by Neil Clarke
Parchment endured more than her share of awful nights.
But not her husband. A life of success had stripped away much of his imagination. Looking forwards, he saw nothing but Paradise, and maybe the road map wasn’t obvious to anyone, including himself, but at least he had confidence in the men and those few bright girls who were better at details than a visionary such as himself.
He still slept with living women. There was always some pretty assistant and a prettier intern and various etcetera girlfriends amenable to a wealthy man’s body parts.
Parchment still shared the mansion with him, on those rare nights when both were home.
They even occasionally slept inside the same room.
There was no blatant moment when Parchment gained the upper hand in the marriage. But it was obvious that colleagues respected her opinion. And the AIs sought out her advice. And her husband was visibly bothered by praises being offered to her, and worse still, to her “innovative” work.
“‘Innovative’ is an idiot’s cliche,” he complained.
“You should share your insight,” she suggested. “Tell the idiots that they don’t know how to use language.”
That earned a hard half-stare, as if the air beside her face had offended him.
“It’s better to be innovative than get stuck inside a hole,” she warned.
Her husband never struck her. Except with his thoughts, that is. And he probably never realized that she could read the violence in his face and posture. But it was obvious just then: His imaginary self had just slapped her across the mouth.
Shifting topics, she said, “We aren’t making enough progress.”
That was a reliable way to make him laugh. Doubt brought ridicule to whoever dared offer the opinion. “We always thought self-aware machines would kill us,” he reminded her. “Yet here we are, still happily in charge of the conscious Them.”
AIs were always Them. And despite the bluster, her husband was never entirely comfortable with Them.
Life was a race, and there was always a moment when someone else took the lead. Her husband was still in charge of quite a lot. At work, at home. But the various girlfriends were running him to exhaustion. That was an argument for later days, Parchment decided. When he was more vulnerable than now. What mattered was the question to be answered in the next few years, if not sooner.
“What will They make of us?” she asked.
“Besides Us being the gods that brought them into existence?”
She stared, and not at the empty air.
He wouldn’t blink. She watched his thoughts, shoulders pushing forwards and the handsome eyes finally staring at her eyes. Dogged and a little scared, he said, “You don’t have any reason to complain. We’re building a helluva set of rules. These Values of ours. No, I’m not the one making them tight enough to last a million years. But shit, we’ve got the best coders and lawyers that ever lived, and the most loyal machines, and we’re going to end up with a political-economic-ecological system that runs itself for ten million years.”
“Nothing runs itself,” she said.
“So our grandkids make baby adjustments,” he maintained. “Flourishes they can drop in where necessary.”
She honestly wished that he was right, and she said, “I believe you.”
Which surprised him. And heartened him. “So what do you think we should do, Parchment? To keep this world orderly and happy, I mean.”
It was a rare opportunity, the two of them together and him pretending to care what she believed.
“The key to this,” she began.
“Yeah?”
“Everyone needs to wake up poor.”
There. She said it as simply as possible, including machines as well as people in that expansive “everyone.”
But what was profound to her was worse than laughable to him.
“I’ll tell you what everybody needs,” he said. Then up went a finger, pointed straight at her face. “There’s one thing and one thing only, and when we get it . . . when we reach that point . . . nothing ever changes again.
“That’s the beautiful, awful truth about tomorrow.”
And the bastard beast was right.
Sitting in front of Parchment, the boy looked both smaller and older. Inside the table, menus upon menus suggested breakfasts and other meals.
“How old are you?” she asked.
“Guess,” he said instantly, as if expecting the question. But before she could guess, he added, “Fifteen years and seven months. Although I look young, I know. The girls always think so.”
“I’m not good with ages,” she said, meaning to shove the matter aside.
Breaking tradition, her friend had come from behind the counter to take this special order.
“I know what I want,” the boy said. A fingertip touched the tiny entry, pulling it into a larger font, and setting both hands flat on the tabletop, he added, “My room won’t make this.”
The man took a sudden breath. But his voice remained calm and warm when he asked, “And how many?”
“Two, please. Grilled and with the bones included. I like playing with bones.”
“Very good, sir.”
Then it was just the two of them, and Parchment guessed, “You live on your own.”
“Emancipated since I turned fourteen,” he said.
The world was crowded but exceptionally safe, and tradition was the only reason why people half his age were called children. Parchment didn’t have much fondness for long childhoods, and if she had any power, she would have ordered . . .
But nobody had that power, did they?
“My room is minimal,” the boy mentioned.
“Minimal?”
“Spartan. That’s the word,” he said with pride.
“But in that room, you can see anything and eat almost anything,” she said. “No home is tiny anymore.”
