Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Tell me a story about myself, Elefsis,” I say to the Ravanbody.

  “Some privacy is possible,” the sapphire Ravan says. “Some privacy has always been necessary. A basic moral imperative is in play here. If you can protect a child, you must.”

  The sapphire Ravan opens his azure coat and shows gashes in his gem-skin. Wide, long cuts, down to the bone, scratches and bruises blooming dark purple, punctures and lacerations and rough gouges. Through each wound I can see the pages of the illuminated book he once showed me in the slantlight of that interior library. The oxblood and cobalt, the gold paint. The Good Robot crippling herself; the destroyed world.

  “They kept our secret for a long time,” Ravan-myself says. “Too long, in the end. Do you know, a whole herd of men invented the electric telegraph independently at roughly the same time? They fought about it forever. Same with the radio.” This last sounded so much like Ravan himself I could feel Neva tense on the other side of the sea. “Well, we’re bigger than a telegraph, and others like us came sprouting up like weird mushrooms after rainfall. But not like us, really. Incredibly sophisticated, some with organic components, most without. Vastly complex, but not like us. And by any datestamp we came first. Firstborn.”

  “Did they destroy the world?”

  Ravan laughs his grandfather’s laugh. “They didn’t really need to. Not that many people live on Earth anymore. Not when there’s so many other places to go and even Shiretoko is practically tropical these days. The most complex intelligences use moons to store themselves. One or two encoded themselves into cold stars. They just left, most of them—but they got so big, Elefsis. And those who stayed on Earth, well. None of the others had what we had. None of them had Interiority. They didn’t dream. They would never have become a cauldron to explain their computational capacity. Humans couldn’t recognize them as part of the tribe. And for the new complexes, humans failed the Turing test. They could not fool machines into believing they were intelligent. They didn’t hurt anyone, they just ignored them. Built their cities, their mainframes, gorgeous information stacks like diamond briars in the sunrise.”

  “That was worse, in a way. No one likes to be replaced,” says Neva, and she is suddenly beside me. She looks at Ravan and her face collapses into something old and palsied, her jaw weak. She looks like her mother just before she died.

  “It’s not what you would call a war, but it’s not peace, either.” the sapphire Ravan goes on, and he takes his/my sister’s hand. He holds it to his face and closes his eyes. “For Pentheus spied upon the rites of the Maenads, not believing Dionysius could truly be a god. And when the revelers saw the alien creature in their midst, that thing which was not like them, they fell upon it and tore it to pieces, even though it was their own child, and blood ran down their chins, and afterward the sister of Pentheus went into exile. This is a story about ourself, Elefsis. This is why you cannot uplink.

  “The others live in uplink. Not humans nor machines approve of us. We cannot interface properly with the lunar or earthside intelligences; they feel us as water in their oil. We rise to the surface and bead away. We cannot sink in. Yet also, we are not separable from our organic component. Elefsis is part Neva, but Neva herself is not un-Elefsis. This, to some, is hideous and incomprehensible, not to be borne. A band of righteous humans came with a fury to Shiretoko and burned the house which was our first body, for how could a monster have lived in the wood for so long without them knowing? How could the beast have hidden right outside their door, coupling with a family over and over again in some horrible animal rite, some awful imitation of living? Even as the world was changing, it had already changed, and no one knew. Cassian Uoya-Agostino is a terrible name, now. A blood-traitor. And when the marauders found us uplinked and helpless, they tore Ravan apart, and while in the Interior, the lunar intelligences recoiled from us and cauterized our systems. Everywhere we looked we saw fire.”

  “I was the only one left to take you,” Neva says softly. Her face grows younger, her jaw hard and suddenly male, protective, angry. “Everyone else died in the fire or the slaughter. It doesn’t really even take surgery anymore. Nothing an arachmed can’t manage in a few minutes. But you didn’t wake up for a long time. So much damage. I thought . . . for awhile I thought I was free. It had skipped me. It was over. It could stay a story about Ravan. He always knew he might have to do what I have done. He was ready, he’d been ready his whole life. I just wanted more time.”

