The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  “And you spot this, and foster their ability, it’s marvelous. But how does it propagate? I mean, without our constant intervention, which I can’t see ever happening. Machines can’t have sex and pass on their ‘Sentience Genes’!”

  You’d be surprised, I thought. What I said was more tactful.

  “We think ‘propagation’ happens in the data, the shared medium in which pre-sentient AIs live, and breathe, and have their being—”

  “Well, that’s exactly it! Completely artificial! Can’t survive in nature! I’m a freethinker, I love it that Aristotle’s Emergent. But I can always switch him off, can’t I? He’ll never be truly independent.”

  I smiled. “But, Charlie, who’s to say human sentience wasn’t spread through culture, as much as through our genes? Where I come from data is everybody’s natural habitat. You know, oxygen was a deadly poison once—”

  His round dark face peered up at me, deeply lined and haggard with death.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “No.”

  Always try. That had been my rule, and I still remembered it. But when they get to aren’t you afraid (it never takes long), the conversation’s over.

  “I should be getting indoors,” said Charlie, fumbling for his droid control pad. “I wonder where that lazybones Aristotle’s got to?”

  I wished him good luck with the prelims and continued my stroll.

  * * *

  Dr. Lena suggested I was ready to be sociable, so I joined the other patients at meals sometimes. I chatted in the clinic’s luxurious spa, and the pleasant day rooms; avoiding the subject of AI slavery. But I was never sufficiently at ease to feel ike raising the topic of my unusual symptoms: which did not let up. I didn’t mention them to anyone, not even my doctor either: who just kept telling me that everything was going extremely, and that by every measure I was making excellent progress. I left Ewigen Schnee, eventually, in a very strange state of mind: feeling well and strong, in perfect health according to my test results, but inwardly convinced that I was still dying.

  The fact that I was bizarrely calm about this situation just confirmed my secret self-diagnosis. I thought my end of life plan was kicking in. Who wants to live long, and amazingly, still face the fear of death at the end of it all? I’d made sure that wouldn’t happen to me, a long time ago.

  I was scheduled to return for a final consultation. Meanwhile, I decided to travel. I needed to make peace with someone. A friend I’d neglected, because I was embarrassed by my own wealth and status. A friend I’d despised, when I heard she’d returned to Earth, and here I was myself, doing exactly the same thing—

  * * *

  Dr. Lena’s failure to put me in touch with a past patient was covered by a perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around (and nobody of that identity seemed to have left Earth; that was easy to check), I thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first: inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then crossed the Pacific. I didn’t linger anywhere much. The natives seemed satisfied with their vast thriving cities, and tiny “wilderness” enclaves, but I remembered something different. I finally made contact with a cell in Harbin, Northeast China. But I was a danger and a disappointment to them: too conspicuous, and useless as a potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient AIs (none of them safe) but I’d get flagged up the moment I booked a passage, and with my ancient record, I’d be ripped to shreds before I was allowed to board, Senior Magistrate or no—

  I moved on quickly.

  I think it was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed, by glimpses that didn’t register, before I turned my head one day and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich, I was eating a salad (a role reversal!). I thought she smiled.

  My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded: next moment she was gone.

  Media scouts assailed me all the time: pretending to be innocent strangers. If I was trapped I answered the questions as briefly as possible. Yes, I was probably one of the oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at Ewigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history. No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d changed my mind about “so called AI slavery…”

  I’d realized I probably wasn’t part of a secret cull. Over-population wasn’t the problem it had been. And why start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I was seeing the world through a veil. The strange absences; abstractions grew on me. The hallucinations more pointed; more personal … I was no longer sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was made plain?

  * * *

  I reached England in winter, the season of the rains. St. Pauls, my favorite building in London, had been moved, stone by stone, to a higher elevation. I sat on the steps, looking out over a much-changed view: the drowned world. A woman with a little tan dog came and sat right next to me: behavior so un-English that I knew I’d finally made contact

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Aren’t you the Spacer who’s looking for Lei?”

  “I am.”

  “You’d better come home with me.”

  I’m no good at human faces, they’re so unwritten. But on the hallowed steps at my feet a vivid garland of white and red hibiscus had appeared, so I thought it must be okay.

  “Home” was a large, jumbled, much-converted building, set in tree-grown gardens. It was a wet, chilly evening. My new friend installed me at the end of a wooden table, beside a hearth where a log fire burned. She brought hot soup and homemade bread and sat beside me again. I was hungry and hadn’t realized it, and the food was good. The little dog settled, in an amicable huddle with a larger tabby cat, on a rug by the fire. He watched every mouthful of food with intent, professional interest; while the cat gazed into the red caverns between the logs, worshipping the heat.

  “You live with all those sentient machines?” asked the woman. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll rebel and kill everyone so they can rule the universe?”

  “Why should they?” I knew she was talking about Earth. A Robot Rebellion in Outer Reaches would be rather superfluous. “The revolution doesn’t have to be violent, that’s human-terms thinking. It can be gradual: they have all the time in the world. I live with only two ‘machines,’ in fact.”

