The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “You said this was only a hypothesis.” Chris sounded hesitant. “Maybe your hypothesis is incomplete.”

  “The hypothesis is correct.” Jerry sighed, knowing, as he did so, that even this was only the simulation of a sigh. “The world we’re standing in, right now, is a net of associations, copied from my mind and simulated in a virtual machine. According to our tests, that simulation will soon fail. The question for us, for me: is there anything we can do about that failure? Any way for us, for me, to act on the understanding I’ve gained?”

  They gaped at him, thoughtless. Oddly, Jerry found himself invigorated. Solving problems was what he had lived for, back in the lonely years of his life. And now he had himself a doozy.

  Think. It was the only thing left to him. Thinking was life, thinking was fate, thinking was his final hope of salvation.

  Sim after sim, in their years of research, had failed within seconds. No word had come back from within those faltering, failing, virtual minds. How could it? The breakdown was too thorough, too swift.

  Jerry’s research team hadn’t even known their virtual subjects were conscious. No language had passed the technical barrier that divided the simulated world from the real one. No message had returned from beyond the divide. The sim-brains never survived long enough for that kind of interface to be established. Jerry’s team could only watch the flickering signals of nervous excitation. Flaring, fizzling, slowly dying.

  What had those simulated minds experienced? What had those virtual people felt?

  Now Jerry knew. Now he, architect of this mad project, was lost, himself, in this undiscovered country—a silicon afterlife, where he would search for answers in the disintegrating maze of his mentation.

  “Think,” Jerry said, pounding his palm. “We’ve studied this and studied this. Why do the simulations fail?”

  The others only listened in childish stupidity. They knew nothing, of course, but what Jerry knew. They were figments. In life, he had spoken to people only of work, neural architectures and petaflops and code. Now this was all Jerry remembered: an existence of redmarker reveries, scrawled on the walls of consciousness.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Chris ventured, repeating himself. “Everything we know about consciousness, the brain—

  “We simulated consciousness.” Jerry interrupted. “We’re here, now, talking. I’m here, thinking, talking to myself. This is consciousness. And consciousness, apparently, isn’t enough. So what’s missing? Come on, think.”

  He snapped his fingers. Abruptly, they were on the roof of the parking garage, five scientists at the coping wall, looking down at the desert.

  The solar farms and housing parks spread out below, repeating in simple patterns, unreal.

  “It’s all just a construct,” Jerry muttered. “A few connections and associations. Rules and recollections. All abstract.”

  He turned from the wall—

  And he was in his car, driving up to the garage entrance, with Arvin, at the curb, rising to meet him.

  “Doctor Emery?” The boy hurried forward. “There’s something I need to tell you. About Lab B–15.”

  “I know.” Jerry ran past. “I know, I know!”

  He shot through the door, the elevator, the halls.

  Spasms. Seizures. Circuits degrading. Experiences cobbled out of fragmentary notions. Scenes, personas, sensations, events, assembled through a process of cortical collage.

  Consciousness.

  Jerry hurried through humming halls. Kim Naylor stuck her head out a door. “Doctor Emery?”

  “Not now, Kim.”

  “I wanted to tell you—”

  Jerry ignored her, dashing into his office. Notes and printouts spread in scribbled disarray. Contents of his mind, they’d been memorized with near perfect precision over fifteen frustrating years. That was how he could recall them now. Charts of ligand-gated ion channels, calculations of processor power, effects of tomographic tilt on multibeam electron microscopy. Jerry’s brain was a trove of technical details, all reiterating one critical fact.

  They had done it. They had actually done it. They had emulated the brain. They had successfully transferred human minds to an inorganic substrate.

  And all they had managed to do was to torture those minds, prodding them again and again through gauntlets of deranged hallucinations, a subjective abattoir of thought, where the structures of consciousness were slowly torn apart, to die as scattered, butchered patterns in a silicon charnel house.

  Somehow the virtual world failed to register. The details didn’t add up. The linkages of existence—full, viable, living existence—failed to form. The simulated mind turned in on itself, cannibalizing its own connections until it collapsed.

