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

by Gardner Dozois

  Tasha frowned. “No,” she signed back. “I had some conservationists for this one, picking up an owl who’d been cleared for release,” she tapped the middle entry on the list, “but all those other times, I was alone with the birds. What’s going on?”

  “Could it be a system glitch?” asked Angie, speaking and signing at the same time. She preferred it that way, since it gave her an excuse to go slowly. She said it was about including Greg in the conversation, and we let her have that; if it kept her from becoming too self-conscious to sign, it was a good thing.

  “It could,” I signed. Silence was an easy habit to fall back into in the company of my sister. “I’d have to take the whole system apart to be sure. Tasha, are you all right with my cloning it and unsnarling things once I get home?”

  “As long as this glitch isn’t going to break anything, I don’t care,” she signed.

  I nodded. “It should be fine,” I signed. “If it’s a system error, that would explain why our caller keeps saying ‘hello,’ and never getting any further. I’ll be able to let you know in a couple of days.”

  Billie tugged on Tasha’s sleeve. We all turned. Billie beamed. “Can we see the parrots now?” she signed. Tasha laughed, and for a while, everything was normal. Everything was the way that it was supposed to be.

  * * *

  My snapshot of Tasha’s system revealed no errors with the code, although I found some interesting logical chains in her translation software’s neural network that I copied over and sent to R&D for further analysis. She had one of the most advanced learning systems outside of corporate, in part because she was my sister, and in part because she was a bilingual deaf person, speaking both American and British Sign Language with the people she communicated with. Giving her a system that could handle the additional non-verbal processing was allowing us to build out a better neural chain and translation database than any amount of laboratory testing could produce, and had the added bonus of equipping my sister to speak with conservationists all over the world. It’s always nice when corporate and family needs align.

  The calls were being intentionally initiated, by someone who had access to Tasha’s computer. There was no way this was a ghost in the machine or a connection routing error. Malware was still a possibility, given the generic avatar; someone could be spoofing the machine into opening the call, then overlaying the woman on the backdrop of Tasha’s dining room. I didn’t know what purpose that would serve, unless this was the warmup to some innovative denial of service attack. I kept digging.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  My head snapped up. The voice was coming from the main computer in the dining room. It was somehow less of a surprise when Billie answered a moment later: “Hello! How are you?”

  “Hello, hello, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m hungry. How are you?”

  I rose from my seat, using the table to steady myself before walking, carefully, quietly, toward the next room. There was Billie, seated in front of the terminal, where the strange woman’s image was once again projected. Greg was nowhere to be seen. He was probably off somewhere busying himself with toddler projects, like stacking blocks or talking to spiders, leaving his sister to unwittingly assist in industrial espionage.

  “Billie?”

  Billie turned, all smiles, as the woman on the screen shifted her focus to me, cocking her head slightly to the side to give herself a better view. “Hi, Mom!” my daughter chirped, her fingers moving in the appropriate signs at the same time. “I figured it out!”

  “Figured what out, sweetie?”

  “Why we couldn’t understand each other!” she gestured grandly to the screen where the black-haired woman waited. “Mumma showed me.”

  I frowned, taking a step closer. “Showed you what?”

  “Hello, hello; can you hear me? Hello,” said the woman.

  “Hello,” I said, automatically.

  Billie was undaunted. “When we went to see Aunt Tasha, Mumma used her speaking words and her finger words at the same time, so Greg could know what we were saying. She was bridging.” Her fingers moved in time with her lips. ASL doesn’t have the same grammatical structure as spoken English; my daughter was running two linguistic processing paths at the same time. I wanted to take the time to be proud of her for that. I was too busy trying to understand.

  “You mean she was building a linguistic bridge?” I asked.

  Billie nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Bridging. So I thought maybe we couldn’t understand each other because the neural net didn’t have enough to work with, and I turned off the avatar setting on this side.”

  My heart clenched. The avatar projections for Billie and Greg were intended to keep their real faces hidden from anyone who wasn’t family. It was a small precaution, but anything that would keep their images off the public Internet until they turned eighteen was a good idea as far as I was concerned. “Billie, we’ve talked about the avatars. They’re there to keep you safe.”

  “But she needed to see my hands,” said Billie, with serene childhood logic. “Once she could, we started communicating better. See? I just needed to give the translator more data!”

  “Hello,” said the woman.

  “Hello,” I said, moving closer to the screen. After a beat, I followed the word with the appropriate sign. “What’s your name? Why do you keep calling my house?”

  “I’m hungry,” said the woman. “I’m hungry.”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  The woman opened her mouth like she was laughing, but no sound came out. She closed it again with a snap, and said, “I’m hungry. I don’t know you. Where is the other one?”

  “Here I am!” said Billie, pushing her way back to the front. “Sorry about Mom. She doesn’t understand that we’re doing science here.”

  “Science, yes,” said the woman obligingly. “Hello, hello. I’m hungry.”

  “I get hungry too,” said Billie. “Maybe some cereal?”

  I took a step back, letting the two of them talk. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my little girl with a live connection to God-knows-who. I also didn’t like the thought that this call was coming from my sister’s house. If she was out back with the birds, she would never hear an intruder, and I couldn’t call to warn her while her line was in use.

