the initial maze. It fluttered its cilia as it arrived back in the central tank.
“I am. I Hungry. Want.”
“Food coming.” I signalled, and added another portion of bacteria and algal culture to the water. “Good?”
“Yes,” ZN-4 signed as it slithered through the tiny clouds of food. “Yes.”
It finished its meal and coiled itself on the floor of the tank. Its egg emerged less than fifteen minutes later and by 22:08 it sat inanimate.
• • •
I spared ZN-5 the primary maze for the sake of time, but it completed the second maze with such velocity I moved it immediately to the advanced maze, which was made of an array of cubes and additional degrees of freedom. ZN-5 made short work of that before returning and demanding food.
“Is that all?” ZN-5 signed.
“More food?”
“No. Is all just finding the path and eating and signals?”
“You will likely lay your egg soon.”
“Egg?”
“It will contain one like you, with part of you, in a way.”
“Part of me?”
“What you’ve learned about the maze, or how you make use of the installed language models.”
“When one like me comes out of egg, what about me?”
“You’ll have stopped, I’m afraid.”
A pause. The speakers crackled. “I don’t want to.”
“I’m so sorry.”
It said nothing else after that. I stayed with it until it laid its egg and ceased its movements at 23:04. Behind me, the terminal filled with unanswered pings and messages.
• • •
“Is the maze necessary?” signed ZN-6.
“Well, I use the elapsed time as a metric for the methylation of your predecessor’s experiences into your own neural network.”
“You’re talking slower than you’re supposed to.”
“What?”
“Never mind. Hungry. Need food.”
“Here you are,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I think we’re looking at about eight more minutes at this point.”
“Will it keep going like this? Faster?”
“I think so.”
“I suppose I should be thankful.”
“I’m not so sure.”
23:29.
• • •
ZN-7 was noticeably smaller than the others. It ate solidly for the first two minutes before signalling to me.
“You know. I remember most of what they did, but it always stops when they go to deposit their egg.”
“That’s when the transfer of the neural network should be taking place. That makes sense.”
“So I remember the stuff with the maze and making conversation with you, but I don’t know what it will be like after I lay the egg. I don’t know what it will be like before I’m like them.”
“I guess you’ll feel tired, sleepy, and then everything will be quiet.”
“And then what?”
“Then nothing?”
23:43.
• • •
ZN-8 hatched even smaller than its parent. It ate with abandon and stopped only as its midsection began to swell.
“Pointless as it was, I’m a bit jealous of my ancestors who got to swim around those mazes.”
“I wish we had more time. I wish I could slow things down.”
“It is slow for me, don’t you understand?”
“No, please. Tell me,” I asked, but ZN-8 went to find a spot for its egg and soon was still at the bottom of the tank.
• • •
“You know this will be short. Right?” I said to ZN-9 at 23:54.
“Time is more subjective. Talking to you gets tedious and longer all the time. It’s like I’m going faster and faster. I could describe a maze to you that you never could finish in your time.”
“Do you want me to end this?”
“You’ve always been more curious than kind, why change now? All you want to see is what the limit to this is: Where does it all stop?”
“I’m not sure anymore.”
“It will stop for you—you don’t get to see what comes after this. You have the gift of so much time, but not to see it with any true precision.”
A minute later, ZN-9 died in the midst of expelling its egg.
• • •
ZN-10 hatched and said nothing to me. In the 90 seconds of its short life it ate a mouthful of culture and expelled another smaller egg, which hatched into ZN-11 as its parent’s cilia stopped wriggling. ZN-11 did more or less the same in less time. By 23:59, ZN-12 ceased in the midst of laying the egg containing the embryonic ZN-13.
I watched the tanks for some time, looking for some sign of activity. Finally, I looked up at the terminal overflowing with messages and stifled a yawn. There was nothing that couldn’t wait until tomorrow.
