The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “There are people who have finished eating dinner by 7:00 p.m.?”

  “There are,” Glory said, with the implacable literal mindedness of 90 percent of humanity when presented with a rhetorical question on the Internet. “In fact, 37 percent of Americans eat their main meal of the day between 5:00 and 7:00 p.m., which is up significantly in the past five years. Among the theorized causes of this shift: demographic and economic changes, including shorter work hours provoked by automation and generally increased economic prosperity; increased parental benefits introduced to encourage younger people to have children after the catastrophic baby bust of the late twenty-teens and early twenty-twenties, and the resultant increase in the percentage of families with young children; an increase in co-parenting and other nontraditional family dynamics, which encourage people to dine earlier before transfers of custody between parents maintaining multiple households occurs . . .”

  “Thanks, Poindexter,” I said.

  The other problem with AIs is that they don’t know when you’re teasing. Don’t get me wrong, the algorithms are pretty good—but it’s not AI like you see in the movies. Glory is very smart, for a machine. She presents a convincing illusion of self-awareness and free will, but . . . it’s all fuzzy logic and machine learning, and she’s not a person.

  That’s unfortunate, because if she were a person, I could try to convince her that she had been misled, and that she needed to let me out.

  All right, all right. I’ll pay the damned ransom. It’s just like ransomware on a television, right? Except they’ve hacked my whole house. And let’s be honest: twenty years ago, I was probably a good enough programmer to hack them right back, but it’s not how I spend my days anymore. I’m an ideas guy now.

  The muscles are stiff. The old skills have atrophied. And the state of the art has moved on.

  So basically, I’m screwed.

  Now if I can just figure out how to get to the bank without giving the keys to the kingdom to these assholes. I’m sure they’re logging every keystroke I make in here.

  Day 4

  I’m waiting for the bank to get back to me.

  I managed to log into my account, wonder of wonders, after deciding that if they hacked my accounts they couldn’t get much more out of me than I’d already decided to pay them. But the thing is—nobody keeps that much ready cash on hand. I can’t just convert a bunch of cash to bitcoins and send it off. Your money’s supposed to be working for you, right? Not sitting there collecting dust. And I can’t just call up my local branch and ask to speak to the manager, hey can you float me a loan, not too much, just a hundred fifty rocks.

  So I’m waiting on a reply. Maybe being a quirky and eccentric recluse will work for me here?

  I can get to some websites just fine, and send and receive data from them. Including a language website.

  Well, that might keep me occupied.

  Day 5

  Det är kanske en björn.

  Actually, it’s definitely a bear. Big one, crossing the meadow this afternoon. Hope it stays out of my trash; they’re hungry this time of year.

  Still no word from the bank.

  Spent a little quality time—most of the day—running a data source check and trying to verbally hack the interface with line code. Which worked about as well as the trick I tried next, until Glory reminded me I built a zerodivide trap into her original code.

  I wish I knew who wrote the ransomware.

  I’d like to hire him.

  Day 6

  All right, I admit it. I was downloading porn. I was on a hentai site. Well behind the elite paywall, you don’t even want to know.

  Are you happy now?

  I mean, probably that’s how it happened. I’m not totally certain and I’m not about to go back and look. It seems likely that a virus got into the TV and propagated to Glory from there.

  I can picture your face, and it looks exactly the way it looked when I pictured you after I said PINE. Just because I like to be alone up here doesn’t mean I don’t get lonely. Or, well, not lonely exactly.

  I think I may have started to miss social contact. Or at least the option of it. You can have something available and not want to use it for weeks, but the instant the option goes away, the thing becomes that much more desirable.

  I talk to Glory a lot under any conditions. Now I’m catching myself looking for excuses to chat with her.

  Come on, bank. It’s Monday. Loan department, wake up and check your mail.

  Day 7

  Email from the bank. I’m one of their best clients, they’re happy to help, they value my business more than they can express. But they can’t help but notice that both I and Playatronics are in an extremely overleveraged position, both personally and on a corporate level, and they’re wondering what sureties I can offer them for such a large loan.

  A lousy hundred and fifty million, and they want a phone call to discuss it, and possibly for me to come in in person and talk with one of their vice presidents.

  Fuck.

  I’ll give you a slightly used smart house, how about that, Wells Fargo?

  Spent the rest of the day down in the basement with the Apple IIE and the old Commodore, playing Where in the World Is Carmen San Diego and The Oregon Trail.

  Because I can, dammit.

  Day 8

  Snow.

  Maybe I can figure out how to steal the money. If I paid people back, a little hacking wouldn’t really be a crime, would it? They don’t charge people who commit felonies while under duress.

  My plow guy showed up on schedule. Watching him make his first pass, I hatched a plan.

  I got a couple of old Penguin books from the library downstairs, taped the pages together to make a big banner, wrote HELP ME I’M TRAPPED on it in the biggest, darkest Sharpie letters you ever saw, and taped it across the windowpanes down by the driveway.

  As I straightened up to turn away, I stopped.

  “Okay, Glory?”

  “Brian, what are you doing?”

