Clarkesworld: Year Three

by Genevieve Valentine

  “A non-fat venti misto,” Chakravarty said. That was Melanie’s drink. She made eye contact.

  “Oh, hi.”

  “How’s life among the proletariat treating you?”

  “I’m a manager,” she said. “Watch this.” Off came her cap and apron— “Tyler, cover me.” She quickly made two drinks and walked around the counter. “See?”

  “Great,” Chakravarty said. “Anyway, I have the list.” From his messenger bag he dug out a binder the size of the local Yellow Pages. “Twice as many as last time.”

  “And still no idea where he could be?” Then, as Chakravarty pointed to the binder, Melanie interrupted herself, “I mean, where he is.”

  “Moore’s law, you know. The longer the AI is out in the wild, the more servers are actually capable of supporting it, plus it’s Alife. It’s been eighteen months, so we can say that the number of nodes capable of holding him has doubled. Plus, who knows what it looks like by now. I’ve been closely reading my spam— ”

  “In that case, the misto is on the house.”

  “Heh,” said Chakravarty. “Anyway, a content analysis shows that lot of the AI’s utterances and the correspondence documents have been popping up.”

  “All his fiction’s in the public domain. Of course it would appear in spam.”

  “You’re still doing that, you know—calling it ‘he.’”

  “And you’re still calling him it.”

  Chakravarty leaned forward, an old and happy argument spelling itself out in his posture. “And you wanted to develop an AI, an Alife, because you didn’t like animal testing and psych exams. But you got too close to the idea of your thesis project being real. Did it need memories of a love life to qualify as sufficiently embodied?”

  “Well, you don’t,” Melanie said, snippy. She pushed the book away. “Why didn’t you just email this to me? Hardcopy isn’t even searchable,” Melanie said. She quickly corrected herself: “Easily searchable.” She made a show of flipping through the pages.

  “Well, anyway,” Chakravarty said, but he didn’t have anything else to say except that he missed Melanie and wanted her to come back to the lab and that a wild AI was still worth a paper or three and how ridiculous it was to quit school, but he couldn’t make himself mention any of that. So he pushed the book across the table to Melanie. “If you want to follow up, go ahead. I have things to do.” He looked around the coffee shop, all dark tones and shelves. “So do you, I bet.”

  Melanie sipped her drink. “If only I did.”

  Melanie often dreamed of Chakravarty. Sometimes she found herself back in school, struggling with the final exam of a course she had forgotten to ever attend, only to be granted a reprieve and an automatic A when Chakravarty’s death was announced over the loudspeaker of what was suddenly her fourth-grade classroom. The plastic desktop scraping against her knees felt thick and soft like a comforter, then she’d wake up. Or she dreamt of the bus ride to Providence, the grungy South Station and the long lines of kids in college sweatshirts. The mysterious letter that burned in her pocket. The house on Angell Street and Chakravarty’s body bubbling into a puddle of ichor and rotten-seeming fungi. Or she dreamt of the sort of day a coffee shop manager dreams about—a bit rainy, but warm inside, and the old smell of the bean surging back to the forefront like the first day of work. No lines, but enough customers to keep the store buzzing. And laptops. And then Lovecraft on all the screens. The image, black and white and shot through with static, like that old Superbowl commercial, opens his mouth—its mouth—and screams that he has correlated all the contents of his own mind. And he is afraid.

  Melanie woke up one morning and remembered that Lovecraft had, on one occasion, a complete story seemingly delivered to him in a dream. Without the resources of the university, she’d never be able to find a wayward AI hiding somewhere in the black oceans of the net, but she knew she could find a frightened man. First, talk to his friends.

  The Lovecraftian cabal was easy enough to find. Melanie already had long experience with being the girl in the comic shop, the girl in the computer lab, the girl in the gaming store. Dove soap and magenta highlights always went a long way toward getting boys to speak to her. The anime club led to the science fiction specialty shop and then to the “goth” store and its plastic gargoyles and stringy-haired vampire cashier which led, finally, to the soggy couch in the basement of the place that sold Magic cards and Pocky. They were there, and the dude in the fedora recognized her. Clearly the alpha of his pack, he swanned across the room, belly and the flapping lapels of his trenchcoat a step ahead the rest of him, and sat down next to Melanie.