  Angie was in the kitchen. “Billie’s on the line with our mystery woman,” I said quickly, before she could ask me what was wrong. “I’m going to drive to Tasha’s and see if I can’t catch this lady in the act.”

  Angie’s eyes widened. “So you just left Billie on the line?”

  “You can supervise her,” I said. “Just try to keep her from disconnecting. I can make this stop, but I need to go.”

  “Then go,” said Angie. I’d be hearing about this later. I knew that, just like I knew I was making the right call. Taking Billie away from the computer wouldn’t stop this woman breaking into my sister’s house and calling us, and one police report could see Tasha branded a security risk by the company, which couldn’t afford to leave software patches that were still under NDA in insecure locations.

  Tasha lived fifteen minutes from us under normal circumstances. I made the drive in seven.

  Her front door was locked but the porch light was on, signaling that she was home and awake. I let myself in without ringing the bell. She could yell at me later. Finding out what was going on was more important than respecting her privacy, at least for right now. I felt a little bad about that. I also knew that she would have done exactly the same thing if our positions had been reversed.

  I slunk through the house, listening for the sound of Billie’s voice. Tasha kept the speakers on for the sake of the people who visited her and used her computer to make calls. She was better at accommodation than I was. The thought made my ears redden. My sister, who had spent most of her life fighting to be accommodated, made the effort for others when I was willing to focus on just her. I would be better, I promised silently. For her sake, and for the sake of my childre
n, I would be better.

  I didn’t hear Billie. Instead, I heard the throaty croaking of a crow from up ahead of me. It continued as I walked down the hall and stepped into the kitchen doorway. And stopped.

  The pied crow that Tasha had been rehabilitating was perched on the back of the chair across from the screen, talons digging deep into the wood as it cocked its head and watched Billie’s image on the screen. Billie’s mouth moved; a squawk emerged. The crow croaked back, repeating the same sounds over and over, until the avatar was matching them perfectly. Only then did it move on to the next set of sounds.

  I took a step back and sagged against the hallway wall, heart pounding, head spinning with the undeniable reality of what I had just seen. A language the neural net didn’t know, one that depended on motion and gesture as much as it did on sound. A language the system would have been exposed to enough before a curious bird started pecking at the keys that the program could at least try to make sense of it.

  Sense enough to say “hello.”

  * * *

  An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.

  “All right, Paulson, this was a funny prank, but you’ve used up over a dozen computing hours,” said Mike, pushing away from his own monitor. “Time to pack it in.”

  “Wait a second,” I said. “Just … just wait, all right? There’s one thing we haven’t tried yet.”

  Mike looked at me and frowned. I looked pleadingly back. Finally, he sighed.

  “Admittedly, you’ve encouraged the neural net to make some great improvements. You can have one more try. But that’s it! After that, we need this lab back.”

  “One more is all I need.”

  I’d been hoping to avoid this. It would’ve been easier if I could have replicated the original results without resorting to recreation of all factors. Not easier for the bird: easier for my nerves. Angie was already mad at me, and Tasha was unsettled, and I was feeling about as off-balance as I ever did.

  Opening the door and sticking my head out into the hall, I looked to my left, where my wife and children were settled in ergonomic desk chairs. Angie was focused on her tablet, composing an email to her work with quick swipes of her fingers, like she was trying to wipe them clean of some unseen, clinging film. Billie was sitting next to her, attention fixed on a handheld game device. Greg sat on the floor between them. He had several of his toy trains and was rolling them around an imaginary track, making happy humming noises.

  He was the first one to notice me. He looked up and beamed, calling, “Mama!”

  “Hi, buddy,” I said. Angie and Billie were looking up as well. I offered my wife a sheepish smile. “Hi, hon. We’re almost done in here. I just need to borrow Billie for a few minutes, if that’s okay?”

  It wasn’t okay: I could see that in her eyes. We were going to fight about this later, and I was going to lose. Billie, however, bounced right to her feet, grinning ear to ear as she dropped her game on the chair where she’d been sitting. “Do I get to work science with you?”

  “I want science!” Greg protested, his own smile collapsing into the black hole of toddler unhappiness.

  “Oh, no, bud.” I crouched down, putting myself on as much of a level with him as I could. “We’ll do some science when we get home, okay? Water science. With the hose. I just need Billie right now, and I need you to stay here with Mumma and keep her company. She’ll get lonely if you both come with me.”

  Greg gave me a dubious look before twisting to look suspiciously up at Angie. She nodded quickly.

  “She’s right,” she said. “I would be so lonely out here all by myself. Please stay and keep me company.”

  “Okay,” said Greg, after weighing his options. He reached contentedly for his train. “Water science later.”

  Aware that I had just committed myself to being squirted by the hose in our backyard for at least an hour, I took Billie’s hand and ushered her quickly away before anything else could go wrong.

  The terminal she’d be using to make her call was waiting for us when we walked back into the room. I ushered her over to the chair, ignoring the puzzled looks from my colleagues. “Remember the lady who kept calling the house?” I asked. “Would you like to talk to her again?”

