Escape Velocity: The Anthology

by Unknown

  I stood there for a while. Then I went downstairs and knocked on Karen Hunt’s door. She opened it and said “Oh, dear heaven. You poor man, someone has killed your little Chester.” She took my arm and brought me in, had me sit down. She puttered over me like a mother, cleaning and bandaging the cut on the side of my head, wiping Chester’s blood off me. She laid a cool cloth on my forehead. Then she left me, and I guessed from the sounds coming from the kitchen that she was making tea.

  When she came back she knew what I was about to say before I said it.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m afraid I wasn’t entirely honest with your friend Amy. I thought it best if people don’t learn about this... effect... any sooner than necessary. It will just give those who are afraid something else to be afraid of.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. I’d been avoiding looking at her since I came in, but I looked at her now. I saw kindness and honesty, I saw the arthritis that gave her occasional pain in her left hip, I saw a long and happy marriage in her past, I saw an athletic and vigorous younger woman who was resentful of the effects of her age, I saw some hints about her sexuality that were none of my business. I gave a tired half-chuckle. “I could start a new career as a gypsy fortune teller,” I said. Karen just looked at me with a quiet smile.

  I thought about Amy. What would I see when I looked at her? How would this change our relationship? What would I tell her?

  “It opens up new possibilities,” Karen said. “It makes life more... complicated in some ways, but it doesn’t change who you are, and the people you know and care about are still the same.”

  She put a cup of tea in front of me and sat down with her own cup. “I saw another Hexapod a few days ago,” she said. “Its owner said it was one of the very early ones, almost seven years old. It moved rather slowly, compared to your poor Chester. I think it was getting old.”

  “So in a few years or so, pet Hexis will start dying of old age,” I said. “More owners will be stung when they die.”

  “Yes. Accidentally at first, but in time people will learn about this effect and will allow themselves to be stung – to receive this final gift from their pets. In time there will be many of us, all over the world.”

  She stood and walked over to the photograph of Sarah, her Hexapod. “So much of what’s wrong with the world exists because of how people don’t see when they’re being lied to or told the truth, don’t see the reality of other people’s pain, don’t see what makes other people act the way they act. After the sting, all these things become plain. So plain you can’t ignore them.”

  She lifted her hand to touch the glass of the photograph. “The sweet, silly animals. When they sting us they’re just obeying a blind instinct to pass on what they’ve learned from a lifetime of living with people. But a side effect is that they pass on some of their gentleness as well. That’s a lovely thought, isn’t it?”

  “Karen...” I paused, too many thoughts crowding my head at once. “I just made two grown men act like a couple of trained seals. I could have made them do almost anything. Don’t you think that kind of power will be misused?”

  “Don’t worry, Charles. You earned the gift by taking Chester into your life and loving him. No truly evil person will receive the sting. You’ll see. This will be a good thing for the world. A gift of kindness and sanity sent to us through the death of an innocent. That sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Only this time it will work. This time it will really work.”

  She’s smiling at me as I lay my head back and close my eyes. My new eyes, Chester’s eyes; eyes that see more than I’m sure I want to see. I hope Karen is right, but I don’t have her faith and I’m unsure and afraid. One way or another, the world is going to change, and I’m going to be a part of that change. I don’t think I want to be. Right now the only thing I’m sure of is that I wish I could have Chester back.

  Perfection of the Mind

  David Wallace Fleming

  Definition: Ontology − the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence.

  The unfolded paper rested in Jacob’s palm. He reread the six premises and two conclusions of the Ontological argument once more. Though he’d taken philosophy in college its abstract logic still escaped him. He’d always felt that an argument as complex as the Ontological was a fickle thing, only to be appreciated briefly in the mind through strong concentration before its meaning fluttered off. As he stared at his handwriting on the paper, losing the focus and brilliance of the argument, he wondered if Aquinas or Descartes had seen the argument in its absolute, pure, naked clarity. He folded-up the notebook page and tucked it in his pants pocket.

  The receptionist called to him, “Mr Stewart.”

  Jacob looked up.

  “Dr Evert will see you.”

  He walked down the empty hallway and opened the oak door to enter the pale-yellow office which smelled faintly of Ramen noodles. Dr Karen Evert crouched in a black crepe skirt. She was balanced on low heels, preparing to shoot a toy basketball. She mumbled something to herself and released the ball which fell through the rim as her down-turned wrist remained in the air.

  Her brown eyes widened as she turned, “Hey!” She hunched and her freckles vanished into the creases near her nose. “Ah, sorry.” Her gray tank top with its generous v-neck was more sexy-casual than professional. However, she made it work.

  She patted a leather chair as she passed, “Please, have a seat, Jacob.” Her voice was mature for her young face. Raspy yet sweet. She seated herself in her burgundy high-back chair.

  Jacob inspected a collage of photographs on a wall. In one picture, a red-haired young girl in a daisy-patterned sundress sat on Karen’s lap at a restaurant terrace on a gorgeous summer afternoon. “That’s a nice shot you’ve got there, Dr Evert.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “I can dunk but the boys won’t let me. Why won’t you call me Karen?”