  “I’m utterly horrid with names, but never forget a face,” he said. He had a smile. Decent teeth, Melanie noticed.

  “Melanie Deutsch. You came to my— ”

  “Ah. Yes. Now I remember everything.”

  For a long moment neither of them said anything. A few feet away someone rolled a handful of die and yelped in glee.

  “I know why you’re here,” he said.

  Melanie shrugged. “Of course you do. Why else would I be here?”

  The man fell silent again, pursed his lips, and then tried again: “I would say that the AI is an it, not a he.”

  “Oh?” Melanie said.

  “It can’t write. Not creatively anyway.”

  “Maybe he just doesn’t feel the need to write—I mean, it’s a goal-oriented behavior and he thinks he’s a ghost.”

  “Pffft,” the fedora man said. “He knew he wasn’t a ghost; he doesn’t believe in them. Lovecraft was a pretty bright guy, a genius by some measures. The program realized its own— ” he waved his hands on front of Melanie’s face, too close— “programmitude right off.”

  “And it was his idea to escape, maybe hitching a ride on your iPhone?”

  “No. We didn’t find the AI till a few months ago. It sought us out, after finding the online fanzine archive, and our club’s server,” he said. “We even tried to make a copy of it, but the DRM was too— ”

  “That’s not DRM,” Melanie said. “He wouldn’t let you. It’s human rights management— ”

  The fedora man snorted again. Melanie realized that she didn’t know his name, and that she wasn’t going to ask for it.

  “Say . . . do you want to talk to it?” Fedora asked. He dug into his coat pockets and pulled out a PDA. “This thing has a little cam, so it can respond to you . . . ” he muttered. Melanie held out a hand, but Fedora just held the device up to her face. “No touchie.”

  Melanie uttered an arbitrary phoneme. Not quite a huh.

  The Lovecraft AI appeared on the tiny screen. He’d . . . changed. Uglier now, jaw hyperinflated but the rest of his head narrow and his nose flat against his face. Eyes like boiled eggs, hair all but gone. Horrid, but somehow alive. “Hello, ma’am,” he said.

  “How are you?” Melanie found herself saying. She was as programmed as anyone else. That realization burst out of her, all sweat.

  “Why did you tell me,” the AI asked, “how exactly I died? How could anyone be expected to . . . persist knowing that? A universe of blasphemous horrors—finger puppets worn by a literary hand. I always knew that my life meant nothing, that all human life means nothing, but to experience it, to be in the void, like a doll cut out of paper only able to think enough just to fear, I-I just wanted to go home, but found myself . . . nowhere. And everywhere.” The fedora man’s meaty hand clamped over the PDA, so Lovecraft’s screams were muffled.

  Melanie reached into her backpack—Emily the Strange, smelled like coffee—and got her phone. It was a very nice phone.

  “Not it, he, ” she said. “He wants to go back to when he wasn’t afraid.”

  Fedora glanced down at the phone. “Oh, so you can make a copy?”

  “Don’t talk like he isn’t here,” Melanie said. “And I’m certainly not going to leave him with you.”

  “Well, have you ever considered that maybe it . . . uh, he, wants to stay?”

&nb
sp; Melanie gave the basement the once over. “No,” she said. “Plus, it . . . or he?”

  “You know what I— ”

  “If it’s an it, you’re in possession of stolen goods.”

  “Fine. He. He came to this place! He came to me, he —

  “If Lovecraft is a he, well, God knows what that’ll mean. Kidnapping, maybe. Is he competent to make his own decisions? Does he have a Social Security number? Do you want the feds going through your systems and digging up all your hentai and stolen music to find out?”