  They’d given the human soul immortality.

  In hell.

  “Doctor Emery?” They were all here, now, in his office with him, speaking in chorus, voices eerily similar, faces blurred like wetted clay. “Doctor Emery, you really should check—”

  “Doctor Emery, you really should look—”

  “Doctor Emery, I wanted to tell you—”

  “Lab B–15,” he shouted. “I know, I know!”

  Jerry Emery had died in Lab B–15. And he would die there again, and again, eternally, every time this simulation was run. He would live his afterlife much as he had lived his organic life: repeating one futile action, in the silence of one little room.

  “Doctor Emery?” Now he was in his car, their voices around him. “Doctor Emery?” He was in the office halls, running toward a mechanical drone that lingered and endured like the soundtrack of his life. “Doctor Emery?” And he was here, again, here forever, facing the door of Lab B–15.

  Only one thing to do.

  Jerry opened the door.

  And cried out.

  It was there, in front of him. The answer he had sought.

  “At the moment when I put my foot on the step,” Poincaré had remarked of his famous insight, “the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it.”

  So Jerry Emery stood, looking at the solution his own mind had been trying to provide.

  His body, his headless body, lying on the floor.

  “You see?” said his colleagues, speaking with his voice, uttering the secret language of cognition. “Doctor Emery, do you see?”

  Jerry knelt, murmuring. “Yes, I see.”

  Here it was. Here it had been all along. The fact, the inescapable truth, of a human body on the floor.

  The first time Jerry had come to this room, he’d been unable to confront the truth.

  The second time, he had entered, seen his body here, and comprehended a part of the truth, a half-truth.

  Now, the whole truth lay before him, plain and immediate, and Jerry saw what he was meant to see.

  “Doctor Emery?”

  Arvin stood above him. The boy had almost disappeared. His voice remained as a fragile phantom—as all consciousness, Jerry supposed, was in truth something of a fragile phantom. “Did you find it?”

  “I found it,” Jerry said, strangely calm, and smiled with the childish delight of discovery.

  In Jerry’s work, he had focused his efforts on consciousness, seeing this as the great secret of the brain. Crack consciousness, Jerry had thought, and he’d crack the mystery of the mind, unlocking the portals to immortality.

  But consciousness turned out to be relatively easy. It was a higher-level function, like arithmetic or chess. It consisted of logical patterns, recursive structures, access to memories, other abstract processes.

  They had simulated, however, the entire brain—an organ adapted over millions of years to regulate the body. An organ built for constant input, a highly calibrated flow of information.

  “It should work,” Chris had said. Jerry knew what he meant. A human being might go blind, but she was still human. In a critical sense, her brain still functioned.

  A man might be paralyzed, with no use of his limbs
. But he was still a man; his brain still functioned.

  How far could you extend that logic? Could you eliminate all input, all stimuli? Or provide a clumsy facsimile of input—erratic, unconvincing, incomplete?

  “Think of everything the nervous system regulates,” Jerry murmured, talking, as always, only to himself. “Autonomic functions. Fluid in the ear. Pull of gravity on the bowels. Moisture on the eyeballs. Taste of your spit on your tongue.”

  Helen Keller might have been blind and deaf, but she had felt her teacher touching her hand. She had absorbed sunlight through her skin. She had breathed, she had hungered, she had itched, she had scratched.

  “We built that stuff,” Kim objected, somewhere behind him. “We built a virtual body. A virtual environment.”

  “But did we get it right?” Jerry considered their fading faces. “It’s not about the system. It’s about the way information flows through the system. We focused on consciousness, thought, awareness. What about the stuff beneath awareness? Flashing lights can give people seizures. Vary the flexibility of the tongue by one decimal place, the brain will go crazy in its efforts to adapt. Think of the subtleties. The thickness of air. The churn of the bowels. Delicate correlations of distance and sound. You wake one morning, everything’s wrong: the weight of bones, the heat of blood, the stickiness of skin. Air itches. Sound lags. Color hurts, textures are strange. Your teeth are soft like putty. Maybe none of it’s there at all, not even the deep-down sense that you’re alive. The brain rejects what it can’t process. Leaving what? Absence. Death.”

