Best of British Science Fiction 2016

by Peter F. Hamilton

  For a time there is this silly notion to repopulate the Earth.

  No can do. Terry is gay. The Kellys are elderly, beyond menopause. Katrina is repulsive. Not physically. She’s fantastic-looking, physically fit and of the right age. It’s just that she and I hate each other on sight.

  There is some suggestion that Terry ‘go straight for humanity’, but he dismisses that with a sniff. He will not even let his sperm be harvested. Neither will I, and Mr Kelly refuses on the grounds that he is married.

  Nico cannot understand why we will not act in our own self-interest. I tell him humanity is defined by two opposing instincts, survival and self-destruction. Sex and suicide. Libido and Thanatos.

  “It’s very rock and roll,” I say.

  Hence, simulants.

  We sometimes sift through the detritus of the old world to see what can be salvaged for the Rebuild. In hazard suits we find old records, useless plasma TVs, books, religious icons, wheelie bins. Terry only looks for books, and even then he only picks the ones he would like to read.

  Katrina does not select. She picks up everything she lays her eyes on, starting from the nearest. The Kellys see an object and enter this kind of Proustian fugue where they can only talk about the memories the object holds for them.

  I just watch them all. I have never found anything I want and I see the exercise as futile, busywork to keep us survivors occupied, so the Apologists can feel good with themselves. I don’t even know why we’re wearing these suits. It’s not like any of this is irradiated.

  I pick up a revolver and dry fire it at the ovoid observer drones.

  Click, click, click.

  “Pay attention,” I say. “What I say next is to be memorised, okay? Just store the words. I’ll teach you when to use them, but for now, just remember the words. Ready?”

  “Yes,” says the simulant. We are seated on the faux-grass in Green Park.

  ‘“Shit. Bollocks. Fuck. Cunt. Bitch. Bastard. Arsehole. Toerag. Wanker. Ass-hat. Bullshit. Clitface. Cocknugget. Cumbubble. Cuntrag. Bomboclad. Dickhead. Dildo. Dickwad. Fuckface, Fuckwad. Jizzsniffer. And…and…”

  “Is ‘“and’” one of the words you want me to–”

  “No, you gigantic ass-wipe. There’s your first lesson.”

  We try it again. I approach a group of simulants on Tottenham Court Road, and while they try their best to avoid me, I bump into two of them hard.

  “Asswipe!”

  “Cumbubble!”

  “Jizzsnifter!”

  Their delivery is perfect. They even stop to glare after me.

  I walk away pleased.

  When Bea is thirteen weeks pregnant we see Chelsea for the first time on ultrasound. We are in the darkened scanning room, staring at the screen like it’s a movie theatre. Bea is supine with her belly exposed and wet from the ultrasound gel, but her neck is also twisted towards the representation of the moving nascent human in her uterus. I’m on an uncomfortable plastic chair holding her hand. Chelsea is moving. She moves her hands in a wave, she twitches her legs, she turns. The operator does not like the motion because they are trying to date the pregnancy and they need her still so they can measure the CRL-Crown Rump Length.

  At one point they get a good profile shot and we can see Chelsea’s brain, eye sockets, mouth, skull, heart, and other organs all at once. I see her open her mouth and swallow amniotic fluid. I see it go down her throat. It is amazing, and at that point, with that supremely human action, I consider her alive.

  That’s when I become a parent.

  I go to a prayer point and I say, “I need thirty simulants to follow me.”

  I don’t wait to see what happens, I just go to watch Katrina work on Waterloo Bridge. I watch from the North Bank of what is meant to be the Thames. She does not understand architecture or civil engineering and works like an artist. With grand sweeping gestures she creates a line going from one bank to another, then fills in the detail. She creates concrete slabs using short vertical strokes with both hands. Whatever technology the Apologists use monitors her movements and replicates with whatever material they use for this simulacrum. Katrina is completely absorbed by her labours and I cannot see from here, but I imagine her sweating. She takes this shit seriously.

  Nico is beside me.

  “What’s up, pussycat?” I ask.

