The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  He had belonged to no party and supported no movement, although many claimed him. He had written a book, The Twilight of the Human Soul, and he had stomped for it like a backwoods evangelist, but what had made him a media celebrity was his personal style: modest at first; then fierce, scolding, bitter, moralistic.

  He had claimed that ancient virtues were being lost or forgotten in the rush to a rationalized economy, that expert systems and globally distributed AI, no matter how sophisticated, could never emulate true moral sensitivity—a human sense of right and wrong.

  That was the big debate of the day, simplistic as it sounds, and it ultimately ended in a sort of draw. Aibots and expert systems were granted legal status in loco humanis for economic purposes but were denied any broader rights, duties, privileges, or protection under the law. Machines aren't people, the courts said, and if the machines said anything in response they said it only to each other.

  And we all prospered in the aftermath, as the old clunky oscillating global marketplace grew increasingly supple, responsive, and bias-free. Novembre had eventually disappeared from public life as people lost interest in his jeremiads and embraced the rising prosperity.

  Lada had given me a dossier of press clippings on Novembre's decline from fame. Around about the turn of the century he was discovered in a Dade County doletown, chronically drunk. A few months later he stumbled into the path of a streetcleaning aibot, and his left arm was crushed before the startled and penitent machine could reverse its momentum. A local hospital had replaced his arm—it was still the only prosthesis he was willing to wear—and incidentally cured his alcoholism, fitting him with a minor corticolimbic mod that damped his craving. He subsequently attempted to sue the hospital for neurological intervention without written consent but his case was so flimsy it was thrown out of court.

  After which Novembre vanished into utter obscurity and eventually signed over his dole annuities to the Wintergarden Retirement Commune.

  From which he would not budge, even for a blind date with Jafar Bloom. I told Lada so when I made it back to the mainland.

  "We have not yet begun to fight," Lada said.

  "Meaning—?"

  "Meaning let me work it for a little while. Stay cozy with Jafar Bloom, make sure he's doing what we need him to do. Call me in a week. I'll come up with something."

  She was thinking hard. . .which, with Lada, was generally a sign of trouble brewing.

  * * *

  Unfortunately, I had begun to despise Jafar Bloom.

  As much as Bloom affected to disdain the ginks and gaffers who paid to see his animal tests, he was just as twisted as his audience—more so, in his own way. Morbid narcissism wafted off him like a bad smell.

  But Lada had asked me to make sure Bloom followed through on his promise. So I dutifully spent time with him during the month it took to rig his show. We rented an abandoned theater in the old district of Doletown and I helped him fix it up, bossing a fleet of renovation aibots who painted the mildewed walls, replaced fractured seats, restored the stage, and patched the flaking proscenium. We ordered industrial quantities of reprogels and commissioned a control rig of Bloom's design from an electronics prototyper.

  During one of these sessions I asked him why he called his show "The Cartesian Theater."

  He smiled a little coyly. "You know the name Descartes?"

  No. I used to know a Belgian acrobat called Giselle de Canton, but the less said about that the better.

  "The philosopher Descartes," Bloom said patiently. "René Descartes, 1596-1650. Discourse on Method. Rules for the Direction of the Mind."

  "Sorry, no," I said.

  "Well. In one of his books Descartes imagines the self—the human sense of identity, that is—as a kind of internal gnome, a little creature hooked up to the outside world through the senses, like a gink in a one-room apartment staring out the window and sniffing the air."

  "So you believe that?"

  "I believe in it as a metaphor. What I mean to do on stage is externalize my Cartesian self, or at least a copy of it. Let the gnome out for a few seconds. Modern science, of course, says there is no unitary self, that what we call a 'self' is only the collective voice of dozens of neural subsystems working competitively and collaboratively—"

  "What else could it be?"

  "According to the ancients, it could be a human soul."

  "But your version of it dies in agony in less than a minute."

  "Right. If you believed in the existence of the soul, you could construe what I do as an act of murder. Except, of course, the soul in question is dwelling in a machine at the moment of its death. And we have ruled, in all our wisdom, that machines don't have souls."

