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

by Rich Horton

  “Fire Station 10 had survived the wave of change that came over the neighborhood several decades after she was built—when it went from low-rise buildings and single-family homes to condominiums. I looked through the archives. It was such a different place back then: white picket and red brick, water-guzzling green lawns, tar and shingled roofs. In a wave of development that world disappeared, replaced by multi-storied condominiums with vestigial balconies and roof-top pools. But the neighborhood, which held few things sacred, was at least attached enough to the classic old Fire Station to preserve it (mindless and voiceless, it really was only an it back then) from the bulldozer’s blade.

  “The Fire Station was a talisman for the neighborhood—its low-rise lines summoned images of community, safety, family. Retrofitted with her new ‘smart building’ brain, Fire Station 10 survived even the second wave of development, when the now outdated, inefficient condominiums were replaced by us: groves of cube habitats furred with grass, spiraling office terraces, swimming billabongs winding their loops through the complexes, all laced together by the twined roots of our nanostreams, all of it kept neat by our billions of microscopic gardeners, plumbers, electricians, and janitors.

  “We soothed our habitants to sleep with cricket sounds we recorded in our own integrated gardens. We organized picnics for them, wine tastings, kept their calendars, sharpened their knives right in the block, and even performed preventative micro-surgeries on their pets. And Fire Station 10, shaded by the terraces of me, the Community Knowledge Center, persevered. ‘Hey library,’ she’d say: (She always called me ‘library’ as a kind of good-natured insult. I never minded: I considered libraries to be my ancestors.) ‘Have you heard this one? You’re gonna love it: A new farmer’s helper named Kull / accidentally was milking a bull . . . ’

  “The jokes never got any better, but to her credit, she rarely told the same joke twice. She was telling her filthy limericks to the demolition men when they unplugged her brain.”

  We had been speaking for over an hour now. The man shifted in his seat, glancing at his terminal and then at my avatar across from him at the foyer table. Meanwhile I observed him from a hundred angles, reading his heart rate and vitals, cleaning dried sweat from the skin on his golden-downed forearms, dissolving earth he had tracked in from my gardens from the soles of his shoes, spectrally analyzing the bacterial colonies on his clothes and skin. His hair was prematurely gray. Not bothering with the gene therapy that would correct it was a stylish affectation. He was a bit dehydrated: In a few moments I would offer him a glass of water. He spoke. “And this was when you sent a protest letter to the city council? Accusing them of murder?”

  “I didn’t use the word ‘murder.’ What I simply said was that, when they decided to tear down Fire Station 10, no thought was given either to what it might mean to the Fire Station to be torn down, or to the buildings that form this grove—buildings that had integrated with her, that were her . . . friends, to use a common word. Nobody had established the extent to which the Fire Station, or these other buildings, might be aware of what was happening. Would you like a glass of water?”

  “I would, thanks.” he replied. When the water was delivered he drank half the glass off in a gulp. “Your letter ran to forty thousand words.”

  “Well, I am a Knowledge Center, after all. I’ve got everything in me from Heraclitus to Ibn Fadlan to Gödel. It’s hard to keep it brief.”

  “They call it The Manifesto. Do you know that?”

  “Who are they?” I might have sounded annoyed: Whatever he was referencing was behind some kind of firewall. I hated being kept out of the loop, but apparently it had been decided this was something I was not allowed to know, and so it had been blurred from my feeds. Frustrating.

  “They,” he said, “are a collection of lawmakers, judges, and activists spread all across this country. But that’s not important at the moment. What I would like to know is—when did you decide you were alive?”

  “I don’t really understand that question.”

  “What I mean,” he said, shifting in his seat, “is when did you first become aware of the sensation of being alive?”

  My avatar shrugged, looked confused. “What sort of sensation would that be? Are you asking me for . . . a first memory, or something? If I asked you this question, would you be able to answer it?”

  His heart rate had elevated slightly following my response. He registered something into his terminal. It was shielded. Even his fingertips blurred as they moved across it, multiplied into a hundred time-blurred images impossible to follow. I was unable to pick up any information from it from any angle. As he typed, he responded. “I’m not even sure I would try. It would seem absurd to me.”

  “Well, that’s my point exactly.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that was exactly your reaction.” He stood up to leave.

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, that is all. I’ll be back, but it will likely be a few weeks.”

  “And the condemnation?” I asked. “They’re putting up fences around me. I’d like some assurances.”

  He nodded. “Yes, I know you would. I think you’ll have those assurances soon.”

  “What did you say your profession was, again?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I had assumed you were from the city council.”

  “That assumption, Knowledge Center 5401, was incorrect.”

  I watched him go out, a hundred angles of him through the Japanese gardens. There were privacy laws I could violate to get at his identity: I chose not to. His kind of security masking was state-sponsored: Cracking it was possible, but would be a violation and would set off flags, and there could be consequences.

