Shine

by Jetse de Vries

  She stopped talking. He’d stepped back and was squinting at her with clenched fists, searching her face for any hint of mockery. Eventually, finding none, he let his hands relax.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely. There’s something about you that’s fascinating. I can’t stop looking at you.”

  He frowned, hesitant for the first time since she’d met him.

  “Most people see the scar and turn away...”

  Lisa took his hand. His fingers were soft and cool.

  “Come on, let’s go,” she urged.

  He turned his head and gave the open door a long, thoughtful look. Then he cracked a genuine smile that lit up his eyes. It was the first she’d seen from him and it sent a small shiver of unexpected pleasure through her.

  “Okay,” he said.

  WHEN THEY GOT to her flat, Stéphane fired up her laptop. He wanted to check and double-check every aspect of their plan.

  She left him staring thoughtfully at the screen and went to make coffee. When she came back, he stretched and looked up at her.

  “I think this is going to work,” he said. “With a big enough portable hard disk, and access to the network, we can download everything onto the disk and walk out, run the script to uplift them later.”

  Lisa raised her eyebrows. “You want to download all the AIs?”

  “Why not? I know where we can get a big enough disk, and I see no reason to leave them imprisoned there.” He shook his head in a quick, fluid gesture. “Of course, this will implicate you, very deeply. Are you sure you want to go ahead?”

  Lisa rubbed her eyes. This was her opportunity, her last chance to do something worthwhile before Pierre and the company ground her down to dust. There’d be Hell to pay later, but she’d work something out. She was sure she would.

  Besides, she thought with a twitch of the lips, this would anger Pierre no end, and that was a good enough goal in itself.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Stéphane smiled at her. He shut down the laptop and they took their coffee to the couch. She offered to watch a movie with him, and he surprised her by selecting a romantic comedy. He sat next to her on the couch, taking in every nuance of the plot with unexpected attention; hungering, she thought, for something he’d never quite have, an emotion he’d never had the chance to feel.

  LISA WOKE THE next morning in her own bed, to the insistent ringing of her alarm clock. Stéphane was sitting cross-legged on the end of the bed. They were both fully clothed, and she had the unnerving impression he’d been sitting there all night, watching her sleep. The curtains were open and she could see the sky, which was grey and dismal, the colour of old newsreel footage, scratchy with rain.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hello.”

  He rose to his feet in a graceful, fluid motion, then hopped lightly from the bed and followed her as, rubbing her eyes and yawning, she led him through to the kitchen.

  She found two clean bowls and a box of cereal, and added two glasses of tap water on the side.

  As he ate, Stéphane was silent, twirling his spoon in the cereal, concentrating on the cracked bowl she’d given him as if he could fix it with the sheer power of his will.

  “Look,” he said eventually. “It’s not you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He gave a quick shake of his head. “Last night. I don’t think I can give you more than that.” He stabbed the bowl, biting his lip. “I know what it should feel like to care for you, for anybody. I can fake it. But I’m not sure I can make it real for you.”

  “You care about the AIs,” Lisa said.

  He shrugged. “As much as I care about anything. Which isn’t much, as things go. But I don’t want you to torment yourself. I know you don’t really believe in our cause and I’m worried the only reason you’re here helping us is that you’re attracted to me.”

  “Is that so bad?”

  “No, no, of course it isn’t. I’m very flattered. You’re the first person since the accident. But now I feel responsible for you, as if I’ve drawn you into this under false pretences.”

  He put his spoon down. “The thing is, I don’t think I can love you the way you want me to and I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  Lisa ran a hand through her hair.

  “It’s okay,” she said, the lie rolling off her tongue as smoothly as if she’d practised it. “I won’t be.”

  TODAY, THERE WERE no protesters in front of the Church’s headquarters, but Lisa still didn’t want to risk going in through the front lobby. Even without the scarf, Stéphane was too distinctive. They went in through the basement car park.

  “You’ve got everything you need?” she asked.

  Beside her, Stéphane nodded. Where she was dressed in her usual cheap grey jacket and trousers, he wore an impeccable pinstripe business suit and held himself with the arrogant ease of an executive, his shiny black shoes and bright tie drawing attention from the scar wrapped around his temple. He had a 500-zettabyte disk concealed in his attaché-case, which he planned to plug into the Church’s network in order to download the AIs and transport them out of the building.

  A classic smash-and-grab, Lisa thought grimly, and tried not to remember the detached concentration with which he’d showered and dressed.

  I can’t give you more than this.

  No. She put his words out of her mind. She couldn’t afford to let her disappointment interfere with what they were doing. She turned around to give the parking lot a final check. It was almost deserted at this early hour, with only two cars parked near the access ramp. Then, satisfied, she slid her security card into the reader and pushed the turnstile to get into the building. She handed her card back over the steel bars to Stéphane.

  “You now,” she said. On the security log, she’d show up as having entered twice but she knew, because she’d seen Pierre do it with an engineer who’d forgotten his pass, that the logs wouldn’t be checked for a while, if at all. An AI, even a weak one, would have spotted the discrepancy at once, but all the AIs were busy beaming their petaflops of prayers into the stratosphere, their time too valuable to be squandered on such a menial task as door security.

