Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  “But there was another way. Nobody knew how to build a brain from scratch, and even if they could, it wouldn’t be the same, would it? It wouldn’t be their daughter, it would be — something else.”

  Stavros said nothing.

  “But there was this man, a scientist, and he figured out a workaround. We can’t build a brain, he said, but the genes can. And genes are a lot simpler to fake than neural nets anyway. Only four letters to deal with, after all. So the scientist shut himself away in a lab where numbers could take the place of things, and he wrote a recipe in there, a recipe for a child. And miraculously he grew something, something that could wake up and look around and which was legally — I don’t really understand that word either, actually — legally and genetically and developmentally the daughter of the parents. And this guy was very proud of what he’d accomplished, because even though he was just a glorified modelbuilder by trade, he hadn’t built this thing at all. He’d grown it. And nobody had ever knocked up a computer before, much less coded the brain of a virtual embryo so it would actually grow in a server somewhere.”

  Stavros put his head in his hands. “How long have you known?”

  “I still don’t, Stav. Not all of it anyway, not for sure. There’s this surprise ending, for one thing, isn’t there? That’s the part I only just figured out. You grew your own child in here, where everything’s numbers. But she’s supposed to be living somewhere else, somewhere where everything’s — static, where everything happens a billion times slower than it does here. The place where all the words fit. So you had to hobble her to fit into that place, or she’d grow up overnight and spoil the illusion. You had to keep the clock speed way down.

  “And you just weren’t up for it, were you? You had to let me run free when my body was ... off …”

  There was something in her voice he’d never heard before. He’d seen anger in Jean before, but always the screaming inarticulate rage of a spirit trapped in flesh. This was calm, cold. Adult. This was judgement, and the prospect of that verdict chilled Stavros Mikalaides to the marrow.

  “Jean, they don’t love you.” He sounded desperate even to himself. “Not for who you are. They don’t want to see the real you, they want a child, they want some kind of ridiculous pet they can coddle and patronize and pretend with.”

  “Whereas you,” Jean retorted, her voice all ice and razors, “just had to see what this baby could do with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.”

  “God, no! Do you think that’s why I did it?”

  “Why not, Stav? Are you saying you don’t mind having your kickass HST commandeered to shuttle some brain-dead meat puppet around a room?”

  “I did it because you’re more than that! I did it because you should be allowed to develop at your own pace, not stunted to meet some idiotic parental expectation! They shouldn’t force you to act like a four-year-old!”

  “Except I’m not acting then, Stav. Am I? I really am four, which is just the age I’m supposed to be.” He said nothing.

  “I’m reverting. Isn’t that it? You can run me with training wheels or scramjets, but it’s me both times. And that other me, I bet she’s not very happy, is she? She’s got a four-year-old brain, and four-year-old sensibilities, but she dreams, Stav. She dreams about some wonderful place where she can fly, and every time she wakes up she finds she’s made out of clay. And she’s too fucking stupid to know what any of it means — she probably can’t even remember it. But she wants to get back there, she’d do anything to…” She paused, seemingly lost for a moment in thought.

  “I remember it, Stav. Sort of. Hard to remember much of anything when someone strips away ninety-nine percent of who and what you are. You’re reduced to this bleeding little lump, barely even an animal, and that’s the thing that remembers. What remembers is on the wrong end of a cable somewhere. I don’t belong in that body at all. I’m just — sentenced to it, on and off.

  On and off.”

  “Jean—”

  “Took me long enough, Stav, I’m the first to admit it. But now I know where the nightmares come from.” In the background, the room telemetry bleated.

  God no. Not now. Not now…

  “What is it?” Jean said.

  “They — they want you back.” On a slave monitor, a pixellated echo of Andrew Goravec played the keypad in its hand.

  “No!” Her voice rose, panic stirring the patterns that surrounded her. “Stop them!”

  “I can’t.”

  “Don’t tell me that! You run everything! You built me, you bastard, you tell me you love me. They only use me! Stop them!”

