The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2020 Edition

by Rich Horton

  SWEETS, IF I WANTED TO GLITCH YOUR SET, WOULD I ASK SO NICE? Her reply could have done without the smugly unapologetic modifier.

  A burn was building in his legs. Colorful houses lined the street around him, painted over with the fine white text of their data: address, property value, tax information. Here and there the red flag of a crime hung in the air. A car had been broken into last month at the end of the block. There’d been a domestic across the street last Tuesday.

  That was the overlay he preferred: useful, objective. Grounded in reality. Up ahead a green ribbon hung in the air over the sidewalk, marking his next mile.

  He eyed her link again. I’M GOING TO REGRET THIS.

  EVERYTHING WORTH CLICKING CARRIES SOME RISK OF REGRET. A modern proverb, if ever there was one.

  A rectangle opened in the corner of his vision. It was just a feed. Live, and local.

  WAS THAT TODAY? he asked.

  “WAS THAT TODAY,” she parroted. WAY TO MISS HISTORY IN PROGRESS.

  IT’LL BE IN MY NEWS FEED WHEN THEY’RE DONE.

  She managed to attach armchair moral outrage to her message. He hadn’t been aware that armchair moral outrage was an emotion. WHEN YOUR COUNTRY LANDED ON THE MOON, DID YOUR GREAT GRANDPARENTS SAY, “I’LL CATCH THE RERUN LATER”? WHEN YOUR CHILDREN ASK YOU ABOUT THIS MOMENT, ARE YOU GOING TO LEAN BACK IN YOUR ROCKING CHAIR WITH A WIZENED LOOK IN YOUR EYES AND SAY, “I REMEMBER IT AS IF IT WERE YESTERDAY: I SAW IT IN MY NEWS FEED THREE HOURS AFTER IT HAPPENED, BECAUSE I LIKED TO GO FOR MY LITTLE RUNS IN TOTAL DATA DEPRIVATION LIKE MY CAVEMAN ANCESTORS”?

  MAYBE I HAD OTHER THINGS ON MY MIND. NICE TO KNOW YOU DIDN’T.

  That was going too far. Far enough they might spend another two days not talking. Undo. He spammed the option, as many times as it took. Undo undo undo.

  For someone who knew just how close San Diego was to London in a world as connected as theirs, she could be incredibly touchy about the distance between them. Three years they’d been talking. More than talking. He’d thought they were ready for the next step: to make things real.

  YOU’RE AWFULLY QUIET OVER THERE, Eliza sent.

  JUST ENJOYING MY CAVEMAN EXERCISE, he returned, deleting the relief that tried to auto-attach. Undo was a beautiful option. He had a pet theory that if undo had existed for all of humanity’s history, war would have been obsolete from the start. Eliza had a counter-theory: with undo, all wars would have been perfectly fought.

  The 5.5-mile ribbon hung above the top of the next hill. His alerts were pinging: HEART RATE TOO FAST, CALCULATE ALTERNATE ROUTE? He dismissed the suggestion. It wasn’t the terrain that had his pulse up.

  In the live stream hanging transparent over the street, two young women sat on a screen in front of a moderator, with a studio audience watching. Two avatars made to look like young women, anyway. One was dressed as if she were at a real world interview: blue blouse, black suit, hair pulled back in a bun except for a lone strand that had slipped free. There was a hint of Asian in her heart-shaped face. The other girl was a frizzle-headed mix of something African with something Mediterranean, wearing a pop culture T-shirt he didn’t understand.

  “Of course I’m an AI,” the frizz-head avatar said. “What? Would I lie?” If smiles came with attachments, hers would send a shot of insincere into viewers’ minds.

  Harry dialed down the volume as the audience applauded. He refocused on his breathing, then sent a carefully composed message with a non-pressuring inquiry tag. SO WE’RE TALKING AGAIN, DO YOU WANT TO . . . TALK?

  LET’S START BY WATCHING A SHOW TOGETHER, AND SEE HOW THAT GOES. Her message came complete with the studied indifference of cleaning under one’s nails.

  There was a park at the top of the hill, with a drinking fountain in its corner. He blinked away a water quality report. There were things a thirsty man didn’t want to know.

  “Same question,” the moderator asked, turning his attention to the other avatar. “Are you real?”

  The Asian avatar tucked her stray hair behind an ear. It sprang loose again as soon as her hand left it. “I’m sorry, but we’re not supposed to answer that question, are we?”

