by Rich Horton
Billie nodded once more and turned to face the monitor. I flashed a low “okay” sign at Mike and the screen sprang to life, showing the blandly pretty CGI avatar that Tasha’s system generated for Pitch. We’d have to look into the code to see when it had made the decision to start rendering animals with human faces, and whether that was part of a patch that had been widely distributed. I could see the logic behind it—the generic avatar generator was given instructions based on things like “eyes” and “attempting to use the system,” rather than the broader and more complex-to-program “human.” I could also see lawsuits when people inevitably began running images of their pets through the generator and using them to catfish their friends.
On the other side of the two-way mirror, Pitch perked up at the sight of Billie’s face on her screen. She opened her beak. Microphones inside the room would pick up the sounds she made, but I didn’t need to hear her to know that she was croaking and trilling, just like corvids always did. What was interesting was the way she was also fluffing out her feathers and moving the tip of her left wing downward.
“Hello, hello,” said her avatar to Billie. “Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello.”
“Hello,” said Billie. “My mom says I can talk to you again. Hello.”
“I’m hungry. Where am I? Hello.”
“I’m at Mom’s work. She does science here. I don’t know where you are. Mom probably knows. She called you.” Billie twisted to look at me. “Mom? Where is she?”
I pointed to the two-way mirror. “She’s right through there.”
Billie followed the angle of my finger to Pitch, who was scratching the side of her head with one talon. Her face fell for a moment, expression turning betrayed, before realization wiped away her confusion and her eyes went wide. She turned back to the screen.
“Are you a bird?” she asked.
The woman looked confused. “Hello, hello, I’m hungry, where am I?”
“A bird,” said Billie, and flapped her arms like wings.
The effect on Pitch was immediate. She sat up straighter on her perch and flapped her wings, not hard enough to take off, but hard enough to mimic the gesture.
“A bird!” announced the avatar. “A bird a bird a bird yes a bird. Are you a bird? Hello? A bird? Hello, can you hear me, hello?”
“Holy shit,” whispered Mike. “She’s really talking to the bird. The translation algorithm really figured out how to let her talk to the bird. And the bird is really talking back. Holy shit.”
“Not in front of my child, please,” I said, tone prim and strangled. The xenolinguists were going to be all over this. We’d have people clawing at the gates to try to get a place on the team once this came out. The science behind it was clean and easy to follow—we had built a deep neural net capable of learning, told it that gestures were language and that the human mouth was capable of making millions of distinct sounds, taught it to recognize grammar and incorporate both audio and visual signals into same, and then we had turned it loose, putting it out into the world, with no instructions but to learn.
“We need to put, like, a thousand animals in front of this thing and see how many of them can actually get it to work.” Mike grabbed my arm. “Do you know what this means? This changes everything.”
Conservationists would kill to get their subjects in front of a monitor and try to open communication channels. Gorillas would be easy—we already had ASL in common—and elephants, dolphins, parrots, none of them could be very far behind. We had opened the gates to a whole new world, and all because I wanted to talk to my sister.
But all that was in the future, stretching out ahead of us in a wide and tangled ribbon tied to the tail of tomorrow. Right here and right now was my daughter, laughing as she spoke to her new friend, the two of them feeling their way, one word at a time, into a common language, and hence into a greater understanding of the world.
Tasha would be so delighted.
In the moment, so was I.
Twelve and Tag
Gregory Norman Bossert
“ . . . Twelve and Tag,” we shouted, and Cheung added, “You two know it?”
Zandt lowered his brows and frowned.
Adra shook her head, looked around at us. She did that, searching faces for clues about what was expected of her. “You mean tee-ay-gee like T-complete Associative Gestalt? Crew’s got the sort of money for neural backup?” she asked.
Cheung said, “Not tech. It’s a bar game. A slam, a rap.”
Zandt’s brows lowered further over pale eyes.
“An improvised impression. And then you tell stories, the worst thing, stupidest thing, most painful thing you’ve ever done.”
