Clarkesworld: Year Six

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Have fun,” I yell after them.

  Laura’s betrayal was the hardest to take.

  “I thought you were going to help me and Carol with the baby,” I said.

  “What kind of world is this to bring a child into?” Laura said.

  “And you think things will be better if you go there, where there are no children, no new life?”

  “We’ve tried to keep this going for fifteen years, and every year it becomes harder and harder to believe in this charade. Maybe we were wrong. We should adapt.”

  “It’s only a charade when you’ve lost faith,” I said.

  “Faith in what?”

  “In humanity, in our way of life.”

  “I don’t want to fight our parents any more. I just want us to be together again, a family.”

  “Those things aren’t our parents. They are imitation algorithms. You’ve always wanted to avoid conflict, Laura. But some conflicts cannot be avoided. Our parents died when Dad lost faith, when he couldn’t resist the false promises made by machines.”

  At the end of the road into the woods was a little clearing, grassy, full of wildflowers. A shuttle was waiting in the middle. Laura stepped into the open door.

  Another life lost.

  The children have permission to stay out until midnight. Lucy had asked me not to volunteer as a chaperone, and I complied, conceding her this bit of space for the night.

  Carol is restless. She tries to read but she’s been on the same page for an hour.

  “Don’t worry.” I try to comfort her.

  She tries to smile at me, but she can’t hide her anxiety. She looks up past my shoulder at the clock on the living room wall.

  I glance back too. “Doesn’t it feel later than 11?”

  “No,” Carol says. “Not at all. I don’t know what you mean.”

  Her voice is too eager, almost desperate. There’s a hint of fear in her eyes. She’s close to panicking.

  I open the door of the house and step into the dark street. The sky has grown clearer over the years, and many more stars are now visible. But I’m looking for the Moon. It’s not in the right place.

  I come back into the house and go into the bedroom. My old watch, one that I no longer wear because there are so few occasions when being on time matters, is in the nightstand drawer. I pull it out. It’s almost one in the morning. Someone had tampered with the living room clock.

  Carol stands in the door to the bedroom. The light is behind her so I can’t see her face.

  “What have you done?” I ask. I’m not angry, just disappointed.

  “She can’t talk to you. She doesn’t think you’ll listen.”

  Now the anger rises in me like hot bile.

  “Where are they?”

  Carol shakes her head, saying nothing.

  I remember the way Lucy said goodbye to me. I remember the way she walked carefully out to Jack’s bike, holding up her voluminous skirt, a skirt so wide that she could hide anything under it, a change of clothing and comfortable shoes for the woods. I remember Carol saying, “You’re all set.”

  “It’s too late,” Carol says. “Laura is coming to pick them up.”

  “Get out of the way. I have to save her.”

  “Save her for what?” Carol is suddenly furious. She does not move. “This is a play, a joke, a re-enactment of something that never was. Did you go to your prom on a bicycle? Did you play only songs that your parents listened to when they were kids? Did you grow up thinking that scavenging would be the only profession? Our way of life is long gone, dead, finished!

  “What will you have her do when this house falls apart in thirty years? What will she do when the last bottle of aspirin is gone, the last steel pot rusted through? Will you condemn her and her children to a life of picking through our garbage heaps, sliding down the technology ladder year after year until they’ve lost all the progress made by the human race in the last five thousand years?”

  I don’t have time to debate her. Gently, but firmly, I put my hands on her shoulders, ready to push her aside.

  “I will stay with you,” Carol says. “I will always stay with you because I love you so much that I’m not afraid of death. But she is a child. She should have a chance for something new.”

  Strength seems to drain from my arms. “You have it backwards.” I look into her eyes, willing her to have faith again. “Her life gives our lives meaning.”

  Her body suddenly goes limp, and she sinks to the floor, sobbing silently.

  “Let her go,” Carol says, quietly. “Just let her go.”

  “I can’t give up,” I tell Carol. “I’m human.”

  I pump the pedals furiously once I’m past the gate in the fence. The cone of light cast by the flashlight jumps around as I try to hold it against the handlebars. But I know this road into the woods well. It leads to the clearing where Laura once stepped into that shuttle.

  Bright light in the distance, and the sound of engines revving up.

  I take out my gun and fire a few shots into the air.

  The sound of the engines dies down.

  I emerge into the opening in the woods, under a sky full of bright, cold, pinprick stars. I jump off the bike and let it fall by the side of the path. The shuttle is in the middle of the clearing. Lucy and Jack, now in casual clothes, stand in the open doorway of the shuttle.

  “Lucy, sweetheart, come back out of there.”

  “Dad, I’m sorry. I’m going.”

  “No, you are not.”

  An electronic simulation of Laura’s voice comes out of the shuttle’s speakers. “Let her go, brother. She deserves to have a chance to see what you refuse to see. Or, better yet, come with us. We’ve all missed you.”

  I ignore her, it. “Lucy, there is no future there. What the machines promise you is not real. There are no children there, no hope, only a timeless, changeless, simulated existence as fragments of a machine.”