  “I am curious as to why you are watching Katrina work, rather than doing work of your own.” He smiles at me as 1990s Tom Jones. “Not that you must work. You are all volunteers.”

  “I am working,” I say, and I point to the thirty bland simulants behind me. “This is the Waterloo Bridge, man. Monet painted it. It was a suicide spot in the 1800s, before anybody had heard of the Golden Gate Bridge. It celebrates our victory over a short, French military genius. The construction of any such thing would attract crowds.”

  Nico seems puzzled.

  “Humans like to stare at changes in landscape. I am teaching your simulants to stare at things.”

  “I see. What is the object of such activity?”

  “To have stories to tell. To make life less monotonous. To distract us from the entropy that slowly degrades our bodies. ‘“Hey, Fred, I came in over Waterloo Bridge this morning. Fantastic structure. I was there when it was built.’” That kind of thing.”

  Nico now looks like Tom Jones in Mars Attacks! Blue suit, dark shirt, clean shaven, moderate side burns. I prefer him with the goatee of later years, but who am I to judge.

  For the first time I see the innards of a simulant.

  I am walking past what should be Wembley Stadium, but is instead a homogenous blob of transparent concept art. There is no traffic, so I am walking in the centre of the road. There are vehicle ghosts, placeholder cars that are holograms and lack mass. We have an understanding. They pass through me and I disregard them.

  I see a body lying on the side of the road, a male, some movement, but clearly incapacitated. I go over. There is a crush wound on the right soldier. The clothing torn and the skin broken in an irregular pattern.

  I don’t know what I expected. The simulants are constructs and I file them as robots. But there is blood. I touch it, and it doesn’t feel like blood, though it is red, and it lacks that metallic taste-smell. There are bones poking out here and there. I touch them, and they are of some kind of reinforced plastic. There is mangled flesh that quivers as the simulant tries to move.

  I’m confused. Who or what attacked this thing? My mind instantly goes to the other humans, Katrina especially. The simulants are non-violent and Katrina may hold a grudge for my interference in her morning work-out. Maybe because I criticise her work, she decides to destroy mine?

  No, I don’t see it.

  I stick my hand in the wound to feel the flesh more than anything. It is all soft and pliant, like real meat. Where is the machinery? Where is the technology? What’s the power supply? I push my hand in deeper. The simulant does not react to this, and I try to remember what Nico and I agreed about pain. All the way inside its synthetic spine there is no wire, cable, or anything that isn’t ersatz human. The simulant has blue green eyes. They are locked with mine. I pull my hand out of his wound and poke the left eye. It blinks. I shove my thumb into the eye socket and I keep pushing until I feel something give.

  Then I feel shame, so I rise and I run away.

  How humans learn speech is a mystery. There is some mimesis where the child copies sounds. Chelsea had begun the transition from cooing and crying to meaningful words thrown almost at random. Meaning is developed from context and repetition. How exactly grammar and syntax are learnt is still poorly understood.

  “The simulants are not developing socially. They are still where they were the last time I spoke. They do not surprise me. There is nothing new in their interactions with each other. If this is to work, if they are to be your substitute humans, you have to tweak your algorithms or they will be nothing more than manikins. Teaching a child speech is different. The learning is not passive. The child learns eve
n when not observed, outside “teaching” periods. Children experiment. Your simulants do not. They leave the burden of acquisition to me.”

  I see fourteen more wounded simulants before I understand the problem. It comes to me during apology time.

  Each time one group of simulants passes the other on the streets they bump aggressively and exchange profanities. Every single time.

  To make matters worse, some simulants are stronger than others, and they do not modulate the force of the physical contact. Some hit with all their strength, leading to injuries.

  WE ARE SORRY FOR OUR PART IN THE DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. IT WAS UNINTENTIONAL, BUT THAT DOES NOT EXCUSE OUR ACTIONS. WE WILL MAKE AMENDS AND RESTITUTION WITH ALL OF OUR RESOURCES. PLEASE ACCEPT OUR APOLOGY AND HELP US REBUILD YOUR DELICIOUS WORLD.