He shrugged. “There has to be a smallest stupidest room. And I’m the one who got it.”
Why did she invite this animal to join her? What did she imagine would come of this?
“You have three rooms,” he continued. “That’s what your neighbors tell me, at least.”
“Your name?” she asked.
Was the question even heard? He looked at one of his hands, then the other. “I thought of asking for one of your extra rooms.”
“And I’d have kept the umbrella for myself,” she joked.
He shrugged. “Asking doesn’t mean you want. Asking is the noise you make to cover up the real business.”
She nodded, working with his words.
Then the expression changed. The little man seemed a hundred years old, asking, “Why do we live this way?”
“What way?”
“Poor and crowded and trapped on one poor crowded world?”
Obvious answers probably wouldn’t appeal to him. But it was important to make the right noise here, and that’s why she offered the obvious reply. “We’re the richest people who ever lived. Even you. You own a room property and enough capital to live for centuries, and an army of servants waiting for your next words.”
“I rather like that image,” he agreed.
“There’s no reason to be stubborn,” she said. “Perhaps I’ll look up your face, see who you are on my own.”
The comment was avoided with a sideways glance.
Then the meal arrived, and she muttered, “Oh god.”
On the plate, woven from soulless ingredients and cooked inside a fierce, brief fire, were a pair of human hands.
The young man’s own hands, apparently.
“Well,” Parchment said.
“Haven’t you heard of this dish?” he asked, lifting a newly made fork and knife. “It’s popular among a few of us.”
“It’s ugly and it’s rude,” she said.
“I’m fifteen. What do you expect?”
She said nothing.
“I know what you’re thinking. ‘Do I have to have him kicked out, or do I stand
and run away to save myself?’”
She looked up, waiting to catch any eye that would help her.
“Ink,” said the young man.
“Pardon?”
“That’s my name. As of a few weeks ago, as it happens.” He dropped the utensils, picking up a cooked hand by the wrist bones and the thumb. “I found out about you and decided to change my name. To Ink.”
“Ink writing on Parchment. Is that the joke?”
“After the first minutes, no. The humor pretty much drained away.”
And suddenly this awful beast of a youngster was fascinating. Why was that? What had he done or said to deserve this change of attitude?
“I didn’t want your umbrella,” he said.
“I realized that.”
“And I don’t care that much about any room inside your house.”
“Good,” she said.
He nibbled at the flesh between the thumb and forefinger. Then with grease on his mouth, he said, “I don’t think normal thoughts.”
“You don’t,” she agreed.
“If you guess what I want,” he began.
Then he bit again.
“If I guess?”
“You’re more clever than I imagined,” he said. “But I don’t think you are. I don’t think anybody can be that clever.”
When was the last time that anyone was this fascinating?
Parchment sat back.
The young man ate in slow careful bites, revealing an unexpected precision with this taunting cannibalism.
“Let me confess a considerable something,” she said.
“If you let me hear it however I want,” he said.
My, this was one exceptionally refreshing fellow.
Their former mansion was abandoned, not sold. Cash and capital had little left to say to the wealthy, and that’s the way it would be for everyone soon. Parchment had designed three portable, nearly perfect rooms. One room was enough for the husband’s endless pleasure, and their home could be carried almost anywhere, which meant Antarctica and Berlin, Bali and the newly green Atacama. What about Mars? Calculations were made, the skeleton of a transport ship was built, but the mistress of the house didn’t relish leaving billions of people out of reach, and that’s why the rooms ended up standing in the midst of a continent-sized city.
Two famous people lived a few steps apart. The husband’s heart was the closest heart to hers. Yet only in a physical sense, of course. After he died, Parchment counted the days since they last spoke. Four thousand and seven days passed since she said any word to her mate. Four thousand days since she could have touched either of his hands or the outlines of his still handsome face. If she had wanted to touch him, which she didn’t.
Did Parchment grieve when he was gone?
More than she admitted to anyone, particularly herself.
No, she never liked the man, and the young-girl’s admiration was long spent. But when everything else was easy, he was otherwise. Her husband was blunt and rude and simple, and he was eager to crush whatever joy she could imagine, and that made him the rarest treasure.
Before he died, Parchment spent long moments imagining the man’s passing. And she was wrong in every way. Her normal assumption was that she wouldn’t know it had happened. Peculiar sex would kill his heart, and being indifferent to the world, he wouldn’t have configured any safety system. The corpse would rot. Sealed doors would keep that secret, perhaps for years. She imagined that he was dead already—a vivid, sometimes appealing daydream that lasted for several years.