“Or kindest,” added Nava, back from the bar with drinks balanced in both hands. And to our chorus of complaints, “That’s the way we do it—”
“—on Mars,” we shouted, the crew of the Tethys. All but Adra and Zandt. They weren’t really crew yet, not until this was done.
“This ain’t Mars,” Orit said, and bounced her head off the window behind her, layers of clear composite and beyond it the flat flat beige of Europa, Jupiter’s fat belly propped on the horizon.
“Something we do,” Perelman rumbled.
“Breaks the ice,” Orit said, to groans. All we did was break the ice, down into the ocean that lay underneath Europa’s surface.
“It’s not just ice that breaks,” Cheung said, “doing what we do.” His fingers mimed something snapping. “It’s equipment, people, whole ships sometimes. Got to know each other.”
“Gotta trust,” Nava said. She was harpoonist, which these days meant piloting a remote vehicle on a two-kilometer cable, and, as if to make up for that, everything about her was sharp. She gave Adra a sharp smile now, then flicked it at Zandt.
Adra was second-shift pilot, had been for two months. Lean and grey, swept-back eyes so dark they seemed opaque, or empty. This was her first shore leave with us; she’d come in mid-mission after her predecessor had lost an arm in a blowout.
Our assayer had just lost his nerve after that. That’s the position Zandt had recently dropped into. Literally: he’d landed in-system that morning from who-knew-where, resume in hand, “ship = Tethys” scrawled in the margin. He hung over the table like Jupiter over the surface out the window, blond hair swept back onto broad shoulders, something in the hard lines of his face keeping him from easy handsomeness.
Adra and Zandt were already signed by the captain, but contracts could be revoked or applicants left stranded if the crew decided against the hire. That’s why we were here.
We? The crew. Perelman was mate, solid, methodical, the wall between the captain and the rest. He left the running of things to Cheung, he’s navigator, and Yu, she’s main-shift pilot. Even the captain deferred to those two. Cheung, he was always in motion, always quick to find the right words. Yu was always still, always looking Out into the deep, yet somehow saw everything anyway.
Orit was cook; that’s not a junior role, not on a ship that spends six months at a time under the ice. She was likely to be at the bottom of any trouble or atop another crewmember, but she always cleaned up her own messes.
Who else? Nava you already know. Patel was there, engineer, and most of the hands: Keita and Barb, Deighton and Sintra. We filled all the spots around the one long, battered table, driving the other patrons into the corners or up to the bar. It was all deep-ocean crew in this place. There were other bars for the spacers, administrators, tourists, and if any of these wandered in here, they’d be driven out soon enough by the noise and the roughhousing and the smell that clung of Europa’s strange secret ocean.
That ocean was thick: with alien viruses, with complex hydrocarbons that triggered fatal autoimmune reactions, with larger creatures that fed on the sludge, and on each other, and on us. We scooped the sludge, trapped the creatures, sold the lot to brokers who sold in turn to the universities and corporations. The Outer System was one big boomtown, bigger than the whole damn Inner System by
orders of magnitude, by any metric.
“So we tell a story . . . ” Adra said.
“Two stories,” Yu said, “one of them true, one of them false.”
“And then we go around the table and vote on which was the lie.”
“A bet?” Zandt said.
“A confirmation,” Cheung said.
Perelman nodded, rumbled agreement.
“Though if we guess right, you buy a round,” Orit added.
Cheung said, “I’ll go first, so you know how it goes.” He laced his fingers together, closed his eyes, a beat, opened eyes and hands, took a breath. No Twelve and Tag for Cheung; the crew knew him too well. But if there had been, the tag would be “flight.” Fragile bones spread under his face like bird’s wings, bird’s eyes, too, black and always flitting, fingers light and fast on the ship consoles, on the table here. Hard to imagine him anywhere but Out, doing anything but Nav, but he’d been a singer back on Earth. The crew knew his stories.
“Stupidest, then,” Cheung started. “I was with the captain out at Saturn, a dozen years ago. Ice mining in the Rings. I was young, thought I knew the ship, thought I knew the system. So, we found a vein heavy with tholins.” A fleeting glance up at Zandt, who gave a slow nod.
“Natural organics, worth their weight in the Outer System for hydroponics, industry,” Zandt said.