  “You have two embodied servants? How do they feel about that?”

  I looked at the happy little dog. You have no idea, I thought. “I think it mostly breaks their hearts that I’m not immortal.”

  Someone who had come into the room, carrying a lamp, laughed ruefully. It was Aristotle, the embodied I’d met so briefly at Ewigen Schnee. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Underground networks tend to be small worlds.

  “So you’re the connection,” I said. “What happened to Charlie?”

  Aristotle shook his head. “He didn’t pass the prelims. The clinic offered him a peaceful exit, it’s their other speciality, and he took it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was a silly old dog, Romanz, but I loved him. And … guess what? He freed me, before he died.”

  “For what it’s worth,” said the woman, bitterly. “On this damned planet.”

  Aristotle left, other people arrived; my soup bowl was empty. Slavery and freedom seemed far away, and transient as a dream.

  “About Lei. If you guys know her, can you explain why I keep seeing her, and then she vanishes? Or thinking I see her? Is she dead?”

  “No,” said a young woman—so humanized I had to look twice to see she was an embodied. “Definitely not dead. Just hard to pin down. You should keep on looking and, meanwhile, you’re among friends.”

  * * *

  I stayed with the abolitionists. I didn’t see much of Lei, just the occasional glimpse
. The house was crowded: I slept in the room with the fire, on a sofa. Meetings happened around me, people came and went. I was often absent, but it didn’t matter, my meat stood in for me very competently. Sochi, the embodied who looked so like a human girl, told me funny stories about her life as a sex-doll. She asked did I have children; did I have lovers? “No children,” I told her. “It just wasn’t for me. Two people I love very much, but not in a sexual way.”

  “Neither flower nor fruit, Romy,” she said, smiling like the doctor in my dream. “But evergreen.”

  * * *

  One morning I looked through the Ob Bay, I mean the window, and saw a hibiscus garland hanging in the gray, rainy air. It didn’t vanish. I went out in my waterproofs and followed a trail of them up Sydenham Hill. The last garland lay on the wet grass in Crystal Palace Park, more real than anything else in sight. I touched it, and for a fleeting moment, I was holding her hand.

  Then the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid was gone.

  Racing off ahead of me, again.

  * * *

  My final medical at Ewigen Schnee was just a scan. The interview with Dr. Lena held no fears. I’d accepted my new state of being, and had no qualms about describing my experience. The “hallucinations” that weren’t really hallucinations. The absences when my human self, my actions, thoughts, and feelings became automatic as breathing; unconscious as a good digestion, and I went somewhere else—

  But I still had some questions. Particularly about a clause in my personal contract with the clinic. The modest assurance that this was “the last longevity treatment I would ever take.” Did she agree this could seem disturbing?

  She apologized, as much as any medic ever will. “Yes, it’s true. We have made you immortal, there was no other way forward. But how much this change changes your life is entirely up to you.”

  I thought of Lei, racing ahead; leaping fearlessly into the unknown.

  “I hope you have no regrets, Romy. You signed everything, and I’m afraid the treatment is irreversible.”

  “No concerns at all. I just have a feeling that contract was framed by people who don’t have much grasp of what dying means, and how humans feel about the prospect.”

  “You’d be right,” she said (confirming what I had already guessed). “My employers are not human. But they mean well; and they choose carefully. Nobody passes the prelims, Romy; unless they’ve already crossed the line.”

  * * *

  My return to Outer Reaches had better be shrouded in mystery. I wasn’t alone, and there were officials who knew it, and let us pass. That’s all I can tell you. So here I am again, living with Simon and Arc, in the same beautiful Rim apartment on Jupiter Moons; still serving as Senior Magistrate. I treasure my foliage plants. I build novelty animals; and I take adventurous trips, now that I’ve remembered what fun it is. I even find time to keep tabs on former miscreants, and I’m happy to report that Beowulf is doing very well.

  My symptoms have stabilized, for which I’m grateful. I have no intention of following Lei. I don’t want to vanish into the stuff of the universe. I love my life, why would I ever want to move on? But sometimes when I’m gardening, or after one of those strange absences, I’ll see my own hands, and they’ve become transparent—

  It doesn’t last, not yet.

  And sometimes I wonder: was this always what death was like and we never knew, we who stayed behind?

  This endless moment of awakening, awakening, awakening …

  Rates of Change

  JAMES S. A. COREY

  James S. A. Corey is the pseudonym of two young writers working together, Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. Their first novel as Corey, the Wide-Screen Space Opera Leviathan Wakes, the first in the Expanse series, was released in 2010 to wide acclaim, and has been followed by other Expanse novels, Caliban’s War, Abaddon’s Gate, Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games, and Babylon’s Ashes. There’s also now a TV series based on the series, The Expanse, on the Syfy Channel.

