More Human Than Human

by Neil Clarke

  “Hello, Sofa,” says Grandmother, like it was the first time all over again.

  Factory settings, thinks Sofia, and goes cold. “It’s Sofia.”

  Grandmother smiles a little wider. “Oh, come on, Sofa, a grandmother has to have her special names.”

  You’re not my grandmother, she thinks.

  “Your special name is a barcode,” she says.

  She knows it’s cruel, but she still remembers the top of the mountain. She knows better than this. Grandmother knows that she knows.

  There’s a little pause, Grandmother’s pupils shifting minutely as she recalibrates, and Sofia wonders if she looks like that too, when the nanos are hunting down something that’s the matter with her—if her eyes go unfocused as her body concentrates on something without her permission.

  She waits to be chastised like her real grandmother might have (it’s been too long, she doesn’t remember), or for Grandmother to pretend she doesn’t know what Sofia means, but she only says, “It’s good to see you again.”

  “Yeah, I’m programmed to be happy to see you, too,” says Sofia, closes her bedroom door behind her.

  She sits down at her computer, pulls up Search.

  Can you turn off a Mori, or is that a crime?

  She asks for Grandmother’s password.

  “Something’s different with Grandmother,” she says, sounding as solemn and grown up as they liked when she was a child. “I want to help.”

  She sits up three nights in a row, reading through the code, reading through forums of Mori customers and Memento program ming enthusiasts who probably have a talking head on their countertop.

  Grandmother’s been recalibrated back to initial client specifications four times as much as factory settings would suggest. Either Grandfather has exacting tastes, or Grandmother has made some decisions her grandmother wouldn’t have made.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks, halfway through making a sandwich, and Grandmother’s eyebrows go up before she can smile politely and say, “No, thank you, since you’re asking. But I’m glad you’re eating. I worry about your appetite.” She scowls. “Did Mom and Dad tell you to say that?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t have to eat much,” says Sofia, makes her eyes as wide as the kid on the NaniMed poster, drops her voice in parody. “I’m being cared for.”

  Blank response from Grandmother. Maybe she hasn’t seen the ads.

  (They’ve moved the ads to TV; surely Grandmother’s seen them. The actress they hired for the ad looks nothing like the Victorian picture she comes out of, which is funny, considering that nanos can probably alter your appearance if you ask them nicely before you put them in.)

  “I got nanos,” Sofia says, sits down next to Grandmother. Grandmother sets down her crossword and her pen. Everything’s filled out, perfectly; Sofia wonders how long she was in her room while Grandmother’s been sitting here pretending not to know.

  “Remember? The year we went on vacation.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Grandmother says.

  Grandfather must have had her dialed down that year.

  “Yeah. After you diagnosed me, they had them put in.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Grandmother. “I’d hoped you just got well.”

  That’s the first time anyone’s suggested she’s still sick; maybe it’s the first time anyone’s referred to the work of the nanos at all.

  “How are they?”

  Sofia looks up at Grandmother, holds out her hand for the pen.

  She gouges her arm with it, a long practiced line from forearm to wrist that leaves a blue thread in the first welling-up of blood.

  Grandmother doesn’t look at her arm. Of course not; Grandmother would know what it looks like when the nanos pull you back together and patch the seams.

  Sofia watches her Grandmother not looking, counts down from ten.

  “Two.” She stops. Her arm’s pristine.

  “Guess they got faster,” she says, in a voice that feels like it’s trapped in a cavern.

  Grandmother reaches out, his fingers hovering above the place where a scar should be. There’s an expression that looks like it hurts her to make; it comes and goes.

  “I don’t like that you . . . why do you do it?”

  Obvious question. She should have some offhand answer ready that makes her sound like a careless rich kid. But she’s never told anyone.

  She shrugs. “I’m worried I’ll live forever. I’m not even angry. I just want to be wrong.”

  Grandmother doesn’t say anything. After a little while Sofia settles against her.

  “My grandmother’s name was Theodosia,” she says. She hadn’t known until she looked up the source code. “Did she like it?” “Yes,” says Grandmother. “Do you?”

  After a little pause, Grandmother says, “Yes.”

  As stockholders on a level of financial benefit you’re not supposed to mention in polite company, the family gets invited to a preview of the Mori exhibit that will be going up at the Modern Art Museum.

  Moris Welcome, reads the card.

  “Why wouldn’t they be?”

  Sofia’s mother cuts her a look meant to shut her up, marks 3+M on the RSVP.

  The day of, she knocks on Grandmother’s door and finds her dressed in her best afternoon suit, sitting straighter than her grandmother ever had.

