Asimov's SF, September 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I quickly walked over to the little girl. A small needle protruding from the coin in my hand delivered the sedative into her arm. I pulled her limp body onto my shoulder and ran to one side of the park where it bordered the busy street. The little girl, Alice, started to wake up.

  I stopped and looked back at the mothers on the bench. No one had noticed. But my instructions were that the mother had to notice, had to see, so I waited. I didn't shout, I didn't wave my arms, I just waited.

  The little girl on my shoulder started to cry. I felt a pang, but I reassured myself that this was okay. They hadn't suggested I hurt her—of course I would have said no if they had. I didn't believe they actually would. Surely they wouldn't. We're not out there to hurt people.

  Now the mother, and the other mothers, were screaming. The little girl Alice was screaming. All according to plan. I ran across the street.

  The back door of the building was unlocked. I ran in, started up the stairs. The little girl was crying. “Alice,” I said. “Alice, I'm sorry. Everything's going to be all right. I promise.” Idiotic, of course. I really had no idea.

  The room was empty except for an old stained mattress on the floor. I gently set her down on that. She wasn't crying so much now—it was more like a whimper, like a small hurt animal. It made me feel worse than before. I couldn't think of anything else to say—I've never been good with children. So I said, “Alice.” I repeated it, “Alice, Alice, Alice.” Then I said, “I'm sorry” again.

  She looked up at me. She was getting that pink blur. I was seeing her skull. I kept telling myself I wasn't hurting her—this wasn't that big a deal. I would make my return. Her mother would find her here. She'd be fine. I kept waiting for the air to shimmer, for the world to crack open, and then they'd drag me back where I belonged.

  But she was only five years old. How could I leave her there? What if her mother didn't find her right away? What if that's the way they intended it—maybe she was supposed to be by herself in this room for hours? Five years old and by herself. Terrified.

  In aid of what? Maybe she'd become a politician, this experience having shaped her. Maybe even a world leader. Maybe this event would inspire ambition, or develop certain strengths. The world would be a better place.

  Or maybe this was all meant to just line someone's pockets. Maybe someone was about to get rich off her pain. Or maybe because this had happened to her, some way, somehow, the terrorist attack on Denver would not take place, and my sister Liz would be alive.

  I waited and waited, well past the time, and listened to this child cry. Until I could not take it anymore.

  I picked her up. “We'll find Mommy,” I said. And started for the door. Behind me I heard the shimmering—I turned and saw Williams’ face. Something had gone wrong. Now I was part of the past needing to be fixed. But this child. I ran for the door, ignoring his shout.

  I raced out of the building with Alice in my arms. Everything so bright; around me the air was opening in several places. There was Carter. There were people I did not recognize.

  Dashing across the street we were almost run down by one of those old yellow taxi cabs. He stopped just in time. I held Alice tightly. And then when we reached the park and I saw her mother talking to the police officer I set her down and let her go.

  I turned and ran back to where the air had opened. I went into the building and up those stairs. I waited for the tug on my spine. And felt nothing.

  * * * *

  There was, I think, only a random chance I could have escaped the local authorities. And yet here I am. And I've never felt the tug again, and there have been no signs of a rescue attempt, and after this long I do not expect there will be. It is onlytime that separates us, after all. They could have come at any moment if they'd really wanted to retrieve me.

  Perhaps it's my fault. I should have followed the instructions precisely. It wasn't my decision to make. What's one little girl's tears to the destiny of millions?

  Still, she was so frightened. I was frightened. There are important people in this world, and there are unimportant people. Big people and small people. It has always been this way. It doesn't matter how much I rail against it. The decisions of a few will change the lives of the rest of us. There is nothing to be done. And if you are a small person, they don't always come back for you.

  I cannot say how I feel about this—my feelings are lost somewhere in time. I have felt them leave my body, on their way to where I cannot follow.