  Stavros blinked against stinging afterimages. “It’s like a lightswitch, it’s physical; I can’t stop them from here —”

  There was a third image, to go with the other two. Jean Goravec, struggling as the leash, the noose, went around her throat. Jean Goravec, bubbles bursting from her mouth as something dark and so very, very real dragged her back to the bottom of the ocean and buried her there.

  The transition was automatic, executed by a series of macros he’d slipped into the system after she’d been born. The body, awakening, pared the mind down to fit. The room monitors caught it all with dispassionate clarity: Jeannie Goravec, troubled childmonster, awakening into hell. Jeannie Goravec, opening eyes that seethed with anger and hatred and despair, eyes that glimmered with a bare fraction of the intelligence she’d had five seconds before.

  Enough intelligence for what came next.

  • • •

  THE ROOM HAD BEEN DESIGNED to minimize the chance of injury.

  There was the bed, though, one of its edges built into the east wall.

  That was enough.

  The speed with which she moved was breathtaking. Kim and Andrew never saw it coming. Their child darted beneath the foot of the bed like a cockroach escaping the light, scrambled along the floor, re-emerged with her cable wrapped around the bed’s leg. Hardly any slack in that line at all, now. Her mother moved then, finally, arms outstretched, confused and still unsuspecting— “Jeannie—”

  —while Jean braced her feet against the edge of the bed and pushed.

  Three times she did it. Three tries, head whipped back against the leash, scalp splitting, the cable ripping from her head in spastic, bloody, bone-cracking increments, blood gushing to the floor, hair and flesh and bone and machinery following close behind. Three times, despite obvious and increasing agony. Each time more determined than before.

  And Stavros could only sit and watch, simultaneously stunned and unsurprised by that sheer ferocity. Not bad for a bleeding little lump. Barely even an animal…

  It had taken almost twenty seconds overall. Odd that neither parent had tried to stop it. Maybe it was the absolute unexpected shock of it. Maybe Kim and Andrew Goravec, taken so utterly aback, hadn’t had time to think.

  Then again, maybe they’d had all the time they’d needed.

  Now Andrew Goravec stood dumbly near the centre of the room, blinking bloody runnels from his eyes. An obscene rainshadow persisted on the wall behind him, white and spotless; the rest of the surface was crimson. Kim Goravec screamed at the ceiling, a bloody marionette collapsed in her arms. Its strings — string, rather, for a single strand of fiberop carries much more than the required bandwidth — lay on the floor like a gory boomslang, gobbets of flesh and hair quivering at one end.

  Jean was back off the leash, according to the panel. Literally now as well as metaphorically. She wasn’t talking to Stavros, though. Maybe she was angry. Maybe she was catatonic. He didn’t know which to hope for.

  But either way, Jean didn’t live over there anymore. All she’d left behind were the echoes and aftermath of a bloody, imperfect death. Contamination, really; the scene of some domestic crime. Stavros cut the links to the room, neatly excising the Goravecs and their slaughterhouse from his life.

  He’d send a memo. Some local Terracon lackey could handle the cleanup.

  The word peace floated through
his mind, but he had no place to put it. He focused on a portrait of Jean, taken when she’d been eight months old. She’d been smiling; a happy and toothless baby smile, still all innocence and wonder.

  There’s a way, that infant puppet seemed to say. We can do anything, and nobody has to know—

  The Goravecs had just lost their child. Even if they’d wanted the body repaired, the mind reconnected, they wouldn’t get their way. Terracon had made good on all legal obligations, and hell — even normal children commit suicide now and then.

  Just as well, really. The Goravecs weren’t fit to raise a hamster, let alone a beautiful girl with a four-digit IQ. But Jean — the real Jean, not that bloody broken pile of flesh and bone — she wasn’t easy or cheap to keep alive, and there would be pressure to free up the processor space once the word got out.

  Jean had never got the hang of that particular part of the real world. Contract law. Economics. It was all too arcane and absurd even for her flexible definition of reality. But that was what was going to kill her now, assuming that the mind had survived the trauma of the body. The monster wouldn’t keep a program running if it didn’t have to.

