“I can learn.” Twitch twitch TWITCH. “Do you remember what Werner Heisenberg said about belief systems? ‘What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’ I need a new method of questioning to lead toward a new mathematics.”
“Well, that’s a—”
“They’re letting me have my laptop back, with controlled wifi access, until I go home.”
“Have they said when that might be?”
“Possibly in a few more weeks.”
Dr. Tremling beamed, twitching. Eliot tried to beam, too. He was getting what he’d wanted—his father back home, working on mathematics. Only—“a new mathematics”? His father was not Godel or Einstein or Heisenberg. He wasn’t even an endowed chair.
Eliot burst out, before he knew he was going to say anything, “There’s no evidence for any larger consciousness! It’s mystical wish-fulfillment, a non-rational delusion! There’s just no evidence!”
“I’m the evidence. Son, I don’t think I actually told you what I experienced.” He leaned closer; involuntarily Eliot leaned back. “It was Zeus, but it was also Odin, was Christ, was … oh, let me think … was Isis and Sedna and Bumba and Quetzalcoatl. It was all of them and none of them because the images were in my mind. Of course they were, where else could they possibly be? But here’s the thing—the images are unimportant. They’re just metaphors, and not very good ones—arrows pointing to something that has neither image nor words, but just is. That thing is—how can I explain this?—the world behind the world. Didn’t you ever feel in childhood that all at once you sort of glimpsed a flash of a great mystery underlying everything, a bright meaning to it all? I know you did because everybody does. Then we grow up and lose that. But it’s still there, bright and shining as solid as … as an end table, or a pig. I saw it and now I know it exists in a way that goes beyond any need to question its existence—the way I know, for instance, that prime numbers are infinite. It’s the world beyond the world, the space filled with shining light, the mystery. Do you see?”
“No!”
“Well, that’s because you didn’t experience it. But if I can find the right mathematics, that’s a better arrow than verbal metaphors can ever be.”
Eliot saw in his father’s eyes the gleam of fanaticism. “Dad!” he cried, in pure anguish, but Dr. Tremling only put his hand on Eliot’s knee, a startlingly rare gesture of affection, and said, “Wait, son. Just wait.”
Eliot couldn’t wait. His English assignment was due by third period, which began, with the logic of high school scheduling, at 10:34 a.m. No late assignments were accepted. His tablet on his knees on the crowded bus, Eliot wrote: Memory is not a room or a bridge or a corn stalk with blight. Memory is not a metaphor because nothing is a metaphor. Metaphors are constructions of a fanciful imagination, not reality. In reality everything is what it is, and that is—or certainly should be!—enough for anybody!
The little boy sitting next to him said, “Hey, man, you hit that thing so hard, you gonna break it.”
“Shut up,” Eliot said.
“Get fucked,” the kid answered.
But Eliot already was.
Dr. Tremling came home three weeks later. He was required to see a therapist three times a week. Aunt Sue bustled over, cooked for two days straight, and stocked the freezer with meals. When Eliot and his father sat down to eat, Dr. Tremling’s eye twitched convulsively. Meals were the only time they met. His father chewed absently and spoke little, but then, that had always been true. The rest of the time he stayed in his study, working. Eliot did not ask on what. He didn’t want to know.
Everything felt suspended. Eliot went to school, took his AP classes, expressed scorn for the jocks and goths who teased him, felt superior to his teachers, read obsessively—all normal. And yet not. One day, when his father was at a therapy session, Eliot slid into Dr. Tremling’s study and looked at his notebooks and, to the extent he could find them amid such sloppy electronic housekeeping, his computer files. There didn’t seem to be much notation, and what there was, Eliot couldn’t follow. He wasn’t a mathematician, after all. And his father appeared to have invented a new symbol for something, a sort of Olympic thunderbolt that seemed to have left- and right-handed versions. Eliot groaned and closed the file.
Only once did Eliot ask, “So how’s it going, Dad?”
“It’s difficult,” Dr. Tremling said.
