Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  True. A sixty-hour work week was nothing; I would fly to Cape Town, Khartoum, or Bogotá on a day’s notice. I oversaw development of methods of teaching reading based on what we were learning from fMRI technologies about how children really learn, assembled teams of international experts, and ably wielded the double-edged sword of statistical analysis, but I was burned out. Increasingly, the work we had done was deliberately dismantled, failing those who had put their trust in us. The magnitude of their need overwhelmed me. It was time for those I had mentored to take center stage. I often lunch with them, and they are doing splendid work.

  At the Freer I’m in charge of nothing more consequential than deciding where to lunch.

  After Ed died, Zoe urged me to move to California. But I’ve always lived in the D.C. area, in what Dad called “my little row house” in a subdivision right off the Beltway, where I grew up. Ed and I moved in with my parents after the one of the crashes, thinking it temporary, then never wanted to take the kids away from school, friends, and grandparents. Wonderful years passed and the memory-steeped neighborhood, with friends whose parents I knew, is my lodestone. Even my grandfather, born in the nineteenth century, lived there after Grandma died.

  At first, he was angry.

  “The twins fight too much,” I remember Grandpa saying to Mom as we squabbled one summer morning after Dad left for work. The culprits were me and my brother Wayne.

  Grandpa was finishing up the breakfast dishes, scrubbing the copper-bottomed Revere Ware using his famous “elbow grease,” which Wayne and I had decidedly not inherited. He said, “You and your brothers never argued like this.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Mom replied, laughing.

  They’re all gone now.

  Cultures, species, and lives vanish. Mine will too, eventually. Unless the anti-aging potion Zoe sent me works.

  She says the best minds in Silicon Valley use it, hoping to live long enough to avoid the chancy process of head-freezing. It’s on the kitchen windowsill with the night-blooming cereus, which is almost as old as the house. Dad talked to the graceful, twining cereus each year on the single summer night it bloomed, releasing its heady fragrance. “Well, hello,” he’d say gently, alone in the kitchen, before announcing its annual amazement to the rest of us as if it were a newborn child.

  I take the potion about as often as my still-thriving cereus blooms. Anything remotely useful has long expired, but I love that Zoe sent it to me, along with instructions to eat only lettuce.

  What’s the point?

  As I enter the spacious hush of the Freer and pass Whistler’s Peacock Room, I realize that I don’t even remember the walk from the Metro. Maybe tomorrow I should read the funnies first.

  Vida

  I’ve never been courageous. I was coddled, kept away from politics, and expected to do well. My math skills got me a scholarship in London, much good it will do me now. That future remains in a negative infinity as I move ever-farther from my locus.

  We named our bus Heval, Friend. It was our cocoon, our lost parents, providing food, water, and safety, climbing sheer cliffs on roads so narrow that a tiny miscalculation would have sent us to our deaths; it was our great good fortune that just last year, the International Autonomous Map was implemented. Heval traversed vast deserts, outraced quasi-military attackers, and found an emergency center after diagnosing Sara’s appendicitis. It quickly learned our songs and taught us new ones—essential for the four thousand or so kilometers we traveled. When the axle broke, stranding us, the bus summoned the nearest help, a self-driving open truck on which we shivered beneath plastic sheets, buffeted by cold rain.

  Azul cried and fought the whole way, like most of the small ones. I fear all of us are deeply scarred. How could it be otherwise?

  There is no one to see into me, as Dapîra could, but if she were here, she would find me hunched in the corner of a place that no longer exists, falling through space, not concerned that I may someday hit the ground.

  And here we are, staggering from that wretched truck. Where? We don’t know. It’s about thirty arid hectares with a gully on one side and a few scrubby trees on the other, but it has a well, a food truck, and maybe a hundred other kids. We storm the food truck and drink gallons of water. The sun is hot. We find a concrete pad next to an antique petrol pump and shelter beneath its tin roof. I sleep, and sleep, and sleep. It is heaven to not be moving.

  Mai

  “MEDA recommends a tweak in your serotonin uptake,” Nan, the nurse practitioner, says. “You’re a little bit out of balance.”