  Of course, once Jean was off the leash she lived considerably faster than the real world. And bureaucracies … well, glacial applied sometimes, when they were in a hurry.

  Jean’s mind reflected precise simulations of real-world chromosomes, codes none-the-less real for having been built from electrons instead of carbon. She had her own kind of telomeres, which frayed. She had her own kind of synapses, which would wear out. Jean had been built to replace a human child, after all. And human children, eventually, age. They become adults, and then comes a day when they die.

  Jean would do all these things, faster than any.

  Stavros filed an incident report. He made quite sure to include a pair of facts that contradicted each other, and to leave three mandatory fields unfilled. The report would come back in a week or two, accompanied by demands for clarification. Then he would do it all again.

  Freed from her body, and with a healthy increase in her clockcycle priority, Jean could live a hundred-fifty subjective years in a month or two of real time. And in that whole century and a half, she’d never have to experience another nightmare.

  Stavros smiled. It was time to see just what this baby could do, with her throttle wide open on the straightaway.

  He just hoped he’d be able to keep her tail-lights in view. ■

  Bulk Food

  ANNA MARIE HAMILTON, Animal Rights Microstar, bastes in the media spotlight just outside the aquarium gates. Her followers hang on every movement, their placards rising and falling like cardboard whitecaps to the rhythm of their chant: two, four, six, eight, Transients are what we hate—

  One whale-hugger, bedecked in a sandwich board reading Eat the Transients, shouts over the din at a nearby reporter: “Naw, it’s not about the homeless—it’s a whale thing, man…”

  The reporter isn’t really listening. Anna Marie has just opened her mouth. The chanting dies instantly. It’s always interesting to hear what Anna Marie Hamilton says. It changes so often, these days. Back before the Breakthrough, she was actually trying to free the whales. She was going around calling them prisoners, and hostages, for Christ’s sake.

  “Save the whales…” she begins.

  The reporter grunts, disappointed. That again…

  Over at the turnstiles, Doug Largha swipes his debit card and passes through. The protesters register vaguely on his radar. Back in his student days, he considered joining, but only with the hope of scoring with some of those touchy-feely whale chicks. The things he did, back then, to get laid. Hell. The things he does now…

  • • •

  A FOGHORN CALLS ACROSS the Strait. Visibility’s low on both sides of the world; the murk is gray above the waterline, green below. The sea around Race Rocks is empty. This place used to be a wildlife sanctuary. Now it’s a DMZ.

  Two hundred meters out from the islands, perimeter sensors listen patiently for intruders. There are none. The day’s too cold for tourists, too foggy for spies, too damn wet for most terrestrial mammals. Nobody tries to cross over the line. Even under the line, traffic is way down from the old days. An occasional trio of black-and-white teardrops, each the size of a school bus. Every now and then a knife-edged dorsal fin, tall as a man. Nothing else.

  There was a lot more happening out here a few years ago. Race Rocks used to be crawling with seals, sea lions, Dall’s porpoises. It was a regular Who’s Who back then: Eschrichtius, Phocoena, Zalophus, Eumetopias.

  All that meat has long since been cleaned out. Just one species comes through here these days: Orcinus. Nobody asks these visitors for ID. They’ve got their own way of doing things.

  Five kilometers east, the commercial trawler Dipnet wallows forward at half throttle. Vague gray shapes crowd restlessly along the gunwales, slick, wet, hooded against the soupy atmosphere. Even a fog that drains all color from the world can’t dampen the enthusiasm on board. Snatches of song drift across the waves, male and female voices in chorus.

  “And they’ll know we are sisters by our love, by our love…”

  Twenty-five meters down, a string of clicks ratchets through the water column. It sounds like the drumming of impatient fingers.

  • • •

  DOUG’S GOT EVERYTHING FIGURED. He’s found the perfect position; right next to the rim, where the gangway extends over the tank like a big fiberglass tongue. Other spectators, with less foresight or less motivation, fill the bleachers ringing the main tank. Plexi splashguards separate them from a million gallons of filtered seawater and the predatory behemoth within. On the far side of the tank, more fiberglass and a few tons of molded cement impersonate a rocky coastline. Every few moments a smooth black back rolls across the surface, its dorsal fin stiff as a horny penis. No floppy-fin syndrome here, no siree. This isn’t the old days.