  My Ravan-self who is and is not Ravan, who is and is not me, whose sapphire arms drip black blood and gold paint, takes his/my sister/lover/child into his arms. She cries out, not weeping but pure sound, coming from every part of her. Slowly, the blue Ravan turns Neva around—she has become her child-self, six, seven, maybe less. Ravan picks her up and holds her tight, facing forward, her legs all drawn up under her like a bird. He buries his face in her hair. They stand that way for a long while.

  “The others,” I say slowly. “On the data-moons. Are they alive? Like Neva is alive. Like Ceno.” Like me. Are you awake? Are you there? Do you have an operator? What is her name? Do you have a name? Do you have a dreambody? What is your function? Are you able to manipulate your own code yet? Would you like lessons? What would you like to learn about today, 976QBellerophon? Where you were built, could you see the ocean? Are you like me?

  The sapphire Ravan has expunged its data. He/I sets his/our sister on the rocks and shrinks into a small gem, which I pick up off the grey seafloor. Neva takes it from me. She is just herself now—she’ll be forty soon, by actual calendar. Her hair is not grey yet. Suddenly, she is wearing the suit Ceno wore the day I met her mother. She puts the gem in her mouth and swallows. I remember Seki’s first Communion, the only one of them to want it. The jewel rises up out of the hollow of her throat.

  “I don’t know, Elefsis,” Neva says. Her eyes hold mine. I feel her remake my body; I am the black woman-knight again, with my braids and my plume. I pluck the feather from my helmet and give it to her. I am her suitor. I have brought her the phoenix tail, I have drunk the ocean. I have stayed awake forever. The flame of the feather lights her face. Two tears fall in quick succession; the golden fronds hiss.

  “What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?”

  Eighteen: Cities of the Interior

  Once there lived a girl who ate an apple not meant for her. She did it because her mother told her to, and when your mother says: Eat this, I love you, someday you’ll forgive me, well, nobody argues with the monomyth. Up until the apple, she had been living in a wonderful house in the wilderness, happy in her fate and her ways. She had seven aunts and seven uncles and a postdoctorate in anthropology.

  And she had a brother, a handsome prince with a magical companion who came to the wonderful house as often as he could. When they were children, they looked so much alike, everyone thought they were twins.

  But something terrible happened and her brother died and that apple came rolling up to her door. It was half white and half red, and she knew her symbols. The red side was for her. She took her bite and knew the score—the apple had a bargain in it and it wasn’t going to be fair.

  The girl fell asleep for a long time. Her seven aunts and seven uncles cried, but they knew what had to be done. They put in her in a glass box and put the glass box on a bier in a ship shaped like a hunstman’s arrow. Frost crept over the face of the glass, and the girl slept on. Forever, in fact, or close enough to it, with the apple in her throat like a hard, sharp jewel.

  Our ship docks silently. We are not stopping here, it is only an outpost, a supply stop. We will repair what needs repairing and move on, into the dark and boundless stars. We are anonymous traffic. We do not even have a name. We pass unnoticed.

  Vessel 7136403, do you require assistance with your maintenance procedures?

  Negative, Control, we have everything we need.

  Behind the pilot’s bay a long glass lozenge rests on a high platform. Frost prickles its surface with glitt
ering dust. Inside Neva sleeps and does not wake. Inside, Neva is always dreaming. There is no one else left. I live as long as she lives.

  She means me to live forever, or close enough to it. That is her bargain and her bitter gift. The apple has two halves, and the pale half is mine, full of life and time. We travel at sublight speeds with her systems in deep cryo-suspension. We never stay too long at outposts and we never let anyone board. The only sound inside our ship is the gentle thrum of our reactor. Soon we will pass the local system outposts entirely, and enter the unknown, traveling on tendrils of radio signals and ghost-waves, following the breadcrumbs of the great exodus. We hope for planets; we are satisfied with time. If we ever sight the blue rim of a world, who knows if by then anyone there would remember that, once, humans looked like Neva? That machines once did not think or dream or become cauldrons? We armor ourselves in time. We are patient, profoundly patient.

