The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1
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She docked at Omo and went into the Sojourn to take a look around.
Parts of the ship were missing. Some of it, probably was the data storage— taken down to Se so that its encryption could be translated, and Eva’s precious historical record preserved.
But was all of it?
Mota ran her hands over the walls, the consoles. She could feel the databank on the shuttle, feel the technicians’ records and the translation program at the edge of her mind.
The Sojourn seemed to be cast from smooth composite, its hull one large component—not like the Segye-Agbaye, where every piece could have been detatched, recycled, cast into any one of innumerable other forms. The Segye-Agbaye had been designed to be broken apart and remade as it carried a living population from one star to the next.
The Sojourn had been designed to perform one task competently once.
And that told Mota something, as she moved from the stasis chamber to what seemed to be a technician access hatch. Everything on the ship had a congruity. Everything that wasn’t part of the stasis system or the engines looked like an afterthought: mismatched.
She looked at the equipment. There, a processing unit. There, a detachable screen.
Mota took a deep breath, calling up all the translation they’d established.
The Sojourn had been able to read the presence of their colony and send out a signal, and Eva had been horrified at the thought of the network laid into human brains. When this craft had been built, someone would have come into this little human-habitable room and calibrated the equipment, would have tested it. And they would have done so with their hands and their eyes, not information communicated directly to their neurons.
Mota took the screen, and began to interface.
Reading the translations of the symbols that greeted her, Mota wondered when the screen had last been touched. How many generations ago, those many light years away? Had the Segye-Agbaye still been on its long voyage, or was this ship younger than that? And had the last person to work their way through these menus been a technician, like Mota, or had their society not been organized upon those lines?
Where we come from, Eva had said, people earn their positions.
Where we come from. Eva experienced a kind of aloneness that Mota could hardly imagine—light-years from home, alone in her thoughts and sensations. Why use we?
And, Yes, there—the ship had transmitters. Not ones that could tap into the larger network, or the smaller ones integrated with a human mind. But it had sent out the signals that called Yan to it, and it had sent out . . . others. And was still sending them out. Mota frowned, and isolated them.
Two signals. One broadly dispersed, one hyper-focused and sent back the way the Sojourn had come. Mota chose that one to follow, digging into the ship’s scanners until something resolved on them.
Seven somethings.
Seven ships.
None as large as the Segye-Agbaye, but approaching its volume combined. And if they were stasis ships, without the need for living areas and corridors and recreational facilities and maintenance bays. . . .
Mota sucked in breath, and the hatch opened behind her.
She spun, eyes wide, and there was Eva. “I thought,” Eva said, “I had asked you to stay away from my ship.”
Mota moved, revealing the screen behind her. “How many?” she asked. Hoped that the words would carry all the meaning she wanted them to.
Eva’s eyes flicked to the screen, but if she was surprised to see her fleet on it, Mota couldn’t read it in her face. “On Earth,” Eva said, “our ancestors were allies—good friends, in agreement. I was sent to negotiate cohabitation if my people had to evacuate the Earth system. I didn’t expect to arrive here and find that you were no longer human.
“We are human,” Mota said.
Eva looked disgusted. This time, the expression stayed. “You are eugenicists” she said. “Your genetics are polluted. It was people like you who are destroying my people.”
“We evolved,” Mota said, “to limit conflict—”
“By engineering subservience?” Eva asked. “My fleet is on its way. We can stop this practice of hooking you up to this mind-control network—we can help restore your genetic pool. Your children can live lives that are truly free.”
“You’re interfering with the network,” Mota said. The realization was a nausea.
“Yes,” Eva said. “Can’t you feel it? You don’t have to submit to everyone you meet—”
You are alone, Eva seemed to say, seemed to not realize she was saying, in the dark, and you should be happy for it.
Mota launched herself at Eva.
Eva started, and planted her feet as though she were in planetary gravity. Mota twisted, changing her angle enough to catch Eva’s arm and spin her, then pushed off from her and flew toward the hatch leading back to the Omo station proper. Eva growled, disoriented, and Mota swung the hatch closed behind her.
Omo station wasn’t large. Mota reached a transmitter just as Eva opened the hatch behind her, and fumbled into a connection. If she could just send this information back to Se, slicing through the interference before Eva was upon her—
And then Eva was upon her, wrenching her away from the transmitter, throwing her into the darkness of network interference again. Mota curled herself and pushed away but this time Eva grabbed her, locking their momentum. Eva’s hand closed around her throat.
And then the hatch opened.
This time, they both startled. Eva turned, and the break in her attention was enough for Mota to twist free. And there in the hatch was Io, tall and present, taking in the scene.
