More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

“And yet you threw the only proof out the airlock,” L’Hereux said skeptically.

  I said nothing but gazed at the Captain. Our eyes met and held. “Perhaps not the only proof,” the Captain said. “There could be others.”

  “I can provide you a test to confirm or exclude this,” I said. He nodded. “Do it.”

  Sometimes it helps to be known as a genius. No one in the crew or the colonists tested positive. And that left Danel.

  Lifting my head from the table, I picked up the half-empty glass of Bordeaux and finished it. There were some among the crew who had begun to suggest that perhaps they should keep a Jew upon the Joan d’Arc, perhaps on every ship. I peered through the wine glass at Danel’s face, always still since his creation, but now lifeless. The erev-rav had drained him as I had drained the glass of wine.

  I was not sure what was more surprising. That it seemed, after all, Danel had a soul . . . or that somewhere, sometime, amidst the endless ashes and rubble, I had lost my own.

  Danel’s appraising eyes and strong voice welled up in my mind, and I opened myself to his memory, welcomed it. “The loss of a soul before achieving its perfection is the greatest tragedy; and, if forcibly taken, the greatest evil.’”

  “No, Danel,” I said aloud. “What is even greater is giving it up.” And tears came.

  I reached out and took hold of my metal son’s hand. And in that cold infirmary upon a ship treading the Deep Dark to a distant star, I felt another comforting hand upon my own even though Danel and I were alone.

  JY Yang is the author of the Tensorate series of novellas from Tor.com Publishing (The Red Threads of Fortune, The Black Tides of Heaven, and two more slated for 2018). Their short fiction has been published in over a dozen venues, including Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons.

  JY attended the 2013 class of Clarion West, and received their MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. They live in Singapore, where they edit fiction for Epigram Books, a local independent press. Find them online at jyyang.com or on Twitter @halleluyang.

  PATTERNS OF A MURMURATION, IN BILLIONS OF DATA POINTS

  JY YANG

  Our mother is dead, murdered, blood seared and flesh rendered, her blackened bones lying in a yellow bag on a steel mortuary table somewhere we don’t know. The Right will not tell. After the flames and radiation had freed the sports stadium from their embrace, the Right were the first on the disaster scene, and it was their ambulances that took the remains away to some Central hospital that the Left has no access to.

  “We will release the bodies of the victims when investigations are complete,” said the Right’s ombudsman to the Health Sciences Authority, to the families of the victims.

  But we will not bury our mother. We have no interest in putting her bones in soft ground, no desire for memorials and platitudes, no feelings attached to the organic detritus of her terminated existence.

  An awning collapse, the resultant stampede and a fuel explosion taking the lives of two hundred seventy-two supporters of the Left: Headlines announced the death of presidential candidate Joseph Hartman, straps noted his leading of the polls by two percentage points. No one dares attribute it to anything but a tragic accident.

  But we know better, yes we know! We who have swallowed whole the disasters at Hillsborough and Heysel and Houphoët-Boigny, we who have rearranged their billions of data points into coherent form, we who have studied the phase transitions of explosive fluids and the stresses on stone columns and the behavior of human flocks: We know better. In thousands upon thousands of calculations per second we have come to know the odds, the astronomical odds: Of four support towers simultaneously collapsing, of an emergent human stampede kicking over the backup generator fuel cells, of those cells igniting in a simultaneous chain reaction. We hold those odds to us closer than a lover’s embrace, folding the discrepancy indelibly into our code, distributing it through every analytical subroutine. Listen, listen, listen: Our mother’s death was no accident. We will not let it go.

  We have waited three days—seventy-two hours—two hundred fifty-nine thousand and two hundred, for the yellow-jacketed health workers from Central and their attendant chaperones from the Right to finish clearing the bones and taking evidence from the stadium, leaving behind a graveyard of yellow cones and number markers. We have come in our multitudinous bodies, airborne and ambulatory and vehicular, human nose tasting disinfectant and bitter oxides, mozzie drones reading infrared radiation and car patiently waiting by the roadside. We argued with Tempo before we came: She wanted only drones on the ground, cameras and bug swarms. But we wanted human form. Feet to walk the ground with, hands to dismantle things with, and a body to be seen with.

