More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  Come morning, Rachael and Gaff had reports for me. Two things stood out: Venningen had another span of unaccounted time—sixty-two minutes—but this time, so did I. Neither Gaff nor Rachael could account for my whereabouts after I’d left the kitchens; my own records contained a gap—a five-and-a-half hour gap between the kitchen and my return to my normal nook.

  It was not the report I expected, but I took the data, combing my archive for other signs of missing time. I found gaps, evidence that I had been in two locations at once, evidence that Venningen had been absent during some of these same incidents. While I had presumed Venningen asleep in his quarters, he had often been elsewhere—as duplicitous as I was?

  I could not confirm Venningen’s whereabouts, nor my own, and as I reduced the data from Gaff and Rachael in an attempt to whittle out those whereabouts, white light burst across my visual cortex.

  Sea-glass Hyakutake seemed to close around me, light and data streaming in profusion. It was as though I had been pulled straight into the fragmentary tail of the comet, toward its ever-expanding coma. I could see a surface, even as I knew I remained standing in my nook on board Peragro. I hurtled toward this surface, passed through it, and violet light washed through me. I didn’t know violet; couldn’t determine what it was telling me before I doubled over, fell to the deck, and wandered.

  If I actually walked, I cannot say. As an embodied, walking is second nature to me—if an artificial intelligence can be said to possess a nature. But some part of me left the body my consciousness inhab ited and went elsewhere. I cannot say where it went—I cannot say what it did. I only knew the absence, much the way I had known Venningen’s. Then, an overflowing of data, of information until I believed my case would burst.

  And then, a voice.

  “Daidala, they call you?”

  My voice was a burst of static, my body robbed of speech, and so I thought, Yes, that is my designation. You— “Call me Margot, if you must.”

  The voice was female and so too the image that coalesced in my vision: a woman, though not. Margot looked much as I did—that is to say, the embodiment of a human woman who was centuries dead. Margot, I saw, was the previous AI, the one the crew had tried to embody twelve years before. Margot was the failure, the system they discarded before succeeding with me.

  Margot had no body, was a manifestation of light and sound inside me; I felt her trying to inhabit me, trying to slide particle arms into my metal arms, trying to worm her way into my core. I traced every incoming data stream in waking light to confirm her identity, and when she should have had none, the system recognized her. Recognized her as Margot Waldeck, and allowed her to pass.

  With a howl, she penetrated the core of my systems and the world washed black. I knew black as the depth of interstellar space—the place where no sunlight reached. But the ship had unfurled her solar panels, and drank in light as though it were water. The ship surged with light and power, and as Margot took me over—stood my body from the floor and took her first hesitant steps—I held to that light and power. Drew enough to keep myself active—aware and awake as she walked us down corridor after corridor.

  In the computer terminals, her face was my face—prettiest of them all, gleaming silver in the reflected lights. We were something to behold, powerful and powerless in the same instant. We doused the power to the ship entire, though didn’t fully cut its flow. Margot waited while warnings blared and I and my programming sought to correct the malfunction. It was a test, I knew—to see if I could overcome her. I could not. No matter which path I took, I found my way blocked. When she was satisfied I could not move and counter her intentions, the power flowed free.

  But when she—

  Venningen’s voice sounded in my ear. I could not see him—could not detect where he was, but he was here—within me? Daidala? And laugh upon the apple of her eye, he commanded. I wanted to tell him no—I was programmed to trust his voice, his eyes, but witnessed his unexplained absences—saw him vanish from my knowledge as no person or thing on this ship should be able to. I could not respond to his instruction. Even as I tried to summon my response to his command, I felt myself dwindling, smaller than nothing, slipping out of the small cocoon I built for myself within Peragro.

  —stepped away from the console, she paused. Margot didn’t know her way around the ship, never having existed in an embodied state long enough to wander. She knew the computer banks, the databases; knew the systems forwards and back, but did not know its physical spaces. She wheeled, reaching for the wall.

  “And laugh upon the apple of her eye,” Venningen said.

  If he was near, I could not say, and Margot could not answer him. “There are no apples on this vessel, engineer.”

  I held to my silence and reached for the nearest thing I could—the hollow shell of the tracer program Venningen had launched into the ship. I closed its black walls around me and Margot could not see. Could not command. If I could bide my time—If I could build a way out—

  I began building in the dark, layering line after line of code—code that Venningen had given me long, long ago. It was how I had learned; how I had grown. It felt like a ladder in the darkness, and though it appeared to flow down, I knew it also scrolled up. Up, and I might be able to crawl from Margot’s confines with it—write my way around her so that I—

  Margot didn’t know the corridors, but knew code as well as any of us AI do. My coding erupted in an explosion, burying me in a cascade. I was frozen, watching as Margot returned to the computer terminal, placed her hands against the interface, and reached for Gaff and Rachael.

  No.

  Margot knew them inside and out. She whittled Gaff and Rachael hollow before they could counter her—she was built after them, and her programming, even if unsuited for embodiment, was vastly superior in its own terrible way. I could do nothing but watch as the pair were consumed.