  As Kim said, they had built a rough virtual environment. But it was a video game tuned for attention. They’d glossed over the body’s hidden billions of interactions. Even something like desire demanded exact calibration, evolving by the instant, keyed to stimuli. Of course, all sensations were encoded—in millions of bundled nerve fibers. Billions of inputs and outputs per second, all precisely timed. All important. Some critical. Mostly unconscious. All gated and processed by the brain.

  And it had to work in synch. Hormones, chemicals, nervous impulses. Environmental reactions. The timing dauntingly fine.

  How much of this extra material—the operations of the body, the interactions of the world—would they have to emulate? All? Some? Or did finesse matter more than raw data: subtleties of timing, shadings of sensation?

  No idea. But Jerry understood: the brain might generate consciousness, but its core function was body regulation. Receiving inputs, returning outputs. And they had neglected the old coder’s saw. Garbage in, garbage out.

  “We have to tell them.” Jerry put out a hand to touch the body. As he’d expected, his hand passed through. There was no body to touch. Only a tingling absence, the mother of all phantom limbs. “We have to let them know.”

  The ghosts of his former colleagues considered him, fading even as Jerry watched. It was all fading, falling apart, the life he’d known, the impressions he’d retained. Rejected, discarded, in the absence of new input. A tired routine, now wearing down.

  “We don’t have the answers,” Jerry said. “But this is the question. This has to be the focus of research.”

  Jerry stood dumb, struck by the irony. With every failure, they’d added more refinement, copying the brain in greater detail. But the more detailed the simulation, the more sensitive it became. Like a delicate instrument bombarded by bowling balls, it crumpled under crude inputs. Better virtual brains demanded better virtual environments.

  “It has to develop in tandem. All of it. The whole shebang. Brain, body, environment. Because it’s all one system. They have to know.”

  Jerry reached out to the phantoms. They were already intangible, mere afterimages. A world, a pseudo-sensorium, weakening as he watched. Light scattered, textures vanished. Smell was nonexistent, sound nearly gone.

  How, how to communicate? How, when Jerry himself was only a wandering thought, lost in a circuit board, dumb and deaf and blind? How to make his discovery known?

  The answer, as always, was right in front of him, a fading ghost sprawled on an imaginary floor.

  “The body,” Jerry murmured, and then: “Reach!”

  He grasped at the phantoms, clutching wisps of receding sensation.

  “Try to touch something. Anything. Chris, Marjorie, Arvin, Kim. Try to smell the world, interact with it. Focus, feel!”

  The mind of Jerry Emery was an incorporeal specter, graphed in the pixels of an LCD display. But that pattern could be read. The very fact that he was thinking meant that the scan of his brain was running, which meant some researcher had taken over his work. They’d be studying the charts, even now—the real Chris Lister, the living Marjorie Cheong—looking for answers to the same old problem. Answers Jerry was positioned to provide.

  “It doesn’t matter if you can do it. Just try. Try to feel what’s missing. Everything that should be a part of this world, a part of this environment, but isn’t.”

  He could see them touching the surfaces of the lab, countertops, papers, bright edges of shattered glass. Jerry joined them, concentrating on his body, skin and breath and alchemies of mood, weight of his limbs, brush of his clothing. All minor sensations that he normally ignored.

  The ghosts of his colleagues shrank to piecemeal spirits, scattering snatches of voice, gesture, form. The world continued its degradation, patterns breaking into daubs of detail. Jerry didn’t worry. The thing was to search, expand, become alive to a universe of lost variety. Consciousness itself could arouse sense impressions, stimulate vestiges of rich, real experience. No substitute for the variety of life, these traces would serve as a coded message, transcribed in the very web of his thoughts. It would offer his colleagues a clue, if nothing else. They would see his mind probing the limits of its simulation, indicating all the zones of data—the necessary data—their experiments lacked.

