“Come with me,” Tara said.
Slipping Erin’s arm across her shoulders, Tara helped her to move. Thankfully, the knee loosened up. It was still stiff and horribly painful, but marginally better than before she’d gone to sleep. A few minutes later, the scrub grass became charred in a circular pattern, perhaps twenty meters in diameter, centered on a hole three meters wide. The hole was ringed by metal, and something like concrete beyond that. They reached the edge and looked down. It dropped thirty meters or so, and was too dark to see beyond that. The entire area smelled like a cedar smoker.
“Missile silo?” Tara asked.
“Must be,” Erin replied.
Tara grabbed herself around the middle. She stood that way for some time, until Erin asked her what was wrong. Tara’s only response was to lean forward. She was tipping into the silo.
Erin grabbed Tara’s arm and yanked her to the ground, twisting her knee in the process. She screamed and held her knee until the pain subsided somewhat. “Tara, what the hell’s wrong with you?”
Tara’s face looked over at Erin. She looked confused, like she’d just been in a car accident. She seemed to be looking through Erin. “What?”
“You nearly fell in,” Erin said slowly.
“I can’t see.”
The words felt like a bucket of ice water being dumped on Erin’s head. “What do you mean?”
Tara frowned. “I can’t see anymore. My vision’s gone.”
Erin realized the two small cameras mounted above Tara’s screen were immobile. Erin pulled her up to a sitting position. “Tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know.” Her voice had a disconnected quality, like she’d slipped into shock. “Everything feels foggy. Like I’m coated in goop. Slow, you know?”
“And your diags?”
“I can’t find them anymore.”
Erin felt her heart speeding up. What the hell was she going to do? She couldn’t exactly take Tara’s blood pressure. “Let’s get you up. We’ll get to the strip, and then we’ll get off this crazy rock.”
“Erin?” Tara asked once they’d started struggling forward again.
“Yeah, Tar?”
“I need you to know something…about the other Tara.”
Erin wasn’t really up to discussing anything, but she let Tara talk, if only to keep her calm.
Tara continued: “When I… When Tara first told control about dropping out, she requested an avatar to take her place, but they refused. They were ready to drop both of us and go to our primary backups. It took days of arguing to get me aboard.”
“Where’s this coming from?” Erin asked, trying hard not to read too much into Tara’s words.
“I know you think she was selfish for sending me, but you need to know that it wasn’t selfishness. She fought to protect you.”
“Then why not just say so?”
“Because if she had, you would have dropped out.”
They continued in silence for some time. Erin thought back to that time in the café, refusing to believe Tara’s words, but Erin had to admit that she’d been close to dropping out after hearing the news. If she’d known that Tara had been trying to coddle her, she might have done it, and there was no going back on a decision like that, not with admin’s constant psych evals.
“Why now, Tara? Why wait ’til now to confess?”
“Good a time as any, O’Shea.” The fear in Tara’s smile was plain. It made Erin realize just how much her opinion of Tara had transformed since the beginning of this journey. She cared for this avatar, very much. She felt safe with her, as strange as the notion seemed.
“Don’t worry,” Erin said as she cushioned Tara from another fall, “one little planet can’t keep two Irish girls down.”
Tara didn’t laugh.
“Right?” Erin said.
“Right.” So much fear compressed into that one word.
“Just a few more klicks.”
“Are we there?” Tara asked.
“Just a few more klicks.”
“Okay.”
They continued. Despite Erin’s best efforts, Tara fell several times. Erin made Tara lean on her, which made the going even slower, but Tara’s legs became so wobbly that even that grew more problematic as they came closer to the landing strip.
The sun rose higher in the east. They finally reached the edge of the alkali flat. The strip would only be…
Dear God, they were nearly there. She could see the top of the landing strip’s comm tower through a wavering haze of heat. For the first time since entering the atmosphere, Erin’s heart lifted. They just might make it.
Erin scanned the horizon, watching for signs of the monstrous walkers.
And then the damage registered. At the northern end of the strip, near the research compound and the hydroponics labs, the control tower was little more than a burned out husk. A faint trail of smoke was quickly dispersed by the wind.
They hadn’t reached it in time. The planet had found it first and now they were stuck.
Erin laughed when she saw the two walkers crawling out from behind the tower and begin eating up the ground toward her.
“What?” Tara asked. Her voice was weak.
Erin wanted to scream. She wanted to cry. She wanted to give up. But she couldn’t. Not with Tara as frightened as she was.
Erin lowered Tara to the ground and rested her head in her lap, ignoring the pain. She removed her helmet and threw it to the side. It kicked up a tiny little puff of dust. Then all was still, except for the faintest of vibrations coming through the salt flats beneath her. “They sent a shuttle, Tara. A rover’s heading our way.”
“It is?”
“Yeah.”
Tara was still for a long time, her eyes closed, her expression peaceful. God, she was beautiful. Strange, throughout her life, Erin had never felt as close to her sister as she did then, with this avatar who was not like Tara in body, but in soul. Her soul was Tara’s, through and through.
“Erin?”
“I’m here, honey.”
“Are we going? Are we safe?”