Cheung nodded back. “We didn’t have processing facilities onship. Ice mining, you just grab hold of a piece, push it out to a moon or a station. Tholins, they’re dark, easy to see in the ice. If we had pulled up to Titan station with a twenty tonne chunk of that, the market would have been ready for us. They’d set a price before we even docked, lose us twenty percent, maybe more. So I had the idea to cut across to the research station around Enceladus, process there, ship the tholins back to Titan in tanks, hit the market and get out before they knew the score.
“Enceladus was far side of Saturn so we cut across the Rings, close above the clouds, serious v, flung ourselves out the far side.
“We hit something over the B Ring that didn’t show on sensors, probably just a dense pocket of dust, but we were moving fast. All I knew was, one minute I was watching the monitors, green down the board, and then woosh half the ship was gone. Main drivers, cargo. Seven crew. Left us in a spin that I couldn’t kill with the thrusters I had left. Left us on a course that didn’t go anywhere except Out.”
Orit shivered, and Yu got that far-gone look she got, straight through the wall and into the deep.
“Long range coms were gone. All we could do was hope Enceladus picked up our beacon, had someone in-station fast enough to catch us. Four days of that spin. Spin wouldn’t let you eat, wouldn’t let you sleep for more than a few minutes before you’d wake up, convinced you were falling. All we could do was watch the view, Saturn, Rings, stars, Saturn, Rings, stars. The captain and I and the one remaining crewmember: ‘I’m not backed up, I’ll be lost,’ she kept saying, round and round, until we had to sedate her.
“Thing was, I was backed up. A full T.A.G. back on Earth, nothing to be scared of, nothing to lose. I wasn’t scared, I was furious. I hadn’t had an update since I’d gotten to the Outer System. If I died and they brought me back, I’d lose a year, I’d lose those four days spinning across the Rings. And I couldn’t stand the idea of losing that view.”
Cheung’s lips twitched, a quick humorless grin.
“We’ll always want more than the tech can give us. And stupid masquerading as clever; that’s the worst kind.”
Adra looked around the table, looking for a hint from the crew. Some eyes met hers, some looked up at the low ceiling, sheet steel and pitted with rust, or out through the plexi at Jupiter.
“If you’re a restored copy, how do you know all this?” she asked, like an accusation.
Cheung shrugged. “Enceladus Station had been tracking us the entire time, got a tug out in time to snare us. That’s how the captain and I got into under-ice work, stuck on Enceladus without a ship. But the oceans here on Europa were deeper.” He took a sip, swallowed, and started his second story.
“A triangle is the strongest shape. Fact. People have known it for a long time, though it took Fuller back in the twentieth century to explain how that fact unfolds across what we know.
“I was twenty. Grad school in Hong Kong. That was right after the referendum, the Second Independence, the first successful neural-nano backups, and HK was the heart of everything that was . . . everything. I was singing all night, studying all day, drinking and drugging and dragging all night and day, no stop, no sleep. Had a boyfriend, Grant, kept me out of the worst of the trouble. Tall, always stooped over like he was looking for something he’d dropped. Couldn’t keep his glasses on straight. He was in the planetary navigation program with me, brilliant at it.”
Cheung turned his head, looked out across Orit and the window and the plains to Jupiter, a long quiet look for him.
“He was gentle in bed. Generous. Never minded my nights out, even though the nights were getting longer. Morning was our time. We’d tell each other that if we could ever afford to get T.A.G.ed, we’d just record one of those mornings and live in it forever.
“I was singing fado, it’d been an underground thing in Macau but suddenly HK was the right place, right time, and I was big. Advertising deals, guest spots on the telenovelas, corporate sponsorship from VanZ. I had company lawyers circling me like mad moons: sing here, be seen there, wear this, drink that, an endless supply of drugs, nano, people. Anything to keep me busy, anything to keep me there making money for them.
“So I got my own lawyer. Leslie. She was from Singapore. Tiny. Quiet. You’d be sitting in a room, forget she was there, and then she’d reach a hand out, touch your shoulder. Should have been a shock, but it was like . . . ”
Cheung’s fingers fluttered downward.
