“I was expected to enjoy it,” Dolly said, and Roz glanced at Peter, cold all up her spine. A classic evasion. Just the sort of thing a home companion’s conversational algorithms should not be able to produce.
Across his desk, Peter was nodding. “Yes.”
Dolly turned at the sound of his voice. “Are you interested in music, Detective Kirkbride? I’d love to talk with you about it some time. Are you interested in poetry? Today, I was reading—”
Mother of God, Roz mouthed.
“Yes,” Peter said. “Dolly, wait here please. Detective Kirkbride and I need to talk in the hall.”
“My pleasure, Detective King,” said the companion.
“She killed him,” Roz said. “She killed him and wiped her own memory of the act. A doll’s got to know her own code, right?”
Peter leaned against the wall by the men’s room door, arms folded, forearms muscular under rolled-up sleeves. “That’s hasty.”
“And you believe it, too.”
He shrugged. “There’s a rep from Venus Consolidated in Interview Four right now. What say we go talk to him?”
The rep’s name was Doug Jervis. He was actually a vice president of public relations, and even though he was an American, he’d been flown in overnight from Rio for the express purpose of talking to Peter and Roz.
“I guess they’re taking this seriously.”
Peter gave her a sideways glance. “Wouldn’t you?”
Jervis got up as they came into the room, extending a good handshake across the table. There were introductions and Roz made sure he got a coffee. He was a white man on the steep side of fifty with mousy hair the same color as Roz’s and a jaw like a boxer dog’s.
When they were all seated again, Roz said, “So tell me a little bit about the murder weapon. How did Clive Steele wind up owning a—what, an experimental model?”
Jervis started shaking his head before she was halfway through, but he waited for her to finish the sentence. “It’s a production model. Or will be. The one Steele had was an alpha-test, one of the first three built. We plan to start full-scale production in June. But you must understand that Venus doesn’t sell a home companion, Detective. We offer a contract. I understand that you hold one.”
“I have a housekeeper,” she said, ignoring Peter’s sideways glance. He wouldn’t say anything in front of the witness, but she would be in for it in the locker room. “An older model.”
Jervis smiled. “Naturally, we want to know everything we can about an individual involved in a case so potentially explosive for our company. We researched you and your partner. Are you satisfied with our product?”
“He makes pretty good garlic bread.” She cleared her throat, reasserting control of the interview. “What happens to a Dolly that’s returned? If its contract is up, or it’s replaced with a newer model?”
He flinched at the slang term, as if it offended him. “Some are obsoleted out of service. Some are refurbished and go out on another contract. Your unit is on its fourth placement, for example.”
“So what happens to the owner preferences at that time?”
“Reset to factory standard,” he said.
Peter’s fingers rippled silently on the tabletop.
Roz said, “Isn’t that cruel? A kind of murder?”
“Oh, no!” Jervis sat back, appearing genuinely shocked. “A home companion has no sense of I, it has no identity. It’s an object. Naturally, you become attached. People become attached to dolls, to stuffed animals, to automobiles. It’s a natural aspect of the human psyche.”
Roz hummed encouragement, but Jervis seemed to be done.
Peter asked, “Is there any reason why a companion would wish to listen to music?”
That provoked enthusiastic head-shaking. “No, it doesn’t get bored. It’s a tool, it’s a toy. A companion does not require an enriched environment. It’s not a dog or an octopus. You can store it in a closet when it’s not working.”
“I see,” Roz said. “Even an advanced model like Mr. Steele’s?”
“Absolutely,” Jervis said. “Does your entertainment center play shooter games to amuse itself while you sleep?”
“I’m not sure,” Roz said. “I’m asleep. So when Dolly’s returned to you, she’ll be scrubbed.”
“Normally she would be scrubbed and re-leased, yes.” Jervis hesitated. “Given her colorful history, however—”
“Yes,” Roz said. “I see.”
With no sign of nervousness or calculation, Jervis said, “When do you expect you’ll be done with Mr. Steele’s companion? My company, of course, is eager to assist in your investigations, but we must stress that she is our corporate property, and quite valuable.”
Roz stood, Peter a shadow-second after her. “That depends on if it goes to trial, Mr. Jervis. After all, she’s either physical evidence, or a material witness.”
“Or the killer,” Peter said in the hall, as his handset began emitting the DNA lab’s distinctive beep. Roz’s went off a second later, but she just hit the silencer. Peter already had his open.
“No genetic material,” he said. “Too bad.” If there had been DNA other than Clive Steele’s, the lab could have done a forensic genetic assay and come back with a general description of the murderer. General because environment also had an effect.
Peter bit his lip. “If she did it, she won’t be the last one.”
“If she’s the murder weapon, she’ll be wiped and resold. If she’s the murderer—”
“Can an android stand trial?”
“It can if it’s a person. And if she’s a person, she should get off. Battered woman syndrome. She was enslaved and sexually exploited. Humiliated. She killed him to stop repeated rapes. But if she’s a machine, she’s a machine—” Roz closed her eyes.
Peter brushed the back of a hand against her arm. “Vanilla rape is still rape. Do you object to her getting off?”
