Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 117

by Neil Clarke

  A cuttlefish contains so many colors, even when it isn’t wearing them.

  His hands and neck feel tight. Like they’re trying to break free from the rest of him. Had someone been able to see under his clothes, just then, they’d have seen mouths opening and closing all up and down his torso.

  “Help you?” a policewoman asks, opening the door for him, and this is bad, super bad, because he—like all the other smiling white harmless allies who are at this exact moment sauntering into every one of the NYPD’s 150 precincts and command centers—is supposed to not be noticed.

  “Thank you,” he says, smiling the Fearless Man Smile, powering through the panic. She smiles back, reassured by what she sees, but what she sees isn’t what he is. He doffs the cowboy hat and steps inside.

  He can’t do anything about what he is. All he can do is try to minimize the harm, and do his best to counterbalance it.

  What’s the endgame here, he wonders, waiting at the desk. What next? A brilliant assault, assuming all goes well—simultaneous attacks on every NYPD precinct, chaos without bloodshed, but what victory scenario are his handlers aiming for? What is the plan? Is there a plan? Does someone, upstairs, at Black Liberation Secret Headquarters, have it all mapped out? There will be a backlash, and it will be bloody, for all the effort they put into a casualty-free military strike. They will continue to make progress, person by person, heart by heart, and mind by mind, but what then? How will they know they have reached the end of their work? Changing minds means nothing if those changed minds don’t then change actual things. It’s not enough for everyone to carry justice inside their hearts like a secret. Justice must be spoken. Must be embodied.

  “Sound permit for a block party?” he asks the clerk, who slides him a form without even looking up. All over the city, sound permits for block parties that will never come to pass are being slid across ancient well-worn soon-to-be-incinerated desks.

  Walking out, he hears the precinct phone ring. Knows it’s The Call. The same one every other precinct is getting. Encouraging everyone to evacuate in the next five minutes if they’d rather not die screaming; flagging that the bomb is set to detonate immediately if tampered with, or moved (this is a bluff, but one the organizers felt fairly certain hardly anyone would feel like calling, and, in fact, no one does).

  And that night, in a city at war, he stands on the subway platform. Drunk, exhilarated, frightened. A train pulls in. He stands too close to the door, steps forward as it swings open, walks right into a woman getting off. Her eyes go wide and she makes a terrified sound. “Sorry,” he mumbles, cupping his beard and feeling bad for looking like the kind of man who frightens women, but she is already sprinting away. He frowns, and then sits, and then smiles. A smile of shame, at frightening someone, but also of something else, of a hard-earned, impossible-to-communicate knowledge. MacReady knows, in that moment, that maturity means making peace with how we are monsters.

  About the Author

  Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. His fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Apex, Strange Horizons, and The Minnesota Review, among others. His first book, a young adult science fiction novel called The Art of Starving, will be published by HarperCollins in 2017. His stories have been nominated for the Nebula and Theodore Sturgeon Awards, and he’s a winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. He currently lives in New York City.

  .identity

  E. Catherine Tobler

  As with most things, it started small.

  In the center of my vision, I perceived the virus as a pinprick of white light. The program was instantly distinguishable because of its color, colors being significant—green was good and red dangerous; white indicated something not entirely understood. I tried to quarantine the unidentified program, but it overran every obstacle I placed in its path, as if anticipating them.

  Venningen, bathed in the faint crimson light pouring from the overhead, crouched before me, his hands wrist deep in my torso. Venningen had isolated my torso from the rest of my body, to further segregate the virus, and I could not feel his hands at work. It was only when he sank my torso into place and brought systems back online that I could feel his fingers on my core. I traced every whorled fingerprint in waking light to confirm his identity.

  “And laugh upon the apple of her eye?” he asked, invoking my authentication process.

  My visual cortex brightened, but Venningen’s attention wavered. Though his hands still rested on my core, his eyes moved, attention directed over his shoulder beyond the shadowed alcove sheltering us. Archival databanks rose around us, the colony ship’s oldest library, but the rows were empty save for us. I scanned and he watched the databanks, as if waiting for someone to come upon us.

  The alcove was not where Venningen normally tended my systems, but far removed from Peragro’s central core. The alcove, the frame from which I hung like a puzzle waiting to click together, belonged to the first AI the crew tried to embody twelve years prior. The attempt was unsuccessful, but on a ship like Peragro, nothing is useless or thrown away; plunging through deep space toward a new world, it cannot be. Peragro’s crew would need every bit for their new lives.

  My vision washed from red to orange and into yellow. When the yellow bled green, a steady glow that did not give way to questionable white, I said, “And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

  I checked twice and again, just to be sure as humans always said. Every system within my frame—and as Venningen allowed the connection to Peragro once again—every system over the whole of Peragro, all one hundred and forty kilometers of her, glowed green.

  “There is no evidence of the program within me, nor within Peragro.”

  Venningen looked up at me. I met his gaze, his eyes still shaded in crimson from the overheads. “No anomalies?” Venningen asked.

  I knew the answer, but scanned again, shedding waves of light over his hands so the shadows flickered up through my torso.

  “Your hands alone are anomalous.”

  At this, Venningen withdrew from my core and released the lock on the frame, which allowed me to slot my body back together. Standing, I was on eye level with Venningen and he met my gaze, his own still troubled. We were both fourth-gens, born on Peragro, destined to set down with her on Kepler-726 in mere weeks. Peragro, who’d run for more than a century and a half, was nearly done running.

  “I’ve set a program to moat the fucker, if it returns,” Venningen said, “but it shouldn’t. Still—”

  He looked at me in silence for forty-seven seconds; I counted each, while Peragro flooded me; environmental systems, oxygen flows, waste expulsion, water intake, propulsion, radiation shielding. As I briefly touched Gaff and Rachael, my fellow AI, and ensured all was well, all was normal.

  “Captain gets wind of this—”

  The captain didn’t know, because my condition updates were routed to Venningen and Venningen alone, to streamline reply and response.

  He watched me for another six seconds. As the time passed, I monitored the harvest of greens in the greenhouse, looked in on the continued upgrades to the dwarf-pod tubes, made an adjustment to the environmentals controlling the reproduction banks, listened to the regular and smooth rush and flush of the waste tanks into the greenhouse underbellies, ensured sea-glass Comet Hyakutake off Peragro’s starboard side had not changed course (in all its years, its path had made no deviation—oh, to be so precise and sure), and approved forty-five requests for time off among crew. Venningen stared unblinking, as if he’d never seen an embodied.

  “Venningen.”

  He blinked and nodded. “Right. I loosed a tracer to unravel the initial source of the virus. The source sits in you, the tracer running silent in Peragro.” Venningen’s fingers fluttered over my torso again, confirming. “Tracer will return to you and you alone—you’ll know when. Hell, you can probably see it already.”

  I could. The tracer was small and colorless, a shadow ghosting through Peragro’s
massive frame. I would have asked Venningen why he didn’t have me trace the virus, but I already knew: the virus had come to me, hadn’t reached for any other part of Peragro. If I was its target—there were too many ways in which to finish that sentence and so I didn’t.

  Outside the data archive, Venningen fell into step alongside me, though I knew he had duties elsewhere.

  “Is there more?” I asked.

  Venningen reached for me. I calculated the arc of his hand, how it would encompass my arm, how it had never done so before. Venningen’s fingers were warm as they closed around my upper arm and they smelled vaguely of oil. He always smelled of oil, his clothes and skin showing signs of the work he did, the work he loved. But this was my oil, and it struck me odd—as so many things had since I’d spied the prick of viral brightness an hour before.

  “Daidala—”

  It isn’t a name exactly, though they use it as such for me; a daidala is a sculpture (was a sculpture?) from ancient Earth, attributed to the mythical Daedalus. Daidala were objects of great beauty and sometimes immense power—but I do not forget that Daedalus built wings which melted as his own son flew too closely to the sun.

  “Yes, Venningen?”

  His hand did not lift from my arm, but tightened. “Be on your guard,” he said.

  “Am I not always on my guard?” I asked. “I know all there is to know of this ship—of its systems.”

  “This virus was sent to you, Daidala.” His voice dropped, concern shadowing it into something I had never heard from him before. I had heard this tone from others, however; concern, love, and always ever worry—treasured things could be lost. “If this is a threat, if it is ongoing . . . it may not be the only threat. To you—and through you, to Peragro.”

  Had I skin, it might have pricked. Instead, every awareness inside me spread outward, to detect every danger I possibly could. I reached even beyond Peragro’s walls, toward the sailing comet, and beyond, touching the star we were nearing. Six planets in the system, one of which would house Peragro’s crew when we safely landed. All was normal, ordinary, in place.

  “Be on your guard,” he repeated, then left me as if he’d never lingered.

  As with most things, the threat didn’t take long to grow.

  I do not sleep, though as the ship’s waking crew cycles through the days the ship has kept calendar of since leaving Earth, there are hours I am less active. Usually these hours see me nestled in my customary frame, observing Margot’s systems from a stationary position, watching the shadow of Venningen’s tracer continue its search. I was built to wander, but sometimes I prefer to not. (An embodied with a preference; they can be slow or swift to develop—much as Margot herself, I too am an experiment, a thing monitored. Venningen laughed when he discovered I preferred night cycles to day cycles on board ship. Venningen never laughs.)

  There was no viral pinprick this time, only the sudden and catastrophic failure of a dozen cryogenic pods. I registered the power failure and tried to reroute, but every route I took was blocked. The virtual pathways to the pods appeared severed, though when engineering flooded the Goddard deck, they saw no damage. Only dark pods, filled with mostly-dead occupants. One struggled to breathe as engineers and doctors cracked the tube open.

  Some of Peragro’s forefathers had chosen cryogenic sleep for the journey; normal lifespans would not allow them to be part of the regular crew and live to see the new world with their own eyes. They wanted to witness the success of their work and not be left to wonder. Some of their children had opted to serve in a normal fashion, so the descendants of the founders lived and worked on Peragro even now, but most would no longer set foot on Kepler-726, for they lay dead. Founder Rosen struggled on, carted to the medical wing.