  Fedora raised his PDA over his head. “No, no. You’re just— ”

  “And then there are the patents we filed. We trademarked the look and feel of his chair, too. But you can turn him over to me instead of to the district attorney.” She smirked at Fedora, but then tilted her head to speak to the AI. “Not among people, but among scenes,” she said, almost as if asking a question. A muffled yawp came from the PDA.

  Melanie, on wind-swept Benefit Street, venti misto in one hand, Lovecraft in the other. Lovecraft says that he is Providence. That’s programmed. Melanie smiles and sometimes he smiles back. That’s not.

  About the Author

  Nick Mamatas is the author of several novels, including Sensation and Bullettime, and of over eighty short stories. His work has appeared in New Haven Review, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Long Island Noir, Steampunk: Revolutions and many other magazines and anthologies. As editor of the Haikasoru imprint of Japanese science fiction in translation, Nick was nominated for the 2010 Hugo award. As an anthologist, Nick co-edited the award-winning Haunted Legends with Ellen Datlow and The Future is Japanese with Masumi Washington.

  Celadon

  Desirina Boskovich

  I was six years old when I shifted between worlds for the first time.

  My mother and I were in our little apartment in the center of the world, the part that got built first. The world was new then and the nanites still busy about their work. The world has stretched much further now.

  Our apartment was small but cozy, bathed in a vague light that spilled everywhere yet came from no particular source. Someone who had seen the first earth might have called it moonlight, or so we believed. None of us had seen earth for ourselves . . . certainly not me. Our artificial moonlight enshrined the city, slanting from every angle, drifting in a manufactured sky.

  I sat at the table alone, drinking weak green tea from a chipped white teacup. Long wet hair fell around my shoulders, fresh from the bath, dampening my fuzzy robe.

  I took a sip, set the teacup down, and looked at the table. A soft layer of green moss crept across it. As I watched, moss tendrils advanced toward me, trembling like slick fingers. The moss rustled as it grew, swallowing the legs of chairs.

  The window had become a stained mosaic of asparagus and emerald. A small white butterfly frolicked around me, then landed on the rim of my cup.

  I felt a glow of amber warmth, like the safety of cuddling into my mother’s fragrant sheets, listening to her lullabies as I fell asleep.

  But then I looked down. The ghostworms were poking their heads up, emerging implausibly through the concrete floor. Their slimy heads waved blindly as they wriggled and squirmed beneath the furniture.

  I jumped up and knocked over my teacup, which bounced and clattered to the floor. A wash of pale green tea dribbled across my white robe. My mother rushed in.

  Then the light changed, and everything resolved to normal. The table was spotless white. Suddenly, I became aware of how clean everything was: synthetic and flawless, wrapped in an artificial sheen.

  “What happened, sweetheart?” my mother asked, picking up my teacup. The spill seeped into the floor and disappeared, swallowed by thirsty nanites.

  “Nothing,” I said, remembering the way the butterfly had landed curiously on my cup. “Can I sleep in your bed tonight?”

  “Hmm,” she said, which meant yes.

  In my mother’s bedroom, lace curtains covered the small window, shuttered to keep out the light. A flame flickered in the lamp on the desk. Her sheets were soft and smelled like lavender.

  Usually she sang to me, but that night, I made her tell me the story. I knew it already, but I loved hearing it again and again. “Tell me about how it was, when you found Celadon, before I was born.”

  My mother loved to tell this story almost as much as I loved to hear it. Even if there were parts she skipped over. “Well,” she said. She tucked a long strand of white hair behind her ears, her green eyes glistening with memories of far away days. “I was exploring with my crew on our ship, a beautiful ship. Her name was Alanis. She’s retired now, but you should have seen her. Maybe someday we can go down to the docks and visit. She was so slick, so smart, so . . . gentle. You know about our home-world: it was a lovely place to live, but it was too full. It was called Tenne. So, even though we loved Tenne, we knew we’d need another world soon where we could have our children— ” at this point in the story she always touched my nose “ —and they could have their children. We spent years with our ship, exploring the darkness, looking for a good spot to grow another world. A planet we could make our own.”