  "Nobody believes in souls," I said.

  But I guess there were a few exceptions.

  Philo Novembre, for one.

  * * *

  Lada called me into her office the following week and handed me another dossier of historical files. "More background?"

  "Leverage," she said. "Information Mr. Novembre would prefer to keep quiet."

  "You're asking me to blackmail him?"

  "God, Toby. Settle down. The word 'blackmail' has really awkward legal connotations. So let's not use it, shall we?"

  "If I threaten him he's liable to get violent." Novembre was old, but that titanium forearm had looked intimidating.

  "I don't pay you to do the easy things."

  "I'm not sure you pay me enough to do the hard things. So where'd this information come from? Looks like ancient police files."

  "Our client submitted it," Lada said.

  * * *

  "What did you ever see in this woman?" Grandfather asked.

  Good question, although he had asked it a dozen times before, in fact whenever I visited him. I didn't bother answering anymore.

  I had come to the city a dozen years ago from a ghost town in the hinterland—one of those wheat towns decimated by the population implosion and rendered obsolete by aifarming—after my parents were killed when a malfunctioning grain transport dropped out of the sky onto our old house on Nightshade Street. Grandfather had been my only living relative and he had helped me find Doletown digs and cooked me an old-fashioned meal every Sunday.

  City life had been a welcome distraction and the dole had seemed generous, at least until grief faded and ambition set in. Then I had gone looking for work, and Lada Joshi had been kind enough, as I saw it then, to hire me as one of her barely paid Doletown scouts.

  Which was fine, until the connection between us got more personal. Lada saw me as a diamond-in-the-rough, begging for her lapidary attention. While I saw her as an ultimately inscrutable amalgam of love, sex, and money.

  It worked out about as well as you'd expect.

  * * *

  Novembre's official biography, widely distributed back when he was famous, made him out to be the dutiful son of a Presbyterian pastor and a classical flautist, both parents lost in the last plagues of the Implosion. The truth, according to Lada's files, was a little uglier. Philo Novembre's real name was Cassius Flynn, and he had been raised by a couple of marginally sane marijuana farmers in rural Minnesota. The elder Flynns had been repeatedly arrested on drug and domestic violence charges, back in the days before the Rationalization and the Ethical Police. Their death had in a sense been a boon for young Cassius, who had flourished in one of the big residential schools run by the federal government for orphans of the Plague Years.

  Nothing too outrageous, but it would have been prime blackmail material back in the day. But Novembre wasn't especially impressed when I showed him what we had.

  "I made my name," he said, "by proclaiming a belief in the existence of metaphysical good and evil independent of social norms. I allowed a publicist to talk me into a lie about my childhood, mainly because I didn't want to be presented to the world as a psychological case study. Yes, my parents were cruel, petty, and venal human beings. Yes, that probably did contribute to the trajectory of my life a
nd work. And yes, it still embarrasses me. But I'm far too old and obscure to be blackmailed. Isn't that obvious? Go tell the world, Mr. Paczovski. See if the world cares."

  "Yeah," I said, "it did seem like kind of a long shot."

  "What intrigues me is that you would go to these lengths to convince me to attend a one-shot theatrical production, for purposes you can't explain. Who hired you, Mr. Paczovski?"

  He didn't mean Lada. She was only an intermediary. "Truly, I don't know."

  "That sounds like an honest answer. But it begs another question. Who, frankly, imagines my presence at Mr. Bloom's performance would be in any way meaningful?" He lowered his head a moment, pondering. Then he raised it. "Do you know how my work is described in the Encyclopedia of Twenty-First Century American Thought? As—and I'm quoting—'a humanistic questioning of economic automation, embodied in a quest to prove the existence of transcendent good and evil, apart from the acts encouraged or proscribed by law under the Rationalization.' "

  "Transcendent," I said. "That's an interesting word." I wondered what it meant.

  "Because it sounds like your Mr. Bloom has discovered just that—a profoundly evil act, for which he can't be prosecuted under existing law."