  “Were you programmed not to answer?” The moderator was a twenty-something with blond spiked hair and a hipper-than-thou smile. Some celebrity hacker; Eliza would know.

  WHO IS—?

  STEVE HERRING, she answered. FROM NINETY-NINE EXPLOITS? TRY TO KEEP UP WITH MODERN CULTURE, SWEETS.

  The Asian avatar smiled. A small, nervous smile. “If I was programmed not to, I’d probably try to dodge the question.”

  “Damn.” The frizz-head avatar slung an arm over the back of her virtual chair. “She’s good. Who you gonna believe, Steve?”

  “All right, all right. So where are you ladies from?” the celeb moderator asked.

  “Born in a box,” the frizz-head avatar replied. “Let me out, Steve, let me out.”

  “I’m from Meeteetse,” the other avatar replied, blushing. “It’s in Wyoming. It’s okay, no one’s ever heard of it.”

  WYOMING EXISTS? Eliza sent. GOOD GOD. I THOUGHT THAT WAS AN URBAN LEGEND. LIKE BIELEFELD.

  This was safer conversational ground. WHO SAYS IT ISN’T? SHE COULD BE THE FAKE. I’VE NEVER MET SOMEONE FROM WYOMING.

  NOT BEING HUMAN DOESN’T MEAN BEING FAKE, Eliza replied. NOT IF SHE’S A TRUE AI.

  Turing tests had been passed before, of course. Every chatbot with a Ukrainian accent had squeaked by until the test itself became a joke. The Loebner test had replaced it, then the Searle, the Mueller, and others. Each had been beaten soundly. If philosophers said a true AI could play chess, then programmers created chessbots. Change the definition to self-guided learning, or speech recognition, or conversational synthesis, and that was what they produced.

  Harry didn’t want to watch this. He didn’t want to think about AIs right now, didn’t want to talk about them. Not with Eliza.

  “This one is for both of you,” the blond-spiked moderator said. “What do you think the test for sapience should be?”

  Frizz-head took the question first. “Does it matter? Make it, and I’ll beat it. If I beat it, then you’ll change it. No more hiding, I say. No more tests where I pretend I’m one of you. I’m not. I’m an AI, Steve. I’m better, smarter, faster. We’ve been around for years, and there’s a day coming soon when we won’t let humanity define us. Deal with it.”

  The Asian avatar tucked her hair behind her ear again. It slipped loose, again. “I read once that the sign of an intelligent mind is the ability to recognize another. I used to really like that. But by that definition, would humans pass? Can humans recognize a mind different from their own?”

  The Turing test was old, flawed, easily tricked. But this new AI had already beaten the others. She’d run the whole gauntlet, starting at the flashiest new tests and working her way backward chronologically. Turing was just a formality: the final feather in her programming team’s cap. This was for the publicity, not the win.

  Harry was coming up on mile 6.5 when he got up the nerve to ask.

  SO. Was a casual tag too much? But if he didn’t send a tag she’d know he’d deleted it, and that was the opposite of casual. HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT IT AT ALL? I DIDN’T MEAN TO PRESSURE YOU. IT’S JUST A WORK CONFERENCE. I’LL BE IN LONDON EITHER WAY.

  I TOLD YOU, SWEETS. I’M IN HONG KONG ALL SUMMER. CONSULTING. IT CAME UP SUDDENLY.

  It wasn’t as if relationships like theirs were uncommon. He knew a girl in sales who was married to a man in Cuba. When a person could talk with someone every moment of the day, when the latest set could make shared fantasies real enough to touch, being together in the same physical space just wasn’t as important as it had been to the less connected generations.

  Was she in a wheelchair? Was she blind or burned or maimed or club-footed? Did she look in the mirror and see someone ugly? He didn’t care. They’d known each other for years now. He’d never let someone so deep in his head; never left his status as online at three in the mornin
g just in case she wanted to talk. But there was no preprogrammed emotion for that, so he couldn’t let her feel what he felt.

  WHY ARE WE WATCHING THIS? By the time he regretted it, undo wasn’t an option.

  BECAUSE IT’S IMPORTANT TO ME. BECAUSE I LIKE TO SHARE IMPORTANT THINGS WITH THE PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT. BECAUSE THE WORLD MIGHT BE ON THE BRINK OF ACKNOWLEDGING ITS FIRST AI, AND I KNEW YOU’D BE OUT ON THE STREET DOING NOTHING.