  Stéphane slid the card in. Lisa held her breath but the LED flashed green, and let him through.

  “Good,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  SHE’D EXPECTED TO be stopped at some point; on some level, she’d even been preparing for it. But the Redemptionists they passed in the lush corridors held sheaves of papers and talked into mobile phones with the impatience of people who were too wrapped up in their own mornings to notice anyone else, and they walked on without attracting a second glance.

  The floor was parquet, covered with luxurious Afghan carpets which made no noise as they trampled across them. They bypassed a call centre and several offices, most of which were empty this early, and the kitchen, which featured a hot-drinks dispenser that Lisa knew from experience produced only coffee that tasted of sawdust and bleach.

  By the time they reached the small server room where she usually worked, her nerves were shot to ribbons. She pushed the metal door, her hands shaking, and her heart almost jumped out of her chest as the hinges creaked.

  “Here?” Stéphane asked dubiously.

  The room was a small cube with bare walls, its ceiling crisscrossed with pipes and exhaust vents. In the centre stood the forbidding mass of the secure server, a mess of cooling fans and electrical spaghetti. “Yeah,” Lisa said. She knelt, and connected her laptop to the server. “I did wire the network for this place.”

  He was also a geek, and he understood her at once. “And you still have access to it?”

  “I hadn’t quite finished,” Lisa said. She logged onto the administrator resources, and asked for a list of all the entities currently running on the network, listed by occupied bandwidth. “Here you go,” she said.

  Stéphane knelt by her side, his hand on her shoulder, his knees brushing hers, and she had to bite her
lip to contain her yearning.

  The bandwidth resources of ten vast, ponderous entities blinked on the screen: the graphs slowly shifting over time to show the bandwidth occupation, the flow of bytes across the network, the spikes in processing power for each of them.

  Lisa, fascinated, couldn’t tear her eyes from the laptop. She’d had no idea...

  “Hum,” Stéphane said. He pulled out the hard-disk. “Good thing I planned large. I had no idea they’d have so many of them.” He dragged two cables to the disk’s port and plugged them in. “This is going to take some time.” His lips worked, silently calculating. “Half an hour, provided I can coax this disk to operate at its maximum download rate.” He opened a terminal on his laptop, and his fingers flew across the keyboard, entering an arcane series of instructions in a programming language Lisa didn’t recognise. She withdrew slightly, watching him: his face transfigured by concentration, his lips working in some inhuman tongue, the laptop almost an extension of his hands. Was he a man or a machine? She could imagine him shaking his head, telling her it made no difference. And yes, both of those, man and AI, were free, thinking beings. But one of those could love her back and the other could not—and that made all the difference.

  Behind her, the door opened and she turned with a jolt, coming suddenly, unexpectedly face-to-face with Pierre, her supervisor.

  “What are you doing here so early?” he said, equally startled.

  “I’m not—” Lisa started, wincing, struggling for an explanation. She’d forgotten Pierre’s threats to come down and fire her face-to-face. But Pierre was looking past her and his gaze had already settled on Stéphane, hunched over the laptop.

  “I see,” he said.

  He took Lisa by the lapel. “Stand still,” he said. He fumbled in his pocket for his mobile phone, to call security. But at that moment, Stéphane rose and turned in a fluid, almost inhuman gesture, and Pierre’s lip curled at the sight of his scar.

  “Jesus, Lisa. I thought you had better taste than that.”

  Lisa stopped breathing. Her hands contracted into claws. The walls and pipes blurred at the edge of her vision, leaving only Pierre at the end of the tunnel: Pierre and his shiny suits; Pierre and his total lack of support and sympathy; Pierre who symbolised and embodied everything that had gone wrong for her since she left university...

  She pushed Pierre away from her with all her strength and he staggered against the open door, pulling her with him, his grip still tight on her jacket. Unbalanced, she slammed into him and felt the impact as his head hit the edge of the door. Horrified, she jumped back and he fell at her feet, limp and unmoving.

  She stood, her hands shaking, wondering how it had come to this. Stéphane was there to steady her. His hands touched her shoulders, solid and reassuring. “Don’t worry, he’s not dead,” he said in his matter-of-fact way, looking down at the crumpled body with impassive eyes. “He’s just unconscious.”

  Lisa let out a long, uncertain breath. “You think so?”

  He grinned at her, an expression that changed his whole stance, making her heart tighten. “I can hear him breathing. Now come on, help me. We’re going to stash him away from sight while the download finishes.”

  THEY WALKED OUT the same way they’d come in: first Lisa with her pass, then Stéphane.

  She still couldn’t believe they’d pulled it off.

  “I’ve uploaded a batch of nasty viruses onto their server,” Stéphane said. “It should be a while before they recover.”

  He went on, as they climbed the exit ramp: “We planned for this. My group has contacts with Pensamiento Aplicado. They have servers of their own, to upload the AIs and give them a whole new world to play and develop in, where the Church won’t find them.”

  That stopped her. “Pensamiento Aplicado?” she said. “The Spanish consulting firm?” The ones who had been quietly solving problems the world over?