No shit. “Have you had any more … uh … incidents?”
“That’s irrelevant, son. I only needed one.” But his face twitched harder than ever.
Three weeks after he came home, Dr. Tremling gave up. He hadn’t slept for a few nights and his face sagged like a bloodhound’s. But he was calm when he said to Eliot, “I’m going to have the operation.”
“You are?” Eliot’s heart leapt and then, inexplicably, sank. “Why? When?”
His father answered with something of his old precision. “Because there is no mathematics of a larger conscious entity. On Tuesday at eight in the morning. Dr. Tallman certified me able to sign my own papers.”
“Oh.” For a long terrible moment Eliot thought he had nothing more to say. But then he managed, “I’m sorry about the pig.”
“It’s not important,” Dr. Tremling said, which should have been the first clue.
On Tuesday Eliot rose at 5:00 a.m., and took a cab to the hospital. He sat with his father in Pre-Op, in a vibrantly and mistakenly orange waiting room during the operation, and beside his father’s bed in Post-Op. Dr. Tremling recovered well and came home a week later. He was quiet, subdued. When the new term started, he resumed teaching at the university. He read the professional journals, weeded the garden, fended off his sister. Nobody mentioned the incident, and Dr. Tremling never did, either, since hospital tests had verified that it was gone from his memory. Everything back to normal.
But not really. Something had gone missing, Eliot thought—some part of his father that, though inarticulate, had made his eyes shine at a breakthough in mathematics. That had made him love pigs. That had led him, in passion, to fling bad student problem sets and blockhead professional papers across the room, as later he would fling furniture. Something was definitely missing.
“Isn’t it wonderful that Carl is exactly the way he used to be?” enthused Aunt Sue. “Modern medicine is just amazing!”
Eliot didn’t answer her. On the way home from school, he got off the bus one stop early. He ducked into the Safeway as if planning to rob it, carrying out his purchase more secretively than he’d ever carried out the Trojans he never got to use. In his room, he locked the door, opened the grocery boxes, and spread out their contents on the bed.
On the dresser.
On the desk, beside his calculus homework.
On the computer keyboard.
When there were no other surfaces left, on the not-very-clean carpet.
Then, hoping, he stared at the toaster pastries until his head ached and his eyes crossed from strain.
Eliot wrote, “Metaphor is all we have.” But the assignment had been due weeks ago, and his teacher refused to alter his grade.
The Nearest Thing
GENEVIEVE VALENTINE
Genevieve Valentine (www.genevievevalentine.com) lives in New York City. Like most writers, she has been writing all her life, she says, but she began writing for publication in 2007, when her first story appeared in Strange Horizons. She is a prolific writer, and more than thirty of her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines such as Clarkesworld and Fantasy, and in the anthologies The Living Dead II, Teeth, and Running with the Pack. She is what Jeff VanderMeer terms an “emerging” writer. Her first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, about a mechanical circus in a post-apocalyptic world, was published late in 2011. She enjoys working within and across all genres of speculative fiction (and finding period films in which anyone wears anything remotely accurate). She has a few novels “in various stages of completion.”
“
The Nearest Thing” was published online by Lightspeed, and this is perhaps its first print publication. Mason is a coding genius and socially awkward. He works for/is owned by a corporation that makes personalized “memorial dolls,” robotic duplicates of individuals with artificial pseudo-personalities. He has been shifted to a development team led by Paul, a charismatic wonder-boy; the project is to develop an AI, “the nearest thing” to human.
CALENDAR REMINDER: STOCKHOLDER DINNER, 8PM.
THIS MESSAGE SENT FROM MORI: LOOKING TO THE FUTURE, LOOKING OUT FOR YOU.
The Mori Annual Stockholder Dinner is a little slice of hell that employees are encouraged to attend, for morale.
Mori’s made Mason rich enough that he owns a bespoke tux and drives to the Dinner in a car whose property tax is more than his father made in a year; of course he goes.
