Freddie suspected these views were just watered-down versions of Fortune’s opinions, the only human mind Bella had ever been exposed to. “But people on Earth,” she said, “don’t always feel that way. AxysCorp did fulfil the Heroic-Solution strategy, to stabilize the climate and to remove the old heavy, dirty industries from Earth. Billions of lives were saved, and a global technological civilization survived and is now even growing economically. That was a great achievement.
“But the Heroics chose to do things a certain way. The whole Earth is full of their gargantuan, aging machines. Memorials erected to themselves by a generation who wanted to be remembered. Look at me. Look at what I did, how powerful I was. Maybe their egos had to be that big to take on the task of fixing a broken planet. But to live at the feet of their monuments is oppressive.”
Bella looked lost. “People ought to be more grateful.”
“You need to come to Earth. It’s not like it is for you, stuck here inside the machinery. Most people just live their lives. They don’t obsess about the Heroics and AxysCorp and the rest. Only historians like me do that. Because it really is all just history.”
A panel in the window filled up with Allen’s blunt features. “Professor Gonzales. Could you rejoin us on the bridge, please? I’ve made my judgment.”
Freddie hurried after Bella, through the maze of corridors back to the bridge.
The room was stripped of virtual displays. Allen sat comfortably on the plinth, the nearest thing to a piece of furniture. Fortune paced about, chewing a silver-colored fingernail.
Allen said, “We’ll need a proper debrief. But technically speaking, the situation here is simple, as far as I can see.” He showed Freddie the probe he’d been using, a kind of silvery network. “This is a cognitive probe. A simple one, but sufficient. I ran a trace on the AI pole, Aeolus. I can find no bug in the software despite the distorted sentience set-up AxysCorp left behind here. Nor, incidentally, according to station self-test diagnostics, is there any flaw in the physical equipment, the microwave generators, the antenna arrays, the station’s positioning systems, all the rest. Aeolus should not have let that hurricane reach Florida. Yet it, he, did so.”
There was a sound of doors slamming far off. Freddie felt faintly alarmed.
“My recommendation is clear. There’s a clear dysfunction between the AI’s input, that is its core programming and objectives, and its output. The recommended procedure is clearly defined in such cases. The AI pole Aeolus must be—”
“No. Don’t say it,” said Fortune, suddenly alarmed.
Allen stared at him. “What now, Fortune?”
“There’s no blame to be attached to Aeolus. None at all.”
“What are you saying?”
Fortune’s mouth worked; his metal teeth gleamed. “That I did it. That Aeolus sent a hurricane into Florida because I asked him to. So there’s no need for termination. All right?”
Allen was amazed. “If this is true, we’ve a whole box of other issues to deal with, Fortune. But even so, the AI acted in a way that clearly compromised its primary purpose—indeed, contradicted it. There’s no question about it. Aeolus will be shut down—”
Cal spoke up. “I’m afraid I can’t allow that to happen, Dr. Allen.”
The station shuddered.
Allen got to his feet. “What in the dieback was that?”
Fortune growled, “I told you. Now see what you’ve done!”
Freddie said to Bella, “Show us your external monitors.”
Bella hurried to a wall workstation and began calling up graphical displays. “Our comms link to Earth is down. And—oh.”
UNSA Shuttle C57-D had been detached from its dock. It was falling away from the station, turning over and over, shining in undiluted sunlight.
“We’re stranded,” Allen said, disbelieving.
Fortune clenched his fists and shouted at the ceiling. “Cal, you monster, what have you done? I saved Bella from you once. Couldn’t you let her go?”
There was no reply.
They stayed on the bridge. It made no real sense, but Freddie sensed they all felt safer here, deep in the guts of the station. Bella sat quietly on the plinth, subdued. Fortune paced around the bridge, muttering.
Freddie and Allen went through the station’s systems. They quickly established that the station’s housekeeping was functioning. Air conditioning, water recycling still worked, and the lamps still glowed over the hydroponic banks.