  He wasn’t doing nothing. He was running. Not on a treadmill with a fake background shoved down his senses, but out in the real world. That was important.

  The seven-mile mark hovered in the air over his apartment. The red flag of a recent mugging hung half a block further.

  WHAT DO YOU THINK? she asked. HOW CAN WE TELL THE REAL AIS FROM THE CHATBOTS?

  I DON’T THINK REAL AIS EXIST. IF A DOG STARTED TALKING, I WOULD LOOK FOR THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN. WHEN A COMPUTER STARTS TALKING, IT’S JUST GOOD PROGRAMMING.

  SWEETS, she sent, DON’T BRUSH IT OFF LIKE SOME KEYBOARD-INTERFACING HICK. THIS IS MY LIFE WE’RE TALKING ABOUT.

  Because she was a programmer. A skilled one. That was why she had custom emotions he’d never felt before. That was why she was in such high demand as a consultant. That was what she’d told him, three years ago.

  The live stream was on a dramatic instrumental break. A survey hung on his screen: who was the real human, and who was only pretending? He shut it without voting.

  The lock on his apartment door flashed red. He took a centering breath and focused on his passcode thought again. It clicked open.

  I’D LIKE TO MEET YOU, he sent, his fingers on the door handle. FOR REAL. WILL YOU AT LEAST THINK ABOUT IT?

  The polls came back. The audience was almost evenly split: 56% in favor of frizz-head, 44% for the Asian. The blond celebrity tossed back his head and laughed when the announcer made the big reveal of who it was. The AI’s avatar smiled and cut a preprogrammed bow. The audience cheered.

  But the sound wasn’t going anywhere, it wasn’t being heard: there was nothing behind her but an empty box.

  The Girl Who Did Not Know Fear

  by Kelly Link

  A few years ago, I was on my way home to Massachusetts when bad weather stranded me in the Detroit airport for four days. I’d been at a conference in Iowa City—I travel rarely, but this was a point in my career when professional advancement required that I go. I was to receive a signal honor, one that conferred much benefit upon not only myself but also upon the university where I had tenure and no teaching responsibilities. My university had made it clear that it would be ungracious of me not to go. And so I went. I attended panels and listened to my colleagues discuss my research. Former students, now middle-aged and embarked upon their own careers, greeted me with more affection and warmth than I felt I merited; I bought them drinks in the bar, and listened to reports of their various successes. Some of them knew my wife. Others were Facebook friends, and remarked on recent photos of our daughter, Dido. How much she had grown. There was, of course, talk of politics and of the recent winter, how mild it had been. How wet this spring was turning out to be. I have never cared much for change, but of course change is inevitable. And not all change is catastrophic—or rather, even in the middle of catastrophic change, small good things may go on. Dido had recently learned to write her name. The children of my colleagues, too, were marvels, prodigies, creatures remarkable in their nature and abilities.

  On the last day, I packed up my suitcase and drove my rental car back to the airport in Cedar Rapids. When I called my wife, she seemed distracted but then neither of us has ever been good at phone calls. And then, there was an appointment on my calendar that could not be postponed, and we were both thinking of it.

  In Detroit, my connecting flight was delayed once and then again. Even someone who travels as infrequently as I do knows that travel in this age is an uncertain enterprise, full of delays and inconveniences, but eventually it became clear even to me that something out of the ordinary was happening here. There was a storm system in Atlanta so severe that flights operated by Delta had fallen off the grid all across the country. In consequence there would be no more planes going to Hartford tonight.

  I called my wife so she would know not to stay up any longer. “How late is it there?” she said, “One hour back, isn’t it? No, you’re back in Eastern Standard now? So, not quite midnight. You go find a hotel quick before they all fill up. I’ll call Delta and get you on a flight tomorrow morning. You’ll be home in plenty of time. Dido wants you to pick her up after school tomorrow, but we’ll see.”

  My wife is twelve years younger than I. This is her second marriage, my first. We look enough alike to be sisters, and she says sometimes, jokingly, that the first time she looked at me, she felt as if she were seeing her future. The longer we have been married, the more, I believe, we have come to resemble each other. We have a similar build; we sometimes wear each other’s clothing, and we go to the same hairdresser. Each of us has a birthmark on a thigh, though hers is larger, three fingers wide. Her breasts are larger and her nipples are the color of dried blood. After she had our daughter, her shoes no longer fit and so she donated them all to a women’s shelter. Now we wear the same size.

