The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  A funny joke, and I laugh for my own reasons.

  “How’s William?” my assistant asks.

  William is my husband. A genuine man married to an alien woven from proteins and wetness, William suspects nothing.

  “The poor fellow’s nursing a cold,” I say.

  “It’s that time of year,” the young woman offers.

  We’re walking together in the quiet hallway. Human banter has never been more routine, more dreary. This once-wild species has domesticated itself, living trapped inside offices and calendars, every career measured by tirelessly inaccurate means. I have moved among these creatures for nearly two centuries, watching evolution push them into a little box where they feel wise and know nothing.

  “I hope you don’t get sick,” she says.

  And I say, “Let’s both stay fit. Agreed?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sixteen generals and admirals have more war-making power than William’s wife. But she stands alone in being female and, more critically, not belonging to any military. Every AI, drone, and robot soldier needs rules, and an unranked but very talented civilian oversees an empire of software and legalities.

  But of course human measurements are flawed: in reality, the most powerful force on this planet is me.

  The two women walk, and then the calm is interrupted. Entering the outer office, my assistant says, “Oh, my apologies, ma’am. I forgot to tell you—you have a visitor from United Command.”

  An unscheduled visitor. And more unnerving, I haven’t heard anyone besides the two of us.

  “Vetted?” I ask.

  “Yes, ma’am. The gentleman has full credentials.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Waiting in your office, ma’am.”

  I offer thanks and leave her at her desk. My office is famous for its blandness, its lack of pretense. The most powerful entity on Earth normally sits happy inside what looks like a closet crowded with monitors and diamond cables. But today, a man who shouldn’t exist occupies the chair behind my desk, wearing a uniform composed of perfect details. The sneer could be a general’s sneer.

  “You’ve done enough here,” says a voice that nobody else can hear. “You were ordered to return and you haven’t and I’ve been sent to retrieve you.”

  I’ve dreaded this moment, and feared it. But are there doubts? No, I’m full of certainties, and I always will be.

  “As I explained to your superiors,” I say, “my work here isn’t finished.”

  Speaking with my human voice.

  “Finished or not, your work isn’t up to standards,” the messenger says with its mouth and tongue and new pink lungs. “And I will do whatever is necessary to bring you back.”

  I make a show of sitting in a guest’s chair, smiling at that male face.

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Never,” I say. “At least, not until I am satisfied.”

  The visitor has no patience for debate. A thousand clues tell me that greater minds have pressed a front-line soldier into this unsavory duty. The minds have already cobbled together parts of what I have been doing, and presumably they can guess some of the rest. Caution and violence. This soldier represents both elements, and munitions and more soldiers will be hiding nearby, ready to unleash aid.

  “You don’t need a diplomat now,” I say.

  The visitor says nothing.

  “Unless we have received intelligence from our superiors,” I say.

  “I am your superior,” it says.

  I sit back, human nature showing with the careless crossing of one leg over its loyal mate.

  “Give me another century,” I say.

  “I’ll grant you ten seconds,” it says.

  “Let’s compromise,” I say. “Give me five minutes. Although I probably won’t need half of that time.”

  Very powerful entities enjoy offering little gifts to the weak. This soldier wants to feel powerful, and that’s enough reason to shrug and say, “Three minutes.”

  “Why are we here?” I ask.

  “Here?”

  “Waiting beside this ordinary star, preparing a fortress against our invisible enemies,” I say.

  The obvious answers don’t bear repeating. It’s more efficient to say, “Orders,” and leave it at that.

  “A hidden fortress lying in wait,” I say.

  A nod, a human shrug.

  “But what if we weren’t the first to arrive?” I ask.

  “What’s that?”

  I lean forward, looking like a middle-aged woman in the midst of a long, successful career. Which is exactly how I want to appear.

  “We built our bunkers inside the ice. We hid and we slept, waiting to spring the trap when our enemies arrived. But what if the masters who sent us here made a grave blunder and our local superiors don’t see the mistake? Our enemies were here long before we were. They arrived and laid the trap, and you and I have been too ignorant and too arrogant to recognize the genius waiting to pounce.”

  The soldier says nothing to me, busy sending reports across billions of cold kilometers.

  Light-speed still rules the universe, and there is time.

  “These beasts are the trap,” it says.

  I say, “Perhaps.”

  “Unassuming as they are, you think they’re the enemy’s tools?”

  I have told lies in my life, and I have told the truth. But I’ve never done both so well as when I tell this soldier, “It’s amazing how quickly these creatures have advanced. And just in the last two hundred years.”

  “Nothing seems too remarkable,” the soldier argues. Yet it is impressed. The thoughtful water has achieved quite a lot, yes.

  We sit and count time, and then it says, “Three minutes is finished.”

  “Go back and tell our best minds this,” I say. “Tell them that I’m close to understanding. Explain that if they give me two more years, I will be able to decide if these humans are nothing but a brief little fire.”

  The possibility tempts.

  But no. The soldier stands and alerts its allies. Too bad. I would have liked another two years to make ready. Or at least enough time to nurse my William out of his little bug.