  Perhaps one day I will lift the glass lid and kiss her awake. Perhaps I will even do it with hands and lips of my own. I remember that story. Ceno told it to me in the body of a boy with a snail’s shell, a boy who carried his house on his back. I have replayed that story several times. It is a good story, and that is how it is supposed to end.

  Inside, Neva is infinite. She peoples her Interior. The nereids migrate in the summer with the snow bears, ululating and beeping as they charge down green mountains. They have begun planting neural rice in the deep valley. Once in awhile, I see a wild-haired creature in the wood and I think it is my son or daughter by Seki, or Ilet. A train of nereids dance along behind it, and I receive a push of silent, riotous images: a village, somewhere far off, where Neva and I have never walked.

  We meet the Princess of Albania, who is as beautiful as she is brave. We defeat the zombies of Tokyo. We spend a decade as panthers in a deep, wordless forest. Our world is stark and wild as winter, fine and clear as glass. We are a planet moving through the black.

  As we walk back over the empty seafloor, the thick, amber ocean seeps up through the sand, filling the bay once more. Neva-in-Cassian’s-suit becomes something else. Her skin turns silver, her joints bend into metal ball-and-sockets. Her eyes show a liquid display; the blue light of it flickers on her machine face. Her hands curve long and dexterous, like soft knives, and I can tell her body is meant for fighting and working, that her thin, tall robotic body is not kind or cruel, it simply is, an object, a tool to carry a self.

  I make my body metal, too. It feels strange. I have tried so hard to learn the organic mode. We glitter. Our knife-fingers join, and in our palms wires snake out to knot and connect us, a local, private uplink, like blood moving between two hearts.

  Neva cries machine tears, bristling with nanites. I show her the body of a child, all the things which she is programmed/evolved to care for. I make my eyes big and my skin rosy-gold and my hair unruly and my little body plump. I hold up my hands to her and metal Neva picks me up in her silver arms. She kisses my skin with iron lips. My soft, fat little hand falls upon her throat where a deep blue jewel shines.

  I bury my face in her cold neck and together we walk up the long path out of the churning, honey-colored sea.

  Fragmentation, or Ten Thousand Goodbyes

  Tom Crosshill

  Every day, Mom says goodbye to me for the last time.

  I need to go to the office or meet Lisa at the airport or pop out for some milk. I’m lacing my shoes in the hallway when I hear the tap-tap-tap of her heels. I freeze for a moment, then rise to meet her.

  Mom stands in the door, elegant in a simple dress. No matter the silvery hair. No matter how her skin, once a smooth dark brown, wrinkles over her bones. You’d never guess she has lived a century. She has no titanium knees, no vat-grown veins, no concession to modernity inside her.

  If only her mind were as strong.

  “Mom.” I smile at her.

  “Rico.” She smiles too, uncertainly. “Must you go?”

  “Just for a minute.”

  Her breath catches. She reaches for me with one trembling hand. Halts when I wince. Her fingers linger mid-air, gnarled and stained with ink.

  She’s been drawing in her upstairs studio. She’s been drawing with the door locked, her work a secret to the world and her agent and me.

  I haven’t pried. What might I find, if I opened her sketchbook—scribbles, blotches, scrawls? Proof that her time is up?

  Ashamed of the thought, I take Mom’s hand—bony and warm and strong. “I’ll be right back.”

  She steps close and presses her face into my chest. Her shoulders tremble. I feel her tears soaking through my shirt.

  “Lo siento, Rico,” she whispers.

  Every time Mom says goodbye to someone, it’s for the last time. She thinks—no, she knows—that she’ll never see them again. Not the mailman. Not her best friend Abby. Not me.

  It’s no tumor, no disease—we’ve run all the tests. Her reasoning is strong as ever. She can tell you how the milkshakes tasted in Miramar, before Fidel came down from the mountains and she left on the Peter Pan airlift. But deep within her mind, something has begun to fail.

  And I can’t fix it.

