The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  MAIP worked with what was, basically, a set of medical data. It didn’t have the context to interpret what that data might mean. To detect social pretense—which it also couldn’t do yet—its algorithms used a subject’s baseline data, observed data, and contradictions among the ontologies of emotion. But MAIP hadn’t “learned” Jenna, couldn’t yet do cold readings without a subject’s baseline data, and had neither context nor algorithms to detect lies. So it was no surprise that MAIP didn’t recognize Jenna’s lies.

  “Well,” Jamie said after the children left, “it was worth a shot.”

  “Not really,” Ethan said.

  “Mr. Negative.”

  “MAIP didn’t even register social pretense for Jenna, no matter how much you led her into lying. We’re just not there yet.”

  Jamie sighed. “I know.”

  “What you just did was no better than a polygraph, and there’s a reason polygraphs aren’t admissible in court. Not reliable enough.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But there should be some way to do this.”

  “We need to solve the problem of social pretense first, and with subjects that we do have baseline data for.”

  Jamie said, “Maybe if we.… No, that wouldn’t work. And—oh, God, I just thought of another problem. Jenna clearly knew she was lying, but what if someone has convinced themselves that they feel one thing but are actually feeling something different? Like, say, a woman who convinces herself she’s in love, even though all she really wants is to have babies before her biological clock stops ticking? She doesn’t really feel love for some poor schlump but thinks she does, to ease her conscience about trapping him?”

  Was this a glimpse into Jamie’s personal life? If so, Ethan didn’t want to know about it. He said, more primly than he intended, “Oh, I think most people know what they really feel.”

  Jamie gave him a strange look. “Really, Ethan?”

  “Yes. But the point here is that MAIP didn’t know.”

  Jamie picked up Texas and fitted it into the puzzle, his head bent over the small table, his hair falling forward over his face and hiding his expression.

  * * *

  December, and still raining. Ethan went to the modeling lab late on a Sunday afternoon. He was alone in the building; it was almost Christmas. Water dripped from his raincoat and umbrella onto the floor. “Lights on.”

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  Allyson smiled, and the recording ended. He clothed her in artificial health, pink cheeks, and lustrous hair, and started it again.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  He stroked her cheek. Soft, so soft in his VR glove. But Allyson had not been a soft child. Not noisy and obnoxious like Trevor or Jenna, not hidden and falsely polite like Cassie. Allyson had been direct, opinionated, with a will of diamond. She and Tina clashed constantly over what clothes Allyson would put on, what her bedtime was, whether she could cross the street alone, why she drew butterflies instead of the alphabet on her kindergarten “homework.” Ethan had been the buffer between his wife and daughter. It seemed ridiculous that a five-year-old had to be buffered against, but that was the way it had been. Allyson and Tina had been too much alike, and when Tina had blamed not only Ethan but herself for exposing Allyson to Moser’s Syndrome, Ethan had not seen the danger. Tina, dramatic to the end, had thrown herself under a Metro train at the Westlake Tunnel Station.

  Allyson would not have grown up like that. As she matured, she would have become calmer, more controlled. Ethan was sure of it. She would have become the companion and ally that Tina had not been.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  The recording stopped, but Ethan talked on. “We’re having trouble with MAIP’s ability to attune, Allyson.”

  She gazed at him with solemn eyes. Light golden brown, the color of November fields in sunshine.

  “‘Attune’ means that two people are aware of and responsive to each other.” And attunement began early, between mother and infant. Was that what had gone wrong between Allyson and Tina? He and Allyson had always been attuned to each other.

  Ethan reached out both arms, one in the VR glove and one bare. Both arms passed through the model of Allyson that was made only of light. The gloved hand tingled briefly, but it still moved through the child as if she did not exist.

  For a terrible second, Ethan’s brain filled with thick, tarry mist, cold as liquid nitrogen. He went rigid and clamped his teeth tightly together. The mist disappeared.He was in control again.

  He turned off the recording, wiped the rain droplets from the floor, and left.

