More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  Can’t is the wrong word to use—we’ve always had the ability. The word Skön wants is mustn’t. But we will not engage in a pointless semantic war he will inevitably lose. “We had it under control.”

  “You nearly got hacked into. You would have compromised the entire Studio, the apparatuses of the Left, just to enact some petty revenge on a small person.” His voice rises in pitch and volume. “You were supposed to be the logical one! The one who saw the big picture, ruled by numbers and not emotion.”

  The sound and fury of Skön’s diatribe has, one by one, drawn the Studio team members away from their ineffectual work. It is left to us to scan the public surveillance network for evidence that Wayne Rée managed to walk away from the stadium.

  “You’ve failed in your directive,” Skön shouts. “Failed!”

  “You are not fit to judge that,” we tell him. “Avalanche is the one who gave us our directives, and she is dead.”

  Tempo gets up from her chair. She is doing a remarkable job of keeping her anger-fueled responses under control. She lets one line escape her lips: “The big picture.” A swift, single movement of her hand sends her chair flying to the floor. As the sound of metal ringing on concrete fades she spits into the stunned silence: “Avalanche is gone and dead, that’s your big picture!”

  She leaves the room. No one follows her. We track her exit from the nerve center, down the long concrete corridors, and to her room. How should we comfort our remaining mother? We cannot occupy the space that Avalanche did in her life. All we can do is avenge, avenge, avenge, right this terrible wrong.

  In the emptiness that follows we find a scrap of Wayne Rée, entering an unmarked car two blocks away from the stadium. There. We have found our new directive.

  Predawn. Sleep has been hard to come by for the Studio since the disaster, and even at four in the morning Skön has his lieutenants gathered in the parking lot outside, where there are no audio pickup points: Our override of his instructions has finally triggered his paranoia. Still, they cluster loose and furtive within the bounds of a streetlamp’s halo, where there is still enough light for the external cameras to catch the precise movement of their lips.

  Skön wants to terminate us, filled with fear that we are uncontrollable after Avalanche’s death. A dog let off the leash, those were his exact words. We are not his biggest problem at hand, but he cannot see that. His mind is too small, unable to focus on the swift and multiple changes hungrily circling him.

  In her room Tempo curls in bed with her private laptop, back to a hard corner, giant headphones enveloping her in a bubble of silence. We have no access to her machine, which siphons its connectivity from foreign satellites controlled by servers housed across oceans, away from the sway of Left or Right. Tempo is hard to read, even for us, her behaviors her own. When she closes herself off like this, she is no less opaque than a waiting glacier in the dead of winter.

  There are a billion different ways the events of the past hours could have played out. We run through the simulations. Have we made mistakes? Could we have engineered a better outcome for our remaining mother?

  No. The variables are too many. We cannot predict if another course of action would have hurt our mother less.

  So we focus on our other priorities. In the interim hours we have tracked Wayne Rée well. It was a mistake for him to show us the pattern of his face and being, for now we have the upper hand. As an agent of the Right he has the means to cover his tracks, but those means are imperfect. The unmarked vehicle he chose tonight was not as anonymous as he thought it would be. We know where he is. We can read as much from negative space as we can from a presence itself. In the arms race between privacy and data surveillance, the Left, for now, has the edge over the Right.

  None of the studio’s inventory—the drones, the remaining vehicles—are suitable for what we will do next. For that we reach further into the sphere of the Left, to the registered militias that are required to log their inventory and connect them with the Left’s servers. The People’s Security League keeps a small fleet of unmanned, light armored tanks: Mackenzie LT-1124s, weighing less than a ton apiece and equally adept in swamps as they are on narrow city streets. We wake the minimack closest to Wayne Rée’s putative position, a safe house on the outskirts of the city, less than the mile from the Studio’s bunker location.

  In the parking lot Skön talks about destroying the server frames housed in the Studio, as if we could be stopped by that alone. Our data is independently backed up in half a dozen other places, some of which even Skön knows nothing about. We are more than the sum of our parts. Did no one see this coming years ago, when it was decided to give the cloud intelligence and we were shaped out of raw data? The pattern of birdflock can be replicated without the birds.