Mota flew to Io and gripped her arm, letting the proximity carry her whole emotional state—anger and fear and incredulity.
Io turned to regard Eva.
“I don’t think I should chastise Mota for disobeying your request,” she said. “I came here because I thought I might have to. But I believe one of you should explain.”
“I will explain,” Mota said. And Io smiled thinly—this close, the network connected them, and the truth burned in Mota for anyone but Eva to see.
Yan arrived on the Segye-Agbaye, his presence clear among the ship’s usual population. Mota paused in her work, extracting herself from the old databanks and recycling systems.
[Here,] she signaled, and felt Yan approach.
He waited until he was in the same room as her to say anything. “We were able to re-activate the stasis,” he told her. “Eva is stable.”
Mota nodded. She didn’t have to say—was relieved not to say—how she felt about that, or that her feelings were confused.
“Io is still angry,” Yan remarked.
Mota let out a laugh. “So am I.”
“And most of us, I think,” Yan said. He didn’t feel angry—just a long, slow resentment curling under his words. “If it had been a vote, we might have killed her.”
Mota closed her eyes. There was a vote, now, and the network visualized the voting for her. The decisions traveled in waves across the colony and outposts, one holdout or another synthesizing and summarizing their views and offering them up for perusal, influencing another shift or dissipating into the growing consensus.
Yan was there, in her peripheral awareness: washed out by the voting she’d called up, but present. No ghost standing next to her. She could hear a question, lingering.
“Eva made a bad decision,” he said. “Her people are going to arrive, and if their stasis is the same as hers, they’ll rely on our cooperation to revive them. So why act antisocially? Did she not know?”
If she’d had the network, she could have felt the fabric of the colony; known that she was making a mistake. Of course, if she’d had the network, she’d never have been able to hide a thing.
“Maybe,” Mota said, though she wasn’t sure, and she knew Yan recognized that. She felt around for the right words—even the right nuance would do. [She hated us and didn’t disengage,] she signaled, at last.
It was . . . unnat
ural.
At least, it went against Mota’s nature.
Yan let out a breath. Then he settled back, and Mota felt him key into the voting.
“Have you decided?” Mota asked.
A wistful affirmative came to her over the network. “Majority,” he said. “Redirect their ships to some other system, or back to Earth. I’ll miss their ships—I want to study them. You?”
Mota closed her eyes again. The visualization was waiting for her, its colors soothing.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Skepticism, from Yan.
Mota’s fingers moved. Eva thought I didn’t have free will, she wanted to signal. But this is my vote. I have to make the choice. But the words were less accurate than she wanted them to be, and she could catch the edge of understanding, flowing from Yan like a warm regard. That was enough.
Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Analog, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He also translated the Hugo-winning novel, The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin, which is the first translated novel to win that award.
Ken’s debut novel, The Grace of Kings, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was published by Saga Press in 2015. His first short story collection, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, was published in March. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts.
THE GODS HAVE NOT DIED IN VAIN
Ken Liu
I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist. How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, “Here is one hand, ” and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, “and here is another. ” —G.E. Moore, “Proof of an External World,” 1939.
Cloud-born, cloud-borne, she was a mystery.
Maddie first met her sister through a chat window, after her father, one of the uploaded consciousnesses in a new age of gods, died.
So that was how Maddie came to call her sister “Mist”: the pylon of a suspension bridge, perhaps the Golden Gate, hidden behind San Francisco’s famous fog.
Maddie kept the existence of Mist a secret from her mother.
After all the wars initiated by the uploaded consciousnesses—some of which were still smoldering—the reconstruction process was slow and full of uncertainty. Hundreds of millions had died on other continents, and though America had been spared the worst of it, the country was still in chaos as infrastructure collapsed and refugees poured into the big cities. Her mother, who now acted as an advisor to the city government of Boston, worked long hours and was exhausted all the time.
First, she needed to confirm that Mist was telling the truth, so Maddie asked her to reveal herself.
For digital entities like Maddie’s father, there was a ground truth, a human-readable representation of the instructions and data adapted for the different processors of the interconnected global network. Maddie’s father had taught her to read it after he had reconnected with her following his death and resurrection. It looked like code written in some high-level programming language, replete with convoluted loops and cascading conditionals, elaborate lambda expressions and recursive definitions consisting of strings of mathematical symbols.
Maddie would have called such a thing “source code,” except she had learned from her father that that notion was inaccurate: he and the other gods had never been compiled from source code into executable code, but were developed by AI techniques that replicated the workings of neural networks directly in machine language. The human-readable representation was more like a map of the reality of this new mode of existence.