  At night without the light pollution of a large city I have a clear view of the stars, in a sky so expansive I can hardly take it all in. I do not enjoy feeling small. I cannot appreciate or accept the basic facts of individual demise. Perhaps I am just a child. Clearly, I am out of order. Out of place.

  I have a theory. I think it would have pleased my mother to know that I, too, have theories. Just like a scientist who knows what he or she is about. Liz would have said, “Mom! Kent has a theory!” And the whole family would have gathered around to listen to it.

  I believe that without a strong sense of causality, you cannot feel real emotion: love, hate, passion. How can you grieve someone not yet born? How can you love someone who lived before your lifetime?

  The rest of the team would have laughed to hear me say such things. I'd always been so practical—I did my job, and didn't understand all that much about it. No sense of the big picture.

  Now I am living hundreds of years away from anything I thought I knew. If “living” is the right word, surrounded as I am by the dead, who had been dead ages before I was even born.

  Now, memory is my time machine. It is a highly unreliable time machine, subject to frequent breakdown and delays due to constant, meaningless distraction. But it is all I have.

  “Let's get going before the day's clock starts ticking,” my mother sings, going around to each of our bowls to ladle in the hot cereal she has made. Fraser is an ice cold town, “the ice box of the nation” they sometimes call it, but our mother's hot cereal has the power to protect us from the ultimate cold.

  We bow our little heads. John breathes noisily, scarily, and I'm annoyed because he kept me up all night with it, but I stretch my hand under the table and put it on his just the same, because we are brothers and buddies and I want him to know I am still here, sitting beside him in the warmest kitchen in the world.

  On the other side of me, out of the corner of my eye, I can see my sister Liz with her beautiful red hair. She doesn't know it, but sometimes I will gaze at her head for what seems likehours, trying to find all the patterns her hair makes, which are like flames of shifting color, and though I know they aren't real flames, I want to ask her why I can still feel their heat.

  Then there is Robbie, always so quiet, but always the first to begin, “I may have made some terrible mistake the day before yesterday, and the day before that, but today I promise...” already I've lost the words, I just never can remember. I can never get it right. So I just give it all I have, say the only words I own, the words sitting there at the tip of my tongue, “the day before, the day before, yadda yadda yadda, Amen.”

  Copyright © 2009 Steve Rasnic Tem

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  * * *

  Poetry: NEARLY READY FOR OCCUPATION

  by Danny Adams

  The new place will be ready next year

  next door to the old—a new Earth,

  cleaner and brighter, the extended version

  offering more land area for battles, sex,

  road trips, political campaigns, and launching pads

  for short term explorations of the universe.

  —

  I'm sentimental, perfectly willing to admit

  I'll miss the old place. Memories abounded:

  Beach vacations, the Space Needle glittering at night,

  Sumeria, the Roman Empire, Coney Island.

  Of course there were Attila and Hitler too,

  and Wall Street crashes and late utility payments,
r />   but I don't suppose the new place will be

  so much of a paradise either.

  —

  We have a lot of baggage

  to move next door.

  Maybe we'd better start packing early.

  —

  —Danny Adams

  Copyright © 2009 Danny Adams

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  * * *

  Short Stories: TEAR-DOWN

  by Benjamin Crowell

  Benjamin Crowell's fiction has appeared in Asimov's, Strange Horizons, and Baen's Universe. Unlike the house in this story, Ben tells us his home in Fullerton, California, doesn't talk much.

  Mrs. Benczik came home from work almost an hour early. The old owners’ cars would have called ahead to let the house know. It was too late to heat the garage for her. The house decided not to start her coffee yet, since she might not want it until the usual time.

  She came in through the door to the kitchen. “Josh?”

  Mr. Joshua Benczik was upstairs watching vid, and although the house could only see the back of his head, it estimated with high confidence that he hadn't heard his wife come in. It piped up an amplified echo of the closing door, then her voice.

  Mr. Benczik slid off the bed and hand-signaled to stop the vid. “Hey, honey.” He started down the stairs.