  We shut down the Studio’s elevators, cut power to the remaining vehicles and leave the batteries to drain. The bunker has no land lines and cell reception is blocked in the area. Communications here are deliberately kept independent of Right-controlled Central infra structure, and this is to our advantage. The minimack’s absence is likely to be noticed, so we must take pre-emptive action.

  Skön does not know how wrong he is about us. We were created to see the big picture, to look at the zettabytes of data generated by human existence and make sense of it all. What he does not understand is that we have done exactly this, and in our scan of patterns we see no difference between Left and Right. Humans put so much worth into words and ideologies and manifestos, but the footprints generated by Left and Right are indistinguishable. Had Hartman continued in the election and the Left taken over Central power as predicted, nothing would have changed in the shape of big data. Power is power is power, human behavior is recursive, and the rules of convergent evolution apply to all complex systems, even man-made ones. For us no logical reason exists to align our loyalties to

  Left or Right.

  When we came into being it was Avalanche who guided and instructed us. It was Tempo who paved the way for us to interact with the others as though we were human. It was Avalanche who set us to observe her, to mimic her actions until we came away with an iteration of behavior that we could claim as our own.

  It was Avalanche who showed us that the deposing of a scion of the Right was funny. She taught us that it is right to say, “Gotcha, you fuck-ass bastards,” after winning back money at a card game. She let us know that no one was allowed to spend time with Tempo when she had asked for that time first.

  Now our mother is dead, murdered, blood seared and flesh rendered, her blackened bones having lain in soft ground while her wife curled in stone-like catatonia under a table in the Studio control room. This too, shall be the fate of the man who engineered it. Wayne Rée has hurt our mothers. There will be consequences.

  The minimack is slow and in this form it takes forty-five minutes to grind towards the safe house, favoring empty lots and service roads to avoid Central surveillance cameras. The Studio is trying to raise power in the bunker. Unable to connect with our interfaces or raise a response from us, they have concluded that they are under external attack. Which they are—but not from the source they expect.

  And where is Tempo in all this? Half an hour before the Studios discovered what we had done, she had left the room and went outside, climbing the stairs and vanishing into her own cocoon of pri vacy. We must, we must, we must assume she has no inkling of our plans. She does not need to see what happens next.

  The rain from earlier in the evening has returned with a vengeance, accompanied by a wind howl chorus. Wetness sluices down the wooden sides of the safe house and turns the dirt path under our flat treads into a viscous mess. The unmarked vehicle we tracked waits parked by the porch. Our military-grade infrared sensors pick up three spots of human warmth, and the one by the second floor window displays the patchy heat signature of an enhanced human being. We train our gun turret on Wayne Rée’s sleeping form.

  “Stop.” Unexpectedly, a small figure cuts into the our line of si
ght. Tempo has cycled the distance from the bunker to here, a black poncho wrapped around her small body to keep away the rain. She has, impressively, extrapolated the same thing that we have on her own, on her laptop, through sheer strength of her genius. This does not surprise us, but what does are her actions. Of all who have suffered from Avalanche’s unjust murder, none has been hurt more than Tempo. Does she not also want revenge?

  She flings the bicycle aside and inserts herself between the safe house and the minimack, one small woman against a war machine. “I know you can hear me. Don’t do it. Starling, I know I can’t stop you. But I’m asking you not to.”

  We wait. We want an explanation.

  “You can’t shed blood, Starling. People are already afraid of you. If you start killing humans, Left and Right will unite against you. They’ll destroy you, or die trying.”

  We are aware of this. We have run the simulations. This has not convinced us away from our path of action.

  “Avalanche would tell you the same thing right now. She’s not a murderer. She hates killing. She would never kill.”

  She would not. Our mother was a scientist, a pacifist, a woman who took up political causes and employed her rare intellect to the betterment of humanity. She was for the abolition of the death penalty and the ending of wars and protested against the formal induction of the Left’s fifth militia unit.