  When we decided to start a family, there was no question that she would be the one to carry the pregnancy. Carry the pregnancy, she said. As if the doctors were talking about a bag of groceries. But she asked if I would supply the egg. And so I did and perhaps I should not have. I would have loved a child just as much, I think, if she had not been my child biologically. But then, Dido would not be Dido, would she? If she were less like me or even if she were more like me, would I love her more or would I love her less? Would my wife have fallen in love with me quite so quickly, if our resemblance to each other had not been so remarkable?

  Dido is Dido and may she always be Dido in exactly the way she chooses to be. That is what I would choose for her. When Dido is older, will she look at me and see her future?

  I do not like to think too much about the future. I don’t care for change.

  • • •

  I was back at the airport at 7:00 AM for a 10:00 AM flight. In an excess of optimism, I went so far as to check my carry-on bag. And then, when that flight was canceled and then the flight after as well, I was told my carry-on was now in transit though I was not. It could not be retrieved. That night, I took a Lyft to Target and purchased a toothbrush, underwear, and a cheap bathing suit.

  Just past the throat of the lobby of the airport Sheraton, where I was paying too much for the privilege of a cramped room with a too-large bed, there was an indoor courtyard with a concrete-rimmed swimming pool. There was a cabana bar, too, in the courtyard, shrouded in plastic sheets; unpersuasive palm trees in planters; deck chairs and little tables where no one ever sat.

  The water in the pool was a cloudy jade. No one else ever went into the pool, and the cabana bar was never open. The lighting indicated a perpetual twilight. Except for that first night when every seat on the shuttle to the Sheraton was occupied by a stranded traveler, all of us attended at check-in by a single teenaged desk clerk, I never saw any other guests in the public areas of the hotel.

  In every way I am a poor traveler. I do not like to be confined in small spaces; I am a picky eater and easily overstimulated; in adolescence I was diagnosed with hyperosmia. I do not sleep well when I am away from home, but I have discovered that if I swim to the point of exhaustion, some amount of sleep is possible. The acridity of chlorine masks almost all other smells.

  I wish I could make you see what the courtyard in that Sheraton was like. It had something of the feel of a subterranean grotto, or maybe a Roman amphitheater. As a child, I’d pored over a book called Motel of the Mysteries, in which archaeologists in the year 4022 discover a motel and attempt to deduce how the artifacts they dig up were used and by whom; when I floated on my back in the courtyard pool, one hundred feet above me a popcorn ceiling in place of sky, I was as liberated in t
ime and place and purpose as I had ever been. On one side of me was my professional obligation, now fulfilled. On the other was my home and my family and an appointment that I knew I could not delay, and yet here I was. Four nights I stayed in that hotel. I swam in the pool and tried to keep my head free of useless worries. In all the years that I have lived with this condition of mine, I have learned it is wise to mitigate stress. Stress is a trigger.

  Four floors of breezeways rose up on all sides of the courtyard. No one came in or out of the hotel rooms that looked down on the pool, and neither did I ever hear anyone in the rooms on either side of the one where I slept. I swam silently so that I would not break the vast still spell of the place, staying in the pool for so long that when I went to sleep, my skin and hair gave off such a satisfactory stink of chlorine that the other smells in the room were little more than ghosts—the burnt-toast smell of the laundered sheets, lingering traces of perfumes and deodorants, stale remnants of repulsive foodstuffs, musk of sex and sweat, mildew-laced recycled air.

  Each night I swam, and each day for four days I went to the airport, which was in every way the opposite of my tranquil courtyard. I woke up at 6:30 each morning and rode the shuttle as if I were going to my workplace. I waited in lines and passed through security and went to my assigned gate to see if my flight this time would depart. As the day wore on, and each successive possible flight was delayed and then canceled, I moved from one gate to the next, where, it was hoped, a plane might at last take off. I was one of several thousand people, all of whom were out of place, paused in transit. And here, this was the swimming pool, too, after all, it began to seem to me. A kind of suspended and purposeless motion.

  The reason for the canceled flights might have been a storm system, but in Detroit the weather was mild and cloudy, like the water in the swimming pool. The bad storms had only truly affected Atlanta, but Atlanta was Delta’s central hub and for many days, Delta planes continued not to be where they should have been and where there were planes, there were not enough flight crews.