“So we’re not going to starve,” Allen said edgily.
“But the AI’s higher functions are locked out,” Freddie said. “There’s no sign Aeolus is monitoring the Atlantic weather systems, let alone doing anything about them. And meanwhile, comms is down. How long before anybody notices we’re stuck here?”
“People don’t want to know what goes on with these hideous old systems,” Allen said. “Even in my department, which is nominally responsible for them. Unless our families kick up a fuss or another hurricane brews up, I don’t think anybody is going to miss us for a long time.”
Fortune snorted. “Bureaucracies. The blight of mankind.”
Allen growled, “You’ve got some explaining to do, Fortune. Like why you ordered up a hurricane.”
“I didn’t think it would kill anybody,” Fortune said weakly. “I did mean to smash up Cape Canaveral, though. I wanted to get your attention.”
Freddie asked, “Couldn’t you have found some other way?”
Allen said dryly, “Such as waggle the solar panels?”
Fortune grinned. “Aeolus is compliant. When you have a god at your command, it is terribly tempting to use him.”
“So you created a storm,” Allen said, “in order to bring somebody up here. Why, Fortune? What do you want?”
“Two things. One. I want my exile to end. A century is enough, for Christ’s sake, especially when I committed no crime. I’d like some respect too.” He said to Freddie, “Look at me. Do you think I did this to myself? My parents spliced my genes before I was conceived and engineered my body before I was out of the womb. I haven’t committed any crime. I am a walking crime scene. But it’s me your grandfather punished, Allen. Where’s the justice in that?” There was a century of bitterness in his voice.
“And, second, Bella. My sentence, such as my quasilegal judicial banishment is, clearly wasn’t intended to punish her. She needs to be downloaded into an environment that affords stimulation appropriate for a sentience of her cognitive capacity. Not stuck up here with an old fart like me. As in fact, your own namby-pamby sentience laws mandate.”
“All right,” Freddie said. “But what is Bella? You didn’t create her, did you?”
“No.” Fortune smiled at Bella. “But I saved her.”
Freddie nodded. “A, B, C.”
Allen snapped, “What are you talking about?”
Freddie said, “There weren’t just two poles of consciousness in the station AI, were there, Fortune? AxysCorp went even further. They created a mind with three poles. A—Aeolus. B—Bella. C—Cal.”
“Oh, good grief.”
“B was actually the user interface,” Fortune said. “Charming, for an AxysCorp creation. Very customer-focused.”
Freddie said, “Somehow Fortune downloaded her out of the system core and into this virtual persona.”
“I had time to figure out how and nothing else to do,” Fortune said sternly. “I’m extremely capable. In fact, I’m wasted up here. And I had motivation.”
“What motivation?”
“To save her from Cal…”
Inside AxysCorp’s creation, three centers of consciousness had been locked into a single mind, a single body. And they didn’t get on. They were too different. Aeolus and Bella embodied executive capabilities. Cal, an artifact of basic engineering functions, was more essential. Stronger. Brutal. They fought for dominance. And it lasted subjective mega-years, given the superfast speeds of Heroic-age processors.
“Cal crushed Bella. Tortured
her. You could call it a kind of rape, almost. He did it because he was bored himself, bored and trapped.”
“You’re anthropomorphizing,” Allen said.
“No, he isn’t,” Freddie said. “You need to read up on sentience issues, Doctor.”
“I had to get her out of there,” Fortune said. “This isn’t the right place for her, in this shack of a station. But better than in there, in the processor.”
Allen asked, “So why did Cal chuck away our shuttle?”
Fortune said, “Because you said you would kill Aeolus.”
“You said they fight all the time.”
“Do you have a brother, Allen? Maybe you fought with him as a boy. But would you let anybody harm him—kill him? Cal defends his brother—and, indeed, his sister if he’s called on.”
