21st Century Science Fiction: The New Science Fiction Writers of the New Century

by David G. Hartwell

  God, Brigid was such a bitch.

  “I like your dress, Momo,” Abigail said.

  This shook Kevin out of his mate-competition trance. “Well that’s good news, baby, ‘cause we bought a version in your size, too!”

  “That’s cute,” Brigid said. “Now you can both play dress-up.”

  Kevin shot her a look that was pure hate. Javier was glad suddenly that he’d never asked about why the two of them had split. He didn’t want to know. It was clearly too deep and organic and weird for him to understand, much less deal with.

  “Well, it was nice meeting you,” he said. “I’m sure you’re pretty tired after the flight. You probably want to get home and go to sleep, right?”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Momo said. Thank Christ for other robots; they knew how to take a cue.

  Kevin pinked considerably. “Uh, right.” He reached down, picked up Abigail’s bag, and nodded at them. “Call you later, Brigid.”

  “Sure.”

  Abigail waved at Javier. She blew him a kiss. He blew one back as the door closed.

  “Well, thank goodness that’s over.” Brigid sagged against the door, her palms flat against its surface, her face lit with a new glow. “We have the house to ourselves.”

  She was so pathetically obvious. He’d met high-schoolers with more grace. He folded his arms. “Where’s my son?”

  Brigid frowned. “I don’t know, but I’m sure he’s fine. You’ve been training him, haven’t you? He has all your skills.” Her fingers played with his shiny new belt buckle, the one she had bought for him especially. “Well, most of them. I’m sure there are some things he’ll just have to learn on his own.”

  She knew. She knew exactly where his son was. And when her eyes rose, she knew that he knew. And she smiled.

  Javier did not feel fear in any organic way. The math reflected a certain organic sensibility, perhaps, the way his simulation and prediction engines suddenly spun to life, their fractal computations igniting and processing as he calculated what could go wrong and when and how and with whom. How long had it been since he’d last seen Junior? How much did Junior know? Was his English good enough? Were his jumps strong enough? Did he understand the failsafe completely? These were the questions Javier had, instead of a cold sweat. If he were a different kind of man, a man like Kevin or any of the other human men he’d met and enjoyed in his time, he might have felt a desire to grab Brigid or hit her the way she’d hit him earlier, when she thought he was endangering her offspring in some vague, indirect way. They had subroutines for that. They had their own failsafes, the infamous triple-F cascades of adrenaline that gave them bursts of energy for dealing with problems like the one facing him now. They were built to protect their own, and he was not.

  So he shrugged and said: “You’re right. There are some things you just can’t teach.”

  They went to the bedroom. And he was so good, he’d learned so much in his short years, that Brigid rewarded his technique with knowledge. She told him about taking Junior to the grocery store with her. She told him about the man who had followed them into the parking lot. She told him how, when she had asked Junior what he thought, he had given Javier’s exact same shrug.

  “He said you’d be fine with it,” she said. “He said your dad did something similar. He said it made you stronger. More independent.”

  Javier shut his eyes. “Independent. Sure.”

  “He looked so much like you as he said it.” Brigid was already half asleep. “I wonder what I’ll pass down to my daughter, sometimes. Maybe she’ll fall in love with a robot, just like her mommy and daddy.”

  “Maybe,” Javier said. “Maybe her whole generation will. Maybe they won’t even bother reproducing.”

  “Maybe we’ll go extinct,” Brigid said. “But then who would you have left to love?”

  TOBIAS S. BUCKELL Tobias S. Buckell was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1979. As a result, some of his earliest memories are of “nervous adults and not being allowed near windows” during the collapse of the island’s government and the U.S. invasion of 1983. He spent the rest of his childhood on boats there and in the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, moving with his family to Ohio when he was eighteen. He has been publishing SF stories since 2000, and novels since 2006.

  Much of his work draws on his Caribbean background, in direct and indirect ways, and “Toy Planes”—a gem of an SF miniature—is no exception.