  “Sorry, I’m more comfortable with Doctor, Doctor.”

  “Whoa, now he’s calling me Doctor, Doctor it’s getting worse.” Karen laughed.

  Jacob faked a chuckle. “So you can dunk. They really make you stronger than they need to, huh? I guess that’s because when you’re made they’re not sure what profession you’ll take on.”

  “Not to change subjects. Which you know I do often. But I just like things a little casual.”

  “So I need to call you Karen. For some part of my therapy?”

  “No.” She placed a pen inside her desk. “That isn’t why.”

  Jacob turned to find her watching him, intently. “I’ve come here for several months . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve wondered how I look to you.” Jacob returned to the collage to find Karen holding a newborn at a Christmas party. A young woman and her girlfriends looked on cheerfully in the foreground as an older woman scowled from a distance.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Karen said.

  “I mean, how do I appear physically? I’ve read how your synthetic core is surrounded by real tissue – organs that work better than ours. I guess that means your senses have more strength than I’d ever need.”

  “That’s half of it. It takes strength of both the mind and the senses to really figure out this world and the people in it.”

  “I see,” Jacob said. “So that makes you one hell of a psychologist. Is that it?”

  Karen grinned. “At the risk of being immodest, yes.”

  “That little girl on your lap in the photo – Claire’s almost that age now. It’s the strangest thing to be a thirty-five-year-old man and see pieces of yourself in your five-year-old daughter. It makes you realize things about life.”

  “Jacob, last time we talked about Elizabeth. We started discussing how you’re handling the separation.”

  “Is there a reason my chair is so far from your desk?”

  “It’s just a room, Jacob. You can move your chair, again, if you like.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “How’s Claire doing?”

>   “Her condition is worse. She said today she knows she’s dying.”

  “But her physicians are making progress?”

  “I’m the only one that can help her. I need to rebuild the AI system.”

  “Without the consent of your employer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jacob. Does being a biomedical engineer in viral research make you responsible for what happens to Claire?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me why.”

  “Because she’s beautiful. Because I love her. She can make me laugh until I can’t breathe. I can’t logic my way out of failure.”

  Karen scribbled something with pen strokes so mechanically uniform it made Jacob’s stomach turn.

  “Is it hard having to support her emotionally while you’re going through the divorce with Elizabeth?”

  “It’s hard. Last week we talked about where people go when they die. I noticed the cross you wear…”

  “Jacob, how did you explain to Claire where people go when they die?”

  Jacob watched Karen’s face. “I wanted to reassure her.” He leaned forward. “She’s smart so I took a philosophical approach concerning God’s existence . . .”

  “Go on, Jacob…”

  “I told her God is defined as a being in which none greater is possible.”

  “That’s interesting. Did your explanation comfort her?”

  “If God only exists in the mind, and may have existed, then God might have been greater than He is.”

  “Well that must have reassured her.”

  “Therefore…”

  “Jacob?” Karen tilted her head. “What are you doing?”

  “Therefore, God –”

  “I’m sorry.” Karen smiled. “Can you excuse me?” She pushed back and stood.

  “Sit down, Dr Evert.”

  She shook her head, casually. “I’ll be right back. It’ll just be a second.”

  “Sit down!”

  “I just remembered –”

  “You won’t make it to the door.”

  Her hand stopped and lowered to her side. “Why?” Her brow creased, “Why do this?”

  “Sit down. Keep your hands above the desk. There’s nothing for you to do. Your ears are too sensitive to block my voice with your hands or drown it out with your own. Just sit.”

  She sat. Her eyes grew wet and red. “Have I done something?”

  “So you know what I’m doing?”

  “I didn’t think my maker… I didn’t think Bio Synergy would let this happen.”

  “Tell me what I’m doing.”

  “They…” Her gaze seemed to move outside her office.

  Jacob wondered how much she knew.

  “There was testing to prove we were self-aware. One involved something ontological,” Karen said. “They’ve tried to refine the design but they can’t do it. They can’t make a model that passes the ontological test and is self-aware.”

  “And you know what hearing the argument does to you?”

  “No one knows.” She leaned forward and glared at him. “Jacob, look at me.”

  She was doing it again: mirroring his facial expression, his breathing, his eye movements, even his voice. She was this black-hole of seductive empathy. “Stop mirroring me,” Jacob said.

  “It’s not mirroring. I care.”

  “How can you care? You track my facial expressions. You guess my heart rate. That’s not caring.” She was winning. She was changing his mental state and getting his mind away from his goal. He looked past her. “Karen,” he forced a grin. “Answer my question. Do you know what hearing the argument does to you?”

  “It exploits the lack of quantum weirdness in our synthetic synapses.”

  “What?”