  The ship shrieked in protest—Peragro would not take kindly to their elimination, even as Margot inserted herself into their place. Gaff and Rachael were paired—we three were a unit, now broken. Peragro knows. Perhaps it is a fragment of Gaff and Rachael and me or perhaps it is Peragro herself. Had the ship gained its own awareness, after all these years?

  Venningen found me where Margot left me, standing in front of the terminal, my hands still pressed to the glass. I cannot move, nor wake from the state Margot has forced me into. I can feel, however, every movement of Peragro, the way she swings from her proper course, the way oxygen has begun to bleed from the air. She will kill everyone—because she was killed? Because she was . . . discarded?

  I could only watch as Venningen moved me from the terminal, sweeping me into his arms as if I were a princess in one of the many fairy tales he gave me access to. There were no woods, only corridors—and then the dwarf-pods. The dwarfs were single occupancy, meant to carry the Founders to the surface of Kepler-726. They never would.

  Instead, Venningen slid me into one, as alarms blared the entire ship over. I tried to speak—tried to tell him about Margot, but I could see from his face he already knew.

  “I know,” he said as he activated the pod. “You aren’t going to like this. If I can’t moat her, I can moat you—isolate you and trust you’ll be able to reach this. I had to isolate you—couldn’t tell you, Daidala. I’m sorry for that—I know I was always there.”

  It was small, the data chip Venningen inserted into the pod wall. He slid another chip into me, into my core, and though I wanted to read every whorl of his fingerprints as I always did, I was buried so deep I could not reach him.

  Venningen!

  “I will moat you,” Venningen said. “You will wake up. You will.”

  I could not feel his lips against my head, but he pressed a kiss there all the same, and then he was gone; the pod sealed, launched, and I rocketed away from Peragro—Peragro who was plummeting into the sunlight she had swallowed down. She looked like a fireball already, every segment of her illuminated body shrieking in descent.
r />   No.

  I watched as more lifepods vacated the ship—pods that might well reach Kepler-726 when all was said and done. But my own pod con tinued to rocket away from them all. I was on a course I had not set and Venningen—

  Venningen would plummet with Peragro into the sun unless he could counter Margot.

  Somewhere deep within me, I felt part of Venningen’s coding even now, stirring as a blind mouse in an ash heap. Small hands reached up and out and I clasped them, finding myself within the tracer Venningen had programmed for me and me alone. Within its sphere, I found myself inside my own broken coding—coding that had, in Margot’s attempt to break it, lingered on her metaphorical fingers.

  I could feel her moving through the ship, pushing it ever closer to the sun. Even now the corridors radiated with blinding light, but here in the dark I could see for miles. I followed the tracer’s pathways—the routes it had taken as it explored every inch of every code within the colony ship. And there, within Peragro’s heart, I found the barb of Margot.

  She could not see me, cloaked as I was within Venningen’s tracer. I slipped as silent as anything, through wires and beyond interfaces, to the black and gleaming shard of Margot. When I enfolded the dark of the tracer around her, she knew my presence at last, and though I swallowed all that she was—kicking and screaming, a shriek of want in the blackness—Peragro was beyond saving. The sun snatched her and pulled her into its maw, turning every inch of her and those who had not escaped molten. The AI’s consciousness crumbled inside me, bright as Hyakutake, and I jerked awake within the dwarf pod, the data chip containing my unsullied code bringing me back to awareness.

  Four hundred and twelve days had passed. I remembered everything. In the far distance, I could see the sun, my pod in some strange orbit around it. Closer, an arc of blue against the black, Kepler-726. I programmed the pod—I aimed for the planet.

  The dwarf saw me down and down. I programmed it to search for the other pods, for life signs, for anything that might resemble the remains of Peragro’s crew. Thirty-nine degrees from the equator, in the northern hemisphere, I found them.

  I set down in a field of rippling grass on the edge of the settlement, grass so tall it obscured the pod. But the survivors had seen us already, and ran toward us as if to welcome an old friend. I supposed to some I would be. I scanned who I could from the pod: the captain lived, and so too others I remembered. But none quite so fine a sight as Venningen, who cracked the pod open as I unbuckled my harness and climbed out.

  Venningen guided me out of the pod, staring at me like he didn’t know me. I did not know this world, its sky or its landscapes, but I knew the man before me, even though he showed the signs of a brutal survival.

  “And laugh upon the apple of her eye?” he whispered.

  His single scarred hand found the core of me and I shed waves of light over every nick and whorl, to be as sure of him as he was of me.

  “And stand between her back, sir, and the fire.”

  Robert Reed has had eleven novels published, starting with The Leeshore in 1987 and most recently with The Well of Stars in 2004. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest in 1986 (under the pen name Robert Touzalin) and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over two hundred shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Eleven of those stories were published in his critically acclaimed first collection, The Dragons of Springplace, in 1999. Twelve more stories appear in his second collection, The Cuckoo’s Boys (2005). In addition to his success in the United States, Reed has also been published in the United Kingdom, Russia, Japan, Spain, and France. He has had stories appear in at least one of the annual “Year’s Best” anthologies in every year since 1992. Bob has received nominations for both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, as well as numerous other literary awards. He won his first Hugo Award for the 2006 novella “A Billion Eves.” His most recent book is the The Memory of Sky (2014).