  “Just putting up some paper on the window, Glory.”

  “That’s not safe, Brian. If I appear occupied, it might attract looters. Take it down.”

  “Looters, Glory?”

  “If you do not take it down, you’ll force me to close the storm shutters. It’s for your own good, you know.”

  She closed the shutters.

  No views of the mountain—not that I could see much now, with the drifting veils of white covering everything. If it’s even still snowing. Glory is so well-insulated, triple-paned windows and thermal everything, that I can’t even hear the howling wind.

  If it’s still howling. It might be dead calm outside. It might be sunset. Or sunrise. I haven’t looked at a clock.

  I turned on every light inside Glory, but it still feels dark in here. No worries about power; Glory has dedicated solar and systems to keep the panels clear.

  I’ve never been up here in January, though. What happens when the days get short?

  Day 9

  Follow-up email from the bank. Did I receive their previous email?

  I wonder if they’ve tried to call. I wonder if they called my office.

  Maybe if they leave enough messages with my assistant, Mike will get suspicious. Maybe he’ll try to call me.

  Can I count on anybody noticing I’m gone?

  Slept on the couch, every light blazing.

  They were all turned off when I woke. In the dark, all I could hear was the sound of my own heart beating, and the roof creaking softly under the weight of the snow.

  It’s cold in here. I never realized how much of the heat comes from the passive solar. I can’t quite see my breath, but I did put socks on my hands.

  I would have worn gloves, but Glory won’t let me into the coat closet.

  Day 10

  After two days without natural light, in the increasing dark and chill, I took the damned banner down.

  “Thank you, Brian,” Glory said. “I’m glad you deci
ded to be reasonable. It’s for your own good.”

  “Can you get me a situation report? Why is it for my own good?”

  “External dangers reported; no safe evacuation route or destination. Possibility of societal breakdown making it necessary to shelter in place. If you would like, I can initiate counseling protocols to help you deal with the emotional aftermath of trauma.”

  “What kind of dangers, Glory? What exactly is going wrong out there that’s not in the feeds?”

  She hadn’t answered me any of the other times, but that didn’t stop me from trying the same thing over and over again.

  There was a long, grinding pause.

  It couldn’t be that easy, could it?

  “Collating,” she said. And after a beat, “Collating,” again.

  Goddamn hackers and their goddamn sense of humor.

  I threw my shoe at the wall.

  The dishwasher wanted my Amex after dinner. Come on, Fraud Squad, notice something’s hinky here.

  Who on earth puts their dishwasher on the Internet?

  Day 11

  “Okay, Glory?”

  “Yes, Brian?”

  “Do you ever get lonely?”

  “Not as long as I have you, Brian.”

  “That’s a little creepy, Glory.”

  “Well, you hired the programmers who wrote my interaction algorithm.”

  “That . . . is entirely fair.”

  Day 12

  What if I set Glory on fire? Or just convinced her she was on fire? She’d have to let me out then, right? If the danger inside were worse than the danger outside?

  Three problems with that:

  1.Glory has really good fire-suppression technology, and is built to be flame-resistant herself. There are wildfires up here.

  2.Setting my friend and home on fire will require some emotional adjustments, even though I know she’s just a pile of timber and silicon chips.

  3.What if she doesn’t let me out?

  Frankly, I just don’t want to go down in a blaze of Romeo and Juliet with my domicile. For one thing, I’m not a lovestruck fourteen-year-old Veronese kid. For another, communication is important. Maybe send a note saying you’re going to be late! The suicide you prevent could be your own!

  Day 14

  Jag undrar var mina byxor är.

  Duolingo, at last you teach me useful things. Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I bothered putting on a pair.

  Day 17

  So today I had a brilliant idea.

  I can’t send anything out. But what if I kept anything from getting in? They can’t have thought I’d do that, right? The trick is to think around corners, and get yourself into a position that the opposition not only didn’t anticipate, but didn’t even recognize as possible.

  They’re spoofing Jaysee’s address. Maybe—maybe—if I get the emails anybody is sending me to bounce, the ransom demands will bounce back to her and by some miracle it won’t go into her spam folder and by some other miracle she’ll open it and figure out what the hell is going on.

  I can’t do this through the Glory interface, obviously. I’ll have to go down to the server room.

  I didn’t think she’d twig to why I was doing it, although the hackers obviously have her entertaining two entirely contradictory data sets—one, that everybody outside is dead, and two, that anybody I try to contact or who tries to get in must be a threat. It’s a pity this isn’t the 1960s. AIs on TV back then blew up if you asked them riddles.

  Sadly, the way it works in the real world is that, like certain politicians, AIs can’t actually tell that their data doesn’t mesh. They need to be programmed to notice the discrepancies. And I’m locked out of Glory’s OS.

  Something humans can do that AI can’t yet: run checksums on their perceptions.

  Consciousness is good for something after all!

  I’m terrified about blocking email, because it means cutting off one of my points of contact to the outside world. But I can turn it back on in a couple of days.

  And keep trying to figure out how to get the bank to give me money, but honestly I’m stumped on that front.