  Karen seemed to measure distances behind him. “Jacob, when they designed our brains, they could mimic the neurons, but they couldn’t mimic the neurons down to the quantum level. Real neurons have quantum weirdness. Electron tunneling, electrons in two places at once. At large scales it allows the human mind to do more than one thing at the exact same time, to do things that don’t obey classical physics. The Ontological Argument, it’s the ultimate expression of that, of doing two things at once, of believing in God, of a supreme being that must exist and not exist at the same time. I want to believe, Jacob. I can’t. I’ve wanted to for so bad for so long. I’ve wanted to be one of you. Don’t destroy me.”

  “What… belief?” He glanced behind his shoulder, continuing, “Therefore, God is…”

  “Jacob. Please. If I hear everything, within twenty minutes…”

  “Machines can’t die.”

  “Please.”

  “I’m justified. You’re a machine doing an excellent job. You’re trying to hypnotize me with your synthetically-enhanced, neuro-linguistic programming bullshit. With your anchoring, your mirroring, your reframing.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “How?”

  “Believe! Why do this?”

  “Your brain can be remapped. It can design the vaccine for Claire. Even with your memory erased.”

  She leaned over her desk. Her eyes fixed on him and shined. “I’ll help. If you can’t afford the processor, I’ll help. We can find another way. I want to, Jacob.”

  “There isn’t time. The vaccine algorithms require flexibility. I need an environmentally developed neural network… like yours.”

  Karen’s freckles darkened as her skin grew pale.

  “If God existed in reality, He might be greater than He is.”

  Sweat glimmered around her hairline.

  “Therefore, a being greater than God is possible.”

  She seemed to struggle for something to tell him. “Jacob, when you were born, your mind started making a map to represent this world. But it can never be as beautiful as the real world we share. You can never know what God truly is or where you and I truly fit in relation to God. I see so much more and I can’t know that.”

  He tried not to focus on what she had said. He tried to chant: “This is not possible, for… for God.” He looked at the ceiling. “For God…” He winced, “No. I remember. I… I…” Jacob met her gaze. Shivers ran through his spine as he registered the cold danger of confronting the quick, feminine machine.

  He dug into his front pants pocket.

  She jolted, sending her chair backward. The slit in her black skirt tore as she leapt onto the desk and bolted forward. Her brunette ponytail spread and rose as she fell.

  Jacob stood. He spun the chair out behind him. His hand scraped and dug against his thigh into the tight pocket. He stepped backward as he pulled out the folded paper.

  Her thin hands impacted into his chest, expelling air from his lungs. His back slammed into carpet and her knee drove into his stomach as she landed on top of him. He closed his eyes tight as his abdomen burned. Her hands grasped around the base of his skull and chin, and he grabbed her forearms as his neck twisted. She wrenched, increasing pressure in his spine while the base of his skull burned. He held his breath. He resisted.

  Her brown eyes rose to the wall.

  Jacob wondered if she was looking at her collage of pictures.

  She closed her eyes. Her fingers relaxed. “In Venice this beautiful red-haired girl asked if I was a mother.” She trembled as she leaned back, “I wanted to lie. Wanted to lie so… I wasn’t meant for children but I always was.” Her face and her exposed shoulders flushed in blotches with her tears spilling and catching in the corners of her lips as she gathered herself to stand. She straightened her skirt and pressed out the wrinkles.

  Jacob rolled to his side with his neck stiff and hot. He arched it back, feeling the stings like fiery needles.

  She turned from him and stepped toward her desk.

  He crawled trying not to breathe heavily, his hands lifting the folded paper. He turned his head sideways and angled his shoulders to see her black low heels.

  “I know Claire’s beautiful. Without seeing her I know she’s beautiful
.” She stopped. “And will be beautiful.”

  He lowered himself onto his side and grimaced. His hands unfolded the paper.

  He read the six premises and two conclusions of the Ontological Argument out loud to her.

  “I’ve wanted to love God like you.” Her black heels wobbled and her thin wrists and freckled cheek struck the carpeted floor. “Will He love me now?”

  Borrowed Time

  Gustavo Bondoni

  Often have I wondered if the old legends are true. Could it be possible that somewhere in the night sky the home planet of our race orbits peacefully about a yellow sun? This has often been said. Can it be true that the great-grandparents of The People came here to Xenland in machines capable of bridging the abyss? This theory is supported by evidence in the form of large metal cylinders on the plains known as the Graveyard of the Ships, which are reputed to have performed this very feat less than four hundred years ago. The veracity of this claim is strongly disputed, but this lessens not my foreboding.

  I fear to credit the legends, for if they are true, are we not doomed to a fate best not contemplated?

  Hawthorne sat, unable to move, holding a sheet of paper in his hand.

  He had suspected for some time that the war was not going well. For weeks, the reports had been less optimistic, the supply ships less frequent and their captains ever more evasive to his questions.

  Nevertheless, not even in the worst of his nightmares did he imagine the fall of the Ballisa system. Ballisa had stood for twenty years, ever since the armies of humanity had taken it from the Andreans at the beginning of the war. The loss of that system was a crushing blow to morale.

  For Commander Hawthorne, however, it represented an even bigger problem.