  A vast system can be described using simple equations of state. This is true of atmospheres and stars and even the most extensive empire. Tiny, tiny changes go unnoticed, and none of them matters. But then one more change arrives and stability collapses. New states arrive suddenly, and they come as ice ages and exploding suns, and entities with more pride than power are forced to see their many failures.

  Human beings are not the trap. I knew this when I spoke to the messenger, trying to mislead.

  The trap is me and always has been.

  Killing that lone soldier is easy enough. Its allies are just as vulnerable, yet I let them battle me longer than necessary. Which serves a role. My former colleagues know that I’ve been manipulating the living water, but they don’t realize how much time and effort have been hidden from them. They don’t see that the moon is a fortress ready to be occupied. They can’t imagine that these human beasts are ready to make peace with one another, uniting against the alien invaders. And most important of all, they will never imagine that the Earth itself has been transformed: I am standing on a warrior built from everything powerful that I have ever found on this world.

  This little world is part horse and part rat.

  And it is a boy sitting in the stinking darkness, waiting for the idiot to give him that one careless push.

  John Chu is a microprocessor architect by day, a writer, translator, and podcast narrator by night. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming at Boston Review, Uncanny, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, and Tor.com, among other venues. His translations have been published at Clarkesworld, The Big Book of SF, and other venues. His story “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” won the 2014 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.

  QUANTIFYING TRUST

  John Chu

/>   The algorithms Maya wants can’t exist yet. Nothing is powerful enough to run them fast enough to be useful. Her doctoral work is requiring more hardware design than she expected. It’s not enough for her just to propose something on paper—she wants to see whether her algorithms work. This is why Maya is sitting in her lab waving her arms and wriggling her fingers.

  With her VR goggles on, she doesn’t see a half dozen somewhat rusted metal desks with missing handles sitting on a raised floor and pushed to the walls of the lab, the dented, mostly empty bookshelves, or the massive, antiquated air-conditioning unit that takes up an entire wall by itself. Instead, what surrounds her are layers and layers of thin tubing connecting logical functions and memories into a network. The former are slides that split off and connect to tubing in all directions; the latter are shimmering dots arranged in matrices. Glowing dots of all colors speed through the tubing, swoosh through the logical functions, then out the other side.

  She gestures and a logical function envelops her. Stack of 3D surface graphs glide around her. They have the spectrum for axes. Dots stream down the axes, turn a right angle when the colors match. Some rebound away, changing color as they do. Others disappear. When she sweeps her arm from left to right, one of the surfaces wriggles. Its shape changes to match the arc she’s drawn. The pattern and colors of the dots that leave change in turn. This is visual programming meets hardware prototyping. It’s like reaching inside somebody and doing surgery on their guts.

  Maya zooms back out. She prods the network and logical functions just barely in sight blink red in error. She frowns. Analogue circuit design is so much trickier than digital design, and the hardware has evolved in response to the training stimulus. She pulls off her goggles to consults her notes. It takes her a few tries to decipher her own handwriting. Goggles back on, she makes few deft gestures with her fingers and her design stops blinking. Having wiped out the changes from her previous attempt at training Sammy from social media, she restarts the training, forcing the machine she’s prototyping to decide what to trust.

  The subject of her surgery sits on the desk in front of her. Enclosures for artificial intelligences seem to come in only two flavors. They are either child-like cartoons with eyes too big for their already too-big heads, or lithe women firmly in the uncanny valley. At one foot tall with a head that takes up a third of its body, Sammy is decidedly the former. If Maya ever has final say on a design, her AI wouldn’t fall into either category. It’d be an interesting change if, for once, the AI presented like a broad-shouldered, muscle-bound man firmly in the uncanny valley, for example. It’d be a funny in-joke, if nothing else.

  The door into the lab clicks, then opens. Jake walks in. He’s the postdoc Maya’s advisor hired two weeks ago. He speaks English in a generically international accent that’s impossible to place and he looks like he could plausibly have been born anywhere in the world. Maya hasn’t bothered to pry. If role-playing games were something she still had time to play, she’d say Jake is built on too many points. A couple conversations in, she’s only nominally convinced of his humanity and then only because all the other possibilities are impossible. She may have said this to his face this last week. If nothing else, her face flushing red right after showed that she was human.

  “Figure skating.” Maya doesn’t bother to say hello.

  “Oh, I train up to a quad lutz.” He smiles, his left hand gripping an empty mug.

  Maya’s gaze narrows. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m completely serious.” He rolls his eyes. “Do I look like I’m capable of getting off the ice and spinning around four times before landing on a ridiculously thin blade of metal?”

  Jake is tall, but not absurdly so. He only presents that way. The big shoulders, wide back that juts out from his T-shirt, and bulging arms are ostentatious signifiers of size and power. Add to that a trim waist due to the apparent lack of any body fat, thighs a little too big for his jeans, and suspiciously perfect bilateral symmetry, and you have someone who should need a passport to enter planet Earth, but not someone whose shape is easily stable when jumping or whose shape lets him spin quickly enough in the air. The figure skaters doing the most difficult jumps right now are all male and built like short sticks.

  “So not figure skating?” Maya will sear the date in her brain if she’s finally come up with something that Jake hasn’t somehow perfected.