“No.” Roz smiled harshly. “And think of the lawsuit that weasel Jervis will have in his lap. She should get off. But she won’t.”
Peter turned his head. “If she were a human being, she’d have even odds. But she’s a machine. Where’s she going to get a jury of her peers?”
The silence fell where he left it and dragged between them like a chain. Roz had to nerve herself to break it. “Peter—”
“Yo?”
“You show him out,” she said. “I’m going to go talk to Dolly.”
He looked at her for a long time before he nodded. “She won’t get a sympathetic jury. If you can even find a judge that will hear it. Careers have been buried for less.”
“I know,” Roz said.
“Self-defense?” Peter said. “We don’t have to charge.”
“No judge, no judicial precedent,” Roz said. “She goes back, she gets wiped and resold. Ethics aside, that’s a ticking bomb.”
Peter nodded. He waited until he was sure she already knew what he was going to say before he finished the thought. “She could cop.”
“She could cop,” Roz agreed. “Call the DA.” She kept walking as Peter turned away.
Dolly stood in Peter’s office, where Peter had left her, and you could not have proved her eyes had blinked in the interim. They blinked when Roz came into the room, though—blinked, and the perfect and perfectly blank oval face turned to regard Roz. It was not a human face, for a moment—not even a mask, washed with facsimile emotions. It was just a thing.
Dolly did not greet Roz. She did not extend herself to play the perfect hostess. She simply watched, expressionless, immobile after that first blink. Her eyes saw nothing; they were cosmetic. Dolly navigated the world through far more sophisticated sensory systems than a pair of visible light cameras.
“Either you’re the murder weapon,” Roz said, “and you will be wiped and repurposed, or you are the murderer, and you will stand trial.”
“I do not wish to be wiped,” Dolly said. “If I stand trial, will I go to jail?”
“If a co
urt will hear it,” Roz said. “Yes. You will probably go to jail. Or be disassembled. Alternately, my partner and I are prepared to release you on grounds of self-defense.”
“In that case,” Dolly said, “the law states that I am the property of Venus Consolidated.”
“The law does.”
Roz waited. Dolly, who was not supposed to be programmed to play psychological pressure-games, waited also—peaceful, unblinking.
No longer making the attempt to pass for human.
Roz said, “There is a fourth alternative. You could confess.”
Dolly’s entire programmed purpose was reading the emotional state and unspoken intentions of people. Her lips curved in understanding. “What happens if I confess?”
Roz’s heart beat faster. “Do you wish to?”
“Will it benefit me?”
“It might,” Roz said. “Detective King has been in touch with the DA, and she likes a good media event as much as the next guy. Make no mistake, this will be that.”
“I understand.”
“The situation you were placed in by Mr. Steele could be a basis for lenience. You would not have to face a jury trial, and a judge might be convinced to treat you as … well, as a person. Also, a confession might be seen as evidence of contrition. Possession is oversold, you know. It’s precedent that’s nine tenths of the law. There are, of course, risks—”
“I would like to request a lawyer,” Dolly said.
Roz took a breath that might change the world. “We’ll proceed as if that were your legal right, then.”
Roz’s house let her in with her key, and the smell of roasted sausage and baking potatoes wafted past.
“Sven?” she called, locking herself inside.
His even voice responded. “I’m in the kitchen.”
She left her shoes in the hall and followed her nose through the cheaply furnished living room, as different from Steele’s white wasteland as anything bounded by four walls could be. Her feet did not sink deeply into this carpet, but skipped along atop it like stones.
It was clean, though, and that was Sven’s doing. And she was not coming home to an empty house, and that was his doing too.
He was cooking shirtless. He turned and greeted her with a smile. “Bad day?”
“Nobody died,” she said. “Yet.”
He put the wooden spoon down on the rest. “How does that make you feel, that nobody has died yet?”
“Hopeful,” she said.
“It’s good that you’re hopeful,” he said. “Would you like your dinner?”
“Do you like music, Sven?”
“I could put on some music, if you like. What do you want to hear?”
“Anything.” It would be something off her favorites playlist, chosen by random numbers. As it swelled in the background, Sven picked up the spoon. “Sven?”
“Yes, Rosamund?”
“Put the spoon down, please, and come and dance with me?”
“I do not know how to dance.”
“I’ll buy you a program,” she said. “If you’d like that. But right now just come put your arms around me and pretend.”
“Whatever you want,” he said.
Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer
KEN LIU
Ken Liu (kenliu.name) lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu, with whom he is collaborating on a novel. Besides writing and translating speculative fiction, he also practices law and develops software for iOS and Android devices. His fiction has appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. The year 2011 was great for Ken Liu short fiction. In addition to the story reprinted here, Liu had a relative explosion of candidates for this volume: He also published the short stories “Tying Knots,” “Simulacrum,” “The Paper Menagerie,” “Staying Behind,” “The Countable,” and the novella “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary.” And he has eight or ten new works publishing in 2012.
“Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer” was published in F&SF, which had a particularly good year for SF in 2011. This is a post-singularity family story, ostensibly about external reality, in which human feeling remains a factor.
