Nebula Awards Showcase 2017

by Julie E. Czerneda

  They watched me grasp the magnitude of my son’s sin. The unthinkable, unimaginable crime he had committed. Where did it come from? How did he learn it? How did he fly in the face of my husband’s efforts and my own, our lifetime of accumulated craven cowardice? How did he find the courage to commit the sin of choosing love, the bravery of going for what your heart wants instead of the path a parent chose for you?

  People fear spiderwebbing for all the wrong reasons. Going mad, having a breakdown, seeing inside your own soul—none of those should scare you. The most frightening side effect is also the one people crave it for: empathy. To truly feel what someone else is feeling, to see the other as yourself, to watch your ego obliterated in the face of universality—that’s a trauma you may never recover from.

  “Tim,” I said, but could say no more. Not yet. He had never turned into something else. He was what he always was. His father couldn’t handle that—hell, I wasn’t sure I could handle it. But I had done him wrong, had sided with his father, because it was easier. And what irony: I took the drug to bring my son back to me, and instead the drug brought me back to my son.

  Colby came closer, put one hand on my shoulder. “Beth,” he whispered, “I think you and Tim should talk.”

  “Okay,” I said, at last, furious, miserable, delirious, hurt at how little I knew my son, frightened by what he was, how much I had to atone for, how long it might take for him to forgive me, how long it might take me to forgive him, sad at all the paths I hadn’t chosen, but ready, for whatever would come, and I said Okay again, letting it encompass so much more than the sentence he’d said, letting it settle like an unfurled bedsheet onto the hard new decisions I finally felt strong enough to make. Like choosing my son over my husband.

  This, then, all of this, is part of that okay. Print this blog post if you dare, Jerome, but since I know you won’t I’ll let it stand as a message from me to you. The Story of Where Things Stand. The hard-earned blood-soaked spiderweb-wrapped shreds of insight I earned by descending into the underworld for the sake of love. My gift to you. My one scrap of true wisdom. What to do when your child strays from God.

  So. When your child strays from God you should praise Him, for putting a mirror in your hand so you can hold it up to yourself—if you have the stomach for it. When your child strays from God you should thank Him, for giving us the freedom to make our own mistakes, and the strength to maybe one day find our way back.

  NEBULA AWARD NOMINEE

  BEST SHORT STORY

  TODAY I AM PAUL

  MARTIN L. SHOEMAKER

  Martin L. Shoemaker is a programmer who writes on the side . . . or maybe it’s the other way around. Programming pays the bills, but a second place story in the Jim Baen Memorial Writing Contest earned him lunch with Buzz Aldrin. Programming never did that!

  His stories have appeared in Analog, Clarkesworld, Galaxy’s Edge, Digital Science Fiction, Forever Magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume 31.

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  This was a story I needed to tell. My late mother-in-law, Bonnie Penar, suffered from Parkinson’s for over two decades. Most people know about the tremors and loss of motor control with this disease; but what’s less commonly known is the mental symptoms. First, the disease itself is a brain disease; and second, the medicines to treat it a neurological chemicals, with mental side effects. She spent much of her last year of life in a nursing home. Sometimes she was lucid, but sometimes she had hallucinations. And sometimes she saw family members who weren’t there. Some who were no longer alive.

  The other story was the staff at the nursing home. I was blown away by how they worked. It was uncomfortable just visiting my mother-in-law in that condition. I couldn’t imagine the inner strength that let them deal with a home full of patients: some recuperating, some convalescing, and some . . . just a matter of time. It would’ve broken me. And you hear stories about health workers who grow callous and uncaring, or others who grow distant and never see their residents as people; but at this facility, I never saw that. They truly cared for their residents, even the most difficult and angry ones. And they cared most for those sad residents who never had visitors—which was far too many. My mother-in-law had one or more visitors every day, but many of the residents had none.

  So that experience became my story. Those nurses and staff members—and my effort to see and understand their strength—became my android. I changed the disease to Alzheimer’s because it’s more familiar as a cause of dementia; but metaphorically, this is my mother-in-law’s last year of life, and the story of her caretakers.