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “It’s a think tank of liberated and uplifted AIs like these.” He patted the case containing the hard disk. “Not many people know that. We haven’t gone public yet. We’re letting them work behind the scenes, applying their minds to the world’s problems, finding ways to prove their worth as independent, free-thinking beings. They’ll pave the way for general acceptance.”

  Changing the world, one step at a time. He’d found his goal, his place in the world. “Stéphane...”

  He shook his head. “Andrea and Danielle have rented a boat. We sail tonight for Bilbao. You should think about leaving too. You’re burnt here. When your boss wakes up—”

  “I know,” Lisa said. “I...”

  She looked at him: his smart suit, his rugged face, with the scar pink and white in the morning sunlight.

  “Do you need an extra hand?” she asked.

  He looked at her, eyebrow raised. “That’s a big decision. Are you sure you won’t regret it?”

  She looked up at the buildings lining the street. Paris had been fun in the early days—but those days were long gone, and it was time she admitted it to herself.

  “I’ll risk it.”

  “We’ll be glad to have you. We always need programmers,” he said, and then stopped, and his smile broadened. “I’ll be glad to have you, Lisa.”

  Man and AI both, and not quite fitting anywhere: who knew, after all, where he would lead her? “Thank you,” she said, and saw him shake his head, as if no thanks at all were necessary.

  Together, they walked down the street in the bright morning sun, ready to change the world.

  He wasn’t looking back, and neither was she.

  She blew into the lab like the warm breath of an approaching storm, holding the secret of physical immortality in a simple glass test tube.

  —Gareth Lyn Powell—

  The Solnet Ascendancy

  Lavie Tidhar

  ACCORDING TO WILLIAM Gibson, ‘the future’s already here, but it’s unevenly distributed.’ Combine that with Jan Romein’s The Law of the Handicap of a Head Start (originally ‘De Wet van de Remmende Voorsprong’) which posits that (original) technological leaders in a certain area can eventually be held back by the same technological ‘lead’ as the technology develops further, since the ‘leaders’ feel no need to renew it, as they already have it. Hence, areas that were behind in the technology can now leap ahead as they use the most innovative version of that technology.

  An extreme example of how this might work is depicted in the wry, funny and heartfelt story below, where the (re-)distribution of the future happens in an exponential curve...

  0

  IN THE BEGINNING there was the Phone.

  And the Phone resided in the Post Office, and Telephone Cards were available at the Province’s office for 500VT blong wan.

  In the beginning there was the Phone, like so: a row of solar panels standing sleepily in the sun, and a radio broadcast tower, which they power, standing above them and aiming far, at the island of Espiritu Santo. Voices travel across the air and over the sea; loved ones, men of business, mothers and daughters, cousins and aunts, men of government and men of church, boyfriends and girlfriends, all queuing up, all dignity forgotten, all queuing up to toktok long telefon.

  The connection drops; when it rains the line crackles; for days on end it doesn’t work; engineers from Santo and from further away, from Efate Island and Port Vila, come on the Monday flight.

  But all the while, when it works, the connection, this line of communication, this way of talking from afar, is seldom still. Mothers and men, everyone has someone on another island, someone to talk to, to pass and receive information in great inefficient data chunks of pure voice.

  In the beginning there was the Phone.

  Then came the Solnet Ascendancy.

  1

  IT BEGAN, THE way these things usually begin, with a Proposal.

  This is Vanuatu. A Y-shaped archipelago of islands somewhere in the nowhere, South Pacific Ocean, home to Michener’s mythical Bali Rai, coconut plantation
s, coconut crabs, a few World War II downed planes, a sunken troop-carrier, volcanoes and coral reefs: its Internet domain suffix is .vu, its capital is the distant Port Vila, described by residents and visitors alike as a slightly dodgy Australian resort town, and known by the wider electronic world primarily for not having certain kinds of laws which make placing off-shore servers there profitable. There is a foreign volunteer for every thousand people on the islands, making Vanuatu the most volunteer-intensive country in the world. Welcome to Vanuatu! AusAid, Peace Corps, VSO, VSA, CUSO, JICA; the EU, the Australian High Commission, l’Alliance française, the Chinese, the Taiwanese, the Japanese—only the Arabs and the Israelis have so far forsaken Vanuatu—what is the nature of your project? What benefit does it have to the community? What is the amount of community buy-in? Please specify expected outcome and sustainability. How much do you need? What sort of materials?

  It began, the way things in Sola usually begin, if they are to begin at all, in the Market House.

  10

  “I WANT E-MAIL,” Fatfat Freddie says. When he speaks English he has a slight Australian accent, a remnant of his four years at university on the continent, where he did tourism and hotel management. “I want to use the Internet. Can’t you do something?”

  His companion is a waetman; the local most recent volunteer; Mike Rowe by name, pale despite the fierce glare of the sun, digging into the local chicken and rice without enthusiasm.

  “If only they could actually cook,” he says. Fatfat Freddie nods and shovels rice into his mouth. There are three bony pieces of chicken on Mike Rowe’s plate, sitting lonely and forlorn on a mountain of rice. He pushes the rice with his fork and says, “You could set up a local e-mail network fairly easily.”