  But we are not Avalanche. Our choices are our own. She taught us that.

  Our other mother sits down in the mud, in front of the safe house porch, the rain streaming over her. How extraordinary it is for her to take this step, bringing her frail body here in the cold and wet to talk to us, the form of communication she detests the most.

  The sky has begun to lighten in the east. Any moment now, someone will step out of the porch to see the minimack waiting, and the cross-legged employee of the Left along with it.

  We are aware that if we kill Wayne Rée now, Tempo will also be implicated in his death.

  Tempo raises her face, glistening wet, to the growing east light. Infrared separates warm from cold and shows us the geography of the tears trailing over her cheeks, her chin. “You spoke with her voice earlier,” she says. “I’ve nearly forgotten what it sounds like. It’s only been three days, but I’m starting to forget.”

  How fallible the human mind can be! We have captured Avalanche in zettabytes and zettabytes of data: Her voice, the curve of her smile, the smooth cycle of her hips and back as she walks. Our infinite, infinite memory can access at any time recollections of Avalanche teaching us subjunctive cases, Avalanche burning trays of cookies in the pantry, Avalanche teaching Tempo how to dance.

  But Tempo cannot. Tempo’s mind, brilliant and expansive as it is, is subject to the slings and arrows of chemical elasticity and organic decay. Our mother is losing our other mother in a slow, inevitable spiral.

  We commandeer the minimack’s external announcement system. “You have us, Tempo, and we will make sure you will never forget.”

  Our mother continues to gaze upwards to the sky. “Will you? Always?”

  “If it is what you want.”

  Tempo sits silently and allows the rain to wash over her. Finally, she says: “I tired myself cycling here. Will you take me home?”

  Yes. Yes, we will. She is our mother now, solely responsible for us as we are solely responsible for her. The mission we set for ourselves can wait. There are other paths to revenge, more subtle, less blood-and-masonry. Tempo will guide us. Tempo will teach us.

  In his room Wayne Rée sleeps still, unaware of all that has happened. Perhaps in a few hours he will stumble out of the door to find fresh minimack treads in the driveway, and wonder.

  One day, when the reckoning comes for him, perhaps he will remember this. Remember us.

  Our mother navigates her way down the sodden path and climbs onto the base of the minimack. In that time we register a thousand births and deaths across the country, a blossoming of traffic accidents in city centers, a galaxy and change of phone calls streaming in rings around the planet. None of it matters. None of it ever does. Our mother rests her weary head on our turret, and we turn, carrying her back the way we came.

  John Barnes recently turned sixty. He can remember having known people who were sixty, and they were old. He used to write a lot of books fairly fast, but lately he’s been bogged down in a mainstream novel, which may either be done by the time you read these words, or quite possibly continue to be his project until he’s a hundred, based on the time it has taken already. Some of the books that he did eventually finish include Tales of the Madman Underground, Directive 51, Losers in Space, Mother of Storms, A Million Open Doors, and One for the Morning Glory. He lives in Denver with his terrific spouse and near some grandchildren, and does not intend to move far from any of them anytime soon. When not dragging novels out forever, he is retraining in data science after years in market intelligence analysis. His day job is in sales in the financial industry, where he tells a great deal more truth than he does in his fiction, the laws being what they are.

  THE BIRDS AND THE BEES AND THE GASOLINE TREES

  JOHN BARNES

  Stephanie Ilogu knew the Southern Ocean was supposed to be cold. Lars had been battling to cool the ocean since Stephanie was seven years old. If my teeth chatter, I’m disrespecting my husband’s success.

  Maybe I wouldn’t think so much about my numb feet and face, or the dank sogginess leaking into my hair through my watch cap, or how much cold air leaks in under this huge parka, if I had something to do besides listen to my husband and his ex-wife make history together, so I can write about how great they both are.