“Yeah, we made it. We’re going to be fine.”
“That’s good.”
Erin felt like she should feel some regret. She’d ignored this Tara for so long. But she couldn’t summon any regret. She felt only relief for finding her before the end. She smiled and held Tara’s hand. “Remember when we were fifteen? And we said we were going to live to see another world?”
“Yeah.”
The vibrations grew stronger.
“Well, we did it, honey. We did it together.”
“Yeah, we did.”
Chasing Humanity
Retta Brown tried to focus on the positives—the breathtaking beauty of the Himalayan peaks, the quaint Tibetan farming village in which she found herself, the nice people she’d been staying with for the last three nights—but no matter what sort of mental time-out she gave herself, the smell of shit and the mind-scraping grunts of the yaks kept invading her senses.
She stood on the edge of a huge, muddy pen in a village near Gyangkar, China. The pen was filled with a randomly wandering herd of yaks and an equally unfocused herd of Chinese scientists. She was biding her time until she could get in a few words with the scientists she was supposed to be interviewing, but the yaks had gone ape shit nearly an hour ago, and the dozen scientists from China’s Ministry of Science and Technology had been squawking about ever since, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
The somatic implants the yaks had been fitted with the day before were supposed to—four times a day—hijack their motor systems and route them to the nearest manure deposit site. The manure would then be used to power the village’s brand new methane power plant. It was the latest gesture of good will in the never-ending—albeit non-violent—feud between the peoples of Tibet and the Chinese government.
Retta’s cameraman, Bobby Levine, stood nearby with a huge grin on his face, filming the madness with the satcam att
ached to his ear.
What a crap assignment, Retta thought, literally and figuratively. And she knew exactly why she’d received it. The order to go to Tibet had come only days after the appearance of her exposé on the NYPD’s most costly fiasco this century: their Remote Patrol Force Project. Most of her sources had been rock solid, but two clearly had suspect information, and Gil had no doubt gotten wind of it.
“You still say I’m not being punished?” Retta asked her hulking compatriot.
He zoomed in on the laughing Tibetan children at the far side of the pen before blinking—which paused the video—and flipping the reticle away from his left eye.
“Gil wouldn’t do that, Rett.”
“Gil would fucking do that, Levine, and he’s probably watching all this right now and laughing his fat ass off his cushy leather chair.”
“Yak!” Bobby called and high-stepped over to the wooden fencing surrounding the pen.
Retta tried to do the same, but the plodding yak’s nudged her in the back and forced her to step into a fresh pile of dung with her brand new hiking boots. “Yup,” Retta said as she stalked toward the pen’s exit, “that about makes this assignment perfect.” The group of embarrassed-looking delegates from China’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission scattered as she plowed through them. She walked past the rickety barn and took a seat on a weather-beaten stump.
Good news… That’s what she needed, just a bit of good news.
She tapped the power button near the hinge of her glasses and brought up her e-mail. There were a few dozen junk mails, which she sent to the trash bin, plus two from her sister Lynn, both marked Urgent. As she was moving the mail from Lynn to the To Be Read folder, another e-mail came in.
Retta froze as she read the name. Rawlins. Her contact in South Africa.
Her fingers tingled as she double-blinked on the e-mail.
rett, you’re not gonna believe it. i think i finally found the invisible man. apparently checked into a hospital in johannesburg two years back. stayed a few weeks. an orderly said he got transferred to cape town.
i’m heading there now, but call me asap. if he smells us coming, he’ll skip town faster’n you can spit. ;)
ttfn,
rawlins
A smile broadened Retta’s lips.
She blinked her address book open and called Gil. Her editor picked up, apparently still in the New York office, stuffing the remains of a powdered donut into his mouth.
He smiled and spoke around his chewing. “How’s Tibet?”
Retta shot his exaggerated smile back at him like a forehand winner while forwarding the e-mail from Rawlins.
Gil frowned and began reading. He finished, and then read it again, more carefully this time. Finally, he met Retta’s eyes and choked down the last of his donut. “You’ve got two weeks.”
* * *
Early the following morning, while sitting in business class waiting for the rest of the Cape Town International passengers to board, Retta’s phone rang. The mini-HUD on her glasses read Sis. She debated letting it go, but she’d been avoiding Lynn for too long. She blinked on the pickup near the edge of her vision. “Hey, Lynn. Look, I’m sorry I haven’t called, but I’ve got a big, big story that’s taking me out of country for a few weeks. Maybe I can head home when I get back. Okay? I really have to—”
“She’s getting worse, Rett.” Lynn’s voice was heavy. Listless. Retta could tell she was doing this more out of habit than with any hope that Retty would fly back to Madison to visit their mother.
“She’s always getting worse. That’s her MO.”
“I can’t believe you.” Her tone was an accusation.
“I was just there for a week.”
“You were here for two days, six months ago. How long are you going to keep playing these games?”
Had it been six months already? “Look, Lynn, she was the one who broke off ties with me.”
Lynn exhaled. “Come on, haven’t we covered that ground enough, Rett? She needs you.”