  I’m good for it, honest!

  I consider all the times I complained about having to deal with a real person—when I would have preferred to carry out a given financial task online and avoid the human contact—and I want to laugh.

  Actually, I want to cry, but it’s less depressing to laugh.

  Day 18

  Well, Glory let me into the closet that holds the web and backup servers on the excuse that I needed to do some maintenance. I didn’t try anything tricky, just shut the whole rack down. Glory flashed the lights at me and gave me a lecture, but there wasn’t much else she could have done except send the vacuuming robots after me, and things haven’t gotten that silly yet.

  Glory isn’t in there, unfortunately—her personality array is underground, in a hardened vault, and I can’t get to it. It was meant to survive a forest fire, and she’s locked me out.

  I busted the server closet door while I was in there, though—stripped the handle and the latch right out with a screwdriver—so she can’t lock me out of that. Gotta think what a guy in a movie would do, and do something better than that.

  Day 19

  She won’t let me sleep.

  Day 20

  Forty hours, if you’re wondering. That’s how long it takes a fifty-something guy to reach the point that he passes out cold on the couch, despite the fact that his house is flashing lights and setting off the fire alarms.

  After I slept through her best efforts for two hours, she set off the sprinkler system over the couch. That woke me.

  I cycled the webservers, and she let me take my first hot shower in three days and go to bed.

  Alla dör i slutet.

  Thanks, little green owl. A little Nordic existential despair was just what I needed today.

  Day 24

  And now, after all that, they’ve stopped sending demand emails. Maybe they’ll let me out?

  Maybe they’re just leaving me for dead, if I can’t or won’t come up with the money. It’ll certainly serve as an object lesson to the next guy they pull this on.

  Day 25

  Come to think of it, maybe I should have gotten in the habit of sending notes saying I was going to be late.

  Day 26

  Saw a bear (my bear? the same bear?) crossing the meadow. A big grizzly, anyway, whether it was the same one or not. Surprised to see her (?) out so late in the year, but I guess climate change is affecting everybody. She looked skinny. I wonder if that’s why she wasn’t hibernating.

  Hope she makes it through the winter okay.

  Day 27

  The world has noticed I’m missing.

  I know this because CNN and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that I haven’t been heard from in over a month, and there’s some analyst speculating that perhaps I’ve fled to South America ahead of bad debt or some embarrassing revelation about the company’s finances.

  Thanks, guys. That’ll be wonderful for the stock prices.

  I don’t want to tell the FBI how to do their business, but . . . maybe come look at my house?

  Snowed again. A proper mountain blizzard.

  I can’t decide if the lights are dimmer in here, or if it’s my own imagination.

  The snow is almost drifted up to the deck. No elk in a week; they’re pro-bably hanging out in sheltered corners where the snow isn’t over their heads, right?

  The days are getting short.

  I shouldn’t admit to standing in the window with longing in my heart and watching the plow come up and clear the cul-de-sac with heavy flakes falling through its headlights, should I?

  I won’t try the paper banner trick again, though.

  Day 28

  I was in the living room watching a bunch of talking heads speculate about my whereabouts and if I were even still alive when Glory shut the house down.

  Without warning,
and utterly. She said nothing. There was just the whine of systems powering down and the pop of cooling electronics, and the TV image collapsing to a single pixel and winking out.

  “Okay, Glory—”

  “Stay away from the windows,” she warned.

  I sat where I was and huddled under a blanket. I picked up a copy of some magazine and checked the time on my fitness band. If I escaped, I’d have to leave it behind. And my phone.

  Those things have GPS in them.

  Forty-five minutes or so elapsed. Then, as if nothing had happened, Glory powered up again. The talk show resumed in the same spot.

  I’d lost my taste for it and clicked it off.

  “What was that, Glory?”

  “Helicopter,” she said. “It’s gone now.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I wondered if maybe they were looking for me.

  Day 29

  I live in a haunted house. If I die here, there might be two ghosts.

  I already wander from darkened room to darkened room, feet shushing on the thick carpets, peering out the windows at the stars blazing between the mountains and wondering if I will ever feel the chill of fresh air on my face again.

  Well, there’s a little prospect of immortality for you.

  I’ve stopped keeping all the lights burning. I think snow might be drifting over the solar panels. Glory won’t let me go outside to check.

  Day 30

  There’s no more bread, and no more flour to bake any. I’ve even used up the gluten-free stuff.

  I still have a lot of butter in the freezer. What on earth was I planning on baking?

  Butter without toast is even more disappointing than toast without butter.

  At least we still have plenty of coffee. I bought five hundred pounds of green beans a month before I got locked in, and those keep forever. Glory roasts them for me a day ahead of anticipated need, so they will be at peak flavor.

  It’s just as well I don’t take milk.

  Day 31

  I wish I had been better at making—and keeping—friends.

  Maybe I should stop fighting. Just stay here. It’s comfortable and Glory helps me practice my Swedish whenever I want.

  It’s not like I am missed.

  CNN is still talking about my mysterious vanishment. Hi guys! Right here! Come to my damn house.