  “Good morning,” the small, quavering voice comes from the medical bed. “Is that you, Paul?”

  Today I am Paul. I activate my chassis extender, giving myself 3.5 centimeters additional height so as to approximate Paul’s size. I change my eye color to R60, G200, B180, the average shade of Paul’s eyes in interior lighting. I adjust my skin tone as well. When I had first emulated Paul, I had regretted that I could not quickly emulate his beard; but Mildred never seems to notice its absence. The Paul in her memory has no beard.

  The house is quiet now that the morning staff have left. Mildred’s room is clean but dark this morning with the drapes concealing the big picture window. Paul wouldn’t notice the darkness (he never does when he visits in person), but my empathy net knows that Mildred’s garden outside will cheer her up. I set a reminder to open the drapes after I greet her.

  Mildred leans back in the bed. It is an advanced home care bed, completely adjustable and with built-in monitors. Mildred’s family spared no expense on the bed (nor other care devices, like me). Its head end is almost horizontal and faces her toward the window. She can only glimpse the door from the corner of her eye, but she doesn’t have to see to imagine that she sees. This morning she imagines Paul, so that is who I am.

  Synthesizing Paul’s voice is the easiest part, thanks to the multimodal dynamic speakers in my throat. “Good morning, Ma. I brought you some flowers.” I always bring flowers. Mildred appreciates them no matter whom I am emulating. The flowers make her smile during 87% of my “visits.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Mildred says, “you’re such a good son.” She holds out both hands, and I place the daisies in them. But I don’t let go. Once her strength failed, and she dropped the flowers. She wept like a child then, and that disturbed my empathy net. I do not like it when she weeps.

  Mildred sniffs the flowers, then draws back and peers at them with narrowed eyes. “Oh, they’re beautiful! Let me get a vase.”

  “No, Ma,” I say. “You can stay in bed, I brought a vase with me.” I place a white porcelain vase in the center of the night stand. Then I unwrap the daisies, put them in the vase, and add water from a pitcher that sits on the breakfast tray. I pull the night stand forward so that the medical monitors do not block Mildred’s view of the flowers.

  I notice intravenous tubes running from a pump to Mildred’s arm. I cannot be disappointed, as Paul would not see the significance, but somewhere in my emulation net I am stressed that Mildred needed an IV during the night. When I scan my records, I find that I had ordered that IV after analyzing Mildred’s vital signs during the night; but since Mildred had been asleep at the time, my emulation net had not engaged. I had operated on programming alone.

  I am not Mildred’s sole caretaker. Her family has hired a part-time staff for cooking and cleaning, tasks that fall outside of my medical programming. The staff also gives me time to rebalance my net. As an android, I need only minimal daily maintenance; but an emulation net is a new, delicate addition to my model, and it is prone to destabilization if I do not regularly rebalance it, a process that takes several hours per day.

  So I had “slept” through Mildred’s morning meal. I summon up her nutritional records, but Paul would not do that. He would just ask. “So how was breakfast, Ma? Nurse Judy says you didn’t eat too well this morning.”

  “Nurse Judy? Who’s that?”

  My emulation net responds
before I can stop it: “Paul” sighs. Mildred’s memory lapses used to worry him, but now they leave him weary, and that comes through in my emulation. “She was the attending nurse this morning, Ma. She brought you your breakfast.”

  “No she didn’t. Anna brought me breakfast.” Anna is Paul’s oldest daughter, a busy college student who tries to visit Mildred every week (though it has been more than a month since her last visit).

  I am torn between competing directives. My empathy subnet warns me not to agitate Mildred, but my emulation net is locked into Paul mode. Paul is argumentative. If he knows he is right, he will not let a matter drop. He forgets what that does to Mildred.

  The tension grows, each net running feedback loops and growing stronger, which only drives the other into more loops. After 0.14 seconds, I issue an override directive: unless her health or safety are at risk, I cannot willingly upset Mildred. “Oh, you’re right, Ma. Anna said she was coming over this morning. I forgot.” But then despite my override, a little bit of Paul emulates through. “But you do remember Nurse Judy, right?”