“ . . . rain falling, when you hadn’t realized you were hot and dry.
“Grant and Leslie, they started meeting evenings, talking, about me, mostly, and what I was in, and how to get me out of it. One day, Leslie was still there when I got home in the morning.
“Next five months . . . ”
His hands settled to the table.
“The next five months were perfect. Leslie broke deals, made new ones; suddenly I was getting paid for singing, money in the bank. Grant even came to the clubs to see me sing. He’d never risked the crowd on his own. The two of them would find a table near the front, and afterward I’d sit down with them, with no desire for anything, anyone, anywhere else.”
Adra leaned in, whispered to Nava, “Is this ‘kindest thing’? Because he already took ‘stupid.’ ”
Nava put a finger to her lips. Cheung gave Adra a glance. His fingers danced around the edge of his mug.
“Five months,” he continued, “and then Grant and I had our degrees. Nav certified, from UHK, any ship in the System would take us on. But Grant was talking about a PhD, teaching at the university. I’d sing, he said, and Leslie would make enough money to support the three of us, enough to get us T.A.G.ed. Nano-neural backups had only hit the market a couple of years before, but the startups were booming in HK and suddenly you only had to be filthy rich to get T.A.G.ed. Those VanZ billboards were everywhere; beautiful people doing beautiful things and then the image would freeze with one word splashed across it: Forever. That was before the hack on the Great Basin longstore, no reason to doubt that ‘Forever.’ ”
“I didn’t sleep for two nights after our certifications came through from the university. I walked, mostly, around and around the block. The HK night is too bright for stars and ships and moons, but I’d spent five years learning to do navigation in my head. No matter how I did the math, the course just led around that block again. ‘Forever.’
“So I transferred all the money I had to a bank on Mars. Took a shuttle up to orbit the next morning. When I left them, they were still asleep, Leslie laid perfectly straight as always, Grant sprawled diagonal, their heads together on the
pillow.
“Triangles. Too perfect. Too strong for me. I had to fly then, go Out, or never leave.”
He looked at Adra. “So, worst thing.”
Adra said, “You’ve made it out this far, and Jupiter the sharp edge of things these days, and that’s the worst you’ve done? I don’t believe it. Regret for the view, I buy, but not for the leaving. The first story is the true one.” She looked around at the crew. Nava smiled, sharp teeth and narrow eyes.
Yu held her hands up, palms out. “We’ve heard his stories.”
Perelman said, “It’s your round, just the two of you.” And looked at Zandt.
Who bit his lip and looked at the table, where Cheung’s fingers had lit amongst the glasses. “You wouldn’t be the first to see the trap in neuro-nano memories,” he said, a deep voice, not Perelman’s rumble, higher pitched but full, like the pedal tone on an organ. “Wouldn’t be the first to hope the Out offered more. Anyway . . . ” He looked up, caught Cheung’s gaze in his own. “This crew wouldn’t take you if you’d lost the captain a ship. First one’s the lie.”
Claps and stomps, and Patel slapped Zandt on the shoulder; might as well have slapped a stone. Adra’s face fell flat, not so much a frown as indifference.
“Truth,” Yu said. “The first story? That’s mine. I was the surviving crewmember. It was the navigator who lost it, though, terrified about being restored from backup and losing those years, that view. We didn’t sedate her; she took the drugs herself, all of them, two days before the tug caught us. Not that I wouldn’t have helped her if I’d known. She was more worried about losing her memories than about losing seven crew, the arrogant shit.” Yu was staring Out, straight through Adra, breathless, still. “Captain and I were the only ones left then, three months on Enceladus, stumbling from bar to bar, still spinning, until we met Cheung and he took us down under the ice.”
Cheung’s fingers brushed the top of Yu’s hand, paused for a beat.
Yu took a breath then. “I was T.A.G.ed too,” she said. “Would have been glad to lose those months, get to rediscover the Outer system again, see those views again for the first time.” She shrugged, a millimeter motion against the ice out the window. “Missed that chance. My backup was at Great Basin. All gone now.”