  TOY PLANES

  My sister Joanie’s deft hands flicked from dreadlock to dreadlock, considering her strategy. “You always leaving,” she said, flicking the razor on, and suddenly I’m five, chasing her with a kite made from plastic bags and twigs, shouting that I was going to fly away from her one day.

  “I’m sorry. Please, let’s get this done.”

  I’d waited long enough. I’d grown dreads because when I studied in the United States I wanted to remember who I was and where I came from as I began to lose my Caribbean accent. But the rocket plane’s sponsor wanted them cut. It would be disaster for a helmet not to have a proper seal in an emergency. Explosive decompression was not something a soda company wanted to be associated with in their customers’ minds. It was insulting that they assumed we couldn’t keep the craft sealed. But we needed their money. The locks had become enough a part of me that I winced when the clippers bit into them, groaned, and another piece of me fell away.

  In the back of the bus that I had pick me up, I hung on to a looped handle swinging from the roof as the driver rocketed down the dirt road from Joanie’s. My sister had found a place out in the country, a nice concrete house with a basement opening up into a sloped garden on the side of a steep hill. She taught mathematics at the school a few miles away, an open-shuttered building, and this would have been my future too, if I hadn’t been so intent on “getting off the rock.”

  The islands always called their children back.

  We hit asphalt, potholes, and passed cane fields with machete-wielding laborers hacking away at the stalks, sweat-drenched shirts knotted around their waists. It was hot; my arms stuck to the plastic-covered seats. The driver leaned into a turn, and looked back. “I want to ask you something.” I really wished the backseats had belts.

  “Sure.”

  “All that money you spending, you don’t think it better spent on getting better roads?” He dodged a pothole. “Or more school funding?”

  Colorful red and yellow houses on stilts dotted the steep lush green mountainsides as I looked out of the tinted windows. “Only one small part of the program got funded by the government,” I explained. “We found private investors, advertisers, to back the rest. Whatever the government invested will be repaid.”

  “Maybe.”

  I had my extra arguments. How many people lived on this island? Tens of thousands. Most of our food was imported, leaving us dependent on other food-producing nations, who all used satellites to track their farming. What spin-off technologies might come out of studying recycling in space? Why wait for other nations to get to it first? Research always produced good things for the people who engaged in it.

  But I was tired of arguing for it, and I had only sound bites for him, the same ones I’d given the media who treated us like kids trying to do something all grown up.

  The market surrounded me in a riot of color: fruit, vegetables, full women in dresses in bright floral patterns. And the noise of hundreds constantly bargaining over things like the price of fish. Teenagers stood around the corners with friends. I wandered around looking for something, as we needed to fill the craft with enough extra weight to simulate a passenger and we still had a few extra ounces to add.

  I found a small toy stall. And standing in front of it I was five years old again, with no money, and a piece of scrap metal in the triangular shape of a space plane. I would pretend it was just like the real-life ones I’d read about in the books donated to the school after the hurricane. And at night, when the power would sometimes flicker out, I’d go out
and stand on the porch and look up at the bright stars and envy them.

  The stall had a small bottle, hammered over with soda-can metal, with triangular welded-on wings, and a cone stuck to the back. It was painted over in yellow, black, and green, and I bought it.

  The rest of the day was a blur. Getting to the field involved running the press: yes I’d cut my hair for “safety” reasons, yes I thought this was a good use of our money, not just first-world nations deserved space, it was there for everyone.

  There were photos of me getting aboard the tiny rocket plane with a small brown package under my arm. The giant balloon platform that the plane hung from shifted in the gentle, salty island breeze. Not too far away the waves hit the sand of the beach. Inside, suited up, door closed, everything became electronic.

  It was the cheapest way to get to orbit. Balloon up on a triangular platform to save on fuel, then light the rocket plane up and head for orbit. We’d scavenged balloons and material from several companies, one about to go out of business. The plane chassis had once been used by a Chinese corporation during trials, and the guidance systems were all open-source. Online betting parlors had our odds at 50 percent. We weren’t even the first, but we were the first island.