(He skipped one year because he was sick, and two Officers from HR came to his door with a company doctor to confirm it. He hasn’t missed a party since.)
He’s done enough high-profile work that Mori wants him to actually mingle, and he spends the cocktail hour being pushed from one group to another, shaking hands, telling the same three inoffensive anecdotes over and over.
They go fine; he’s been practicing.
People chuckle politely just before he finishes the punch line.
Memorial dolls take a second longer, because they have to process the little cognitive disconnect of humor, and because they’re programmed to think that interrupting is rude.
(He’ll hand it to the Aesthetics department—it’s getting harder to tell the difference between people with plastic surgery and the dolls.)
“I hear you’re starting a new project,” says Harris. He hugs Mrs. Harris closer, and after too long, she smiles.
(Mason will never know why anyone brings their doll out in public like this. The point is to ease the grieving process, not to provide arm candy. It’s embarrassing. He wishes stockholders were a little less enthusiastic about showing support for the company.)
This new project is news to him, too, but he doesn’t think stockholders want to hear that.
“I might be,” he says. “I obviously can’t say, but—”
Mr. Harris grins. “Paul Whitcover already told us—” (Mason thinks, Who?) “—and it sounds like a marvelous idea. I hope it does great things for the company; it’s been a while since we had a new version.”
Mason’s heart stutters that he’s been picked to spearhead a new version.
It sinks when he remembers Whitcover. He’s one of the second-generation creative guys who gets his picture taken with some starlet on his arm, as newscasters talk about what good news it would be for Mori’s stock if he were to marry a studio-contracted actress.
Mrs. Harris is smiling into middle space, waiting to be addressed, or for a keyword to come up.
Mason met Mrs. Harris several Dinners ago. She had more to say than this, and he worked on some of the conversation software in her generation; she can handle a party. Harris must have turned her cognitives down to keep her pleasant.
There’s a burst of laughter across the room, and when Mason looks over it’s some guy in a motorcycle jacket, surrounded by tuxes and gowns.
“Who’s that?” he asks, but he knows, he knows, this is how his life goes, and he’s already sighing when Mr. Harris says, “Paul.”
Since he got Compliance Contracted to Mori at fifteen, Mason has come to terms with a lot of things.
He’s come to terms with the fact that, for the money he makes, he can’t make noise about his purpose. He worked for a year on an impact-sensor chip for Mori’s downmarket Prosthetic Division; you go where you’re told.
(He’s come to terms with the fact that the more Annual Stockholder Dinners you attend, the less time you spend in a cubicle in Prosthetics.)
He has come to terms with the fact that sometimes you will hate the people you work with, and there is nothing you can do.
(Mason suspects he hates everyone, and that the reasons why are the only things that change.)
The thing is, Mason doesn’t hate Paul because Paul is a Creative heading an R&D project. Mason will write what they tell him to, under whatever creative-team asshole they send him. He’s not picky.
Sure, he resents someone who introduces himself to other adults as, “Just Paul, don’t worry about it, good to meet you,” and he resents someone whose dad was a Creative Consultant and who’s never once gone hungry, and he resents the adoring looks from stockholders as Paul claims Mori is really Going Places This Year, but things like this don’t keep him up at night, either.
He’s pretty sure he starts to hate Paul the moment Paul introduces him to Nadia.
At Mori, we know you care.
We know you love your family. We know you worry about leaving them behind. And we know you’ve asked for more information about us, which means you’re thinking about giving your family the greatest gift of all:
You.
Medical studies have shown the devastating impact grief has on family bonds and mental health. The departure of someone beloved is a tragedy without a proper name.
Could you let the people you love live without you?
A memorial doll from Mori maps the most important aspects of your memory, your speech patterns, and even your personality into a synthetic reproduction.
The process is painstaking—our technology is exceeded only by our artistry—and it leaves behind a version of you that, while it can never replace you, can comfort those who have lost you.
Imagine knowing your parents never have to say goodbye. Imagine knowing you can still read bedtime stories to your children, no matter what may happen.