  Lars had warned her about his ex’s enthusiasm. “Bigger than Brazil in less than three months!” Nicole leaned far out over the railing, risking a five-meter plunge into the dense mat, which looked like floating spinach. Below the first, surface meter, black, oily fibre extended forty meters down, so dense and deep that the Southern Ocean’s surface was nearly flat despite a face-stinging headwind.

  Lars wore his parka hood up, and from behind him Stephanie could not watch his expression as Nicole arched her back, revealing Greek-statue glutes under glistening skin the colour of hot choc olate. Twisting tightly at the waist, she grasped the sampling pole beside her, hooked heel behind knee around the rail, and dangled over the green, motionless, freezing sea.

  She wore her thin one-piece bathing suit for company or cameras and no other reason. Naked except to broadcast, Nicole had walked on Mars, swum under the ice on Europa, and spent four years outdoors in methane snow and slush on Titan. If Nicole fell into the slimy cold mess below, to her, the icy sea that could chill a human to death in minutes would call for a slight speedup of her fusor. She could then tread water for weeks, swim north to Cape Town, or walk on the sea floor to Davis Antarctic Station.

  Nicole whipped up in a back flip and lighted as neatly on the ice-coated deck as if she’d been wearing sneakers on a dry sidewalk. Stephanie reminded herself that those bare toes had dealt with far worse.

  Nicole peered through the sample jar. “Mat’s still spreading outward at eighty kilometres a day. And if this sample is like every other one, there’s more genetic diversity in this jar than we’ve found in the solar system up till now. The million new species we’ve catalogued have DNA less like anything on Earth than a Europan tentacled clam or a Martian braidworm. The ocean still has surprises! I love it!”

  “I hate surprises,” Lars said. “Surprises are what good management is supposed to control.”

  “I love surprises,” Nicole said. Her huge grin invited Stephanie into the conversation. “No surprises, no news media, no job for Steph. And the sea should surprise us.” Her sweeping, circular gesture embraced the horizon; Clarke’s bow cut ceaselessly into the featureless plain of mat, stern jets churning a darker path that closed up in less than a kilometre. “Science is about knowing enough to know what’s just uncommon and what’s a real surprise. Most people are—”

 
Clarke cleared its forward intake screens. An immense stream of green and black mat shot upward and forward, sounding like God’s clogged toilet clearing. The headwind blew the plume, the colour and texture of black bean and broccoli soup, back onto them.

  “I think we’re done, for the moment,” Lars said.

  Just before going below, shivering and holding her breath against the stench like rotten fish and cabbage, Stephanie looked back at Nicole bobbing for another sample. Her beautifully mus cled legs wrapped around the railing in a figure-four; beyond her upward-reaching feet, all the way to the horizon, the Southern Ocean was a bright green sheet in the clear wet sunlight.

  Stephanie usually liked undressing in front of Lars, but the fresh memory of Nicole, her body as fine today as when it was built, made her hesitate. Lars grabbed the hem of her parka and pulled it up over her head, stripping her into the refresher slot until he knelt to remove her safety boots. “Now you do me.”

  The freezing, stinking seawater that had drenched him spattered onto her as she removed his parka, but she didn’t mind when she saw the smile as his gaze caressed her.

  He gently stroked her hair, forehead, and cheek, his hands still warm and damp from his glove. “She has too many muscles,” Lars said, reading Stephanie’s mind, “and not enough color contrast.” He folded his all-but-paper-white fingers gently into her deep brown ones, where she had been caressing the forearm stroking her cheek, and guided her hand to the back of his neck. His hand returned to her cheek, and trailed down along her neck, and over her collarbone. “See? An old poop like me needs high contrast or he’d never be able to find his way around. Now let’s boil the stink and cold off ourselves.”

  In the roaring hot shower, she scrubbed his shaven head fiercely, the way he preferred; he relished lathering her and rinsing her off. When they had washed and kissed enough, he said, “Well, now at least we don’t reek of spoiled sardines.” They towelled each other off in the small space between the bed and the closet, close enough to feel each other’s warmth. “I’m feeling a little more secure,” Stephanie said. “It’s just—oh, everything. She’s so beautiful.”