  The countdown finished, my stomach lurched, and I saw palm trees slide by the portholes to my right. I reached back and patted the package, the hammered-together toy, and smiled.

  “Hello out there, all of you,” I whispered into the radio. “We’re coming up too.”

  KEN LIU Ken Liu was born in Lanzhou, China, and moved to the United States when he was eleven. He began publishing SF in 2002. In 2012, his story “The Paper Menagerie” became the first work of fiction, of any length, to win the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the World Fantasy Award. He has also won the SF and Fantasy Translation Award, for his translation into English of “The Fish of Lijiang” by Chen Qiufan. He has translated several other significant works of Chinese SF and literary fiction into English as well.

  “The Algorithms for Love,” published in 2004, is about a brilliant designer of robotic toys whose job is driving her crazy. Various segments of this idea could have been used (and some have been used, by other writers) to generate whole stories, but Liu lets it keep rolling along to see what will happen. It’s both a love story and an AI existential-horror story that turns the Turing test inside out.

  THE ALGORITHMS FOR LOVE

  So long as the nurse is in the room to keep an eye on me, I am allowed to dress myself and get ready for Brad. I slip on an old pair of jeans and a scarlet turtleneck sweater. I’ve lost so much weight that the jeans hang loosely from the bony points of my hips.

  “Let’s go spend the weekend in Salem,” Brad says to me as he walks me out of the hospital, an arm protectively wrapped around my waist, “just the two of us.”

  I wait in the car while Dr. West speaks with Brad just outside the hospital doors. I can’t hear them but I know what she’s telling him. “Make sure she takes her Oxetine every four hours. Don’t leave her alone for any length of time.”

  Brad drives with a light touch on the pedals, the same way he used to when I was pregnant with Aimée. The traffic is smooth and light, and the foliage along the highway is postcard-perfect. The Oxetine relaxes the muscles around my mouth, and in the vanity mirror I see that I have a beatific smile on my face.

  “I love you.” He says this quietly, the way he has always done, as if it were the sound of breathing and heartbeat.

  I wait a few seconds. I picture myself opening the door and throwing my body onto the highway but of course I don’t do anything. I can’t even surprise myself.

  “I love you too.” I look at him when I say this, the way I have always done, as if it were the answer to some question. He looks at me, smiles, and turns his eyes back to the road.

  To him this means that the routines are back in place, that he is talking to the same woman he has known all these years, that things are back to normal. We are just another tourist couple from Boston on a mini-break for the weekend: stay at a bed-and-breakfast, visit the museums, recycle old jokes.

  It’s an algorithm for love.

  I want to scream.

  • • • •

  The first doll I designed was called Laura. Clever Laura™.

  Laura had brown hair and blue eyes, fully articulated joints, twenty motors, a speech synthesizer in her throat, two video cameras disguised by the buttons on her blouse, temperature and touch sensors, and a microphone behind her nose. None of it was cutting-edge technology, and the software techniques I used were at least two decades old. But I was still proud of my work. She retailed for fifty dollars.

  Not Your Average Toy could not keep up with the orders that were rolling in, even three months before Christmas. Brad, the CEO, went on CNN and MSNBC and TTV and the rest of the alphabet soup until the very air was saturated with Laura.

  I tagged along on the interviews to give the demos because, as the VP of Marketing explained to me, I looked like a mother (even though I wasn’t one) and (he didn’t say this, but I could listen between the lines) I was blonde and pretty. The fact that I was Laura’s designer was an afterthought.

  The first time I did a demo on TV was for a Hong Kong crew. Brad wanted me to get comfortable with being in front of the cameras before bringing me to the domestic morning shows.

  We sat to the side while Cindy, the anchorwoman, interviewed the CEO of some company that made “moisture meters.” I hadn’t slept for forty-eight hours. I was so nervous I’d brought six Lauras with me, just in case five of them decided in concert to break down. Then Brad turned to me and whispered, “What do you think moisture meters are used for?”