  "Does that mean you're interested?"

  "It means I'm curious. Not quite the same thing."

  But he was hooked. I could hear it in his voice. The blackmail had had its intended effect, though not in the customary way.

  * * *

  "Entertainment," Grandfather said.

  "What?"

  "That's really the only human business anymore. Aibots do all the physical labor and the EES sorts out supply and demand. What do we do that bots can't do? Entertain each other, mostly. Lie, gossip, and dance. That, or practice law."

  "Yeah, but so?"

  "It's why someone wanted to put Bloom and Novembre together. For the entertainment value." His photograph stared while I blinked. "The motive, stupid," he said.

  "Motive implies a crime."

  "You mentioned blood. So I assume Novembre made the show."

  "It opened last night." And closed.

  "You want to tell me about it?"

  Suddenly, no, I didn't. I didn't even want to think about it.

  But I was in too deep to stop. Story of my life.

  * * *

  Doletown, of course, is a museum of lost causes and curious passions, which means there's plenty of live theater in Doletown, most of it eccentric or execrably bad. But Bloom's production didn't rise even to that level. It lacked plot, stagecraft, publicity, or much of an audience, and none of that mattered to Jafar Bloom: as with his animal experiments, public display was only a way of raising money, never an end in itself. He didn't care who watched, or if anyone watched.

  The Cartesian Theater opened on a windy, hot night in August. The moon was full and the streets were full of bored and restless dole gypsies, but none of them wanted to come inside. I showed up early, not that I was looking forward to the show.

  Bloom rolled his glassy Death Chamber onto the stage without even glancing at the seats, most of which were empty, the rest occupied by the same morbid gaffers who had attended his animal experiments. There were, in fact, more aibots than live flesh in the house. The ushers alone—wheeled units in cheap black tuxedos—outnumbered the paying customers.

  Philo Novembre, dressed in gray, came late. He took an empty seat beside me, front-row-center.

  "Here I am," he whispered. "Now, who have I satisfied? Who wants me here?"

  He looked around but sighted no obvious culprit. Nor did I, although it could have been someone in dole drag: the wealthy have been known to dress down and go slumming. Still, none of these ten or twelve furtive patrons of the arts looked plausibly like a high-stakes benefactor.

  The theater smelled of mildew and mothballs, despite everything we'd done to disinfect it.

  "What it is," Novembre mooted to me as he watched Bloom plug in a set of cables, "is a sort of philosophical grudge match, yes? Do you see that, Mr. Paczovski? Me, the archaic humanist who believes in the soul but can't establish the existence of it, and Mr. Bloom," here he gestured contemptuously at the stage, "who generates evil as casually as an animal marking its territory with urine. A modern man, in other words."

  "Yeah, I guess so," I said. In truth, all this metaphysical stuff was beyond me.

  Eventually the lights dimmed, and Novembre slouched into his seat and crossed his good arm over his prosthesis.

  And the show began.

  Began prosaically. Bloom strolled to the front of the stage and explained what was about to happen. The walls of the Death Chamber, he said, were made of mirrored glass. The audience would be able to see inside but the occupant—or occupants—couldn't see out. The interior of the chamber was divided into two identical cubicles, each roughly six feet on a side. Each cubicle contained a chair, a small wooden table, a fluted glass, and a bottle of champagne.

  Bloom would occupy one chamber. Once he was inside, his body would be scanned and a duplicate of it would take shape in the other. Both Bloom and counter-Bloom would look and act identically. Just like the dogs in his earlier experiment.

  Novembre leaned toward my right ear. "I see now what he intends," the old man whispered. "The genius of it—"

  There was scattered applause as Bloom opened the chamber door and stepped inside.

  "The perverse genius," Novembre whispered, "is that Bloom himself won't know—"

  And in response to his presence hidden nozzles filled the duplicate chamber with pink electrosensitive gel, which contracted under the pressure of invisible sculpting fields into a crude replica of Bloom, a man-shaped form lacking only the finer detail.