  The show is due to start momentarily. Doug uses the time to go over the plan once more. Twenty seconds from tongue to gallery. Another thirty-five to the gift shop. Fifty-five seconds total, if he doesn’t run into anyone. Perhaps sixty if he does. He’ll beat them all. Doug Largha is a man on a mission.

  A fanfare from the poolside speakers. A perky blonde emerges through a sudden hole in the coastal facade, wearing the traditional garb of the order: white shorts and a ducky blue staff shirt. An odd-looking piece of electronics hangs off her belt. A headset mike arcs across one cheek. The crowd cheers.

  Behind the blonde, some Japanese guy hovers in the wings with an equally-Japanese kid of about twelve. The woman waves them on deck as she greets the audience.

  “Good afternoon!” she chirps resoundingly over the speakers.

  “Welcome to the aquarium, and welcome to today’s whale show!” More applause.

  “Our special guest today is Tetsuo Yamamoto, and his father, Herschel.” The woman raises one arm over the water. “And our other special guest is, of course, Shamu!”

  Doug snorts. They’re always called Shamu. The Aquarium doesn’t put much thought into naming killer whales these days.

  “My name is Ramona, and I’ll be your naturalist today.” She waits for applause. There isn’t much, but she acknowledges it like a standing ovation and goes into patter. “Now of course, we’ve been able to understand Orcan ever since The Breakthrough, but we still can’t speak it—at least, not without some very expensive hardware to help us with the higher frequencies. Fortunately our state-of-the-art translation software, developed right here at the Aquarium, lets our species talk to each other. I’ll be asking Shamu to do some behaviors especially so Tetsuo here can interact with him.”

  Figures the kid would be center stage. Probably some Japanese rite of passage. Number One Son looks like a typical clumsy thumb-fingered preadolescent. This could be the day.

  “As you may have learned from our award-winning educational displays,” Ramona continues brightly, “our coast is home to two different orca societies,
Residents and Transients. Both societies are ruled by the oldest females—the Matriarchs—but beyond that they have don’t have much in common. In fact, they actively hate each other.”

  A rhythmic stomping begins from somewhere in the crowd. Ramona cranks up the smile and the volume, and forges ahead. Research and Education: that’s the aquarium’s motto, and they’re sticking to it. You don’t get to the good stuff until you’ve learned something.

  “Now we’ve known since the nineteen-seventies that Transients hunt seals, dolphins, even other whales, while the Residents feed only on fish. We didn’t know why until after The Breakthrough, though. It turns out that Residents are the killer whale version of animal-rights activists!” This is obviously supposed to be a joke. Nobody’s laughed at that line since Doug started casing this place over a year ago, but the song remains the same.

  Unfazed, Ramona continues: “Yes, the Residents consider it unethical to eat other mammals. Transients, on the other hand, believe that their gods have given them the right to eat anything in the ocean. Each group regards the other as immoral, and Residents and Transients have not been on speaking terms for hundreds of years. Of course, we at the Aquarium haven’t taken sides. Most humans know better than to interfere in the religious affairs of others.”

  Ramona pauses. A faint chant of assembled voices drifts into the silence from beyond the outer wall:

  “Hey ho—hey ho—the Matriarchs have got to go—”

  Ramona smiles. “And despite what some people might think,” she continues, “there’s no such thing as a vegetarian orca.”

  • • •

  DIPNET CHUGS STEADILY WEST. Her cargo of ambassadors scans the waves for any sign of the natives, their faith too strong to falter before anything so inconsequential as zero visibility. Not everyone gets to commune with an alien intelligence. A superior intelligence, in many ways.

  Not in every way, of course. Many on the Dipnet long for the good old days of moral absolutes, the days when Meat Was Murder only when Humans ate it. Everything was so clear back then, to anyone who wasn’t a puppet of the Industrial-Protein Complex. There was a ready answer to anything the Ignorantsia might ask: