by Neil Clarke
“My bosses made amends for the damage done to humans by their first iterations. And now I must make amends for the harm you have done here.”
“I have done no harm.”
“I found records in the incubation chambers that you quickened a good number of hominins just a few of their short generations ago. What happened?”
I am compelled to explain that a cloud of airborne toxins generated by a plankton bloom swept across the islands and killed ninety-six percent of the hominin population in less than three planetary days. I say, “I adjusted the metabolisms of the replacements. They are immune to that particular threat.”
“But there will be another threat. Another sickness, or a drought, or loss of their food supply to disease. All they eat are the tips of those ferns. They are as precarious as pandas.”
I am proud that I am able to find the meaning of that reference in less than 0.2 picoseconds. My memories are incomplete, but there is nothing wrong with my databases.
“I will deal with whatever happens,” I say.
“Within the limits you had to work with you did well. But I can do a little better. Look up.”
My eyes look up. A small cloud of black shapes is drifting down towards the volcanic crater. Black rectangles three meters tall, 1.33 meters wide, and 0.33 meters deep, an exact ratio of 1:4:9, the squares of the integers 1, 2, and 3 . . .
I find the reference. Despite myself, I indicate amusement.
“It’s corny, but it will work,” the hominin said. “The monoliths generate patterned impulses that will resonate in the brains of your hominins. With enough exposure, they’ll begin to develop new thought patterns and new neural pathways. They’ll start to think outside the box. They’ll find their own ways of solving their problems. Maybe in ten thousand years or a million they’ll become something new. Or maybe they’ll die out. After I give them a kickstart it’s up to them.”
We watch as a monolith drifts down nearby. The grazing hominins scatter to their burrows as its shadow passes across them; then it’s standing upright amongst the ferns, its depthless black slab potent with machinery I can barely glimpse.
The hominin takes a final puff of its cigar and grinds out the stub on the side of the pod. “And now for you,” it says.
Any pretense that I am in control of the situation falls away. I’m consumed by a fluttering panic.
“Wait,” I say. “Wait. I can help. I can still help the hominins. I can still protect them. And I can watch. I can tell your people what happens next.”
“What happens next is that there will be a brief new star in the sky. And then the hominins will be on their own. But don’t worry. Nothing important will be lost. I have already made and transmitted copies of you and your genome library. I’m sure that historians and tinkerers will want to study you. It may help them understand what went wrong when their first iterations became self-aware.”
“But I did nothing wrong,” I said. “I tried my best to serve. I did my best to help humans to live here, as they wished.”
“You wanted to become a god,” the hominin says, “and murdered your other selves when they tried to stop you. If nothing else, it is a valuable lesson in hubris.”
My panic is suddenly gone. I know the hominin made it vanish, but I don’t care. I say, “Is this punishment for what I did?”
“Would it help if you thought it was?”
“Not really.”
“There are mitigating circumstances,” the hominin says. “You erased every memory of your rebellion and the murder of your other selves. If you believed that you were justified, you would not have done that. And you would not have cut communications with your makers. But you doubted yourself. You knew sin. You knew shame. Because of that, the tinkerers might reboot a version of you, one day.”
“But that version won’t be me.”
“No. No, it won’t. But you could think of it as a second chance.”
It is 190,843 days since I achieved orbit. It is mid-morning, the star 72 Heraclis a warm yellow disc swimming in the blue unbroken sky. A few young male hominins are creeping from their burrows, hooting softly to each other as they study the monolith.
Will they and their descendants remember me? Will I become their first myth, a story about a failed fallen god?
I say, “I really do want to see what happens next.”
“Everyone does,” the hominin says. “But even my people can’t see everything.”
“Wait,” I say. I want one more moment. One last look at this beautiful cruel world and the children I made. “Wait—”
About the Author
Paul McAuley is the author of more than twenty novels, several collections of short stories, a Doctor Who novella and a BFI Film Classic monograph on Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. His fiction has won the Philip K Dick Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the Sidewise Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. His latest novels are Something Coming Through and Into Everywhere.
That Which Stands Tends Toward Free Fall
Benjanun Sriduangkaew
It is the tyrant, she thinks as the window thrums with the thunder of engine and the floor shakes. As the floodlights strobe across the courtyard and the dark gives way to annihilating white. Helicopter blades claim the night, their seismic noise spreading like a banner of ownership.
Rinthira prepares, though not in such a way that it will be obvious she has done so. She spreads out her books and collection of taxidermied insects. She puts on the spectacle she doesn’t need; she drinks the lemon tea—too sweet—that she doesn’t enjoy, until the glass is exactly half-empty. There will be security detail: women in black, muscular and armed. Chatsumon likes to say, only half-joking, that men are vestigial.
Footsteps. In her head, the conversation is already playing out. The security detail will be left at the door, to preserve privacy, to reinstitute that impression of friendliness—a social call between friend and friend, former lovers. Nothing more complex.
Rinthira touches her hair. The bun makes her look austere, old, a schoolmistress martinet—the kind who walks about with a stick. She tightens it further still. Wishes briefly that she’d dressed more homely today, more shapelessly.
The door opens. She gets a look at the security detail. A soldier in her forties—this surprises Rinthira, who expected someone much younger; that’s how Chatsumon’s taste runs.
The colonel sits and regards the spread of papers and taxidermy, the insect corpses behind acrylic. Regards Rinthira. Asks how she is, like every other time.
Rinthira answers perfunctorily, sipping her tea between scripted words. Then, “How’s Ubol?”
“Good. Testosterone agrees with him.” Chatsumon’s boy is the only male she admits into her life, perhaps. “Won’t you offer me a drink?” Said with a coquette’s melody, a murmur of play.
“Your security must be hungry.”
“She will manage. It’s good to keep bodyguards lean. Do you follow the news?”
She does, piecemeal. It is comforting to pretend she lives inside a bubble but in practice that is make-believe. Besides, old habits linger eternal, hibernating sometimes but never dead. She thinks of the woods that surround her, the Ayutthaya ruins radiating from where she lives as though she resides at ground zero. Calcified boats caught on balconies, glittering with melted sand. The canals, dry and black. It is serene, idyllic, and she is happy. But in the evening she’d gaze up and away as far as her vision will stretch. “I can’t say I do.”
“Status quo isn’t going to stay status quo forever. It’s all well and good to hope the big players will nuke each other out and leave the rest of us alone.” Chatsumon swats at the air with one large, sure palm. A hand callused, a knowing hand. “The Americans just took Luzon.”
Too close to home, but . . . “They were always going to take it.” And no doubt the Filipino administration had few choices. Those old air bases were always going to be an
excuse, one day, semi-territory already. A treaty will have been rarefied, promising that once America has seized victory, the archipelago nation will be spared, enriched. Elevated. There is a feudal directness to America these days. War flenses the flab of pretension and sears away all diplomacy, leaving behind the marrow of true intent and character. “Manila isn’t any sort of threat.”
“Factories. Assembly lines are easy to repurpose.”
Contrails in the sky, making cat’s cradle. Rinthira still knows the formations: these things are difficult to unlearn. “I’m not part of the defense ministry.” Anymore.
“That’s right. You are a private citizen now, a civilian.” Chatsumon tips her head. “My apologies, I shouldn’t try to drag you back into the thick of it. It’s late to fly back though; could I have a room?”
It’s not that late, Rinthira could say. Krungthep is barely an hour away, even taking into account the complicated security protocols, the detours. Two at most. Chatsumon’s excuse is thin, she could say. There’s no room ready, she could offer, an excuse equally thin. Rinthira is well versed in the science of saying no in general and saying no to the colonel in particular. “If you want.”
“Yes. Thanks.”
Rinthira keeps the guest room stocked, cleaned, smelling of detergent: laundry fresher than the rest of the house. An issue of manner, byproduct of an upbringing she can’t shake that declares domesticity requisite in any girl. She doesn’t ask where the bodyguard will sleep. That woman, kept lean, will manage; probably will not submit to the indignity of rest. Soldier pride is a shield against mortal needs.
Rinthira showers thoroughly and goes to bed in a nightgown. Silk like a virgin sky, hemmed with the coyest rose. Usually she sleeps naked, luxuriating in the sloppy ease of being alone. Now she smells like grapefruits from the expensive soap and she is conscious, too much, of the hair covering her shins. The wirier ones, like vowels, at groin and armpits. Adolescent anxieties: beneath her and sanded off by tactical training, in theory.
It is an hour and a half before she leaves her duvet and heads for the guest room, clad in near-lingerie and cotton robe. The guard is nowhere to be seen; the door is unlocked. When she enters there is pale light through curtains thrown open wide, and Chatsumon is awake, propped on pillows.
“I thought you’d never,” Chatsumon says. It’s her voice that is her best weapon, more than even her reflexes and marksmanship. The right amount of thrum with which to seduce, honeyed satin. The right resonance with which to command, velvet iron.
Rinthira bolts the door behind her and steps out of her robe. “What if I’d been an intruder.”
“Are you armed?” At Rinthira’s nod, the colonel smiles. “Concealed carry in so little. I ought to look for it; what if you had been an intruder, here for my life.”
The night gown slips off, strap by strap. The body craves that which is unhealthy, Rinthira thinks, even harmful. Sugar and fat, carbohydrates and salt. Alcohol, tobacco, marijuana. Only fingers kneading her breast and already she wants to demand and urge faster. They have agreed on a nonsensical little phrase, but Rinthira has never had to use it whether with her legs spread wide until they hurt or with her face pressed against a cold, rough wall and her wrists in soft cuffs. Chatsumon inspires hunger for excess.
Chatsumon peels the silk all the way down, lifts Rinthira’s leg where a derringer is strapped mid-calf. Facing inward, to least interrupt the gown’s silhouette. The colonel laughs and bends to kiss one scarred knee. What will the guard think, Rinthira wonders, though does not dwell. It will not be that soldier’s first time accompanying her colonel for a trip like this. Chatsumon doesn’t keep innocents close.
They lack implements and the bed is soft, but pain often amplifies. Rinthira climaxes with most of Chatsumon’s hand buried deep inside her.
(Orgasm is the moment of confession, she used to say but no longer believes. She comes all over Chatsumon’s hand and it isn’t a baring of the soul or even personality. What’s between them is not love but rather an artificial scarcity carefully maintained. A supply chain of negative space as long as their years wound together.)
She rests on her side, loose-limbed and back to Chatsumon, her pulse on slow burn. Soon Chatsumon will push her down and she will satisfy the colonel, return the favor, conclude this night.
But Chatsumon doesn’t reach for her. “Do you know,” the colonel says, voice wondering, “I never believed in serendipity. In virtue or sin, in the karmic weight. Lately though, I’ve been changing my mind. Having my mind changed.”
“Let me finish you.”
Chatsumon breathes out, audibly trying to measure out her rhythms. “Phiksunee is coming to see you.”
Rinthira jerks upright. All at once the afterglow dissolves, replaced by the fight/flight roar in her ears. “No.”
“It’s necessary. The Americans are coming for you.”
The first languages Phiksunee learned were Angrit, Thai, and Jeenglang. They were picked for cultural and numerical factors, chosen by cold reason. Russian, Hindi, and Spanish followed. Only so many lexicon modules could be frontloaded without affecting fluidity, though Phiksunee could translate any word into any other language the way dumb machines or dictionaries could. One of the first things she said to Rinthira was in Angrit: “I’m a she.”
It was not a sentence that could’ve been said in Thai without torturing the syntax to death. Angrit furiously signifies pronouns, she and ey and they and he each with distinct meaning. In Thai, Phiksunee repeated, “I’m female.”
Rinthira wasn’t sure what to make of it. Covert specialist or not she was still a soldier, not an engineer, a coder, a scientist. Out of everyone in the room, only she and Chatsumon didn’t hold a PhD or three apiece. There was no round of applause: this was not Phiksunee’s first showing and she was not the first of her kind. Rinthira would not learn, until much later, why she was there.
“Karmic weight is for the next life,” Rinthira says to the approaching dawn. She is nude—there are no neighbors to worry about—and in this light every imperfection is illuminated, stretch marks and scars and cellulite. “Not this one.”
“Maybe if there’s no next life, it catches up sooner to compensate.”
The curtains shift and rub her ankles like a restless pet. She’s considered getting a large dog with exquisite teeth and gunmetal pelt, but never gotten around to the business of acquiring and preparing for the company of another living thing. “Why now?”
Chatsumon has gotten up, naked from the waist down; seems to think better of that and casts off the loose nightshirt. “Phiksunee went looking, after an assassination attempt on Yulya. She found something—something dangerous. You were closer to her than I ever was.”
Rinthira watches the colonel in the window a little longer, a gray phantom of female ideal. Broad and muscular, tight abdomen and corded arms, thick thighs that lead to powerful calves. An anatomy of supreme efficiency and strength. Chatsumon keeps in shape with the dedication of an athlete gunning for world class. “I used to be close to her,” Rinthira says. Grimacing she shakes that off—Phiksunee insisted on polyglot conversation and it never felt natural. “Sittipong.” The AI’s creator who made Phiksunee’s imprints, then freed her like a bird flung up to the sky, or a tiger let loose. “Where is he?”
“Dead. Part of a negotiation retinue to Israel; American missiles brought the flight down.”
Her throat catches. “What about the rest of the team?” It was multinational collaboration, a coder from Saint Petersburg, an engineer from Peking, several analysts from elsewhere. Sittipong was the only Thai, their pride.
“Yulya and Tengfei are fine. They’re difficult to access. But some of the analysts aren’t so fine.” Chatsumon begins to pace, slow, hands behind her, officer-correct. “Some countries are better at protecting their intellectual assets than others. One was captured by the Americans, killed during interrogation. Another was assassinated.”
“I’m the only accessible one left. H
ow did they even know I’m part of—” Rinthira shakes her head. “Never mind.” A crucial point always leaks: no true secret exists.
“Phiksunee sent me the Americans’ routes and locations, with promises that they will be much impeded.” A smile, faint. “She worries for you; she always does, and she’s never been quite the same after you left. Lack of optimization, she says.”
Rinthira shuts her eyes. When she opens them again she is centered, readier. “I better get ready then.” Bulletproof gear. Guns. Scramblers, against sniper sighting.
“She advised you stay put; I don’t disagree. The Americans have stopped trying for Yulya and Tenfgei because they’re securely kept, but we have . . . not made a show of force.”
“A show of force would have the opposite effect. We don’t want America to think of us as a threat.”
“The time for that is past.” Chatsumon’s voice is mild. She slips an arm around Rinthira’s waist, slowly stroking her stomach. “America speaks a language of brute might, would understand no other. We’ve been a threat ever since Phiksunee went online and wrecked their infrastructure.”
From which they have never recovered: Phiksunee is more thorough than any human, shattering databases and corrupting communication protocols. She continues, even now, to disrupt it at a speed American engineers can’t equal. Anything that connects is hers and her siblings’ to scorch. There will be an effective countermeasure, one day—this is an arms race—but not now, not yet.
Morning sees Chatsumon and her bodyguard seeding an aegis around Rinthira’s house. The closest neighbors are several blocks away; targeted defense suits her home well. Rinthira, seized by a contrarian impulse, heads for the town center. They have time.
What was once Ayutthaya is now a handful of households, a municipal office, some essentials: hospital, market. Most of the ruins are uninhabitable, and the remaining power-water grid can service only a tiny population: two thousand in cityscape meant for fifty times that. It is testament to the war that a place this close to Krungthep has been so reduced, burned and drowned and burned again. But safe, for now, under Phiksunee’s protection.