  "He won't know which is which, or rather—"

  Another bank of electronics flickered to life, stage rear. The gel duplicate clarified in an instant, and although I knew what it was—a hollow shell of adaptive molecules—it looked as substantial, as weighty, as Bloom himself.

  Bloom's neural impulses were controlling both bodies now. He lifted the champagne bottle and filled the waiting glass. His dutiful reflection did likewise, at the same time and with the same tight, demented smile. He toasted the audience he couldn't see.

  "Or rather, he won't know which is himself—each entity will believe, feel, intuit that it's the true and only Bloom, until one—"

  Now Bloom replaced the glass on the tabletop, cueing an aibot stagehand in the wings. The house lights flickered off and after a moment were replaced by a pair of baby spots, one for each division of the Death Chamber.

  This was the signal that Bloom had cut the link between himself and the machinery. The neuroprostheses were running on a kind of cybernetic inertia. The duplicate Bloom was on borrowed time, but didn't know it.

  The two Blooms continued to stare at one another. Narcissus in Hades.

  And Novembre was right, of course: the copy couldn't tell itself from the real thing, the real thing from the copy.

  "Until one begins to decohere," Novembre finished. "Until the agony begins."

  Thirty seconds.

  I resisted the urge to look at my watch.

  The old philosopher leaned forward in his seat.

  Bloom and anti-Bloom raised glasses to each other. Both appeared to drink. Both had Bloom's memory. Both had Bloom's motivation. Each believed himself to be the authentic Bloom.

  And both must have harbored doubts. Both thinking: I know I'm the real item, I can't be anything else, but what if—what if—?

  A trickle of sweat ran down the temples of both Blooms.

  Both Blooms crossed their legs and both attempted another nonchalant sip of champagne.

  But now they had begun to fall just slightly out of synchronization.

  The Bloom on the right seemed to gag at the liquid.

  The Bloom on the left saw the miscue and liked what he saw.

  The Bloom on the right fumbled the champagne glass and dropped it. The glass shattered on the chamber flo
or.

  The opposite Bloom widened his eyes and threw his own glass down. The right-hand Bloom stared in disbelief.

  That was the worst thing: that look of dawning understanding, incipient terror.

  The audience—including Novembre—leaned toward the action. "God help us," the old philosopher said.

  Now Bloom's electronic neuroprostheses, divorced from their biological source, began to lose coherence more rapidly. Feedback loops in the hardware read the dissolution as physical pain. The false Bloom opened his mouth—attempting a scream, though he had no lungs to force out air. Wisps of gel rose from his skin: he looked like he was dissolving into meat-colored smoke. His eyes turned black and slid down his cheeks. His remaining features twisted into a grimace of agony.

  The real Bloom grinned in triumph. He looked like a man who had won a desperate gamble, which in a sense he had. He had wagered against his own death and survived his own suicide.

  I didn't want to watch but this time I couldn't turn away—it absorbed my attention so completely that I didn't realize Philo Novembre had left his seat until I saw him lunge across the stage.

  I was instantly afraid for Bloom, the real Bloom. The philosopher was swinging his titanium arm like a club and his face was a mask of rage. But he aimed his first blow not at Bloom but at the subchamber where the double was noisily dying. I think he meant to end its suffering.

  A single swing of his arm cracked the wall, rupturing the embedded sensors and controllers.

  Aibot ushers and stagehands suddenly hustled toward the Death Chamber as if straining for a view. The dying duplicate of Bloom turned what remained of his head toward the audience, as if he had heard a distant sound. Then he collapsed with absolute finality into a puddle of amorphous foam.

  Bloom forced open his own chamber door and ran for the wings. Novembre spotted him and gave chase. I tried to follow, but the crowd of aibots closed ranks and barred my way.

  Lada would love this, I thought. Lada would make serious money if she could retail a recording of this event. But I wasn't logging it and nobody else seemed to be, except of course the aibots, who remember everything; but their memories are legally protected, shared only by other machines.