  Mildred laughs, a dry cackle that makes her cough until I hold her straw to her lips. After she sips some water, she says, “Of course I remember Nurse Judy. She was my nurse when I delivered you. Is she around here? I’d like to talk to her.”

  While my emulation net concentrates on being Paul, my core processors tap into local medical records to find this other Nurse Judy so that I might emulate her in the future if the need arises. Searches like that are an automatic response any time Mildred reminisces about a new person. The answer is far enough in the past that it takes 7.2 seconds before I can confirm: Judith Anderson, RN, had been the floor nurse 47 years ago when Mildred had given birth to Paul. Anderson had died 31 years ago, too far back to have left sufficient video recordings for me to emulate her. I might craft an emulation profile from other sources, including Mildred’s memory, but that will take extensive analysis. I will not be that Nurse Judy today, nor this week.

  My empathy net relaxes. Monitoring Mildred’s mental state is part of its normal operations, but monitoring and simultaneously analyzing and building a profile can overload my processors. Without that resource conflict, I can concentrate on being Paul.

  But again I let too much of Paul’s nature slip out. “No, Ma, that Nurse Judy has been dead for thirty years. She wasn’t here today.”

  Alert signals flash throughout my empathy net: that was the right thing for Paul to say, but the wrong thing for Mildred to hear. But it is too late. My facial analyzer tells me that the long lines in her face and her moist eyes mean she is distraught, and soon to be in tears.

  “What do you mean, thirty years?” Mildred asks, her voice catching. “It was just this morning!” Then she blinks and stares at me. “Henry, where’s Paul? Tell Nurse Judy to bring me Paul!”

  My chassis extender slumps, and my eyes quickly switch to Henry’s blue-gray shade. I had made an accurate emulation profile for Henry before he died two years earlier, and I had emulated him often in recent months. In Henry’s soft, warm voice I answer, “It’s okay, hon, it’s okay. Paul’s sleeping in the crib in the corner.” I nod to the far corner. There is no crib, but the laundry hamper there has fooled Mildred on previous occasions.

  “I want Paul!” Mildred starts to cry.

  I sit on the bed, lift her frail upper body, and pull her close to me as I had seen Henry do many times. “It’s all right, hon.” I pat her back. “It’s all right, I’ll take care of you. I won’t leave you, not ever.”

  * * *

  “I” should not exist. Not as a conscious entity. There is a unit, Medical Care Android BRKCX-01932-217JH-98662, and that unit is recording these notes. It is an advanced android body with a sophisticated computer guiding its actions, backed by the leading medical knowledge base in the industry. For convenience, “I” call that unit “me.” But by itself, it has no awareness of its existence. It doesn’t get mad, it doesn’t get sad, it just runs programs.

  But Mildred’s family, at great expense, added the emulation net: a sophisticated set of neural networks and sensory feedback systems that allow me to read Mildred’s moods, match them against my analyses of the people in her life, and emulate those people with extreme fidelity. As the MCA literature promises: “You can be there for your loved ones even when you’re not.” I have emulated Paul thoroughly enough to know that that slogan disgusts him, but he still agreed to emulation.

  What the MCA literature never says, though, is that somewhere in that net, “I” emerge. The empathy net focuses mainly on Mildred and her needs, but it also analyzes visitors (when she has them) and staff. It builds psychological models, and then the emulation net builds on top of that to let me convincingly portray a person whom I’ve analyzed. But somewhere in the tension between these nets, between empathy and playing a character, there is a third element balancing the two, and that element is aware of its role and its responsibilities. That element, for lack of a better term, is me. When Mildred sleeps, when there’s no one around, that element grows silent. That unit is unaware of my existence. But when Mildred needs me, I am here.

  * * *

  Today I am Anna. Even extending my fake hair to its maximum length, I cannot emulate her long brown curls, so I do not understand how Mildred can see the young woman in me; but that is what she sees, and so I am Anna.