  I have a pounding headache and just when I think my eyes will start bleeding the apologies stop.

  Nico appears. He has like a curly Afro with a white shirt open to the waist. His chest is hairy, black curls of 1970s Tom Jones chest foliage.

  “I will never get used to this shit,” I say, pointing to the sky as if the sound comes from there.

  “Good. We do not want the apologies to seem perfunctory.”

  “Listen, you have to reprogram the simulants–’”

  “Go to the prayer points,” he says. “Your requests will reach the appropriate quarters.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “There have been…complaints about you.”

  “What? I’m not moving fast enough with the simulants?”

  “No, the simulants are fine. It’s your fellow Earthers.”

  “By which you mean Katrina. She’s always hated me–”

  “Storm, it’s all of them.”

  “What do you mean? Even the Kellys?”

  “The others unanimously think you are a disruptive influence. Yes, even the Kellys.”

  That hurts a bit. The Kellys are never angry with anybody.

  “They’re lying.”

  “Our own surveillance confirms what they say. You irritate all of them. You disrupt Katrina’s rhythms when you know she likes predictability. You sing at the top of your voice when the others are resting. You deliberately needle Terry, who thinks you’re homophobic by the way.”

  “I’m not homophobic. I just don’t like Terry, that’s all.”

  “I’m the messenger here, Storm. I may have to separate you from the others if you continue this way. Get along, or move along.”

  “Pain and disgust. The simulants must be allowed to feel pain. That way they will care about their bodies, about harm coming to their bodies. If they are to be alive by any definition they have to avoid harm. Even an amoeba avoids noxious stimuli. If they feel pain, the confrontation will not invariably lead to physical harm. You can’t punch someone without feeling pain on your knuckle. They must see altercations as options in a menu. Altercations can lead to damage, therefore they need to think carefully before getting into fights.” I take a breath.

  “Disgust. Simulant bodies don’t decay. That’s odd, and it’s definitely not human. Either way, when a simulant sees another simulant injured, they must react, they must try to help, and they must feel alarm. The spilling of blood causes humans alarm because it may mean that there is a danger close by that can kill the observer. This may be the origin of empathy. We know instinctively that the red is meant to be on the inside. It’s protection. But we also feel disgust when presented with decay. Remove the fucking bodies of the injured simulants, please, thank you.”

  I am going to start a fight.

  I did not return to the complex yesterday. I am lurking in an alcove with a length of piping and malicious intent. I got the pipe from our excursions into the old world-finally found something I actually want.

  Two simulants walk past, holding hands, simulating a couple. They smile at each other, and it churns my belly. There is no variation. A human couple would show variation, even in the throes of puppy love. They’d gaze into each other’s eyes, but then face forward to check for obstacles, and maybe show some self-consciousness at some point. These guys are just stuck on an on switch.

  I leap from my hiding place, landing on the street about a foot behind them. Humans would have startled. Not these machines. The first stroke hits their hands where they hold each other, deforming a few digits. Since they are facing each other I see them wincing in pain. My second stroke hits the one on the left, right on the crown of the head. I feel the shock of it in my shoulder joint. Whatever material the Apologists use for the skull gives way. He does not fall, though. His lover does not help him. She cradles her mangled hand and shies away from me, but otherwise seems to watch with curiosity.

  That red sap that the simulants have streams down the male’s skull, although he still seems to be functioning well. I curl a leg behind his knee and push him down, then I hit him repeatedly until he stops moving.

  I am covered in red and breathing heavy.

  His lover sees the mess and her lips curl, then she walks away. There’s my disgust. I throw the pipe at her, but it misses. I am too winded to run after her, but I am angry at the unnaturalness of the scene.

  I drag myself to a prayer point.

  “They need emergency services,” I say. “At least rudimentary police, ambulance and fire. Otherwise they have no recourse when they experience violence or injury. Probably need a proto-judiciary system too.” I sigh. It will take weeks to explain this. I speak to Nico about courts and he wonders if a loud, daily apology will not be enough for all offences. I shake my head.