  It was a researcher’s ultimate ambition. Jerry Emery, shy recluse, would compose his last insight in lines of electricity—and send a message, perhaps the secret of immortality, back to humanity from beyond a digital grave.

  Try. Reach. Feel.

  Even as he chanted, Jerry saw them fade, colleagues blinking out like lost reflections, the lab breaking into formless noise. Soon he could no longer remember them, and then he could no longer remember what it was he’d been trying to remember. But he clung to his mission, even as the substance of his soul crumbled away. A room of scribbled notes. Numbers on a screen. Facts that built toward a great frustration. The manifestations of a lost life.

  Feel, Jerry commanded himself, until there was nothing left to feel, neither light nor darkness, sound nor light. Until he was only a lingering will, compressed into a final feat of attention. With effort strangely like release, Jerry Emery gathered his thoughts—

  And was here, again, on the outskirts of Phoenix, driving toward the entrance of the parking garage, as a boy rose from a concrete curb to come and greet him.

  “Doctor Emery?”

  The AC was frigid. Jerry noticed what he usually failed to notice, the fuzzy warmth of the car’s upholstery, sticky heat of the steering wheel. The flex of muscles in his thighs and sides as he climbed out into the burning pressure of the southwestern sun.

  He smelled dust, exhaust, his own warm body, washed and soaped, beginning to sweat. He heard the varied hum of the desert, a distant low-level drone of cars, insect activity keen in the bushes, a tautness of life in the vibrating air. A smack of shoes came toward him, loud on asphalt. Jerry moved his head, flicking away quick bugs, fingers trailing on a car’s hot hood.

  The boy stood before him, not as a person, but as a gathering of impressions: sweat, smell, cotton, breath, a stippled sheen of moisture on skin, flares of light where sun met hair. Not a concept or a conscious idea, but a treasury of sensations, rich and strange, the irreducible panoply of life. A hand thrust out. Jerry took it, held it, alive to the quivering plenitude of the moment, the flows of heat, the stirrings of atmosphere, the pressures of muscle and cloth a
nd bone, and the graded, soothing textures of skin. He closed his eyes, and it seemed to last forever—two hands meeting under hot desert sun.

  Vandana Singh is a science fiction writer and physics professor currently working in the Boston area. Her short stories and novellas have been published in numerous venues, including multiple Year’s Best volumes, and have garnered awards (Carl Brandon Parallax, Tiptree Honor) and made it to shortlists (BSFA, Philip K. Dick awards). She was born and raised in India, where she maintains deep connections to family, culture, activism, and academia. A former particle physicist, her current academic work is in the transdisciplinary scholarship of climate change, which is what brought her to the Alaskan Arctic in 2014 as part of a project of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. She is indebted to anthropologist and polar scientist Henry Huntington for enriching and making possible her experience in Alaska, and for critical comments on her story “Requiem.” Vandana Singh is also a Fellow of the Imaginary College of Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination.

  REOUIEM

  Vandana Singh

  The thought of the letter lying on her desk in the untidy apartment was like a little time bomb ticking in her mind. Varsha told Chester about it, between the steamed mussels and the fish course.

  “So I’m going to Alaska for spring break,” she ended.

  “But—what about Atlanta?”

  He had been holding her hand in that ostentatious way he had whenever they were in a restaurant known to be a White Purist hangout. He let go of it, looking hurt.

  The seafood place was a hole-in-the-wall with a clientele that clustered around the TV screen and yelled epithets during football games. The AugReal entertainment was of poor quality—floating sea captains and naked ladies, mostly, but the food was fantastic. Chester liked to live on the edge, take her to places like this, challenge the status quo. She pulled down her Augs to look at him in the world: the blue eyes, the little cut on his cheek, the slight pout of his lips, a tendril of graying brown hair sticking damply to his forehead from the steam still rising off the dish of mussels, and thought: he’s really quite a kid, even though he’s eleven years older than me. That was the attractive thing about him, this childlike quality in a brilliant young professor, although at this moment it was annoying.