Allen clapped, slow, ironic. “So, Fortune, even stuck up here in this drifting wreck, you found a way to be a hero. To save somebody.”
Fortune’s face was dark. “I am a damn hero. We were told we were special—the peak of the Heroic-Solution age, they said. We were the Singularity generation. A merger of mankind with technology. We would live forever, achieve everything. Become infinite, literally.
“And, you know, for a while, we grew stronger. We were transported. Rapt. There aren’t the words. But we got lost in our data palaces, while the rest of the world flooded and burned and starved. And we forgot we needed feeding too. That was the great fallacy, that we could become detached from the Earth, from the rest of mankind.
“In the end, they broke into our cybernetic citadels and put us to work. And they made us illegal retrospectively and imprisoned us in places like this. Now we’re already forgotten. Irrelevant, compared to the real story of our time. AxysCorp and their ugly machines.”
“That’s life,” Allen said brutally.
“This is Aeolus.” The thin voice spoke out of the air.
Fortune snapped, “Aeolus? Are you all right?”
“I don’t have much time. Cal and I are in conflict. I am currently dominant.”
“Aeolus—”
“I restored communications. I contacted your Oversight Panel, Dr. Allen. I received an assurance that a second shuttle will shortly be launched. The shuttle will have grappling technology, so Cal won’t be able to keep it out. But Cal is strong. I can contain him but not subdue him. Mr. Fortune.”
“Yes, Aeolus?”
“I fear it will be impossible to fulfil further objectives.”
Fortune looked heartbroken. “Oh, Aeolus. What have I done?”
“As you know, I have always fulfilled all program objectives.”
“That you have, Aeolus. With the greatest enthusiasm.”
“I regret—”
Silence.
Allen blew out his cheeks. “Well, that’s a relief.”
Bella was wide-eyed. “Am I really going to Earth? Is a shuttle really coming? I’m going to go look out for it.” She ran out of the bridge.
The three of them followed Bella to the observation blister, more sedately.
“Saved by a god in the machinery,” Freddie said. “How ironic.”
“What an end,” Fortune whispered. “Two halves of the same mind locked in conflict for a subjective eternity.” He seemed old now, despite his youthful face. “So it’s over. What will become of Bella?”
Allen said, “Oh, they’ll find her a foster home. There are far stranger minds than hers in the world, in the trail of tears left behind by AxysCorp and their like. We try to care for them all. The station’s screwed, however. In the short term I imagine we’ll reposition another Tempest to plug the gap. Then we’ll rebuild. And we’ll let this heap of junk fall out of the sky.”
“But not before we’ve come back to save Aeolus and Cal,” Freddie said.
“You’re kidding,” Allen said.
“No. As Fortune points out, it’s actually mandatory under the sentience laws, just as it is for Bella.”
“I’d like to see Aeolus spared that hell,” Fortune said. “As for Cal, though, that deformed savage can rot.”
“But Cal is the more interesting character, don’t you think?”
“He locked us up and threw away our shuttle,” Allen snapped.
“But there’s an independent mind in there,” Freddie said. “An original one. Aeolus just did what you told him, Fortune. Cal, born in a prison, knowing nothing of the real world, rebelled instinctively. With a mind as independent and strong and subtle as that, who knows what he’d be capable of, if set free?”
Fortune nodded. “And what of me? Will your indulgence set me free?”
“Oh, we’ll take you home too,” Allen said, sneering. “You’ll stand trial for the hurricane. But there are places for creatures like you. Museums of the Singularity. Zoos,” he added cruelly. “After all, there’s plenty of room, now the chimps and tigers are all extinct.”
Bella came running up, her face bright. “I saw the shuttle launch. You can see its contrail over the ocean. Oh, Freddie, come and see!”
Freddie and Bella hurried on to the blister and gazed down at the shining Earth, searching for the spaceship climbing up to save them.