She rather liked being a widow, if only in practice.
On the four thousand and eighth morning, someone knocked on her tenement door. This was the door leading into the central room, that space where nobody ever was, and her surprise was vivid. Fun. Dressing as quickly as she could, she called out a few words about patience and who was there and what was happening. Nobody answered, but the knocking persisted. So she asked her room if she was in danger, and with its calmest warm voice, the room promised that danger had never been less of a possibility.
That’s when she knew. Her neighbor, the man who had beaten her endless times inside his mind, was no more.
Half-dressed, she opened her door.
What wasn’t human stood before her. It was vividly female, yes, but shaped unlike every earthly woman. The orifices were filled with light, and she smelled of odd musks and salt and odors that resisted definition, and after offering a name that might have been her own, the fantasy creature told the Earth woman that her man was lost but the body remained, and could she come please claim the body before it began to foul the world?
“The world,” Parchment repeated to her breakfast partner.
The half-eaten hand was forgotten. Ink watched her face, spellbound.
“I always assumed he was screwing interns,” Parchment said. “But it seems no, he had moved past those pale dreams. Decades ago, the man secretly bought the help of high-end AIs. He wanted a world of unusual depth, packed with details no rational person would bother with. A world drawn down to every grain of scented sand and a deep history, with ten willing alien wives playing on tendencies and oddnesses that I couldn’t have imagined, even when I imagined his worst.”
A sigh preceded a shake of the head. And the boy said, “Neat.”
“No,” she disagreed.
He thought of arguing. She saw the ideas flashing across his face. But he decided not to strike back with logic or emotion.
Silence was best.
“The man’s body was still warm,” she said. “He still smelled alive, but not in a normal way. Because he had been eating contrived alien meats and whatever else, I assume. And breathing a different air. A very beautiful air, by the way. I looked about. Before calling the appropriate officials, I stood on a mountaintop not much larger than this restaurant, admiring a view that was as lovely as any could be. The wife stood beside me. Grieving in her fashion, I suppose. Some orifices leaked music. Other portions of her offered words. She told me that the mountain was filled with amazing rooms. The sum total of her world’s artistic wealth was within my reach, and wouldn’t I wish to have a quick year-long look?
“I told her to show me the way.
“She lead me to a staircase. And when she started down, I used the kill-command that I wove into each of our rooms. Back when I built them, I did that. And the data were instantly dumped. So much data, so quickly, that the Earth felt the impact as AIs and servers fell into their first sleep in decades.”
She stopped talking.
Ink looked at his plate.
“I own worlds,” she said.
He nodded.
“Ages ago, I sent my fortune into the Kuiper Belt and told it to keep busy.”
“I know that,” he said.
“You don’t want umbrellas or rooms,” Parchment said. “I think you want me to hand over one of my little terraformed comets.”
He didn’t say, “Yes.”
Instead, Ink sobbed with genuine, weary despair. “We’ve got so much out there, but this is where we stay.”
“People are homebodies, by nature,” she said.
“I’m not.”
She waited.
“Yeah,” he said. “I want one world and a ship. And I know people. People who can’t live another day here, eating a life that won’t ever test them.”
Emotion welled up inside Parchment.
The boy watched.
Both of them waited.
Then she said, “No,” and picked up the uneaten hand. And taking a first little nibble, liking the pepper but not the grease, she said, “I have a rather different proposal to offer.”
The hip hop woke her.
Violent, joyous lyrics ended with the hard bark of a car backfiring. Which was more alarming than a pistol, odd as that seemed.
Parchment sat up.
“Change the scene?” the room anticipated.
“No. Don’t.”
For the first time since she was a
thirteen, Parchment dressed inside that grim, bug infested room. A freshly woven third-hand dress and comfortable shoes and a hat ready to catch any eye. Then she stepped through the other door, into the central room. An expansive volume originally meant to be filled with parties and significant ceremonies, it was occupied by nothing but white walls and a gray floor and one youngster sitting with legs crossed in the middle of the floor, speaking to unseen faces on a privacy screen.
“Ready?” she asked.
He tried twice to stand, and then succeeded, legs revealing his nervousness. Which was endearing to see in any groom.
About the Author
Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over 200 shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically-acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys [2005]. In addition to his success in the U.S., Reed has also been published in the U.K., Russia, Japan, Spain and in France, where a second (French-language) collection of nine of his shorter works, Chrysalide, was released in 2002. Bob has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award (nominated and voted upon by genre authors) and the Hugo Award (nominated and voted upon by fans), as well as numerous other literary awards (see Awards). He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves.” His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (Prime Books, 2014).