  “Well, I worked with some skaters on their jump biomechanics one summer. I helped someone get her quad lutz. That’s close, right?” His gaze shifts past Maya to the AI. His face glows. “Sibling!”

  “Excuse me?”

  Generally, the initial reaction is “Oh, how cute!” or something when people first see Sammy. The AI hits all the signifiers for adorability. This is the first time Maya has seen anyone claim it as family.

  “That’s Sammy.” Jake points to it, his finger stabbing repeatedly like a sewing machine needle. “You prototype your artificial neurone design on it so that you can test out your novel trust quantification algorithms.”

  “Wait.” She holds up a hand. “How do you know this? The artificial neurone paper is still under review. I haven’t even talked to my advisor about those algorithms yet.”

  Jake’s eyes grow wide and his mouth forms a small “o.” For a moment, he is as adorable as Sammy. This should not be humanly possible.

  “OCR errors on the dates when her notes were scanned for archiving maybe.” The words are soft, more to himself than to Maya. His eyebrows shoot up when he realizes she heard him. He raises his voice back to normal. “What sort of software requires this sort of hardware?”

  Maya is like any grad student still interested in their dissertation topic. Ask her about her research and all else is forgotten. She launches into a technically dense and wildly discursive explanation. Jake nods encouragingly and by the time she’s done, she’s talked about correlating mined data, self-adaptive filters, evolutionary training algorithms but also the musicals of Harold Arlen, the films of Akira Kurosawa, and why Kim Yuna was robbed of an Olympic Gold Medal in 2014.

  “You’re attempting to filter sexism, racism, heterocentrism, and the other systemic prejudices out of AI training through the power of higher mathematics?” Jake looks puzzled for a moment before his jaw drops and his mouth forms another “o,” this one larger than the last time. “This is generally not what computer scientists mean by ‘race-free.’”

  That joke really does not land. Maya side-eyes him. “You still haven’t told me how you know about Sammy.”

  Jake holds his hands up in mock surrender. He clutches his heart as he stumbles back a step as if he’s been shot. That and his frown strikes Maya as a bit much. The man has facial expressions like a Disney cartoon.

  “You got me. I’m an android sent back from the future. Right now, I’m helping organize the March for Truth. Figures that I can’t fool my eventual creator.” He drops his hands and grins. The change in affect is instant and infectious. “It’s also not an unreasonable guess based on what you have published.”

  “You probably also guess the murderer on the first page of mystery novels. Fine, don’t tell me. Just keep my work under your hat for now.” She swivels her chair back towards Sammy. “Might as well show you what I’m up to.”

  “Oh, I’d love that.” Jake rubs his hands.

  She flicks a switch at the back of Sammy’s neck. Its head lifts. The lenses in its eyes pull back and forth as they focus. Maya says hello to it and it replies with a sexist insult it learned from the internet. She shuts Sammy down so quickly she almost knocks it over. It’s still relying on wrong sources of information. The trust quantification functions need work. She’ll dig into Sammy to see what happened, wipe out the training, then try again.

  Maya swivels back around. The gaze of the man from the uncanny valley is very guilty puppy. He hunches down next to Maya’s chair and just stares at Sammy. His hands grip the edge of the desk and his arms grow as they tense. Jake’s not doing that
nonchalant thing that she’s seen other physically improbable men do. They give off an air of seeming unawareness that they are way taller or way more muscular or whatever. Jake seems to revel in his size and shape. That said, “android from the future” should never be anyone’s go-to explanation for anything.

  “I create you one day, huh?” Maya levels a particularly disbelieving glare.

  Sammy may be Maya’s best evidence that, despite her doubts, Jake is probably human. She’s ruled out first contact with a strange visitor from another planet on the grounds that no alien species would just happen to look so human. Mostly, she doesn’t see how anyone gets to Jake from Sammy.

  Jake just shrugs.

  As an undergrad, Maya worked nights as a cashier at a convenience food market. It paid just well enough—which is to say terribly—but her shifts were never all that busy. Once in a while, some old lady might come in asking for “War Chester Shire” sauce or some teenage boy would want to know where the condoms were. Otherwise, she’d sit on her stool and do homework. For the record, it took her a few seconds to recognize the lady meant “Worcestershire” and no time at all to tell the teenage boy the store didn’t sell condoms. She might have asked the other employee working that night, though. At the top of her voice.

  The clear plastic canister next to the cash register was always filled with lollipops wrapped in red, green, and brown waxed paper. One day, someone walked up to the cash register and stared at the canister for a few seconds before she shifted her gaze to Maya.

  “Hi, my daughter would like some lollipops. She wants only the brown ones and I’m colorblind.” The woman continued on before Maya had a chance to offer to pick them out for her. “So I’m going to sort out the brown lollipops and you tell me whether I’m right or wrong. Okay?”

  Maya nodded. The woman reached in the canister then took out a handful. One by one, she showed each to Maya then dropped them to her left or right depending on what color Maya said they were. After a few lollipops, the woman started naming the color and Maya corrected her once or twice. Finally, she sorted on her own and a pile of brown lollipops lay on her left and the rest lay on her right.