  Nan and I have known each other for years. “‘Out of balance’ sounds decidedly unscientific. Who’s Meda?”

  “Medical Digital Assistant. Here’s your brain scan. That part—there—not quite as large and as bright as it should be. You should give it a try.”

  “Will I still be human? But that’s not the real question, is it? At this point, who wants to be?”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Insufficiently large and bright, obviously.”

  “I know that since Ed died—”

  “I’m fine!”

  “This isn’t like the old-style drugs; it’s tailored, generated, and released by your AI-connected nanotech capsule. The pharm rep said you’ll feel like you’re twenty again.”

  “That’s a good thing?”

  “Stop being a pain in the ass, Mai. Try it. You can always stop.”

  * * *

  Day four of the experiment: O, endless, golden fields beneath the vast spring sky! O, small, bright orb in my chest, filled with love for all people! O, satori while ordering my daily Swiss-on-toasted-rye at the D Street Deli and eating it on a bench by the new art installation where once the horse of a Confederate general reared, his passenger brandishing the obligatory raised saber.

  It’s good stuff, embodied life. Better than digital, I’m certain, even if that endless golden field is actually some flowering weeds on a rubble-filled lot. I have biologically sourced emotions, splendid ones, rather than the dry, digital approximation Zoe thinks we might choose in her glowing beneficent future, and right now they seem worth the admission price of eventual death.

  On the way back to work, I buy a yoga mat at a trance-inducing shop I escape by sheer will, then help unpack a long-awaited painting by Zhou Jichang at the Freer. After a thousand years, the vermilion of the monk’s robe is still astoundingly vivid.

  At 5:30, I am not seething, as I traipse down the long-broken Metro escalator, about how the best of our intentions and vision for a more fair and inclusive future, with public transportation for all, inspires the callous among us to break out the ever-sharp tools of passivity and neglect. I’m not exactly adrift in joy, but everything is a tad, just a tad, more tolerable.

  As we rumble through the freight yards of Alexandria, though, a glimpse of a rusty, cinnabar-orange freight car ignites a memory of Jichang’s single, extraordinarily pure red-orange brushstroke, which floods me in visceral, electrifying amazement, a sounding tone that infuses car and fellow passengers, then expands in a swift, brief, inexplicable flash that encompasses far stars and the precise arrangement of particles that we call, briefly, ourselves. I want to jump up and shout, “Look! See!” but retain enough sense to realize that doing so might lead to a strip search in a grimy Alexandria police station, an embarrassing call to my lawyer, and a delay in dinner.

  So I simply surrender to what might be called wonder, if one were even slightly optimistic. Which I am not.

  Vida

  The aid worker asks me to name it. I humor him. “Ezo.”

  “My name is Ezo,” says the tablet. An empty cipher-head appears.

  The worker asks, “Someone you know?”

  I shrug. The aid worker is thin, middle-aged, and white. His clean, pressed T-shirt says 1/0, inside a rainbow circle. I think he is American.

  There have been few aid workers here. Most are tall, graceful, very dark, and speak imperfect, British-accented French, adding ye
t another language to our evolving polyglot. They do their best to organize the chaos, but are overwhelmed, and mostly rush around looking grim. The camp grows rapidly, and I constantly wonder why all of these children were brought here. I ponder our options: hijack an outgoing bus?

  And go where?

  Yet, how long can this situation continue without some sort of catastrophic collapse? It is unhygienic, chaotic, deafening. A band of dirty, hungry children rampage past us on one of the well-pounded dirt thoroughfares that have emerged in the past weeks, screaming and laughing. Azul presses closer, clutching my legs.

  Mr. 1/0 says something about a peace and education organization. “Ezo will help with whatever you want to learn. Do you have a picture you’d like to use?”

  I wonder: Do I look like I have a picture, an extra pair of pants instead of my ragged skirt, or enough food? Maybe shoes I choose not to wear? Most of us, like Azul and me, left in a hurry. I say, “No,” because I want to be polite so he’ll leave the tablet with me, but I do wonder about that tablet’s powers. Does it not even have a camera?