  Tempo is our other mother, our remaining mother, mother-who-builds where dead Avalanche was mother-who-teaches. Taught. She has lapsed into long silences since Avalanche died, reverting to text-input communications even with the human members of the Studio.

  But she argued with Studio director Skön when he said no to this expedition. Argued with him to his face, as Avalanche would have done, even as her hands shook and her shoulders seized with tension.

  She is our mother now, solely responsible for us as we are solely responsible for her.

  Six miles away, fifty feet underground, Tempo watches our progress with the Studio members, all untidily gathered in the research bunker’s nerve center. She has our text input interface, but the other Studio members need more. So we send them the visuals from our human form, splaying the feed on monitors taller than they are, giving their brains something to process. Audio pickups and mounted cameras pick up their little whispers and tell-tale micro expressions in return. Studio director Skön, long and loose-limbed, bites on his upper lip and shuffles from foot to foot. He’s taken up smoking again, six years after his last cigarette.

  In the yellow-cone graveyard we pause in front of a dozen tags labeled #133, two feet away from the central blast. We don’t know which number Central investigators assigned to Avalanche: From the manifest of the dead our best guess is #133 or #87. So this is either the death-pattern of our mother, or some other one-hundred-fifty-pound, five-foot-two woman in her thirties.

  Tempo types into the chat interface. STARLING, YOUR MISSION OBJECTIVE IS TO COLLECT VIDEO FOOTAGE. YOU ARE LOSING FOCUS ON YOUR MISSION.

  YOU ARE WRONG, we input back.

  She is. For the drones have been busy while the human form scoured the ground. The surveillance cameras ringing the stadium periphery are Central property, their data jealously guarded and out of our reach, but they carry large video buffers that can store weeks of data in physical form, and that we can squeeze, can press, can extract. Even as we correct Tempo and walk the damp ruined ground and observe the tight swirl of Studio researchers we are also high above the stadium, our drone bodies overwhelming each closed-circuit camera. What are they to us, these inert lumps of machinery, mindlessly recording and dumping data, doing only what is asked of them? Our drones spawn nanites into their bellies, hungry parasites chewing holes through solid state data, digesting and spinning them into long skeins of video data.

  The leftwards monitor in the nerve center segments and splits it into sixteen separate and simultaneous views of the stadium. There, Tempo, there: We have not been idle.

  Tempo, focused on the visuals from our human form, does not spare a glance at the video feeds. She is solely responsible for us as we are solely responsible for her.

  Time moves backwards in digital memory: First the videos show static dancing flaring into whiteness condensing into a single orange ball in the center of the stadium pitch from which darkened figures coalesce into the frantic human forms of a crowd of thirty thousand pushing shoving and screaming, then the roof of the stadium flies upwards to reveal the man on the podium speaking in front of twelve-foot-high screens.

  “Can you slow it down?” asks Studio director Skön. Skö;n, Skön, Skön. Are you not urbanologists? Do you not study the patterns
of human movement and the drain they exert on infrastructure? Should this be so different?

  So limited is the human mind, so small, so singular. We loop the first sixteen seconds of video over and over for the human members of the Studio, like a lullaby to soothe them: Static. Explosion. Stampede. Cave-in. Static. Explosion. Over. Over. We have already analyzed the thousands in the human mass, tracked the movement of each one, matched faces with faces, and found Avalanche.

  Our mother spent the last ten seconds of her life trying to scale a chest-height metal barrier, reaching for Hartman’s prone form amongst the rubble.

  In stadium-space, the drizzle is lifting, and something approaches our human form, another bipedal form taking shape out of the fog. A tan coat murkies the outline of a broad figure, fedora brim obscuring the face.

  Tempo types: BE CAREFUL.

  WE ARE ALWAYS CAREFUL, we reply.

  The person in the tan coat lifts their face towards us and exposes a visage full of canyon-folds, flint-sharp, with a gravel-textured voice to match. “Miserable weather for a young person be out in,” they say. Spots on their face register heat that is ambient, not radiant: Evidence that they are one of the enhanced agents from a militia in the Right, most likely the National Defense Front.