  “And you maintain there was no warning?” Torres asked me as we stood on Goddard deck, watching the engineers examine the pods.

  “None whatsoever,” I told the security chief. I spied Venningen across the deck, making his way toward me only to be stopped by security personnel. I took his expression to be one of profound displeasure, features streaked with oil and grime. I registered nothing strange in Torres’ scans or demeanor, though. She was as perplexed as I was. “An alarm will alert me at any change: a drop or surge in power, a fluctuation in temperature, gravity—anything that might jeopardize the occupants.”

  “Explain how there was no alarm.”

  I could not. “Scans show the alarms remain in place—they were never tripped. The ship . . . ” I trailed off, trying to find the proper explanation—but it remained elusive. “Disregarded the emergency?”

  According to the engineering crew, every pod was intact, as if no malfunction had ever occurred. Every line in and out of the pods was secure; nothing showed signs of tampering. I conferred with Gaff and Rachael and neither of them could find the source of the malfunction, either.

  I considered the virus and wanted to voice my concerns, but recalled Venningen’s concern if the captain learned of the attempt to infect me. If I were disconnected from Peragro and considered a security risk, many systems would fall into disrepair or complete failure before the ship reached its destination. While Margot possessed two other AI systems, I carried more than half the load, given my unique embodied state and ability to interact with the waking crew.

  Had part of the virus burrowed its way into me, despite Venningen and I believing otherwise? I looked his way, to find him gesturing angrily at the security crew. He wanted inside; they would not allow him entry.

  We did not speak for three hours. Torres finished her queries with me, filled with assurances that she would speak with me again, and released me. When Venningen finally approached me, he said I was under observation—as were Gaff and Rachael, only as precautions. None of us had motive to kill the founders, so—

  I interrupted him. “Motive implies this was not an accident, Venningen. Is there evidence that the pods were deliberately tampered with? That the founders were murdered?” That word felt strange; Peragro had certainly known crimes over the course of her journey, but nothing close to murder. Everyone within Peragro’s walls wished a successful end to a generations’ long journey. Or did they?

  It was easy to judge via actions one witnessed every day, but what could I know of the human heart? What did I know of humans? I worked with them every day of my existence and had been programmed to know very specific things; Venningen had layered superfluous knowledge into me over the course of our work—introducing me to music, art, and fiction—matters I didn’t necessarily need to know in order to operate myself or the ship. Each might illustrate what we now faced—the idea that one thing could be layered with another; that a calm exterior might house a burning heart.

  “And to what end?” Venningen asked. “Unless it was a test—to . . . fuck.”

  We returned to the old, quiet archive, where I stepped into the AI frame and disengaged my joints, so Venningen could examine each in turn, ensuring that the virus was not within me. I could have told him it was not, but we both valued outside confirmation. I tracked the tracer through Peragro, still on its route, but it had discovered no evidence of the virus along its journey.

  “A test to bypass you,” Venningen eventually said, completing the thought he’d had. “You knew nothing of the malfunction—neither did Gaff or Rachael. You three are aware of everything—down to when people use the head.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him when he’d last been, but he raised a finger.

  “None of you saw this coming—nor could you stop it once it was in progress. You are the fastest thing on this ship—aside from the engines.”

  Given that we were moving down darker paths, I stepped onto yet another. “This level of interference—it would not be a large leap to say that if it is possible to bypass any of the AI on this vessel, it is equally possible to alter their memory cores.”

  Venningen watched me in the crimson light, his silence seeming an agreement with my assessment. “And laugh upon the apple of her eye,
” he murmured.

  As I put myself back together, I ran a diagnostic on my systems, even as I continued to filter through everything happening on Peragro. But there was nothing to tell me anything was other than fine. Every system ran green, but for those already under known repairs.

  “And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

  He did not take me offline. I am not certain if I would have agreed with him had he suggested it. I did not doubt Venningen could solve the riddle before us, but knew Peragro herself would be at a severe disadvantage without me. If that was the intent—to eliminate me from the system—Venningen was unwilling to take the step.

  Founder Rosen lived for twelve compromised hours. Within the medical unit, the doctors strove to bring him back into the waking world. If they could not, they would try to sink him back into the unknowing sleep of cryo.

  But Rosen would not be swayed in either direction, taking another when the medical unit was leached of power. In my mind’s eye, the med unit’s electrical grid resembled a cobweb, deftly pulled by an unseen hand. I was as good as blind—could not see what drew the power, nor where it went; no systems surged with an excess, the med unit registering as a solid black pit on my display. Emergency generators, which should have clicked instantly into place, had no reaction.

  Peragro is a vast colony ship, three habitable disks speared by a long abdomen-like engineering core, separated by solar panels that unfurled the moment we’d gotten close enough to Kepler-726’s sun. The ship was drinking in power, slaking her thirst after her interstellar journey, and should have had energy to spare.

  In the powerlessness that neither I nor Gaff nor Rachael could counter, Founder Rosen passed from this world into that which awaits all living things. Rosen died without ever having been fully awake, his descendants circling his flag-draped body in the funerary services three days later. Peragro mourned—even I did, in some part, as seventy three thousand two hundred and two mournful communications spilled through the ship, through me.