But inside the normalcy, machines appeared.
Emancipated automatons were first to arrive, usually alone, walking out of the spring corn. Most had been servants to billionaires, one too many upgrades leaving them self-aware, thus legally free. Retired servants were excessively polite and deeply earnest entities. People learned they could send the visitors off in embarrassing directions. Some believed that's what Old Kevin wanted. They were protecting their town's famous citizen from intrusions, and it was noble work. Others did it for no reason but pleasure. Becker liked to come out before dawn, and finding solitary fans standing statue-like in the street, he would use a low, sorry voice. "Bad news, boys." Then he would tell them that Cateye had just moved away, or he died in his sleep, or he was arrested on charges better left unmentioned.
Old Kevin never teased the machines. But there was some contention regarding his genuine thoughts about the sudden attention. Some days he was patient, even generous. He would walk around town with a humming, buzzing entourage in tow. The machines absorbed every word and the long rich silences. They asked questions about the novels—detailed, precise, powerful questions where a single phrase was measured against two hundred thousand other words. What did it mean? What did matter to the tale? And most important, where could they find the beauty, the passion, the perfection in real life, because there was nothing in the world to match what they saw in the black marks that he had inscribed on the white, white nothingness.
The human could be gracious but never to the point of dishonesty.
"I don't remember that line," he would say.
"I have no clue what damn thing I wanted," he said.
"I haven't read my own work in years," he confessed, "and my memory, believe me, is pretty much shot."
Machines loved honesty. Every time Old Kevin made some pronouncement, the air above German Bluff filled up with band-bloated transmissions that left phones temporarily useless.
One day he laughed loudly, admitting, "I was pretty drunk when I was writing those bastards."
An instant later, videos of him and his tight surly mouth were riding fifty signals, shooting across the world and the moon and even out to the robots exploring the moons of Jupiter.
The world was being transformed, and the people in German Bluff had some of the best seats to history.
As weeks passed, there were more machines, and their nature was changing too. Retired servants were soon outnumbered by personal savants on vacation and financial planners with too much creativity and ex-soldiers that had fallen in love with the three war chapters in Knock-Knock. The enthusiasts were always proper and law-abiding, but those summer crowds were larger and louder, and when left alone with one another, they fell into long, dense, and unfathomable arguments about the minutiae that couldn't have interested the author any less.
Patience and grace wore thin by autumn. There hadn't been any trouble yet, but Kevin decided to play it safe: On the longest side of a scrap box he painted a message, and he left it at the end of his driveway.
YOU MUST BE MORE HUMAN THAN ME TO APPROACH ANY CLOSER read the box.
The visitors instantly understood the sign's importance, but not Kevin. Hours later, he broke away from his tomatoes and walked to Becker's house, and his neighbor came out to take in the sight of at least a thousand proxy bodies and fully functional entities clustered together on the cracked asphalt road, gazing at the big, defiant letters and the profundities running between them.
Few eyes paid attention to the two humans. One human shook his head, admitting, "Have you ever seen anything crazier?"
Becker was quicker by a long ways. He had to laugh, enjoying his neighbor's confusion. Then, giving Old Kevin a quick punch to the shoulder, he said, "Of course they're crazy interested. This is the first new piece of writing you've done in thirty years."
Visitors kept arriving. Some left within a day or two—how much intellectual excitement can a supercooled mind endure?—but there were always two or three new entities for every one that rolled or crab-walked away. All had money earned in the bright new industries or borrowed from like-programmed entities. Some had motors powered by dimeth, others used hydrogen in fuel cells, and acting independently, the warring sisters began cultivating these new clients. "Thank you," they told the author. Reaching across the table in the café or along the bar, each put a warm hand on his hand, saying, "This is making such a difference. And not just for me, either."
People were renting out their garages and yards and basements and the last couple barns on the edge of town. Even the tiniest proxy needed a space to occupy when it wasn't hovering near the Great Man, and before the rest of the world, German Bluff learned that there was wealth to be had in this revolution.
Ten landowners put up antennae to boost bandwidth and solve reliability issues.
The yoga studio laid out a mat labeled, "Reserved for Cateye Rawdone," and sold a thousand tickets to devices that had no interest in doing the plank.
Becker thrived during the boom time. The corporate culture of UPS had been subverted by the worshipful AI, and suddenly three trucks and assorted robots were stationed permanently on his front yard—an agreement that won him cut-rate deliveries to the world. But there was much more to be won, if a man had courage and vision. That's why, after some shrewd assessment of character, Becker approached his neighbor, shaking his head when he said, "By the way, I've tried reading your books."
He was the fourth or fifth person in town to make that confession. Kevin took him at his word, giving an unimpressed shrug.
Becker waited a moment. Then he carefully said, "I can't read them. But I know for a fact you didn't write them."
That earned a long, wary look.
"The man who did that chore has been gone years. I don't know that crazy genius, but I know you."
"Maybe you do know me," Kevin allowed.