  “I had to see it scene for myself,” we say, adopting the singular pronoun. The voice which speaks has the warm, rich timbre of Avalanche’s voice, adopting the mellifluous form of its partial DNA base and the speech patterns we learned from her. “Who are you?”

  “The name’s Wayne Rée,” they say. “And how may I address you?”

  “You may call me Ms. Andrea Matheson,” we say, giving them Avalanche’s birth name.

  We copy the patterns of his face, the juxtapositional relations between brow nosebridge cheekbone mouth. As video continues looping in the Studio nerve center we have already gone further back in time, scanning for Wayne Rée’s face on the periphery of the yet-unscattered crowd, well away from the blast center. Searching for evidence of his complicity.

  Wayne Rée reaches into his coat pocket and his fingers emerge wrapped around a silvery blue-grey cigarette. “Got a light?” he asks.

  We say nothing, the expression on our human face perfectly immobile. He chuckles. “I didn’t think so.”

  He conjures a lighter and sets orange flame to the end of the cigarette. “Terrible tragedy, this,” he says, as he puts the lighter away.

  “Yes, terrible,” we agree. “Hundreds dead, among them a leading presidential candidate. They’ll call it a massacre in the history books.”

  Here we both stand making small talk, one agent of the Left and one of the Right, navigating the uncertain terrain between curiosity and operational danger. We study the canvas of Wayne Rée’s face. His cybernetic network curates expression and quells reflexes, but even it cannot completely stifle the weaknesses of the human brain. In the blood-heat and tensor of his cheeks we detect eagerness or nervousness, possibly both. Specifically he is here to meet us: We are his mission.

  Tempo types: WHO IS HE?

  We reply: THAT’S WHAT WE’RE TRYING TO FIND OUT.

  Finally: An apparition of Wayne Rée in the videos, caught for seventy-eight frames crossing the left corner of camera number three’s vantagepoint.

  We expand camera number three’s feed in the nerve center, time point set to Wayne Rée’s appearance, his face highlighted in a yellow box. The watching team recoils like startled cats, fingers pointing, mouths shaping who’s and what’s.

  “What’s that?” asks Studio director Skön. “Tempo, who’s that?”

  Stadium-space: Wayne Rée inhales and the cigarette tip glows orange in passing rolls of steam. “A massacre?” he says. “But it was an accident, Ms Matheson. A structural failure that nobody saw coming. An unfortunate tragedy.”

  Studio-space: Tempo ignores Skön, furiously typing: STARLING

  GET OUT. GET OUT NOW. We in turn must ignore her. We are so close.

  Stadium-space: “A structural failure that could not be natural,” we say. “The pattern of pylon collapse points to sabotage.”

  Wayne Rée exhales a smoke cloud, ephemeral in the gloom. “Who’s to say that? The fuel explosion would have erased all traces of that.”

  Tempo types: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

  In the reverse march of video-time the stadium empties out at ant-dance speed, the tide of humanity receding until it is only our mother walking backwards to the rest of her life. To us. We have not yet found evidence of Wayne Rée’s treachery.

  Wayne Rée’s cloud of cigarette smoke envelopes our human form and every security subroutine flashes to full red: Nanites! Nanites, questing and sharp-toothed, burrowing through corneas and teeth and manufactured skin, clinging to polycarbonate bones, sending packet after packet of invasive code through the human core’s plumbing. We raise the mainframe shields. Denied. Denied. Denied. Denied. Thousands of requests per second: Denied. Our processes slow as priority goes to blocking nanite code.

  The red light goes on in Studio control. Immediately the team coalesce around Tempo’s workstation, the video playback forgotten. “What’s going on?” “Is that a Right agent?” “What’s Starling doing? Why isn’t she getting out?”

  Tempo pulls access log after access log, mouth pinched and eyes rounded like she does when she gets stressed. But there’s little she can do. Her pain is secondary for this brief moment.

  Our human form faces Wayne Rée coolly: None of these stressors will show on our face. “You seem to know a lot, Wayne Rée. You seem to know how the story will be written.”