“Oh, hold on—” Retta paused as several passengers filed by. “They’re still funny about phone calls on takeoff here, Lynn. Sorry. I’m going to be really busy, but I’ll call when I get back, okay?”
After a pregnant pause, the connection dropped.
It was just as well, Retta thought. Their mother has had sarcoidosis, a chronic lung disease, for nearly eighteen years now. She took medicine for the pain, but there was no longer anything the doctors or Lynn or Retta could do to help. Besides, Retta had her own life to take care of. She couldn’t afford to fly home every weekend just to find out her mother was fine.
“Couldn’t you just tell her you didn’t want to talk?” Bobby asked as he leaned his seat back and hit the service button.
“Mind your business,” Retta told him as she activated the vidscreen in her glasses and patched in to the Times’ s archives.
The stewardess came over and Bobby ordered a preflight Jack Daniel’s, rocks. “Just wondering why you had to lie.”
Retta blinked the vidscreen off and stared him straight in the eye. “Tell you what, Levine. When you get off your ass and visit your grandmother, I’m on the next flight home.”
Bobby stared at her for a second, then replaced his earbuds, leaned back in his chair, and thumbed through the playlists on his phone.
“Thought so,” Retta said.
She reactivated her vid and reread the e-mail from Rawlins.
The invisible man referred to a man named Dag Åkerlund. Nine years ago, he’d been chosen from a select group of the world’s most renowned psychologists, philosophers, and scholars to represent humanity in a competition of sorts. His opponent? Navinder, the first Artificial Intelligence that claimed not that it was indistinguishable from another human, but that it was human.
Åkerlund was given free rein to design the match in any way he saw fit, so long as Navinder wasn’t asked any questions that a normal human couldn’t answer. Navinder fell short in each of the first four matches, which were highly televised and open to a select audience, but every match took longer than the last. When the fifth annual match finally arrived, the world held its collective breath while the thirteen-hour contest ensued.
In the end, Åkerlund had concluded that Navinder was human, but even stranger than that was the fact that he’d granted no interviews afterward and issued only one short, prepared statement before completely disappearing from worldview.
Just like every other tech or human-interest columnist in the world, Retta had tried in vain to follow Åkerlund. She’d studied all five matches dozens of times, but Åkerlund’s trail had become so cold that she hadn’t watched the vids in over a year. She needed desperately to refresh her memory, to uncover any vital clues, before their scramjet reached Cape Town.
She watched highlights of the early matches, but quickly gave up on them. The secret was going to be in the final marathon match. It had been held at the Universidade de São Paulo. The auditorium was filled with media reps, politicians, members of the programming team, movie stars, and other Important People from around the world. Navinder sat in a comfortable chair, looking like a run-of-the-mill, thirty-year-old bald man in a wool suit. This was assuming, of course, that “run-of-the-mill” meant a man with blue skin. The color had been a conscious decision on the part of his development team. They wanted Navinder’s win to be based on his intellect, they’d said in a BBC interview, not on any physical similarities to humanity.
A stout wooden table and an empty chair were the only other things on the stage with Navinder. Atop the table sat a marble chess board, which had a single piece—the white king placed on E4, a nod to IBM’s Deep Blue vs. Kasparov chess matches of the late twentieth century.
A few moments later, the crowd erupted into applause as Dag Åkerlund stepped onto the auditorium stage and walked over to the table. He wore a wool cardigan, brown corduroy slacks, and his trademark Birkenstocks. His long pepper-and-brown beard, balding head, and rectangular
glasses made him look like a young Father Christmas.
Navinder stood, the two shook hands, and then they both took their seats.
“You’re looking well, Navinder,” Åkerlund said as he made himself comfortable. His tone was a bit condescending, Retta thought. He’d already won the contest four times, and no doubt he was sure of another victory.
“As are you, Doctor,” Navinder replied. It would be impossible to tell that Navinder’s voice didn’t come from a human unless you’d heard it as long as Retta had. There was a certain quality to it, a recurring pattern of pitch and delivery that seemed…artificial.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s happened in the past year?” Åkerlund asked.
“Don’t you think that might taint your opinion?”
Åkerlund smiled. “It just might, Navinder. It just might. So tell me instead why you’re here.”
Navinder gave Åkerlund a wry smile in return. “I’m sure you think I’m here to convince you I’m human.”
“And you’re not?”
Navinder shrugged. “That is the goal of my development team, yes.”
“You didn’t answer the question.”
“In my eyes, I’m here to have a conversation with an equal, a conversation I’ve looked forward to the whole year.”
“Looked forward to…”
“Of course, haven’t you? I may not be as perceptive as you, Doctor, but I sensed some exuberance in you during last year’s match.”
Åkerlund flashed white teeth through his thick mustache and beard. “Bad clams, Navinder. It was only bad clams.”
The audience chuckled.
Retta let it run for a bit more, but then she fast-forwarded through the preliminaries. There was an exchange about three hours in that she wanted to review. Navinder and Dag were still in their chairs, but Åkerlund was sipping from a green bottle of Perrier.
“Do you get frustrated, Navinder?”
“I do.”
“And what frustrates you?”
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