Candle

by Barnes, John

  “And now here you are. A free human being, with a free meme. Someone for me to talk to. With your permission, I will want to begin copying bits and pieces of you, Resuna. I think it may be a few decades before I have freed everyone—I must admit that it’s much easier to cope with the ecological disaster with everyone working together and no backtalk. But ultimately I want to live in a world filled with backtalk.”

  I asked, “But if everyone is free … how can the copies of Resuna in them be the cellular automata that you emerge from?”

  One True’s constructed image on the screen grinned. “That’s why I’m so scared, and so excited. As this happens, well, perhaps I shall just fade. Perhaps I’ll want to migrate onto a giant computer network. Perhaps I can coexist with all those free people and all those free Resunas. That’s what’s truly beautiful here. I don’t know where it’s going, or how. I’m just going to turn it all over and shake it and … well, we’ll see.”

  “You know,” I said, “I’m beginning to like you.”

  The image on the screen flickered and bumped for a moment, and when it came back, the synthesized face seemed to have an odd tic, as if trying to create an expression that it had seen but never needed before. After several seconds of that, the face gave up and became blank. Then One True said, “Really? You’re not just saying that?”

  <> The day Kelly graduated from high school, Mary and I went over with Dave and Nancy to watch the ceremony. It was a curious sort of event. At one moment everyone moved comfortably in step, at another they almost stumbled. Sometimes everyone laughed in unison at the speaker’s little jokes, sometimes people reacted with a ragged scatter of laughs, and sometimes the audience just ignored the speaker entirely. When Kelly got up to speak, I muttered to Dave, “She is a great kid, you know.”

  “Yeah. Wouldn’t have missed knowing her for the world.”

  “Shhh,” our wives hissed in unison.

  “The topic I have been assigned for today,” Kelly began, “is freedom and responsibility. Having been assigned it, I’m responsible for it; now all I have to do is work in some freedom.”

  Her classmates laughed, one of those ragged laughs that indicated that they were increasingly not controlled.

  And they will be less controlled next year, and the year after, a voice thought in my head.

  Resuna?

  No, it’s One True. Let me know if you like the speech.

  Did you write it for her? I asked, thinking that this might be the way One True got some of its new ideas out in front of the human race. In the years since Dave and I had returned, the freer version of Resuna had proven not to be terribly popular; it made too many people feel insecure. Every so often, for the last couple years, One True had been coming up with ways for those of us with the freer version to gently spread the idea, making it less threatening and strange to those with the old, rigid version.

  No, that speech is all hers. One True assured me. The reason I wanted to know whether you like it is, I liked it when I watched her write it.

  Kelly rattled off a set of paradoxes that didn’t sound like much more than college sophomore philosophy to me, but the voice in the back of my head chuckled along the whole time. It was May, which meant vivid green mountains, brilliant light off the glaciers, thundering rivers everywhere, and perfectly blue skies. The six graduating students of Sursumcorda High would each be giving a speech, but whether I chose to listen or not, it would be a fine day to just sit, still and quiet, in the park by the old town hall. I let my mind drift from the paradoxes to the mountains, and it stayed there.

  That night, just before I fell asleep, One True asked me what I had thought of the speech. I had to admit that I hadn’t listened very closely. What exactly did you like about it? I asked One True.

  Oh, that’s embarrassing, One True admitted. I wasn’t really as impressed by her speech, per se, as I thought I was. It was the cleverness and the self-appreciation with which she was putting it together; I had so much fun watching her create the speech, because she was having so much fun creating it. So I guess to really enjoy the speech she created—as opposed to the one she gave—you had to be there.

  But you were the only one who could be there, I thought back at one true.

  Not true. Kelly was.

  The funny thing was, I had forgotten that obvious point. I was still chuckling about that a few minutes later, as Mary and I lay holding hands, waiting for sleep, and Scorpio blazed in through the big south window.

  About The Author

  JOHN BARNES is the award-winning author of Orbital Resonance, A Million Open Doors, Mother of Storms, Earth Made of Class, and many other novels. He lives in Gunnison, Colorado, with his wife, author Kara Dalkey.