  I didn’t know Brad that well, having been at Not Your Average Toy for less than a year. I had chatted with him a few times before, but it was all professional. He seemed a very serious, driven sort of guy, the kind you could picture starting his first company while he was still in high school—arbitraging class notes, maybe. I wasn’t sure why he was asking me about moisture meters. Was he trying to see if I was too nervous?

  “I don’t know. Maybe for cooking?” I ventured.

  “Maybe,” he said. Then he gave me a conspiratorial wink. “But I think the name sounds kind of dirty.”

  It was such an unexpected thing, coming from him, that for a moment I almost thought he was serious. Then he smiled, and I laughed out loud. I had a very hard time keeping a straight face while we waited for our turn, and I certainly wasn’t nervous anymore.

  Brad and the young anchorwoman, Cindy, chatted amiably about Not Your Average Toy’s mission (“Not Average Toys for Not Average Kids”) and how Brad had come up with the idea for Laura. (Brad had nothing to do with the design, of course, since it was all my idea. But his answer was so good it almost convinced me that Laura was really his brainchild.) Then it was time for the dog-and-pony show.

  I put Laura on the desk, her face towards the camera. I sat to the side of the desk. “Hello, Laura.”

  Laura turned her head to me, the motors so quiet you couldn’t hear their whirr. “Hi! What’s your name?”

  “I’m Elena,” I said.

  “Nice to meet you,” Laura said. “I’m cold.”

  The air conditioning was a bit chilly. I hadn’t even noticed.

  Cindy was impressed. “That’s amazing. How much can she say?”

  “Laura has a vocabulary of about two thousand English words, with semantic and syntactic encoding for common suffixes and prefixes. Her speech is regulated by a context-free grammar.” The look in Brad’s eye let me know that I was getting too technical. “That means that she’ll invent new sentences and they’ll always be syntactically correct.”

  “I like new, shiny, new, bright, new, handsome clothes,” Laura said.

  “Though they may not always make sense,” I added.

  “Can she learn new words?” Cindy asked.

  Laura turned her head the other way, to look at her. “I like learn-ing, please t
each me a new word!”

  I made a mental note that the speech synthesizer still had bugs that would have to be fixed in the firmware.

  Cindy was visibly unnerved by the doll turning to face her on its own and responding to her question.

  “Does she”—she searched for the right word—“understand me?”

  “No, no.” I laughed. So did Brad. And a moment later Cindy joined us. “Laura’s speech algorithm is augmented with a Markov generator interspersed with—” Brad gave me that look again. “Basically, she just babbles sentences based on keywords in what she hears. And she has a small set of stock phrases that are triggered the same way.”

  “Oh, it really seemed like she knew what I was saying. How does she learn new words?”

  “It’s very simple. Laura has enough memory to learn hundreds of new words. However, they have to be nouns. You can show her the object while you are trying to teach her what it is. She has some very sophisticated pattern recognition capabilities and can even tell faces apart.”

  For the rest of the interview I assured nervous parents that Laura would not require them to read the manual, that Laura would not explode when dropped in water, and no, she would never utter a naughty word, even if their little princesses “accidentally” taught Laura one.

  “ ’Bye,” Cindy said to Laura at the end of the interview, and waved at her.

  “ ’Bye,” Laura said. “You are nice.” She waved back.

  Every interview followed the same pattern. The moment when Laura first turned to the interviewer and answered a question there was always some awkwardness and unease. Seeing an inanimate object display intelligent behavior had that effect on people. They probably all thought the doll was possessed. Then I would explain how Laura worked and everyone would be delighted. I memorized the non-technical, warm-and-fuzzy answers to all the questions until I could recite them even without my morning coffee. I got so good at it that I sometimes coasted through entire interviews on autopilot, not even paying attention to the questions and letting the same words I heard over and over again spark off my responses.