A memorial doll from Mori is a gift you give to everyone who loves you.
Nadia holds perfectly still.
Her nametag reads “Aesthetic Consultant,” which means Paul brought his model girlfriend to the meeting.
She’s pretty, in a cat’s-eye way, but Mason doesn’t give her much thought. It takes a lot for Mason to really notice a woman, and she’s nowhere near the actresses Paul dates.
(Mason’s been reading up. He doesn’t think much of Paul, but the man can find a camera at a hundred paces.)
Paul brings Nadia to the first brainstorming meeting for the Vestige project. He introduces her to Mason and the two guys from Marketing (“Just Nadia, don’t worry about it”), and they’re ten minutes into the meeting before Mason realizes she had never said a word.
It takes Mason until then to realize how still she is. Only her eyes move—to him, with a hard expression like she can read his mind and doesn’t like what she sees.
Not that he cares. He just wonders where she came from, suddenly.
“So we have to think about a new market,” Paul is saying. “There’s a diminishing return on memorial dolls, unless we want to drop the price point to expand opportunities and popularize the brand—”
The two Marketing guys make appalled sounds at the idea of Mori going downmarket.
“—or, we develop something that will redefine the company,” Paul finishes. “Something new. Something we build in-house from the ground up.”
A Marketing guy says, “What do you have in mind?”
“A memorial that can conquer Death itself,” says Paul.
(Nadia’s eyes slide to Paul, never move.)
“How so?” asks the other marketing guy.
Paul grins, leans forward; Mason sees the switch flip.
Then Paul is magic.
He uses every catchphrase Mason’s ever heard in a pitch, and some phrases he swears are from Mori’s own pamphlets. Paul makes a lot of eye contact, frowns soulfully. The Marketing guys get glassy and slack-jawed, like they’re watching a swimming pool fill up with doubloons. Paul smiles, one fist clenched to keep his amazing ideas from flying away.
Mason waits for a single concept concrete enough to hang some code on. He waits a long time.
(The nice thing about programs is that you dea
l in absolutes—yes, or no.)
“We’ll be working together,” and Paul encompasses Mason in his gesture. “Andrew Mason has a reputation for out-thinking computers. Together, we’ll give the Vestige model a self-sustaining critical-thinking initiative no other developer has tried—and no consumer base has ever seen. It won’t be human, but it will be the nearest thing.”
The Marketing guys light up.
“Self-sustaining critical-thinking” triggers ideas about circuit maps and command-decision algorithms, and for a second Mason is absorbed in the idea.
He comes back when Paul says, “Oh, he definitely has ideas.” He flashes a smile at the Marketing guys—it wobbles when he looks at Nadia, but he recovers well enough that the smile is back by the time it gets to Mason.
“Mason, want to give us tech dummies a rundown of what you’ve been brainstorming?”
Mason glances back from Nadia to Paul, doesn’t answer.
Paul frowns. “Do you have questions about the project?”
Mason shrugs. “I just think maybe we shouldn’t be discussing confidential R&D with some stranger in the room.”
(Compliance sets up stings sometimes, just to make sure employees are serious about confidentiality. Maybe that’s why she hasn’t said a thing.)
Nadia actually turns her head to look at him (her eyes skittering past Paul), and Paul drops the act and snaps, “She’s not some stranger,” like she saved him from an assassination attempt.
It’s the wrong thing to say.
It makes Mason wonder what the relationship between Paul and Nadia really is.
That afternoon, Officer Wilcox from HR stops by Mason’s office.
“This is just a random check,” she says. “Your happiness is important to the company.”
What she means is, Paul ratted him out, and they’re making sure he’s not thinking of leaking information about the kind of project you build a market-wide stock repurchase on.
“I’m very happy here,” Mason says, and it’s what you always say to HR, but it’s true enough; they pulled him from that shitty school and gave him a future. Now he has more money than he knows what to do with, and the company dentist isn’t half bad.
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