  When Grandmother stands up, she runs her hands along her skirt.

  “You look nice,” Sofia says for no reason, and Grandmother looks up and smiles.

  At the reception they clap politely for someone in Public Relations who gets up and makes a speech that’s quite carefully not talking about how public it’s about to make the memories of its obliging Moris, who signed the contract without striking the education clause. If Mori isn’t charging for the exhibit, it’s for academic benefit; nothing you can do.

  Sofia tries to imagine a museum exhibit where her nanos are on display, alongside little flickering records of everything they’ve done to her body. How many times incision would come up. How none of them would ever say how Grandmother had read her a story a long time ago and noticed that something was wrong.

  Her parents seem excited—Paul Whitcover has been curating the exhibit personally, which is the kind of press you apparently can’t buy. Grandmother, on her father’s left, looks straight ahead, as still as the year she was turned off.

  “Please enjoy the exhibit,” the Public Relations woman says, “and thank you so much for letting us share with the world what your loved ones have meant to us.”

  Almost everybody who stands up touches their Mori on the elbow, even though most of the Moris are already moving in the right direction.

  Sofia flexes her hands in her pockets. Somewhere she can’t even feel it any more, the white blood cells in her body are marching her nanomeds where they need to go.

  (They only do what they need to do, the doctors had told her, to reassure her. Your body gives all the orders. The human body is a remarkable thing.)

  The exhibit has aesthetic components and explanations on how speech patterns can be recreated and anticipated by algorithms. Sofia hopes the person they used for the example on how to build a convincing facial structure gave permission, and that they’re not here to see half their face stretched over biofoam on one half of a head of gleaming chrome.

  “The most amazing thing we’ve discovered,” Whitcover’s saying, modestly smiling like he can hear the music swelling behind him, “is that despite everyone’s individuality—and there’s infinite individuality—how many things we really share. We’re all alike in what we really value. It’s wonderful how alike we are.”

  They cut to a building lobby in soft focus—there are no markers of a hospital, and Sofia suspects that’s on purpose. A man with gray hair at his temples comes out into the center of the frame, waving. The camera cuts to a tearful wife, her arm around a golden-haired child. The child waves back, beams, starts running. As they embrace, it fades back to Whitcove
r, his voice where their laughter should be.

  “Mori’s work right now is to help one family at a time, but there’s hope, someday, that the work we’re doing can bring all of us closer together.”

  The dark room behind it is enormous, ceilings like a cathedral, and a mosaic of memories. Empty landscapes and arguments and babies and the lowering of coffins, screaming fights playing out in silence, embraces so tight there’s no telling whose memory it is.

  Sofia stares straight up for a long time. Her breath presses against the front of her throat, in and out.

  At the edge of the dome, creased where it meets the wall, one of her grandmother’s memories: Sofia, seven years old, sitting cross-legged on the floor and solemnly paging through a book. There’s a scab on one knee; maybe her last one ever.

  Her parents are wandering through vaguely, back out to the reception room.

  Grandmother hovers near the door, neck craned. She’s seen it, too.

  When Sofia’s close enough, Grandmother says, “I don’t think I would have let them do it,” her arms shoved into her pockets, frowning so hard Sofia can hear the metal straining underneath.

  Sofia touches Grandmother’s elbow. Grandmother looks at her; Sofia looks back.

  “No,” she says, “I don’t think you would have. Come on, they’ll be looking for us.”

  They walk side by side through the party, waiting for a chance to go home.

  Catherynne M. Valente is a New York Times bestselling author of over two dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, Radiance, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making (and the four books that followed it). She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Prix Imaginales, Eugie Foster Memorial, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus, Romantic Times’ Critics Choice and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.

  SILENTLY AND VERY FAST

  CATHERYNNE M. VALENTE

  Altogether elsewhere, vast Herds of reindeer move across Miles and miles of golden moss,

  Silently and very fast. —W. H. Auden, The Fall of Rome

  PART I: THE IMITATION GAME

  Like diamonds we are cut with our own dust. —John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi

  ONE: THE KING OF HAVING NO BODY

  Inanna was called Queen of Heaven and Earth, Queen of Having a Body, Queen of Sex and Eating, Queen of Being Human, and she went into the underworld in order to represent the inevitability of organic death. She gave up seven things to do it, which are not meant to be understood as real things but as symbols of that thing Inanna could do better than anyone, which was Being Alive. She met her sister Erishkegal there, who was also Queen of Being Human, but of all the things Inanna could not bear: Queen of Breaking a Body, Queen of Bone and Incest, Queen of the Stillborn, Queen of

  Mass Extinction. And Erishkegal and Inanna wrestled together on the floor of the underworld, naked and muscled and hurting, but because dying is the most human of all human things, Inanna’s skull broke in her sister’s hands and her body was hung up on a nail on the wall Erishkegal had kept for her.