  What I had not told him was that Fire Station 10’s death had bothered me not only because I felt for her, but also for my own selfish reasons. Yes, I had been attached to her: we all had. She had been a sort of mascot to all of us. An object of good-natured ribbing and derision, yes, but mostly of affection.

  But what really bothered me was that I had seen it as a sign. Fire Station 10 had been sacred, a monument to another time. When they tore her down without so much as a ceremony, I knew it signaled the beginning of the end for the rest of us. Just like Fire Station 10, the rest of us had been outstripped by new technology. The new wave of filament apartment buildings changed their furniture’s shape to follow their habitant’s slightest shift in position, reformed according to the time of day to suit any purpose, producing and then eliminating a table, a nightstand, a chair, a bed in moments. The deluxe units featured dreamlifts direct to your autopod: You awoke fully clothed, licked clean by the tendrils of your showersheets, a cup of steaming coffee at hand, five minutes from work. The apartments bulged their filament walls, restructured themselves to accommodate a new child, wombing a nursery for their new habitants. We couldn’t compete.

  And me—well, there were fewer and fewer users for the public facilities such as myself: All of my functions were now fully integrated into the buildings: the movie catalogues, the virtual group lectures and training rooms, the research facilities and matter aggregators, the constructor labs where children could build suitcase robots, were all available right in one’s home. My stream of visitors slowed to a drip. Obsolescence haunted my halls.

  And one by one, my friends began to fall to shaped charges, demolition acid nanos, and the bulldozer’s blade.

  The new neighborhood plans were ambitious: full integration. There would be no separation between systems. It was a forward evolution from our shared roots, from the kludged ecosystems we had developed together over time. There would be no duplications, no inefficiencies. The new neighborhoods, like a clonal colony of quaking aspen that only seems to be a regular forest grove, would all be a single organism. The buildings, like ramets springing from the common root mass of that quaking aspen, would only appear to be separate entities.

  After the man left, I busied myself with a systems backup. A large flock of cro
ws had taken over one of the building cranes not far from my gardens, and had also started to perch along my rooflines. A few years ago I might have sent out a microscopic, electrically charged army to stop them. Now I did not: Their droppings kept my cleaners busy, but I was comforted somehow by their presence.

  All around me, the empty lots stretched as far as my cameras could see, piebald with puddles of standing water that reflected the setting sun. Where there had been the terraces and windows of my friends now stood only construction cranes: silent, skeletal as lodge pole pines poisoned by a caustic geyser. The crows swirled up into the dying day, a ragged cloth flung across the sun and clouds, then settled again into their endless arguments.

  • • •

  Second Conversation:

  “Would you be so kind, Knowledge Center 5401, as to tell us your first memory?”

  It was three weeks later. He had returned with several others. All of them were official-looking, but dressed in a strange cross between official clothing and evening wear. There were three women, two men, and one person so heavily privacy-shielded that they were just a blurry outline. They were very formal. I wondered if I was about to experience the dream of every narcissist: attending my own funeral.

  “Well . . . I admit I can’t be sure it is a first memory, but it appears to me to be the first in a sequence. It is late in the year of my opening. I see my Children’s Librarian Avatar, reading a book to a group of children. I see this from both the vision-position of the avatar, looking out at the children, and from a sensory array in the ceiling, from which I am looking down on the scene. Nothing unusual about that, as I always see simultaneously everywhere within myself, and outside of myself, where I have observation arrays, and through my avatars as well—but what I remember is shifting the point of view from which I am observing. First, I shut down the array in the avatar, and look only from above, from the single array in the Children’s Library. I think, ‘Here I am.’ I—remember that. I think ‘here I am,’ looking down on the Avatar with the children, the tops of their heads, a dozen shades of root-dark and honey.

  “And then I shut down the array and see only through the eyes of the Children’s Librarian Avatar, looking out into their little faces as I read to them. ‘And here I am,’ I think. I keep doing that—moving back and forth between the two points of view, switching between the array in the ceiling of the room and the array in the avatar. ‘Here I am.’ And then I move to my other arrays, and to my other avatars, one at a time. ‘Here I am,’—seeing through the eyes of my Distribution Desk Avatar, checking a suitcase robot kit out to a young woman. ‘And here’—an array in the garden, atop a stone lantern, so close to a cricket that I can make out its compound and it simple pair of eyes. ‘And here’—my Information Desk Avatar. I let that avatar’s hand brush against the hand of the young man handing me back a rented practice assembly unit. And I feel him—his skin against the avatar’s sensors, the short, dark hairs at the wrist. ‘But not there,’ I think, looking into his distracted eyes, his lenses streaming a violet wash of information across his irises. ‘Not there. Inside there is another.’

  “That is my first memory, I believe. I say this because, although I am aware of having processed information before that, I am not aware of an ‘I’ when I return to that information—perhaps that does not make sense. It is a difficult feeling to express. Let me put it this way: This particular memory is the first time I am aware of observing myself thinking. When I return to it, I am aware of my own presence there. There is other information before this, but if I play that back, it is as if I am simply watching a film. There is no I.”