  “We have children now,” the copy of Laura’s voice says. “We’ve figured out how to create children of the mind, natives of the digital world. You should come and meet your nephews and nieces. You are the one clinging to a changeless existence. This is the next step in our evolution.”

  “You can experience nothing when you are not human.” I shake my head. I shouldn’t take its bait and debate a machine.

  “If you leave,” I tell Lucy, “you’ll die a death with no meaning. The dead will have won. I can’t let that happen.”

  I raise my gun. The barrel points at her. I will not lose my child to the dead.

  Jack tries to step in front of her, but Lucy pushes him away. Her eyes are full of sorrow, and the light from inside the shuttle frames her face and golden hair like an angel.

  Suddenly I see how much she looks like my mother. Mom’s features, having passed through me, have come alive again on my daughter. This is how life is meant to be lived. Grandparents, parents, children, each generation stepping out of the way of the next, an eternal striving towards the future, to progress.

  I think about how Mom’s choice was taken away from her, how she was not allowed to die as a human, how she was devoured by the dead, how she became a part of their ceaselessly looping, mindless recordings. My mother’s face, from memory, is superimposed onto the face of my daughter, my sweet, innocent, foolish Lucy.

  I tighten my grip on the gun.

  “Dad,” Lucy says, calmly, her face as steady as Mom’s all those years ago. “This is my choice. Not yours.”

  It’s morning by the time Carol steps into the clearing. Warm sunlight through the leaves dapples the empty circle of grass. Dewdrops hang from the tips of the grass blades, in each a miniature, suspended, vision of the world. Birdsong fills the waking silence. My bike is still on the ground by the path where I left it.

  Carol sits down by me without speaking. I put my arm around her shoulders and pull her close to me. I don’t know what she’s thinking, but it’s enough for us to sit together like this, our bodies pressed
together, keeping each other warm. There’s no need for words. We look around at this pristine world, a garden inherited from the dead.

  We have all the time in the world.

  Immersion

  Aliette de Bodard

  In the morning, you’re no longer quite sure who you are.

  You stand in front of the mirror—it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see—eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew.

  You’re dressed, already—not on your skin, but outside, where it matters, your avatar sporting blue and black and gold, the stylish clothes of a well-traveled, well-connected woman. For a moment, as you turn away from the mirror, the glass shimmers out of focus; and another woman in a dull silk gown stares back at you: smaller, squatter and in every way diminished—a stranger, a distant memory that has ceased to have any meaning.

  Quy was on the docks, watching the spaceships arrive. She could, of course, have been anywhere on Longevity Station, and requested the feed from the network to be patched to her router—and watched, superimposed on her field of vision, the slow dance of ships slipping into their pod cradles like births watched in reverse. But there was something about standing on the spaceport’s concourse—a feeling of closeness that she just couldn’t replicate by standing in Golden Carp Gardens or Azure Dragon Temple. Because here—here, separated by only a few measures of sheet metal from the cradle pods, she could feel herself teetering on the edge of the vacuum, submerged in cold and breathing in neither air nor oxygen. She could almost imagine herself rootless, finally returned to the source of everything.

  Most ships those days were Galactic—you’d have thought Longevity’s ex-masters would have been unhappy about the station’s independence, but now that the war was over Longevity was a tidy source of profit. The ships came; and disgorged a steady stream of tourists—their eyes too round and straight, their jaws too square; their faces an unhealthy shade of pink, like undercooked meat left too long in the sun. They walked with the easy confidence of people with immersers: pausing to admire the suggested highlights for a second or so before moving on to the transport station, where they haggled in schoolbook Rong for a ride to their recommended hotels—a sickeningly familiar ballet Quy had been seeing most of her life, a unison of foreigners descending on the station like a plague of centipedes or leeches.

  Still, Quy watched them. They reminded her of her own time on Prime, her heady schooldays filled with raucous bars and wild weekends, and late minute revisions for exams, a carefree time she’d never have again in her life. She both longed for those days back, and hated herself for her weakness. Her education on Prime, which should have been her path into the higher strata of the station’s society, had brought her nothing but a sense of disconnection from her family; a growing solitude, and a dissatisfaction, an aimlessness she couldn’t put in words.

  She might not have moved all day—had a sign not blinked, superimposed by her router on the edge of her field of vision. A message from Second Uncle.

  “Child.” His face was pale and worn, his eyes underlined by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept. He probably hadn’t—the last Quy had seen of him, he had been closeted with Quy’s sister Tam, trying to organize a delivery for a wedding—five hundred winter melons, and six barrels of Prosper’s Station best fish sauce. “Come back to the restaurant.”

  “I’m on my day of rest,” Quy said; it came out as more peevish and childish than she’d intended.

  Second Uncle’s face twisted, in what might have been a smile, though he had very little sense of humor. The scar he’d got in the Independence War shone white against the grainy background—twisting back and forth, as if it still pained him. “I know, but I need you. We have an important customer.”

  “Galactic,” Quy said. That was the only reason he’d be calling her, and not one of her brothers or cousins. Because the family somehow thought that her studies on Prime gave her insight into the Galactics’ way of thought—something useful, if not the success they’d hoped for.