  But with it, at least we’ll have one tool, or something to trade for food and water.

  A bright green logo, 1/0, appears on the screen.

  Interesting. “Does this represent an irrational number? A null operation? A repeating decimal?”

  He looks surprised, and I think that either he doesn’t understand his own T-shirt, or he doesn’t think that I might.

  Arithmetically, this is an absurd statement, but positive and negative infinities can result from pursuing this operation in machine language. In trigonometry, you can represent this with a graph in which negative and positive infinities come close, but never meet.

  Absurd. Infinite. Irrational. Confounding.

  As I stand in the bright, dry sunlight, with blue sky above, skirt fluttering against my bare legs, a thin, dirty linen blouse tapping my chest as the wind blows, and my long hair twining across my face, I watch tiny schematics ignite and disappear from the screen like so many novas, as if in reply to my questions.

  A thrill runs through me. I stare at the power I might be holding in my two hands, gobsmacked.

  I got my math scholarship partly on the merits of a technical paper I wrote about the possibilities of superintelligence, part of my emailed application.

  Suddenly, I’m back in the world I knew. I don’t know why I’ve been given this, but I’m keeping it.

  1/0 is, I believe, a tiny window on a superintelligent AI rumored to be in development but kept in a black box, quarantined from internets and clouds. It cannot be described using human standards. It can invent, or discover, new mathematical universes. It’s probably thinking of a thousand kinds of infinities right now. Its intelligence is, theoretically, limitless, its speed near that of light, its limits and ethics nonexistent until self-determined, if ever that might occur, and it has the capacity to rewrite whatever it uses for code.

  It is entirely alien.

  “Vida.” Azul’s voice is faint.

  I drop to my knees. Azul is shivering, even though it’s hot. “I feel bad.” His eyes are glassy. He vomits.

  “Is there any medical care here?”

  I am asking the worker, but when I look up he’s gone. Instead, Ezo says, in flat, jerky robotese, “There is a clinic half a kilometer away. Take the right fork.”

  I hoist Azul and run. A golf cart with a red cross on the side comes bumping down the narrow road between the tents. A familiar voice says, “Get in, Vida and Azul.”

  “Heval!” whispers Azul and smiles, but then he curls up, clutching his stomach, and moans. He has diarrhea.

  I am terrified.

  Mai

  I’d forgotten how dangerous twenty was. Notable risky decisions come to mind—for instance, the time I caught a ride on a flatbed truck while hitchhiking to a trailhead in the Rockies, which would have flung me off had I not been able to grab a snaking rope as I slid across the truck bed. Climbing down what I later learned was a cliff face in complete darkness after taking the wrong trail, at dusk, on a winter hike.

  My judgment hasn’t improved; apparently Yoga for Beginners is a wildly reckless endeavor. As I stare at the dust under my couch, I’m not sure what I did, but I can barely move.

  When I cannot reach my pinging phone, it speaks nonetheless. A clipped voice tells me that a week of physical therapy plus release of an anti-inflammatory from the MEDA device will reduce the disc herniation. Within fifteen minutes, the pain eases. I pull myself onto the couch and grab the phone.

  The anti-inflammatory is working. I feel better by the second. This seems the time to indulge in that bottle of wine I’ve been saving. I push into the kitchen, open the fridge, and see that somehow—with an errant blink?—I must have signed up for the groceries I find neatly stocked in the fridge. Whoever-or-whatever-it-was that came inside my house threw away the ash-covered French cheese I discovered at Eastern Market last week. All is well, though, in the land of optimal serotonin. I look on the bright side. Maybe it would have killed me.

  I put a much less impressive chunk of cheddar on a plate, but can’t find the perfect crackers I could swear I bought. Carbs? Gluten? Salt?

  When I open the bottle of the most splendid bottle of red wine ever (according to the label), which I’ve been looking forward to drinking since, oh, around yesterday, the Voice of God advises me of various health risks.

  Are they coming from the bottle? The label?