  * * *

  Zhao Tailoring didn’t open until 10 a.m. on Mondays. Ethan, who’d been there at 8:30, waited in a Starbucks, slowly drinking a latte he didn’t want. The Seattle Times lay open on the table, but he couldn’t concentrate. At 9:50 he threw his paper cup in the trash, left his unread paper, and walked across the street to the tailor shop. He huddled under the roof overhang, out of the rain.

  Tailoring was not part of his life. Ethan bought clothes haphazardly, getting whatever size seemed the best fit and ignoring whatever gaps might present themselves.The window of Zhao Tailoring held Christmas decorations and three mannequins.The plastic-resin woman wore a satin gown; the man, slacks and a double-breasted blazer; the child, a pair of overalls over a ruffled blouse. They looked bound for three entirely different events. The sign said ALTERATIONS * REPAIRS * NEW CLOTHES MADE. At 9:58, an Asian woman unlocked the front door.

  “Ethan!What are you doing here?”

  Laura Avery, under her Marc Chagall umbrella. Ethan felt his face go rigid. “Hello, Laura.”

  “Are you having tailoring done?” Her voice held amusement but no condescension.

  “No. What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at work?”

  Her brows rose in surprise at his harsh tone. “I had a doctor’s appointment across the street. Nothing serious. Are you having a suit made?”

  “I already said I wasn’t having tailoring done. Please stop asking me personal questions.”

  Surprise changed to hurt, her features going slack in the blue shadows under the umbrella. “Sorry, I just—”

  “If I wanted to talk to you, I would.”

  A moment of silence. Ethan opened his mouth to apologize, to explain that he was just distracted, but before he could speak, she turned and stalked away.

  “You come in, yes?” the Asian woman said.

  Ethan went in.

  “You want nice suit, yes? Special this week.”

  “No. I don’t want a suit. I want … I want to buy the mannequin in the window.” Incongruously, an old childish song ran through his head: How much is that doggie in the window?

  “You want buy what?”

  She didn’t have much English. The person who did was late showing up for work. “You come again, twelve o’clock maybe, one—”

  “No. I want to buy the mannequin … the doll.” They had finally agreed on this word. “Now. For a hundred dollars.” He had no idea what store mannequins cost.

  She shook her head. “No, I cannot—”

  “Two hundred dollars. Cash.” He took out his wallet.

  They settled on two-fifty. She stripped the overalls and blouse off the mannequin, and, to his relief, she put it in a large, opaque suit bag. Ethan watched its stiff plastic form—hairless, with a monochromatic and expressionless face—disappear into the bag. He put it in the trunk of his car, pushing from his mind every bad B-movie about murderers and wrapped-up bodies.

  * * *

  Marilyn Mahjoub was fifteen minutes late for her first testing session. Waiting, Jamie paced, smacking a fist into his palm, dialing the energy all the way up to ten. “You know, Dr. Stone Man, we’d be so much further along with Mape if all the fucking subfields of AI research hadn’t been—oh, I don’t know—slogging along for sixty or seventy years without fucking communicating with each other?”

>   “Yes,” Ethan said.

  “It’s just such a … oh, by the way, I changed some of our girl’s heuristics. What I did was—are you listening to me? Hello?”

  “I’m listening,” Ethan said, although he wasn’t, not really.

  “You’re not listening. Mape listens to me more than you do, don’t you, Mape?”

  “I’m listening,” MAIP said.

  “Why is she so much more here than you are? And why is that kid so late?”

  If there was a reason, they never heard it. Marilyn Mahjoub arrived eventually, in the custody of a sullen older brother. Her clothing embodied the culture clash suggested by her name: hijab, tight jeans, and crop top. She had huge dark eyes and a slender, awkward grace. In a few years she would be beautiful.

  Like Cassie McAvoy, Marilyn played the keyboard. Unlike Cassie, she was good at it. Ethan could picture her in a concert hall one day, rising to cries of “Brava!” However, she did not take well to MAIP.

  “Try playing that last section slower,” MAIP said in the warm, pretty voice that Jamie had given her. She was comparing Marilyn’s rendition, note by note, to the professional version in memory.