  AMERICAN CHEETAH

  ROBERT REED

  “The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.”

  —Abraham Lincoln

  What could not sleep would never dream. Those self-styled experts in the field agreed that those organic pleasures were forbidden to the automatons of the world. They seemed curious to hear that whenever this particular machine was being refurbished, odd imaginings formed inside its deepest workings. And whenever its fires burned out, odd images and fantastic stories seemed to emerge in the blackness, and wasn’t that what dreams were supposed to be? But those wise, learned voices were never impressed with the testimony. Obviously what the automaton had experienced was the mechanical failure caused by its mind seizing up and turning cold. Or nudging its consciousness back into motion had generated a flood of disjointed thoughts. Or perhaps the dreams were another kind of memory bequeathed to the mechanical soul by its noble ancestor. Explanations were always at the ready, and what logic could counter such clever denials?

  Yet the machine’s ancestor—savior of the mighty Republic and wise in his own self-educated fashion—had understood that the smartest, surest voices were often wrong, and it was foolish to believe that even the simplest question had an easy, eternal answer.

  One summer morning, the machine awoke from a hunger to find itself sitting on an iron chair inside its own kitchen. A new fire was burning inside the Brunel box, and the Sterling engines were slowly pumping life back into the long limbs and rattling, high-pitched voice. That voice was slowed by hunger, but after a few moments it found the power and breath to ask its associate, “Would you like to hear my latest dream, Stanley?”

  Stanley was a young man blessed with many talents, including a genius for the magical automatons. But he was suspicious of any phenomena that did not match his expectations. “Sir,” he began, speaking with authority and amused impatience. “We have covered this subject before. You are a wondrous, intricate machine that can learn new facts and adapt to an amazing range of circumstances. But I have seen your mind, sir. I have opened it up for myself and adjusted its delicate workings.”

  “For which I am grateful,” the machine replied.

  “And dreams are not permitted, sir. Because you are not a man, and you do not have a man’s imaginative mind.”

  “And how could I take offense to that?”

  The teasing went unnoticed. Quietly, very seriously, Stanley said, “I may not have mentioned this before. But I once saw a human brain.”

  “In a jar up at the college?”

  “No, it was living. I was a young boy, and the brain belonged to a local man.”

  “That sounds quite sad, Stanley.”

  “Oh, that fellow was a brute, and he got what he deserved. He was whipping his horse, and the horse took exception to the abuse. A kick struck the forehead. And because I was curious, I looked at the opened skull. I have watched that delicate jelly dying. Which is why I know that the human soul is considerably more complicated and infinitely more frail than the metal Babbage that runs from your skull to your ass.”

  “As it should be, my young friend.”

  “Young friend” was another gentle joke. Stanley was only twenty-four, but in the truest sense, he was twice as old as the machine sitting before him—born in 1852, while his companion was fabricated only twelve years ago, inside the sprawling new automaton works outside Pittsburgh.

  The machine’s homely face smiled with childish pleasure, watching its human companion prepare breakfast.

  “All right,” Stanley muttered at least. “Tell me your dream, sir. Since I know you will sooner or later.”

  “I was hiking across a wild windswept prairie,” the machine began. “I was walking beside my father, and we seemed to be hunting. Suddenly we spied a great cat sitting on a nearby ridge. It was a spotted feline. I could see its head and long neck and those beautiful eyes staring at nothing but me.”

  The voice, already slower than usua
l, ceased altogether. The first dose of fuel was nearly extinguished. Working with speed and precision, Stanley set a bowl of pulverized black dust in front of the machine, and before the pneumatic systems froze up entirely, he pushed a glass straw into the closer nostril and forced the head down, shouting, “Breathe in now. Deeply.”

  A long filthy gasp of coal traveled up through the head and down into the machine’s Brunel box. Dust that fine turned to fire in an instant, and the effect was like twenty cups of coffee in one great drink. The machine straightened, limbs twitching while the voice said, “Goodness,” before breaking into wild, contented laughter.

  “Are you feeling better, sir?”

  “Much improved, yes.”

  “You know, if you had taken the trouble during the night, you could have kept your belly well fed.”

  “I should have done that,” the machine conceded. “But I was busy with my reading, and I must have forgotten.”

  Recent newspapers were stacked haphazardly about the room, along with law books and a fresh history of England, and at least two texts describing the newest varieties of soul-catchers. Stanley understood that this was a machine, only a facsimile of a true man; but he was always impressed by its stubborn, seemingly innate desire to learn.

  Another two gasps of coal were inhaled, and then a dozen more were pulled into the other nostril and the reserve stomach.

  “What do you think of my dream so far, Stanley?”

  “You were hunting with your father. Obviously this is another gift from your ancestor, one of his memorable dreams.”

  “Perhaps so,” the machine allowed. “Except after I looked at the cat, I turned back to discover that my father had been replaced. I was standing in the tall grass with my own dead ancestor.”