  “I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers,” said Billie, eyeing me warily as she waited for the catch. She was old enough to know that when a parent offered to break the rules, there was always a catch.

  “I’m right here this time,” I said. “That means she’s not a stranger, she’s … a social experiment.”

  Billie nodded, still dubious. “If it’s really okay…”

  “It’s really, truly okay.” Marrying a physicist meant that my kids had always been destined to grow up steeped in science. It was an inescapable part of our lives. I hadn’t been expecting them to necessarily be so fond of it, but that worked out too. I was happier raising a bevy of little scientists than I would have been with the alternative.

  Billie nodded once more and turned to face the monitor. I flashed a low “okay” sign at Mike, and the screen sprang to life, showing the blandly pretty CGI avatar that Tasha’s system generated for Pitch. We’d have to look into the code to see when it had made the decision to start rendering animals with human faces, and whether that was part of a patch that had been widely distributed. I could see the logic behind it—the generic avatar generator was given instructions based on things like “eyes” and “attempting to use the system,” rather than the broader and more complex-to-program “human.” I could also see lawsuits when people inevitably began running images of their pets through the generator and using them to catfish their friends.

  On the other side of the two-way mirror, Pitch perked up at the sight of Billie’s face on her screen. She opened her beak. Microphones inside the room would pick up the sounds she made, but I didn’t need to hear her to know that she was croaking and trilling, just like corvids always did. What was interesting was the way she was also fluffing out her feathers, and moving the tip of her left wing downward.

  “Hello, hello,” said her avatar, to Billie. “Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello.”

  “Hello,” said Billie. “My mom says I can talk to you again. Hello.”

  “I’m hungry. Where am I? Hello.”

  “I’m at Mom’s work. She does science here. I don’t know where you are. Mom probably knows. She called you.” Billie twisted to look at me. “Mom? Where is she?”

  I pointed to the two-way mirror. “She’s right through there.”

  Billie followed the angle of my finger to Pitch, who was scratching the side of her head with one talon. Her face fell for a moment, expression turning betrayed, before realization wiped away her confusion and her eyes went wide. She turned back to the screen.

  “Are you a bird?” she asked.

  The woman looked confused. “Hello, hello, I’m hungry, where am I?”

  “A bird,” said Billie, and flapped her arms like wings.

  The effect on Pitch was immediate. She sat up straighter on her perch and flapped her wings, not hard enough to take off, but hard enough to mimic the gesture.

  “A bird!” announced the avatar. “A bird a bird a bird yes a bird. Are you a bird? Hello? A bird? Hello, can you hear me, hello?”

  “Holy shit,” whispered Mike. “She’s really talking to the bird. The translation algorithm really figured out how to let her talk to the bird. And the bird is really talking back. Holy shit.”

  “Not in front of my child, please,” I
said, tone prim and strangled. The xenolinguists were going to be all over this. We’d have people clawing at the gates to try to get a place on the team once this came out. The science behind it was clean and easy to follow—we had built a deep neural net capable of learning, told it that gestures were language and that the human mouth was capable of making millions of distinct sounds, taught it to recognize grammar and incorporate both audio and visual signals into same, and then we had turned it loose, putting it out into the world, with no instructions but to learn.

  “We need to put like, a thousand animals in front of this thing and see how many of them can actually get it to work.” Mike grabbed my arm. “Do you know what this means? This changes everything.”

  Conservationists would kill to get their subjects in front of a monitor and try to open communication channels. Gorillas would be easy—we already had ASL in common—and elephants, dolphins, parrots, none of them could be very far behind. We had opened the gates to a whole new world, and all because I wanted to talk to my sister.

  But all that was in the future, stretching out ahead of us in a wide and tangled ribbon tied to the tail of tomorrow. Right here and right now was my daughter, laughing as she spoke to her new friend, the two of them feeling their way, one word at a time, into a common language, and hence into a greater understanding of the world.

  Tasha would be so delighted.

  In the moment, so was I.

  Capitalism in the 22nd Century or A.I.r

  GEOFF RYMAN

  Born in Canada, Geoff Ryman now lives in England. He made his first sale in 1976, to New Worlds, but it was not until 1984, when he made his first appearance in Interzone with his brilliant novella The Unconquered Country that he attracted any serious attention. The Unconquered Country was one of the best novellas of the decade, had a stunning impact on the science fiction scene of the day, and almost overnight established Ryman as one of the most accomplished writers of his generation, winning him both the British Science Fiction Award and the World Fantasy Award; it was later published in a book version, The Unconquered Country: A Life History. His novel The Child Garden: A Low Comedy won both the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award; and his later novel Air also won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. His other novels include The Warrior Who Carried Life, the critically acclaimed mainstream novel Was, Coming of Enkidu, The King’s Last Song, Lust, and the underground cult classic 253, the “print remix” of an “interactive hypertext novel” which, in its original form, ran online on Ryman’s home page of www.ryman.com, and which, in its print form, won the Philip K. Dick Award. Four of his novellas have been collected in Unconquered Countries. His most recent book is the anthology When It Changed: Science into Fiction, the novel The Film-Makers of Mars, and the collection Paradise Tales: and Other Stories.