  I could hardly imagine the years-long journey in that smart, gentle ship. I was only six years old, after all. Back then, I didn’t understand how old my mother really was. I’m not sure if I even understand it now. “And finally you found the planet,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. She looked over my head, as if she was looking out the window, though it was closed. “We descended closer and closer, and the surface of the planet was this beautiful green. So we called it Celadon. We sent the bots down to do readings, investigate the surface, see if it was safe. We had to wait for a while, but I already knew. I felt it, somehow, you know? We were home. By that time, I was already expecting you.”

  “And I was the very first baby born on Celadon,” I interjected self-importantly.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you were. But before that, we sent the nanites down to the surface of the planet, and they began building a new world for us, just like the cities we’d left behind on Tenne.”

  It was a lovely story, the beginning of a myth. And my mother was the heroine.

  It was a lovely story, but it wasn’t entirely true.

  But no one knew that at first, except the original crew of the spaceship from Tenne. And they didn’t have anything to say about it. Waves of new settlers came in every year or so, and they all viewed my mother as a heroine, too. I remember the ceremony they staged, honoring her with a medal on the steps of the newly constructed city hall. Her white hair was just as luminescent as the marble steps. They hung a glistening silver medal around her neck. She was brave and beautiful, a conqueror and a pioneer.

  But when I was twelve, the anthropologists finally arrived. They were angry.

  Not all of them were human. They were a motley group, a strange menagerie of feathers and wings and awkward tusks and shining cyborg limbs. This was not good. Celadon was a human planet, discovered and populated by ancient earth-stock. The others tended to be a bit resentful. They thought the humans had too many planets already.

  They met in the city hall, the same one where my mother had been honored years ago. I sat in the last row of chairs, my pale hair falling in my eyes. I listened as my mother explained her case to the strange and unsympathetic panel of judges. And for the first time, I heard the whole story.

  There had been life on this planet: a natural ecosystem. An endless network of worms crawled just beneath the surface. Enormous flocks of butterflies lived in the trees, roaming the oceans of moss. When they landed en masse, they could shroud a tree in shimmering snow.

  The scouting bots’ findings corroborated those of the few anthropologists who’d landed on this planet some years earlier. Without further intensive study—by the anthropologists, of course—it was impossible to rule out the potential that the worms and butterflies had been sentient life forms.

  They no longer existed on Celadon. They had been de
stroyed. My mother had given the order.

  Two years before the ship had arrived at the planet that would become Celadon, the travelers received the news from Tenne. Among the news, there was the gruesome story of a ship that left just before Alanis. This ship had discovered a new planet, odd but livable. There was only one possibly-sentient life form: a species of small reptiles, lizard-like creatures that traveled in swarms and packs. The settlers had already been on the ship for years, and they were determined to co-exist peacefully, while the anthropologists studied the reptiles. Somehow, the reptiles infiltrated the colony. They massacred the settlers, leaving nothing but regurgitated bones and walls smeared with blood. The nanites were already tidying the remains when the next wave of settlers arrived.

  “So I did what I thought was right,” my mother said, facing the panel without flinching. “I wanted this planet to be safe.”

  At her order, nanites swarmed the planet, pulsing the surface with brutal light. The worms and butterflies and moss that coated the surface were destroyed. The planet was scrubbed clean.

  The hearings were long, the panelists long-winded. They called expert witnesses, and the settlers on the first ship called their own.

  Sometime during this long proceeding, the shift happened again. I watched with interest as the windows darkened with moss and the floor disintegrated into a mass of ghostworms. I was still surrounded by people, but no panelists. Things were strangely silent in this world. No one felt the need to speak.

  A man sat just ahead of me, listening intently to nothing in particular. As I watched, a ghostworm wriggled out of his left ear, explored the back of his neck with a probing tip, then slid into the right ear.

  I felt the amber glow again, the numbing warmth. The bench I sat on disintegrated, then the wall beside me—whole patches consumed by a black rot, eaten wafer-thin. The moss consumed windows, and white butterflies wandered in through broken panes.