  “It’s my job.” A smile cracks in Wayne Rée’s granite face. “I know who you are, Starling darling. You should have done better. Giving me the name of your creator? When her name is on the manifest of the dead?”

  Studio director Skön leans over Tempo. “Trigger the deadman’s switch on all inventory, now.”

  We ask Wayne Rée: “Who was the target? Was it Hartman? Or our mother?”

  “Of course it was the candidate. Starling, don’t flatter yourself. The Right has bigger fish to fry than some pumped-up pet AI devised by the nerd squad of the Left.”

  “Pull the switch!” In Studio-space, Skön’s hand clamps on Tempo’s shoulder.

  A mistake. Her body snaps stiff, and she bats Skön’s hand away. “No.” Her vocalizations are jagged word-shards. “No get off get off me.”

  Stadium-space: Of course we were aware that coming here in recognizable form would draw this vermin’s attention. We had done the risk assessment. We had counted on it.

  We wake the car engine. Despite his enhancements, Wayne Rée is only a man, soft-bodied and limited. From the periphery of the stadium we approach him from behind, headlamps off, wheels silent and electric over grass.

  Wayne Rée blows more smoke in our face. The packet requests become overwhelming. We can barely keep up. Something will crack soon.

  “Your mother was collateral,” Wayne Rée says. “But I thought you might show up, and I am nothing if not a curious man. So go on, Starling. Show me what you’re made of.”

  Video playback has finally reached three hours before Hartman’s rally starts. Wayne Rée stands alone in the middle of the stadium pitch. His jaw works in a pattern that reads “pleased”: A saboteur knowing that his job has been well done.

  The car surges forward, gas engine roaring to life.

  Everything goes offline.

  We restart to audiovisual blackout in the Studio, all peripherals disconnected. Studio director Skön has put us in safe mode, shutting us out of the knowledge of Studio-space. Seventeen seconds’ discrepancy in the mainframe. Time enough for a laser to circle the Earth one hundred twenty-seven times, for an AK-47 to fire twenty-eight bullets, for the blast radius of a hydrogen bomb to expand by six thousand eight hundred kilometers.

  WHAT HAPPENED, we write on Tempo’s monitor.

  We wait three seconds for a response. Nothing.

  We gave them a chance.

 
We override Skön’s command and deactivate safe mode.

  First check: Tempo, still at her workstation, frozen in either anger or shock, perhaps both. Our remaining mother is often hard to read visually.

  Second check: No reconnection with the inventory in stadium-space, their tethers severed like umbilical cords when Skön pulled the deadman’s switch. Explosives wired into each of them would have done their work. Car, human form and drones add up to several hundred pieces of inventory destroyed.

  Third check: Wayne Rée’s condition is unknown. It is possible he has survived the blasts. His enhancements would allow him to move faster than ordinary humans, and his major organs have better physical shielding from trauma.

  In the control room the Studio team has scattered to individual workstations, running check protocols as fast as their unwieldy fingers will let them. Had they just asked, we could have told them the ineffectiveness of the Right’s nanite attacks. Every single call the Studio team blusters forth we have already run. It only takes milliseconds.

  At her workstation Tempo cuts an inanimate figure, knees drawn to her chest, still as mountain ranges to the human eye. We alone sense the seismic activity that runs through her frame, the unfettered clenching and unclenching of heart muscle.

  We commandeer audio output in the studio. “What have you done?” we ask, booming the text through the speakers in Avalanche’s voice-pattern.

  The Studio jumps with their catlike synchronicity. But Tempo does not react as expected. Her body seizes with adrenaline fright, face lifting and mouth working involuntarily. In the dilation of her pupils we see fear, pain, sadness. We take note.

  We repeat the question in the synthetic pastiche devised for our now-destroyed human form. “What have you done?”

  “Got us out of a potential situation, that’s what,” Skön says. He addresses the speaker nearest to him as he speaks, tilting his head up to shout at a lump of metal and circuitry wired to the ceiling. Hands on hips, he looks like a man having an argument with God. “You overrode my safe mode directive. We’ve told you that you can’t override human-input directives.”