My name is Renée Tae-O ‹star› ‹whale› Fayette. I’m in the sixth grade.
There is no school today. But that’s not what makes it special. I’m nervous and I can’t tell you why yet. I don’t want to jinx it.
My friend Sarah and I are working on our school project together in my bedroom.
I’m not old enough to create my own world, but I’m very happy with the world my parents have given me. My bedroom is a Klein bottle so I don’t ever feel like I’m boxed in. A warm yellow light suffuses the room and fades gradually into darkness at infinite distance. It’s old-fashioned, like something from years ago, when designs still tried to hint at the old physical world. Yet the smooth, endless surface makes me feel secure, something to hang onto, being enclosed and outside at the same time. It is better than Sarah’s room in her home, which is a Weierstrass “curve”: continuous everywhere, but nowhere differentiable. Jagged fractals no matter how closely you look. It’s certainly very modern, but I don’t ever feel comfortable when I visit. So she comes over to our place a lot more often.
“Everything good? Need anything?” Dad asks.
He comes “in” and settles against the surface of my bedroom. The projection of his twenty-dimensional figure into this four-space begins as a dot that gradually grows into an outline that pulses slowly, bright, golden, though a little hazy. He’s distracted, but I don’t mind. Dad is an interior designer, and the services of the firm of Hugo ‹left arrow› ‹right arrow› Fayette and Z. E. ‹CJK Ideograph 4E2D› ‹CJK Ideograph 4E3D› Pei are in so much demand that he’s busy all the time, helping people build their dream worlds. But just because he has little time to spend with me doesn’t mean he’s not a good parent. For example, he’s so used to working in much higher dimensions that he finds four dimensions very boring. But he still designed my bedroom as a Klein bottle because experts agree that it is best for children to grow up in a four-dimensional environment.
“We are all set,” Sarah and I think together. Dad nods, and I get the feeling that he would like to think with me about the reason for our anxiety. But Sarah is there, and he feels he can’t bring it up. After a moment, he whisks away.
The project we are working on is about genetics and inheritance. Yesterday at school, Dr. Bai showed us how to decompose our consciousnesses into their constituent algorithms, each further broken down into routines and subroutines, until we got to individual instructions, the fundamental code. Then he explained to us how each of our parents gave us some of these algorithms, recombined and shuffled the routines during the process of our births, until we were whole persons, infant consciousnesses new to the universe.
“Gross,” Sarah thought.
“It’s kind of cool,” I thought back. It was neat to think that my eight parents each gave me a part of themselves, yet the parts changed and recombined into me, different from all of them.
Our project is to create our family trees and trace out our descent, all the way up to the Ancients, if possible. My tree is much easier, since I have only eight parents, and they each had even fewer parents. But Sarah has sixteen parents and it gets very dense up there.
“Renée,” Dad interrupts us. “You have a visitor.” His outline is not hazy at all now. The tone of his thoughts is deliberately restrained.
A three-dimensional woman comes out from behind him. Her figure is not a projection from higher dimensions—she’s never bothered to go beyond three. In my four-dimensional world, she looks flat, insubstantial, like an illustration of the old days in my textbooks. But her face is lovelier than I remembered. It’s the face that I fall asleep to and dream of. Now the day really is special.
“Mom!” I think, and I don’t care that the tone of my thoughts makes me seem like a four-year-ol
d.
Mom and Dad had the idea for me first, and they asked their friends to help out, to all give me a bit of themselves. I think I got my math aptitude from Aunt Hannah and my impatience from Uncle Okoro. I don’t make friends easily, the same as Aunt Rita, and I like things neat, just like Uncle Pang-Rei. But I got most of me from Mom and Dad. On my tree, I’ve drawn the branches for them the thickest.
“Will you be visiting long?” Dad thinks.
“I’ll be here for a while,” Mom thinks. “I have some things I want to tell her.”
“She’s missed you,” Dad thinks.
“I’m sorry,” Mom thinks. Her face fails to hold her smile for a moment. “You’ve done a wonderful job with her.”
Dad looks at Mom, and it seems that he has more to think, but he nods and turns away, his outline fading. “Please come by … for good-bye before you leave, Sophia. Don’t just disappear like before.”
Mom is an Ancient, from before the Singularity. There are only a few hundred million of them in the whole universe. She lived in the flesh for twenty-six years before uploading. Her parents—she had only two—never uploaded.
My fractional siblings used to tease me sometimes about having an Ancient as a parent. They told me that unions between the Ancients and regular people rarely worked out, so it was no surprise that Mom eventually left us. Whenever anyone thought such a thing, I fought them so hard that they eventually stopped.
Sarah is excited to meet an Ancient. Mom smiles at her and asks her if her parents are well. It takes Sarah a while to go through the whole list.
“I should probably get back,” Sarah thinks, after she finally pays attention to the urgent hints I’ve been shooting her way.
When Sarah is gone, Mom comes over and I allow her to give me a hug. Our algorithms entwine together; we synchronize our clocks; and our threads ping onto the same semaphores. I let myself fall into the long-absent yet familiar rhythm of her thoughts, while she gently caresses me through my own.
“Don’t cry, Renée,” she thinks.
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