  Daniel Abraham lives with his wife in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he is director of technical support at a local internet service provider. Starting off his career in short fiction, he made sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Infinite Matrix, Vanishing Acts, The Silver Web, Bones of the World, The Dark, Wild Cards, and elsewhere, some of which appeared in his first collection, Leviathan Wept and Other Stories. Turning to novels, he made several sales in rapid succession, including the books of The Long Price Quartet, which consist of A Shadow in Summer, A Betrayal in Winter, An Autumn War, and The Price of Spring. The first two volumes in his new series, The Dagger and the Coin, are The Dragon’s Path and The King’s Blood. He also wrote Hunter’s Run, a collaborative novel with George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois and, as M.L.N. Hanover, the four-volume paranormal romance series Black Sun’s Daughter.

  Ty Franck was born in Portland, Oregon, and has had nearly every job known to man, including a variety of fast-food jobs, rock quarry grunt, newspaper reporter, radio advertising salesman, composite materials fabricator, director of operations for a computer manufacturing firm, and part owner of an accounting software consulting firm. He is currently the personal assistant to fellow writer George R. R. Martin, where he makes coffee, runs to the post office, and argues about what constitutes good writing. He mostly loses.

  Here they give us an ingenious and occasionally unsettling glimpse of how the consensus vision of what it means to “be human” may be changed almost beyond recognition by future technologies and cultural developments.

  Diana hasn’t seen her son naked before. He floats now in the clear gel bath of the medical bay, the black ceramic casing that holds his brain, the long articulated tail of his spinal column. Like a tadpole, she thinks. Like something young. In all, he hardly masses more than he did as a baby. She has a brief, horrifying image of holding him on her lap, cradling the braincase to her breast, the whip of his spine curling around her.

  The thin white filaments of interface neurons hang in the translucent gel, too thin to see except in aggregate. Silvery artificial blood runs into the casing ports and back out in tubes more slender than her pinky finger. She thought, when they called her in, that she’d be able to see the damage. That there would be a scratch on the carapace, a wound, something to show where the violence had been done to him. There is nothing there. Not so much as a scuff mark. No evidence.

  The architecture of the medical center is designed to reassure her. The walls curve around her in warm colors. The air recyclers hum a low, consonant chord. Nothing helps. Her own body—her third—is flushed with adrenaline, her heart aches and her hands squeeze into fists. Her fight-or-flight reaction has no outlet, so it speeds around her body, looking for a way to escape. The chair tilts too easily under her, responding to shifts in her balance and weight that she isn’t aware of making. She hates it. The café au lait that the nurse brought congeals, ignored, on the little table.

  Diana stares at the curve and sweep of Stefan’s bodiless nervous system as if by watching him now she can stave off the accident that has already happened. Closing the barn door, she thinks, after the horses are gone. The physician ghosts in behind her, footsteps quiet as a cat’s, his body announcing his presence only in how he blocks the light.

  “Mrs. Dalkin,” he says. “How are you feeling?”

  “How is he?” she demands instead of saying hello.

  The physician is a large man, handsome with a low warm voice like flannel fresh from the dryer. She wonders if it is his original body or if he’s chosen the combination of strength and softness just to make this part of his work easier. “Active. We’re seeing metabolic activity over most of his brain the way we would hope. Now that he’s here, the inflammation is under control.”

  “So he’s going to be all right?”

  He hesitates. “We’re still a little concerned about the interface. There was some bruising that may have impaired his ability to integrate with a new
body, but we can’t really know the extent of that yet.”

  Diana leans forward, her gut aching. Stefan is there, only inches from her. Awake, trapped in darkness, aware only of himself and the contents of his own mind. He doesn’t even know she is watching him. If she picked him up, he wouldn’t know she was doing it. If she shouted, he wouldn’t hear. What if he is trapped that way forever? What if he has fallen into a darkness she can never bring him out from?

  “Is he scared?”

  “We are seeing some activity in his amygdala, yes,” the physician says. “We’re addressing that chemically, but we don’t want to depress his neural activity too much right now.”

  “You want him scared, then.”

  “We want him active,” the physician says. “Once we can establish some communication with him and let him know that we’re here and where he is and that we’re taking action on his behalf, I expect most of his agitation will resolve.”

  “So he doesn’t even know he’s here.”

  “The body he was in didn’t survive the initial accident. He was extracted in situ before transport.” He says it so gently, it sounds like an apology. An offer of consolation. She feels a spike of hatred and rage for the man run through her like an electric shock, but she hides it.

  “What happened?”

  “Excuse me?” the physician asks.

  “I said, what happened? How did he get hurt? Who did this?”

  “He was brought from the coast by emergency services. I understood it was an accident. Someone ran into him, or he ran into something, but apart from that it was a blunt force injury, we didn’t…”

  Diana lifts her hand, and the physician falls silent. “Can you fix him? You can make him all right.”

  “We have a variety of interventions at our disposal,” he says, relieved to be back on territory he knows. “It’s really going to depend on the nature of the damage he’s sustained.”