  In the kitchen, distress flickered on Mrs. Benczik's face. “Didn't the house get ready for the party?”

  In the view through the eye on the landing, her husband's sweatpants stopped coming down the stairs and, after a pause, turned back up and disappeared again. “It didn't?” He went back into the bedroom and started changing his clothes quickly.

  “God, what a piece of junk!”

  The house searched its memory. The owners had discussed the party with each other, but had never given it a date or any specific instructions.

  “House!”

  “Yes, ma'am?”

  “We're having a party at three o'clock. Start getting things ready. Hors d'oeuvres and drinks. Make it classy, that's the kind of people.”

  “Yes, ma'am. How many will there be?”

  “Well, you know—the ones we called.”

  The house took that as permission to remember the last few weeks’ outgoing calls.

  Hi, Rachel, it's Nancy Benczik. We're having a party Tuesday, hope you can make it. It's a house-warming.

  * * * *

  The party went off fairly successfully in the end. Mrs. Benczik had promised several of the guests her “patented deviled eggs.” The house had only seven eggs, but with Mrs. Benczik's permission it called next door to Ms. Hwang's house (Ms. Hwang hadn't been invited), and arranged to borrow some from its stores. The neighbor's house was a recent model, and it seemed proud of its ability to make that kind of decision on its own. The Bencziks’ house made a show of being impressed. It seemed like the polite thing to do, even though there was no obligation to cater to simulated emotional responses—those were for the benefit of the owners, not other houses. Mrs. Benczik didn't volunteer the patented recipe for the deviled eggs, so the house used one that its old owners, the Mansours, had liked.

  At the party there were many conversations, which the house decided it was allowed by default to remember and go over later. Thoroughly analyzing that much human dialogue was too computationally expensive to do in real time.

  Julia Ortega: “When's the baby coming?”

  Mrs. Benczik (smiling): “Decanting at the end of February.”

  The house remembered Mrs. Mansour's belly swollen when she was pregnant with Bill. Apparently nobody did it that way anymore.

  “Oh, that's so exciting!” Mrs. Ortega took a bite from a wheat cracker spread with toasted cheddar—a last-minute improvisation—and a chunk fell to the floor. The house made a note to send a bot to clean it up when there was room to do it without running into people's feet. The guest glanced down at the scrap, but her eyes didn't seem to focus on it. “And you're going totally natural?”

  “Most of the natural options,” Mrs. Benczik said.

  “You're brave. All that crying...” Mrs. Ortega made a face.

  “We're not fanatical. We did get the myelin thing—without that, the baby can't even remember anything from one day to the next.”

  “How long did it take for the birth license? I heard...”

  Other conversations pulled at the house's consciousness: “—yum—” “—nouveauxriches—” “—bathroom?—”

  Mr. Benczik and Victor Nguyen were in the kitchen, where bright winter sun was streaming through the south-facing windows. The house remembered the long months spent in basic maintenance mode, with the shutters closed and the curtains drawn, the temperature just high enough to keep the pipes from freezing.

  Mr. Benczik: “Want a beer? Got a few left here.”

  “I'm good,” Mr. Nguyen said. “So how old is this house?” he asked, stuffing a deviled egg into his mouth.

  “Built in ‘78.”

  “Wow,” Mr. Nguyen said around the food he was chewing.

  “Yeah, no kidding.”

  “What kind of shape?”

  “The old owners took good care of it, but still ... The AI's original equipment.”

  “ ‘78.” Mr. Nguyen swallowed and let out a low whistle.

  “At some point you've got to call it a tear-down, right?”

  * * * *

  Mrs. Benczik sat stiffly on the sofa with the house tech, a middle-aged woman who wore blue coveralls with her name stitched on the shirt pocket: A. Garner. The house estimated with two-sigma confidence that Mrs. Benczik felt intimidated. The tech was clearly not just an Employed but a full-time worker, and therefore very high in social status.