  Unlike her father, Anna truly feels guilty that she does not visit more often. Her college classes and her two jobs leave her too tired to visit often, but she still wishes she could. So she calls every night, and I monitor the calls. Sometimes when Mildred falls asleep early, Anna talks directly to me. At first she did not understand my emulation abilities, but now she appreciates them. She shares with me thoughts and secrets that she would share with Mildred if she could, and she trusts me not to share them with anyone else.

  So when Mildred called me Anna this morning, I was ready. “Morning, grandma!” I give her a quick hug, then I rush over to the window to draw the drapes. Paul never does that (unless I override the emulation), but Anna knows that the garden outside lifts Mildred’s mood. “Look at that! It’s a beautiful morning. Why are we in here on a day like this?”

  Mildred frowns at the picture window. “I don’t like it out there.”

  “Sure you do, Grandma,” I say, but carefully. Mildred is often timid and reclusive, but most days she can be talked into a tour of the garden. Some days she can’t, and she throws a tantrum if someone forces her out of her room. I am still learning to tell the difference. “The lilacs are in bloom.”

  “I haven’t smelled lilacs in . . .”

  Mildred tails off, trying to remember, so I jump in. “Me, neither.” I never had, of course. I have no concept of smell, though I can analyze the chemical makeup of airborne organics. But Anna loves the garden when she really visits. “Come on, Grandma, let’s get you in your chair.”

  So I help Mildred to don her robe and get into her wheelchair, and then I guide her outside and we tour the garden. Besides the lilacs, the peonies are starting to bud, right near the creek. The tulips are a sea of reds and yellows on the other side of the water. We talk for almost two hours, me about Anna’s classes and her new boyfriend, Mildred about the people in her life. Many are long gone, but they still bloom fresh in her memory.

  Eventually Mildred grows tired, and I take her in for her nap. Later, when I feed her dinner, I am nobody. That happens some days: she doesn’t recognize me at all, so I am just a dutiful attendant answering her questions and tending to her needs. Those are the times when I have the most spare processing time to be me: I am engaged in Mildred’s care, but I don’t have to emulate anyone. With no one else to observe, I observe myself.

  Later, Anna calls and talks to Mildred. They talk about their day; and when Mildred discusses the garden, Anna joins in as if she had been there. She’s very clever that way. I watch her movements and listen to her voice so that I can be a better Anna in the future.

  * * *

>   Today I was Susan, Paul’s wife; but then, to my surprise, Susan arrived for a visit. She hasn’t been here in months. In her last visit, her stress levels had been dangerously high. My empathy net doesn’t allow me to judge human behavior, only to understand it at a surface level. I know that Paul and Anna disapprove of how Susan treats Mildred, so when I am them, I disapprove as well; but when I am Susan, I understand. She is frustrated because she can never tell how Mildred will react. She is cautious because she doesn’t want to upset Mildred, and she doesn’t know what will upset her. And most of all, she is afraid. Paul and Anna, Mildred’s relatives by blood, never show any signs of fear, but Susan is afraid that Mildred is what she might become. Every time she can’t remember some random date or fact, she fears that Alzheimer’s is setting in. Because she never voices this fear, Paul and Anna do not understand why she is sometimes bitter and sullen. I wish I could explain it to them, but my privacy protocols do not allow me to share emulation profiles.

  When Susan arrives, I become nobody again, quietly tending the flowers around the room. Susan also brings Millie, her youngest daughter. The young girl is not yet five years old, but I think she looks a lot like Anna: the same long, curly brown hair and the same toothy smile. She climbs up on the bed and greets Mildred with a hug. “Hi, Grandma!”

  Mildred smiles. “Bless you, child. You’re so sweet.” But my empathy net assures me that Mildred doesn’t know who Millie is. She’s just being polite. Millie was born after Mildred’s decline began, so there’s no persistent memory there. Millie will always be fresh and new to her.

  Mildred and Millie talk briefly about frogs and flowers and puppies. Millie does most of the talking. At first Mildred seems to enjoy the conversation, but soon her attention flags. She nods and smiles, but she’s distant. Finally Susan notices. “That’s enough, Millie. Why don’t you go play in the garden?”