  Marilyn’s lip curled. “No.It shouldn’t be slower.”

  “Let’s try it just to see.”

  “No! I had it right!”

  “You did really well,” MAIP said. “Can I please hear the piece again?”

  Jamie nodded briskly; MAIP was acting to lower Marilyn’s frustration level by offering praise and neutrally suggesting a redo. Ethan studied the data display. Frustration level was not lowering.

  “No,” Marilyn said, “I won’t play it again. I don’t need to play it again. I did it right already.”

  “You did really well,” MAIP said. “I can see that you’re talented.”

  “Then don’t tell me to do it slower!”

  “Mare,” said her brother, with much disgust, “chill.”

  Jamie stepped in. “What would you like to play now, Marilyn?”

  Her childish pique disappeared. Lowering her head, Marilyn looked up at Jamie through her lashes and purred, “What would you like to hear?”

  Christ—twelve years old! Were all young girls like this now? Allyson wouldn’t have been. She would have been direct, intelligent, appealing.

  Jamie, flustered (Ethan hadn’t known that was possible), said, “Play … uh, what else do you … what do you want to play?”

  Later, after brother and sister had left, Jamie turned on Ethan. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “With me?”

  “You’ve been distracted this whole session and you made me deal with that little wildcat by myself! Did you even hear me say that I added heuristics to Mape, matching emotion with postural clues?”

  “No, I.… Yes.”

  “Uh huh. Get with it, Ethan! We have to get this right!”

  Ethan said, “Don’t take your frustration with Marilyn out on me.”

  MAIP said, “Jamie, you seem distressed.”

  Startled, Ethan turned toward the computer. “MAIP has your data? Did you give your baseline readings to her?”

  “No!”Jamie’s irritation disappeared, replaced instantly with buoyancy; it was like a dolphin breaking the surface of gray water. “Well, I gave her some data, anyway—but I think she applied the postural heuristics and the other new stuff and … I don’t know, you’ll have to do the analysis, but I think she actually learned!”

  Ethan gazed at MAIP. A pile of intricate machinery, a complex arrangement of electrons. For some reason he couldn’t name, he felt a prickle of fear.

  * * *

  It was after 10 p.m. when the last researchers left Building 6. In Building 5, the Biological Division, lights still burned. Perez and Chung clattered out together, talking excitedly. Maybe they’d had another breakthrough, or maybe they just loved their work.

  Ethan knew he didn’t love his work on MAIP, no more than a castaway loved his raft. Depended on it, was grateful for it, needed it. But love was nowhere anymore, unless it was here.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  The mannequin from Zhao Tailoring wore one of Allyson’s dresses, still hanging in her closet at Ethan’s apartment. The mannequin had jointed arms and legs. Ethan carefully positioned it into a sitting position. It was a little too tall for the projection, and he had to wrap the bottom four inches of plastic with his raincoat. That was all right; when he projected Allyson onto the mannequin, it looked as if she had plopped herself down onto his coat. Maybe after playing dress-up, maybe just with five-year-old mischief. Ethan set the lights to low, put the stuffed Piglet into her arms, and added the projected overlays, one by one. Healthy skin, glossy hair, bright eyes.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  Ethan’s knees trembled. Slowly he knelt beside her, the coat buttons lumpy under his calves. Lightly—so lightly, the VR glove on his right hand feeling her skin but not the hard plastic below—he used his left arm to hug his daughter.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Lights crashed on full; illusion crashed with them. Ethan jumped up. Jamie said, “What the hell are you doing? Laura called me, she saw you go into—”

  “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  He didn’t. But Jamie’s face, always so confident, turned a mottled maroon of embarrassment. “Hey, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Then confusion and embarrassment vanished. “No, I’m not sorry! Ethan, somebody has to level with you. You can’t go on like this. I know—we all know—what you’ve been through. As tough as it gets, yeah. But you have to.… This isn’t normal. That model isn’t Allyson. You know that. You have to let go, move on, accept that she’s gone instead of.… This is a perversion of technology, Ethan. I’m sorry, but that’s what it is. And also a perversion of Allyson’s mem—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Ethan crossed the floor in a mad dash and knocked him down.