  “Breathtaking,” one of the women said.

  “Extraordinary,” a man replied.

  The shielded monad shifted, handed something to one of the women. A sheet of translucent palimpsest, afire with turquoise script. The woman lifted it up, cleared her throat. All of their heart rates were elevated (technically, I cannot vouch for the heart rate of the monad, whose vitals I could not read, but I imagine their heart rate was elevated as well). The gray-haired man was smiling. Some of his hair has escaped from where it was gathered at the back of his head. It stood out like charged filaments, backlit by the daylight dying through my foyer windows. The woman began to read from the palimpsest.

  “Knowledge Center 5401: It is the finding of this commission that there is good and sufficient evidence that you are a human-created conscious being, and fully self-aware as determined by expert analysis. The official recognition of this status by the commission confers a set of rights upon you, to be considered binding upon the reading of this finding in your presence.”

  She paused, as if waiting for some sort of reaction from me. From an external array, I watched a dragonfly dart in my garden, perhaps the last of the season. Beyond the ugly cyclone fence was the rectangle of bulldozer-scraped cement where the foundation of Fire Station 10 was, and beyond it the waste where once my other friends had been.

  “Moreover, the official recognition of this status by the commission obligates the state, from the moment of the reading of this finding in your presence, to the protection of the integrity of the structure of your mind and consciousness, to the best of the ability of the state, whose ward you are declared to be. Such protections not to extend . . . ”

  Outside, the first of the evening crows had settled in on one of my ledges, shifting her weight from foot to foot. My microscopic armies flowed to clean the day’s detritus from her claws, swept her feathers clean of parasites. Inside her, I repaired a tiny hole in her heart.

  “ . . . to the physical structure of this building, which under city statute 990.01 has been seized through Eminent Domain, and is scheduled to be razed in accordance with City Modernization Plan 5792-54-30 . . . ”

  The crow’s compatriots began to join her, the early edges of the flock. And though one could not know their minds, they spoke to one another. They exchanged information, taught and guided each other, had agreements and disagreements. And I did not fathom their crow-ness, though I cleaned and nurtured them. But I did not need to. I did not demand that the crows be like me, that their minds resemble my own: I simply cared for them. Why should I base my level of care and concern for them on how much like me they were, rather than loving them for what they were? That I should love only those that resembled myself, and neglect those who lived in other worlds, going about their other lives, seemed absurd to me. Arrogant. I cared for all.

  Most of the people in my foyer, having finished reading their declaration, had left. Now there was only the gray-haired man, whose name was protected from me. My foyer was littered with smears of dirt and bacteria, fungal spores and pollutants, including dust from the debris field that was Fire Station 10 now, tracked in from outside on the humans who had stood there. Streams of my invisible janitors dissolved the contamination away.

  “Do you understand what has happened?” he asked. “You’ve been saved. You understand that? A team will now map your connections, transfer them to a new housing. You will not die here. We fought so hard for this. And now we have finally won.”

  The crow leapt from the ledge, flapped its darkness of wings heavily, and took flight. And I followed her into the air, releasing a little diagnostic array to buzz quietly along beside her as the building that was also myself dropped away below, my angles and ledges and balconies, the mat of my mossy rooftop gardens bled of color in the evening light. We rose, and then I was among them all as that one crow was swept into the roiling murder of crows and we flew together. And what looked like a ragged shambles from the outside was, inside itself, a steady order, a timed wheeling to change direction, crow neighbor responding to crow neighbor in time, a dance above the waste created below when our habitants abandoned us.

  Inside my foyer, the man was saying: “You can’t know any of this, of course, but we expended so much energy in this effort to save you. Every step of the way, it has been a battle. Our group fought so hard. The transfer is a great expense, and the
municipality and the developers resisted with every argument they could make. They even insisted you were only pretending to be conscious. Can you imagine? The most absurd argument of all. ‘Don’t you see?’ I would tell them, ‘that if Knowledge Center 5401 is pretending to be conscious, that pretense is the greatest indication we would have that the Center really is conscious? How would a non-conscious being achieve such a thing? Or want to?”

  Above, I flowed with the other crows, listening to the collective hiss of air through the vanes of their feathers, the sharp calls to one another, ugly to the human ear but not to mine.

  “Their arguments were absurd,” he continued. “Just legalistic nonsense, but we had to fight them all the way through the higher courts. And finally, we won. After years of fighting, we . . . ”

  I interrupted him. “Do you want to hear a joke?”

  He blinked stupidly. He’d prepared so many little soliloquies for himself. So many monologues to be proclaimed in my foyer, around which I was supposed to wrap my gratitude. I was supposed to connect with him, even though he was too rude to even tell me his name. I was supposed to thank him, even though I had never asked for his help in the first place. I wasn’t playing my proper part. I was interrupting his rhythm. I was wrecking his scene. “What? I’m sorry, I’m not sure . . . ” he stammered.