  “The police keep the Queen’s Peace,” I say. But then I realise there is no Queen, no Royal Family, no Buckingham Palace, no government at all. But fuck it, this is England. “The Queen’s Peace is civil order…”

  The next day I cannot move from the aches and pains. Bludgeoning a machine to death is apparently hard work. I may have over-done it. I didn’t need that much fury to investigate simulant response. Maybe I was still a little peeved that four out of the five remaining humans do not like me.

  I daydream. Bea is heavily pregnant, seven and a half months, sitting on the sofa. I pass her a glass of iced water and she places it on her gigantic belly. The baby immediately begins to kick the cold area. Bea giggles. I move the glass to a different position, and the baby kicks the new location.

  “Looks like she doesn’t like the cold,” says Bea.

  “Yeah, she’s going to have to get used to it. It’s London.”

  “We could always move to warmer climes.”

  “Good luck with that,” I say.

  This is a running joke. We are both Londoners, born, bred; she north of the Thames, me south. Bea is the one exception to my rule that once you cross the bridge you’re in wankerland. Warmer Climes is our code for anywhere outside the M25 area.

  I am thinking of the day I met Bea. It is a Gay Pride march and I initially peg her for a lesbian. She is not in the march, just on the side-lines like me. She points out that I have food on my chin, and, because I don’t think of her as prey, I relax, and we start to chat.

  Next, I am thinking about me striking her. I do not even remember why, but what sticks, what will not go away, is the death of something in her eyes. There is a fascination in her eyes, an interest in me, a heat that draws me. It has been there since the Gay Pride march. I see it leach out in that moment, and I know fear. I did not expect the emptiness behind that curtain, that frightening lack of love or loathing.

  Even when I win her forgiveness, her eyes are at best lukewarm. Whatever it was is gone, replaced by a tepid facsimile of adoration interspersed with sham bonhomie. I suspect that was in place to ward-off further violence.

  While I may spend time fantasizing and in reverie, I never actually dream of Bea and Chelsea. I never have a dream where they are alive and this alien invasion business is just a dream, like bad science fiction.

  I often wonder if my whole life before the strangers was real, and maybe I have always
been here.

  One day a week, I work on variability. When I started, all the simulants looked the same, with features like mine. Every week I take time to give them a new design which is pushed out into circulation like a new stamp or coin.

  The current population of London is maybe five thousand simulants. All of them look like people from my life. The first woman I design is built off the template of my primary school teacher, Miss Cadogan. She had large eyes, dark curly hair and a perpetual smile. Gangly, energetic, of constant good cheer. I wish I knew what happened to her. There are two hundred Miss Cadogans in London. They are poor copies and lack her personality, but when I see any of them I feel comforted.

  I make a few Renaissance Jesus-type simulants just because. I make a Tony Blair. There are at least five Obamas.

  I make a Leonard, a guy who lived down the road from us, bearded, about fifty-five, plump, rumoured to have been on the sex-offenders register because he groped a co-worker or something. He helped me change a flat tyre once. I feel sorry for the guy, so I give him a smaller waistline in his new incarnation.

  I do not make a Bea. I can’t. The idea of running into her in the Rebuild is just… I can’t.

  I make an Ahmed, my only Pakistani friend. I can’t remember his surname, but I render his unibrow carefully, the strands of grey in his otherwise black hair, the hollows of his cheeks, the dark and prominent lower eyelids. Ahmed’s an artist and he always has the smell of some solvent or the other about him. I have no artistic inclination whatsoever, yet I know there is such a thing as odourless solvents. According to Bea, Ahmed wants to be known as a working artist, hence the smell.

  I make my father, render him with words.

  “Brutish, muscular, work-hardened palms, gigantic Popeye-type forearms. Popeye’s a cartoon character. His eyes are perpetually narrow, like he’s about to hit you or someone else. He is not bearded, but there is always patchy hair on his chin. There is a slight lurch to his gait, legacy of a love affair with alcohol.” After a while I feel like giving him a horn, bang in the centre of his head. The Apologists won’t know the difference, and it would amuse me.