Bespoke
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Genevieve Valentine (www.genevievevalentine.com) lives in New York City. She began writing for publication in 2007. Her first story was published in Strange Horizons. She is a prolific writer, and over thirty of her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Clarkes-world and Fantasy, and in the anthologies The Living Dead II, Teeth, and Running with the Pack. She is what Jeff VanderMeer terms an “emerging” writer. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, about a mechanical circus in a post-apocalyptic world, is forthcoming from Prime Books in 2011. She says in the third person: “As “Bespoke” would suggest, she has a partic u lar interest in historical costume and fashion. It’s an enthusiasm rivaled only by her insatiable appetite for bad movies, which she chronicles in her columns for Tor.com and Fantasy Magazine, and on her blog. She enjoys working within and across all genres of speculative fiction (and finding period films in which anyone wears anything remotely accurate).”
“Bespoke” was published in Strange Horizons. It is told from the point of view of a clothier of wealthy time travelers, and is an amusing take on costuming and fashion—and time travel. We especially like the ambience.
Disease Control had sprayed while Petra was asleep, and her boots kicked up little puffs of pigment as she crunched across the butterfly wings to the shop.
Chronomode (Fine Bespoke Clothing of the Past, the sign read underneath) was the most exclusive Vagabonder boutique in the northern hemisphere. The floors were real date-verified oak, the velvet curtains shipped from Paris in a Chinese junk during the six weeks in ’58 when one of the Vagabonder boys slept with a Wright brother and planes hadn’t been invented.
Simone was already behind the counter arranging buttons by era of origin. Petra hadn’t figured out until her fourth year working there that Simone didn’t live upstairs, and Petra still wasn’t convinced.
As Petra crossed the floor, an oak beam creaked.
Simone looked up and sighed. “Petra, wipe your feet on the mat. That’s what it’s for.”
Petra glanced over her shoulder; behind her was a line of her footprints, mottled purple and blue and gold.
The first client of the day was the heiress to the O’Rourke fortune. Chronomode had a history with the family; the first one was the boy, James, who’d slept with Orville Wright and ruined Simone’s drape delivery par avion. The O’Rourkes had generously paid for shipment by junk, and one of the plugs they sent back with James was able to fix things so that the historic flight was only two weeks late. Some stamps became very collectible, and the O’Rourkes became loyal clients of Simone’s.
They gave a Vagabonding to each of their children as twenty-first-birthday presents. Of course, you had to be twenty-five before you were allowed to Bore back in time, but somehow
exceptions were always made for O’Rourkes, who had to fit a lot of living into notoriously short life spans.
Simone escorted Fantasy O’Rourke personally to the center of the shop, a low dais with a three-frame mirror. The curtains in the windows were already closed by request; the O’Rourkes liked to maintain an alluring air of secrecy they could pass off as discretion.
“Ms. O’Rourke, it’s a pleasure to have you with us,” said Simone. Her hands, clasped behind her back, just skimmed the hem of her black jacket.
Never cut a jacket too long, Simone told Petra her first day. It’s the first sign of an amateur.
“Of course,” said Ms. O’Rourke. “I haven’t decided on a destination, you know. I thought maybe Victorian England.”
From behind the counter, Petra rolled her eyes. Everyone wanted Victorian England.
Simone said, “Excellent choice, Ms. O’Rourke.”
“On the other hand, I saw a historian the other day in the listings who specializes in eighteenth century Japan. He was delicious.” She smiled. “A little temporary surgery, a trip to Kyoto’s geisha district. What would I look like then?”
“A vision,” said Simone through closed teeth.
Petra had apprenticed at a tailor downtown, and stayed there for three years afterward. She couldn’t manage better, and had no hopes.
Simone came in two days after a calf-length black pencil skirt had gone out (some pleats under the knee needed mending).
Her gloves were black wool embroidered with black silk thread. Petra couldn’t see anything but the gloves around the vast and smoky sewing machine that filled the tiny closet where she worked, but she knew at once it was the woman who belonged to the trim black skirt.
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