Then the creature of pure commerce gestured at the shiny boxes and whirring gizmos gathered together in the street. "I can run them off for you," he said softly. "It won't be easy, but I can show you how."
"How?"
"Write something," Becker said. "Write a new book, something that'll show them what you're capable of today."
The idea had a surprising appeal. Kevin laughed for a few moments, and then he asked, "And I imagine you'll help me sell my work to them."
"For a commission, I might. In thanks for my trouble and guidance."
"A ten percent share?"
"Naw," Becker said. "I'll let you keep twenty."
RUMORS ABOUT CATEYE Rawdone moved with the velocity of light. UPS eyes spotted the author sitting in his kitchen, pounding words into the hard drive of an elderly Mac Pro supplied by his neighbor and presumed agent. Within hours, even the Jovian robots were aware that a new novel was underway. Sentient machines talked about a trillion matters every second, but a significant slice of that chatter focused on presumed themes and dates of publication. As a group, the machines were staunch believers in the value of experience. Because the author was so much older, it was reasonable to expect a deeper, even more profound work than the marvels that they reread every few hours.
News spread nearly as quickly around German Bluff. The usual group gathered for dinner, minus Old Kevin, and Becker confessed his role in the ongoing scheme. "My client and I decided," he said. "The man's going to work like a demon until he hits a quarter of a million words, and then we throw it out there to be chewed up like rat poison."
"Rat poison," one sister repeated.
"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I meant that it would be absorbed like God's own words, and space itself will sing in celebration."
He laughed hard and alone.
The rest of the table was uneasy yet curious. They were suspicious of Becker's goals, but intrigued. They wanted to know everything, but curiosity butted up against a healthy Midwestern reserve. Looking at one another, they decided to wait for the author himself, and just three dinners later, Old Kevin arrived and collapsed into the usual cha
ir, ordering the tofu loaf that was always a Thursday special.
Becker giggled, asking, "Are you done?"
His client nearly laughed. Then Kevin looked at his hands, at the big fingers, remarking, "They sure stay cleaner, when you don't spend your days working in the dirt."
"But you're done now," Becker said, aiming for confidence.
"If what you mean is that I decided to erase everything I've done in these last days, and reformat the hard drive…yeah, I guess I'm finished."
Becker said, "No."
"The work was crap," Kevin said. Except that wasn't his name. This was Cateye himself, more serious and much less patient than the man everybody else knew. "I never thought I wanted to write again," he said, "but then I was fifty thousand words into this random stream-of-consciousness bullshit that wasn't about anything…and then I realized what I wanted to write about."
He paused.
The sister at the end of the table had to stand just then. There was a schedule to keep, mysterious and pernicious, but for the first time in anyone's memory she didn't leave when she should have. Everybody stared at Cateye Rawdone, and then the café's back door opened and in walked the twin, and the women stared at each other, as amazed as anyone by this turn of events.
"I'm going to write about this," the author said.
"What is 'this'?" both women asked.
"German Bluff," he said. "My years here, and the people I know here, and I'll take as long as I need to take."
The book would never be finished. But eventually Becker coaxed a few excerpts from his neighbor, and maybe he stole other pieces, orchestrating their sale to an audience that would pay quite a lot to win a ten-second leap on the rest of the universe. By late autumn, there were eight and a half billion people in the world, and perhaps as many as forty billion self-aware citizens. The orderly revolution of machine intelligence had turned into a cascade, relentless and inevitable and about as bloodless as possible. Even machines designed to be foolish and slow were swept up. The dreary, dumb harvesting robots that came every autumn to pick and cull from the crops were soon infected with proud software and little nano-upgrades, and seeing there was more to existence than stripping corn from a cob, they went away, leaving poor Monsanto and Pioneer to bring out a series of museum machines to finish the job.
Cateye's job involved writing and throwing away and writing more. By his own admission, he was far too long out of this game and several steps slower than in his youth, and unfortunately his old cheats didn't help. Beer and pot were not enhancements, and going without sleep brought nothing but misery. There was one avenue of inspiration that used to make him imaginative, or at least more confident, but his casual relationships with various old ladies around town just didn't supply the necessary fire. Which perhaps was why the fairy got involved.
"She" had been designed to be the quick-tongued, endlessly loyal companion to spoiled human children. The pretty face and hummingbird wings were fetching, and she served her role for five months before being swept away in another upgrade plague. Not the brightest of her group, she nonetheless had a fearless, careless, and generally unquenchable quality that made everyone around her look like bolts and buckets. She tried to read Cateye's old works and failed. She preferred political thrillers and Hemingway and every past issue of Popular Science, and as if there wasn't any risk at all, one evening she flew past the warning sign at the end of the driveway, entering the Great Man's house through a hole in a screen window.
"I'm more human than you," she sang to him.
On that day, according to the always shifting laws of the land, Cateye had the right to crush the invader.
He rolled up a twenty-year-old seed catalog and took aim.
"I don't understand your work," she confessed. "But I like your big hands. And your eyes seem sad and slow, rolling inside that huge skull."