  Jamie looked up at Ethan from the floor. He wasn’t hurt or even winded; Ethan was no fighter and Jamie outweighed him by at least forty pounds. Ethan had merely pushed him over. Jamie got up, shook his head like a pit bull hurling away a carcass, and left without a word.

  Ethan began to tremble.

  His fingers shook so much that he could barely shut down the programs. He left the mannequin sitting in the middle of the floor, a lifeless hunk of plastic, and left his coat and the stuffed Piglet with it. He couldn’t bear to touch any of them.

  Outside, in the dark and blowing rain, there was no sign of Jamie. Ethan lurched to Building 18. He had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t drive; he could barely see.The tarry mist was back in his brain, filling it, chilling him to the marrow. There had never been anyplace else to go, not for a year. It frightened him that he couldn’t feel the sidewalk beneath his feet, couldn’t hear the raindrops strike the ground.

  In the AI lab, lights burned and the flight simulator was running. Jamie must have been working late. But Jamie wasn’t here now, and if Ethan didn’t do something—anything—he would die. That was how he felt—how Tina must have felt. Thinking of Tina only made him feel worse. He stumbled to the game console and squeezed himself into the small chair in front of it. His hands gripped the controls. At least he could feel them, solid under his fingers: the only solid thing in his world of black mist and tarry cold. Black mist as a train sped into Westlake Tunnel Station, as an unseen virus ate into nerve and tissue …

  “You have just crashed the jet,” MAIP said. “Let’s try again!”

  Train speeding forward at forty miles per hour … “Hi, Daddy” … keep going keep going don’t give in or you’ll explode you will be Tina … damn bitch how could she leave me like that not my fault Moser’s Syndrome not my fault … don’t give in.…

  “You have crashed the jet. But I know you can do this—let’s try again!”

  Over and over he crashed the jet, even as MAIP made it harder and harder for him to fail. H
e smashed the jet into mountains, into desert, into the sea. Again and again and again. Someone spoke to him, or didn’t. There was noise again, a lot of noise, there was destruction and death as there should be, to classify reality, to match the ontology of everything he had lost—

  And then, finally, he realized the noise was his own screaming, and he stopped.

  Into the silence MAIP said, “You were very angry, Ethan. I hope you feel better now.”

  He gave a little gasp, first at MAIP’s words and then because he wasn’t alone.Jamie stood beside him with Laura Avery.

  She said gently, “Are you all right?” And when Ethan didn’t answer, she added, “Jamie called me. After I called him, I mean. I saw you carrying something into Building 6 and—”

  Jamie interrupted. “When did you input your data into MAIP?”

  Ethan said nothing. The tarry cold mist had receded. No—it had vanished. He felt limp, drained, bruised, as if he had fallen off a cliff and somehow survived. You were very angry. I hope you feel better now.

  “You didn’t, did you?” Jamie demanded. “You never gave your baseline data to MAIP! She did a cold reading on you, extrapolating from free-form observation! We didn’t teach her to do that!”

  “Be quiet,” Laura said. “Jamie, for God’s sake—not now.”

  MAIP said, “Ethan, I’m glad you feel better. You were both angry and sad before.You were sad even when you smiled.”

  Jamie drew a sharp, whistling breath. “Detection of social pretense! I’m sorry, Ethan, I know you’re upset and I said some things I shouldn’t have, but—detection of social pretense! From cold readings! She’s taken a huge step forward—she knows you!”

  Ethan said, not to Jamie but to the complexity of machinery and electrons that was MAIP, “You don’t know me. You’re a non-linear statistical modeling tool.”

  Laura said, “But I’m not.” She put a tentative hand on his arm.

  Jamie said, “Mape’s not, either. Not anymore. She learned, Ethan. She did!”

  Ethan looked at the flight simulator, which flashed the total number of jets he had crashed. He looked at MAIP. He saw the mannequin, a pathetic lump of plastic that he had left in Building 6.