  “Yes. An important man, head of a local trading company.” Second Uncle did not move on her field of vision. Quy could see the ships moving through his face, slowly aligning themselves in front of their pods, the hole in front of them opening like an orchid flower. And she knew everything there was to know about Grandmother’s restaurant; she was Tam’s sister, after all; and she’d seen the accounts, the slow decline of their clientele as their more genteel clients moved to better areas of the station; the influx of tourists on a budget, with little time for expensive dishes prepared with the best ingredients.

  “Fine,” she said. “I’ll come.”

  At breakfast, you stare at the food spread out on the table: bread and jam and some colored liquid—you come up blank for a moment, before your immerser kicks in, reminding you that it’s coffee, served strong and black, just as you always take it.

  Yes. Coffee.

  You raise the cup to your lips—your immerser gently prompts you, reminding you of where to grasp, how to lift, how to be in every possible way graceful and elegant, always an effortless model.

  “It’s a bit strong,” your husband says, apologetically. He watches you from the other end of the table, an expression you can’t interpret on his face—and isn’t this odd, because shouldn’t you know all there is to know about expressions—shouldn’t the immerser have everything about Galactic culture recorded into its database, shouldn’t it prompt you? But it’s strangely silent, and this scares you, more than anything. Immersers never fail.

  “Shall we go?” your husband says—and, for a moment, you come up blank on his name, before you remember—Galen, it’s Galen, named after some physician on Old Earth. He’s tall, with dark hair and pale skin—his immerser avatar isn’t much different from his real self, Galactic avatars seldom are. It’s people like you who have to work the hardest to adjust, because so much about you draws attention to itself—the stretched eyes that crinkle in the shape of moths, the darker skin, the smaller, squatter shape more reminiscent of jackfruits than swaying fronds. But no matter: you can be made perfect; you can put on the immerser and become someone else, someone pale-skinned and tall and beautiful.

  Though, really, it’s been such a long time since you took off the immerser, isn’t it? It’s just a thought—a suspended moment that is soon erased by the immerser’s flow of information, the little arrows drawing your attention to the bread and the kitchen, and the polished metal of the table—giving you context about everything, opening up the universe like a lotus flower.

  “Yes,” you say. “Let’s go.” Your tongue trips over the word—there’s a structure you should have used, a pronoun you should have said instead of the lapidary Galactic sentence. But nothing will come, and you feel like a field of sugar canes after the harvest—burnt out, all cutting edges with no sweetness left inside.

  Of course, Second Uncle insisted on Quy getting her immerser for the interview—just in case, he said, soothingly and diplomatically as always. Trouble was, it wasn’t where Quy had last left it. After putting out a message to the rest of the family, the best information Quy got was from Cousin Khanh, who thought he’d seen Tam sweep through the living quarters, gathering every piece of Galactic tech she could get her hands on. Third Aunt, who caught Khanh’s message on the family’s communication channel, tutted disapprovingly. “Tam. Always with her mind lost in the mountains, that girl. Dreams have never husked rice.”

  Quy said nothing. Her own dreams had shriveled and died after she came back from Prime and failed Longevity’s mandarin exams; but it was good to have Tam around—to have someone who saw beyond the restaurant, beyond the narrow circle of family interests. Besides, if she didn’t stick with her sister, who would?

  Tam wasn’t in the communal areas on the upper floors; Quy threw a glance towards the lift to Grandmot
her’s closeted rooms, but she was doubtful Tam would have gathered Galactic tech just so she could pay her respects to Grandmother. Instead, she went straight to the lower floor, the one she and Tam shared with the children of their generation.

  It was right next to the kitchen, and the smells of garlic and fish sauce seemed to be everywhere—of course, the youngest generation always got the lower floor, the one with all the smells and the noises of a legion of waitresses bringing food over to the dining room.

  Tam was there, sitting in the little compartment that served as the floor’s communal area. She’d spread out the tech on the floor—two immersers (Tam and Quy were possibly the only family members who cared so little about immersers they left them lying around), a remote entertainment set that was busy broadcasting some stories of children running on terraformed planets, and something Quy couldn’t quite identify, because Tam had taken it apart into small components: it lay on the table like a gutted fish, all metals and optical parts.

  But, at some point, Tam had obviously got bored with the entire process, because she was currently finishing her breakfast, slurping noodles from her soup bowl. She must have got it from the kitchen’s leftovers, because Quy knew the smell, could taste the spiciness of the broth on her tongue—Mother’s cooking, enough to make her stomach growl although she’d had rolled rice cakes for breakfast.

  “You’re at it again,” Quy said with a sigh. “Could you not take my immerser for your experiments, please?”

  Tam didn’t even look surprised. “You don’t seem very keen on using it, big sis.”

  “That I don’t use it doesn’t mean it’s yours,” Quy said, though that wasn’t a real reason. She didn’t mind Tam borrowing her stuff, and actually would have been glad to never put on an immerser again—she hated the feeling they gave her, the vague sensation of the system rooting around in her brain to find the best body cues to give her. But there were times when she was expected to wear an immerser: whenever dealing with customers, whether she was waiting at tables or in preparation meetings for large occasions.