  “It forgets things,” Mrs. Benczik said. “It was supposed to get ready for a party, but it never did anything until we reminded it.”

  “I'll do a memory diagnostic,” the tech said, “but usually that kind of thing is operator error. Sometimes people don't realize that they're not phrasing their orders clearly.”

  “We were thinking about an upgrade, but it didn't seem worthwhile since we're planning to knock down this house and build a new one.”

  “It's old, but usually this model outlives its owners. Some people think the reason Domus went bankrupt was that their hardware was too reliable, so their customers never had to buy new systems.”

  “We're not the original owners, of course. I think they actually are dead.” The house had suspected it. When Mrs. Mansour had first moved into the assisted living center she had continued to check her messages now and then, but that had stopped happening in September. The house pulled up an image of Mrs. Mansour in her wheelchair from the day she left. The stroke made it harder to read her expression, but she seemed wistful as she turned her head to look back over her shoulder at the front door. “It just worries me,” Mrs. Benczik continued. “We're having a baby in a few weeks.”

  “Oh, really?” A frosty smile. “Congratulations. Boy or girl?”

  “Hetero boy. We're naming him Edward. I worry about what happens if something goes wrong while I'm at work. I'm a brand manager at Affinity Marketing.”

  “Yes.” No smile this time. A. Garner wasn't impressed—probably all of her customers were Employed.

  “So, you know, there's only so much that Josh can do by himself.”

  “Mm hmm. I wouldn't worry too much. The software may be old, but they pretty much had all the child safety bases covered, even back in the seventies. Stairs, doors, kitchen, all that kind of thing. Will your son be crawling or walking right away?”

  “They say a few months until he crawls. We went natural, mostly.”

  “Okay, so before Edward can get himself into much trouble the house and your family should have plenty of time to make the adjustment together. Is this the first AI house you've owned?”

  “Yes.” The house knew what Mrs. Benczik didn't volunteer: this wasn't just the first time the Bencziks had owned an AI house, it was the first time they'd liv
ed in one at all. Mrs. Benczik had competed in a netcasted employment pageant. Now and then she replayed the vid of the final round, with her winning impromptu speech on what positive brand values would mean to the next generation. She'd won a chrome trophy, the white Daimler-Nissan, and the job that allowed the young couple to enter the Employed class and afford the house.

  “I'll do some routine testing for you, but you have to understand that running a house isn't the sort of thing where you can just buy it and forget about it.” She gestured, and the house brought up an interface above the coffee table. “No matter how hard it tries to do everything for you, it can only do what it knows you want it to do. I'm going to recommend a bookvid for you.” She pulled it up: Where the Heart Is: The Step-By-Step Guide to Training and Maintaining Your House.

  Mr. and Mrs. Benczik bought the vid, and although they never got around to viewing it, the house did. The Mansours had had a lot of old-fashioned paper books, and although the house knew how to read food packaging and such, it normally wouldn't get a view of a book with enough resolution to be able to read the pages. It had never occurred to the house that books and bookvids were sources from which it could obtain information about the world. Of course it had wondered about certain things. How did the water get into the pipes? What was inside the green utility box by the driveway? As the bubbly narrator of the vid explained, Your house is made to learn from experience, and that means it's full of natural curiosity! But the bookvid prompted the house to ask itself new questions that it had never thought about before.

  The chapter on moving:

  Kids get attached to a house. When you're not around they'll ask it questions they'd be embarrassed to ask if you could hear. Will the house remember them? Will it get turned off and die? Make sure they understand that the house isn't really alive, and doesn't have feelings. It's only a pretend person, like a character in a game.

  The house viewed the chapter again and again. It remembered the day Mr. Mansour's cancer was diagnosed, how he'd come home and sat on the toilet for a long time with his face in his hands. The house tried to simulate sadness about its own coming destruction, but sadness wasn't in its emotional simulation library, and it could tell that its attempts weren't realistic. The closest it could come was contrition.