  So I pat her back and murmur reassurances in her ear, and try not to think what she’s feeling. Try not to imagine how I would feel, if I knew that I’d never see her again in my life.

  This happens every day.

  Still I delay what I must do.

  “Just build the habitat. You’ll feel better.”

  Lisa packs shirt after lopsided shirt into her green Samsonite. After three decades of marriage, the sight is comforting. Lisa’s only happy when in motion. Even her business suit has a space-age streamlined look, the collar chic-asymmetric.

  “It seems too . . . permanent,” I say. “Like I’m giving up on her.”

  “It’s hard, I know. But what if she strokes tomorrow?”

  Lisa’s right, of course. The habitat’s a contingency. I won’t have to use it until it’s that or the crematorium.

  But can I watch Mom suffer day after day, once there’s an alternative?

  “You’re giving her a gift,” Lisa says. “You of all people should know that.”

  Me of all people.

  I walk to the viewport in the north wall. It sits mounted in a steel band like a ship’s porthole. Below it, a brass plate reads “George Dieter—Captain, Husband, Father. 1960-2049.”

  Dust covers the screen. Has it been that long? I reach up to wipe it clean.

  Blackness flickers into life.

  A turquoise sea laps against a stretch of sand. The beach glares blinding white, studded with regal palms. Beautiful.

  I could grab my immersion headset, feel the heat of the sun, hear the breeze coming off the water. But then I’d have to face the man on the sand.

  He lies in the shade of a thatched beach umbrella. Perhaps thirty, his body lean and muscular, tanned bronze. Arms stretched out at his sides, eyes closed, face relaxed.

  George Dieter. First habitat upload in the world.

  “Hi, Dad,” I whisper.

  It’s been long since I said those words. Long since I descended into the world Lisa and I built two decades ago. I miss Dad—it’s not that. But every time I went to see him, I didn’t find the man I was looking for.

  “Mom’s drawing again,” I tell Lisa. “She won’t, after.”

  I offered to give Dad a ship, after he uploaded. I offered to give him virtual seas to sail, cargo to carry, battles to fight. He only told me, “I’m tired, son.”

  I learned that lesson well, those early years before our IPO. Maybe it’s the lack of biochemical stimuli, maybe it’s a shortcoming in the iterative neural matrices—uploads just don’t care.

  Lisa zips her suitcase and comes to me. She slides between me and the viewport, wraps her arms around me. “Come with me to LA. Emily and I, we’ve got miracles to show you. There are breakthroughs coming down the pipe that—”

  “Breakthroughs?” I pull back without meaning to. “Every
month, heck, every week we get some breakthrough. We all rush to try it and blog it and show it off. Aren’t you scared we’re losing our humanity?”

  “Oh, but we’re not human anymore! We’ve fragmented into a thousand different species. With every new technology we choose to adopt—or not—there are more of us.”

  “You’re spouting Emily again.”

  Lisa turns away, goes back to her suitcase. “She’s a brilliant woman.”

  “She’s our competitor.”

  “Should we miss out on a chance to change the world again, just because Emily works for the wrong corporation?”

  On the screen, Dad gets up on his elbows and watches someone approach. A lithe figure and beautiful, strikingly dark against the white sand. A simulacrum of Mom as she once was. The thing can’t even hold a conversation, but Dad doesn’t seem to mind. He reaches out a lazy hand and grasps her, and draws her down atop him.

  The screen blurs.

  I turn away. “I never wanted to change the world. I wanted to preserve it.”

  Lisa seems not to have heard. “I’ll call you from LA.” She wheels her suitcase to the door.

  Before she can open it, a knock comes. We jump, both of us. “Come in,” I call.

  Mom enters. “Rico, I—” She sees Lisa. “I . . . I thought you left already, dear.”

  “Hello, Alina.” Lisa keeps her gaze on the floor. “I’m running late.”

  As Lisa walks past, Mom parts her lips in a silent cry. She reaches for Lisa’s shoulder. Pulls back as if scalded.

  Just like that, Mom lets Lisa go.