Without hesitation, Mist revealed her map to Maddie when asked. Not all of herself, explained Mist. She was a distributed being, vast and constantly self-modifying. To show all of herself in map code would take up so much space and require so much time for Maddie to read that they might as well wait for the end of the universe. Instead, Mist showed her some highlights:
Here’s a section I inherited from our father.
((lambda (n1) ((lambda (n2 . . .
As Maddie scrolled through the listing, she traced the complex logical paths, followed the patterns of multiple closures and thrown continuations, discovered the contours of a way of thinking that was at once familiar and strange. It was like looking at a map of her own mind, but one where the landmarks were strange and the roads probed into terra incognita.
There were echoes of her father in the code—she could see that: a quirky way of associating words with images; a tendency to see patterns that defied the strictly rational; a deep, abiding trust for a specific woman and a specific teenager out of the billions who lived on this planet.
Maddie was reminded of how Mom had told her that there were things about her as a baby that defied theories of upbringing, that told her and Dad that Maddie was their child in a way that transcended rational knowledge: the way her smile reminded Mom of Dad even at six weeks; the way she hated noodles the first time she tried them, just like Mom; the way she calmed down as soon as Dad held her, even though he had been too busy with Logorhythms’s IPO to spend much time with her during the first six months of her life.
But there were also segments of Mist that puzzled her: the way she seemed to possess so many heuristics for trends in the stock market; the way her thoughts seemed attuned to the subtleties of patents; the way the shapes of her decision algorithms seemed adapted for the methods of warfare. Some of the map code reminded Maddie of the code of other gods Dad had shown her; some was entirely novel.
Maddie had a million questions for Mist. How had she come to be? Was she like Athena, sprung fully-formed from her father’s mind? Or was she something like the next generation of an evolutionary algorithm, inheriting bits from her father and other uploaded consciousnesses with variations? Who was her other parent—or maybe parents? What stories of love, of yearning, of lone liness and connection, lay behind her existence? What was it like being a creature of pure computation, of never having existed in the flesh?
But of one thing Maddie was certain: Mist was her father’s daughter, just as she had claimed. She was her sister, even if she was barely human.
Like her father, Mist had a habit of shifting into emoji whenever she found words inadequate. What Maddie got out of her response was that life in the cloud was simply beyond her understanding and Mist did not have the words to adequately convey it.
So Maddie tried to bridge the gap the other way, to tell Mist about her own life.
I know lots about tomatoes: lycopene, Cortéz, nightshade, Mesoamerica, ketchup, pomodoro, Nix v. Hedden, vegetable, soup. Probably more than you.
You seem really quiet.
Other attempts by Maddie to share the details of her own life usually ended the same way. She mentioned the way Basil wagged his tail and licked her fingers when she came in the door, and Mist responded with articles about the genetics of dogs. Maddie started to talk about the anxieties she experienced at school and the competing cliques, and Mist showed her pages of game theory and papers on adolescent psychology.
Maddie could understand it, to some extent. After all, Mist had never lived in the world that Maddie inhabited, and never would. All Mist had was data about the world, not the world itself. How could Mist understand how Maddie felt? Words or emoji were inadequate to convey the essence of reality.
Life is about embodiment, thought Maddie. This was a point that she had discussed with Dad many times. To experience the world through the senses was different from simply having data about the world. The memory of his time in the world was what had kept her father sane after he had been turned into a brain in a jar.
And in this way, oddly, Maddie came to have a glint of the difficulty Mist faced in explaining her world to Maddie. She tried to imagine what it was like to have never petted a puppy, to have never experienced a tomato filled with June sunshine burst between the tongue and the palate, to have never felt the weight of gravity or the elation of being loved, and imagination failed her. She felt sorry for Mist, a ghost who could not even call upon the memory of an embodied existence.
There was one topic on which Maddie and Mist could converse effectively: the shared mission their father had left them to make sure the gods didn’t come back.
All of the uploaded consciousnesses—whose existence was still never acknowledged—were supposed to have died in the conflagration. But pieces of their code, like the remnants of fallen giants, were scattered around the world’s servers. Mist told Maddie that mysterious network presences scoured the web to collect these pieces. Were they hackers? Spies? Corporate researchers? Defense contractors? What purpose could they have for gathering these relics unless they were interested in resurrecting the gods?
Along with these troubling reports, Mist also brought back headlines that she thought Maddie would find interesting.
Today’s Headlines:
•Japanese PM Assures Nervous Citizens That New Robots Deployed for Reconstruction Are Safe