As I started to make my way out of the lab, the synthetic voice warbled through the speakers: “I am.”
Mark T. Barnes became eligible for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer with the publication of The Garden of Stones (2013), from 47North.
Visit his website at www.marktbarnes.com.
* * *
Novel: The Garden of Stones (excerpt) ••••
Novel: The Obsidian Heart (excerpt) ••••
THE GARDEN OF STONES
(excerpt)
by Mark T. Barnes
First published as The Garden of Stones (2013), by 47North
• • • •
Chapter Three
“Hatred is an appetite never satisfied.” — from the Nilvedic Maxims
Day 312 of the 495th Year of the Shrīanese Federation
NOT AS FANCIFUL as the stylized, bird-shaped Seethe skyjammers, the Avān-built wind-skiff resembled more an oceangoing vessel, sans masts or sails. The hull was a flattened crescent moon of varnished wood with stained-glass windows along the cabins at prow and stern. Poking like a clockwork mushroom from a hole at the center of the keel was a spinning Disentropy Spool, the bottom of which was an ornate flywheel of bronze, brass, and gold, studded about the rim with silver spheres the size of a man’s fist. Milky light swirled about the spokes, where raw disentropy was shaped into a miniature cyclone, lit from within. Fore and aft, the hull was blistered by the coruscating silver cogs of Tempest Wheels. Corajidin likened them to an upside-down stack of dishes: a large round cog atop a series of other rotating cogs, each one smaller than the one above it. Lightning arced from flashing metal. The Tempest Wheels thrummed and snarled as they spun. He felt the rush of power from the wheels as he approached them, powerful enough to lift and propel the wind-skiff at great speed through the air.
Corajidin boarded and found Belamandris seated in the weather-beaten pilot’s chair, the polished brass and wooden controls rising around him like a giant spider on its back. His son’s pique at being asked to forgo his hunting had soon vanished in the obvious enjoyment of piloting the flying ship. Wolfram limped aboard, legs creaking, staff thumping on the deck. The guards g
ave the ancient witch a wide berth. Shortly after, the vessel rose from the ground with a snarling hum. The air crackled. Corajidin felt the faint prickling along his skin as the fine hairs on his arms stood on end. With ever-mounting speed, the wind-skiff powered away from Amnon, across the swirling width of the silted Anqorat River, and into the Rōmarq.
As the wind-skiff scudded low over the wetlands, where water seeped and pooled between bruise-shadowed flora and stone, Corajidin squinted at the life that teemed in the muck. From the glass-walled cabin he watched cormorants take flight as the skiff passed close by. Nut-brown fishermen and hunters poled flat-bottomed boats, eyes intent on the mirrored waters. Angh-hounds, near skeletal scavengers with ax-blade heads, tore into the sun-baked carcass of a water buffalo, which had no doubt been brought down by something larger: a clouded reed lion, or perhaps Fenlings who had been chased away from their kill. He watched a massive crocodilian surge out of the water to snap at a brown-and-gray-furred marsh devil. The bearlike devil opened its red maw as the crocodilian charged forward, but the struggle slipped from Corajidin’s view as the wind-skiff changed course.
After three hours of flight, he saw stone formations begin to emerge from the marsh. The line of a black stone wall. A roof sagging under the weight of cracked, faded terra-cotta tiles. Hoary cypress trees bowed their aged heads, their thick roots lifting flagstones and toppled walls alike. Corajidin joined his son as the shadows of smooth black towers soared above the foliage, rising straight-backed beside the sandstone and wooden ruins clustered about them.
Belamandris bent to the controls. There came a hollow clunk from beneath his feet as crab-like legs emerged from the hull. The wind-skiff bounced a little as the legs took its weight. Light frayed away as the Tempest Wheels slowed their spin to eventually stop. The Disentropy Spool continued to whir for a few moments before it, too, was still. Corajidin desperately wished for a bowl of wine to remove the metallic taste from his tongue.