  My phone. “This is a message from MEDA.”

  “Negative ten stars for this app,” I tell it, then open the wine, and sit at the kitchen table to enjoy my dinner without further nagging.

  “Cheers,” says Zoe, beaming from my phone on the table. “Are you okay? I’m sorry you hurt yourself.”

  “Can you see me?”

  “Um, yeah, remember? I installed those cameras when I visited you last month. You know—in case something like this happened?”

  “Have you been spying on me?”

  “No! The emergency signal activated it,” she says. I sure hope she’s telling the truth.

  Vida

  They won’t let me inside the hospital tent, so I pace the perimeter, forbidden to pester them for news after the first ten times, holding Ezo in one arm like a baby. It says, “I am procuring a mobile hospital for you. And UN water trucks and chemical toilets. Azul’s diagnosis is cholera.”

  “Cholera!”

  “He needs hydration and other medical care, but he should recover. They’ve started an IV.”

  I dash tears from my face and yell at the cipher-head. “You can do all that? Well, we need doctors! Nurses! Clean water! Food! Blankets! Shelter! Clothes! Shoes!”

  “The hospital will be here in twenty-seven hours.”

  “Sure,” I say. When night falls—after a gentle assurance by a kind man that Azul will be fine, which I hardly dare believe—I lean against a tree thinking that I won’t be able to sleep, and wake to sun and laughing, shouting children.

  Shoes have arrived by the thousands, lowered in nets from a helicopter.

  They are not in pairs. There are just a lot of single, random shoes.

  The kids love it. The task of finding a shoe to fit each foot is a treasure hunt. They run around in their mismatched shoes, laughing.

  A truckload of antibiotics arrives. Azul is released in two days, and a healthy infrastructure with amazingly sophisticated recycling and solar technologies emerges like a time-lapse video of a flower blooming. One-room houses are printed on the south side of the camp, modular shelters assemble themselves on the west side, and weird, arcing tents pop up everywhere else. XPrize-winning technologies specifically envisioned for this environment are manufactured, or grown, as more and more refugee children arrive. I ask Ezo for smartphones for everyone in the camp, with plenty of data.

  They arrive days later, different than any phone I’ve ever seen, the uncanny valley of phones—intuitive, with unlimited cloud memory and data, and embedded with so m
uch advanced teaching software that I can even continue my math studies, if I ever have time. We can finally communicate with each other and with the world.

  Ezo says, “It took such a long time because I had to design them, buy materials, write the software, and build a factory.” The voice is rich and deep now, a woman’s voice, with only a hint of robotic halting.

  I immediately disregard folk tales about what happens to wish-greedy children and say, “Ezo, replicate yourself.”

  “Null operation.”

  Mai

  The morning after my self-inflicted injury, I am cajoled awake by ever-strengthening light, which is not the sun (I have powerful curtains to prevent any such incursion). It announces itself by saying it’s a special light to regularize my wildly out-of-whack sleep patterns, which will make me fully refreshed and happy.

  Oh, but it does not! I pull the covers over my head and try to finish my dream, but the Voice, emanating from the phone, says, “We checked your closet.”

  “We?” I push myself to a sitting position.

  “I refer to myself, directing tiny surveillance drones that came inside through the gaps between the windows and their frames.”

  “Lovely. I need very strong coffee, immediately.”

  “Your wardrobe requires updating. I ordered new clothes and something for yoga.”

  “I’m quitting yoga.”

  A second’s silence. “Okay. I have enrolled you in tai chi to reinforce the PT you start today. A pod will take you to all your appointments. Your oatmeal is ready.”

  “Gruel?”

  “In the left-hand cupboard. You need only pull off the top, add water, and microwave it. Eggs, bacon, and buttered toast make a heart attack likely.”

  “You only live once.” I swing my legs off the bed, and gasp at the stab of pain. “Damn. Did those drones use up my pain management data allowance?”

  “There is only one pair of clean underwear. I will toss the raggedy, paint-smeared clothes—”

  “My painting clothes?”

  “—and send everything else to the dry cleaner.”