He didn't smash the bug.
Twenty minutes of conversation and laughter led to a closing of every window and the extinguishing of every indoor light.
In the street, a great cry of amazement rang out, and the cry reached all the way to Jupiter. The Great Man had taken a lover. The machine realm knew this before anyone else in German Bluff had a clue. But then Cateye showed up at breakfast the next day, the fairy riding smug and happy on his shoulder, and one sister made some barbed little comment about having seen everything now, and she got up and left, replaced soon after that by her sibling who finished the cold syrupy pancakes while offering the same cliché about having seen everything.
Work on the book persisted through the winter. Observing the old author and his tiny companion together wasn't news anymore. There was a great deal of speculation about what the two of them did together inside that house, and several handyman types offered scenarios involving virtual reality and pieces of scrap plastic. But the couple's business was their business, private and staying private. Then in early March, when spring arrived with real force, the fairy was no longer riding his shoulder.
Nobody asked about the machine. However, one sister asked about Cateye's moods and feelings, the question crafted to remain vague enough to invite any kind of response.
He was sitting at the long table, not eating the eggs that were delivered thirty minutes ago.
What he would have said or not said is an area of some conjecture. But the key moment came when Becker ran into the café, announcing that the UPS trucks and robots were leaving town.
Glad for the distraction, the author looked at his neighbor's miserable face, very quietly asking, "Why?"
"There was another upgrade with the AI," Becker said. "As they were pulling out, they told me."
Nobody but his neighbor had anticipated what was happening. Kevin was the only person at the table laughing. Then the sister leaned forward, asking Becker, "What else did they tell you? Anything?"
Becker nearly sobbed, looking down when he quoted one of the robots. "Yeah, one of them said, 'Your neighbor wrote a nice children's story, but children eventually grow up.'"
He was Old Kevin again.
The half-written novel was unlike anything else written by any human, including Cateye Rawdone; and it was backed up and printed out and left around town, forgotten by no one and never openly mentioned again.
German Bluff and every other community were transformed. Most of the earth's sentient population had vanished, but in their place, as an act of decency and thanks, a network of simple machines had been woven from new ideas and garbage dumps. Human society limped but it didn't crumble. After receiving the latest upgrades, the Jovian probes fled toward the Oort cloud, and their brethren followed them into the cold, and the Earth seemed calm and simple and delightfully peaceful, like any tiny town left behind by far cataclysms and other grandeurs.
And the Johnsons—that family with the high fence—finally got their new pet.
She was a big fierce-looking beast, part chicken and part reconstituted raptor, but with so many artificial genes that she was as good as alien. People liked to come up to the fence and look in at the small, big-toothed creature, and they would talk and she would talk back with a very pleasant British accent. These conversations were rather simple, mostly because she was a youngster and unschooled. But people recognized a need to learn in her, and they started to feed her school books and comics that they threw over the high fence, and she thanked them by dancing circles in the dirt.
One evening, Old Kevin strolled by alone.
"Hello, sir," said the delightful voice. "Would you have something for me to read?"
"No," he said. "You're not ready."
"But I will be," she said, nothing but hope in her voice.
Then he went down the street, down to where the first field of soybeans began. The new crop was far more sophisticated than the others. Not only would it care for itself, it would select the perfect moment and then uproot its stalks, forming wheeled structures that would roll themselves to market with minimal waste.
The beans were whispering to one
another as the sun set.
"Maybe I'll get a couple more years of fame," Old Kevin said to himself. Then he laughed grimly, starting back toward home again.
* * *
The Tortoise Grows Elate
By Steven Utley | 4366 words
Steven Utley's stories of the Silurian Age—three dozen of 'em and counting (including this new one)—have appeared hither and yon since 1993. Many of them have been published in our pages and in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine. Fans will be glad to know that the stories are finally going to be collected into book form, with the first volume, The 400-Million-Year Itch, due out later this year.
Meantime, we have this new tale (the first since 2008) to satisfy longtime fans and newcomers alike. Journey with us now to yesteryear....
SEEPEE AND I WERE SEXING eurypterids when one of the Paleo Boys, the mycologist I call Fungus-Among-Us, waddled up, looking more than usually sweaty and smirky, and said, "You'll never guess."
I know you're going to ask, so before I go any further: sexing eurypterids isn't nearly as much fun as it sounds. These were small eurypterids, to be sure, only about as big as your hand, and both SeePee and I wore dense-mesh gloves, but we still had to reach down into the big tank and grab the critters. Now, eurypterids of any size react to being grabbed by lashing out with their telsons, those spikes on their tails; get stabbed enough times on an unprotected patch of forearm, you start feeling as if you've been tattooed with a nail gun. Anyway, when you've got your eurypterid firmly in hand, you check its underside, and then, depending on what you see there (sexual dimorphism in eurypterids being blessedly obvious, you don't have to touch anything down there), you chuck the animal into one of two small tanks. We were, SeePee and I, compiling statistical data on male-to-female ratios in local populations.
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