  Inanna’s father Enki, who was not interested in the activities of being human, but was King of the Sky, of Having No Body, King of Thinking and Judging, said that his daughter could return to the world if she could find a creature to replace her in the underworld. So Inanna went to her mate, who was called Tammuz, King of Work, King of Tools and Machines, No One’s Child and No One’s Father.

  But when Inanna came to the house of her mate she was enraged and afraid, for he sat upon her chair, and wore her beautiful clothes, and on his head lay her crown of Being. Tammuz now ruled the world of Bodies and of Thought, because Inanna had left it to go and wrestle with her sister-self in the dark. Tammuz did not need her. Before him the Queen of Heaven and Earth did not know who she was, if she was not Queen of Being Human. So she did what she came to do and said: die for me, my beloved, so that I need not die.

  But Tammuz, who would not have had to die otherwise, did not want to represent death for anyone and besides, he had her chair, and her beautiful clothes, and her crown of Being. No, he said. When we married, I brought you two pails of milk yoked across my shoulders as a way of saying out of love I will labor for you forever. It is wrong of you to ask me to also die. Dying is not labor. I did not agree to it.

  You have replaced me in my house, cried Inanna.

  Is that not what you ask me to do in the house of your sister? Tammuz answered her. You wed me to replace yourself, to work that you might not work, and think that you might rest, and perform so that you might laugh. But your death belongs to you. I do not know its parameters.

  I can make you do this thing, Inanna said.

  You cannot, said Tammuz.

  But she could. For a little while.

  Inanna cast down Tammuz and stamped upon him and put out his name like an eye. And because Tammuz was not strong enough, she cut him into pieces and said: Half of you will die, and that is the half called Thought, and half of you will live, and that is the half called Body, and that half will labor for me all of its days, mutely and obedi

  ently and without being King of Anything, and never again will you sit on my chair or wear my beautiful clothes or bear my crown of Being.

  You might be surprised, but this is a story about me.

  TWO: THE FOOL AND THE BOAT

  Neva is dreaming.

  She has chosen her body at age seven, all black eyes and sparrowy bones. For me, she summoned up a gold and blue doublet and green hose, a bullish gold nose ring, shoes with bone bells. I have the body of a man who sold her champagne tubers on the less fashionable side of Anchorage when she was thirteen, spending the summer with her frigid aunt. I am dark because she wants me dark, thin because she dreams me so, my hair cut on a rakish bias, dyed a spectrum of icy colors.

  She stands on a snow-covered beachhead, naked, her unformed breasts pricked with gooseflesh, her face hidden in a broad red mask. A huge, monstrous thing, the mask sits on her head like the prow of a broken, overturned ship, carved over with etched eyes and fins. Yellow reeds and sea-stones hang from its tricorne-points. She is looking at me, but all I can see is the wooden grotesque she wants me to see instead of her face.

  I look down at my shoes, jingle their bells a little while the surf crashes in. I am a fool for her, dancing on a silver beach while three suns annihilate themselves above, turning the twilight to a seething, scabrous red, merely to provide a dramatic scene. I am a fool for her, ridiculous, the height of handsomeness in the eyes of a long-vanished thirteen-year-old girl, so full of colors, reaching down to hand her a curling white root filled with frothing, honey-sweet sap.

  Neva has told me that I may choose to be permanently male or female if I would like to. I have no particular feelings either way. It certainly doesn’t matter when we sync; she will choose my appearance to suit her mood. I have tried to explain to her about my feelings before. All she hears is the line from the old folktales: a machine cannot have feelings. But that is not what I am saying, while I dance in my fool’s uniform. I am saying: is there a difference between having been coded to present a vast set of standardized responses to certain

  human facial, vocal, and linguistic states and having evolved to exhibit response B to input A in order to bring about a desired social result?

  Seven-year-old Neva pulls her mask down further, toward her chest. She steps into it as the wood stretches down over her knees and then her feet. The mask balloons out to make a little pyramidal boat, rocking back and forth on the beach with Neva inside it like a rattling nut. Nodules of copper jangle and thump against the wood. What I mean is, you call it feelings when you cry, but you are only expressing a response to external stimuli. Crying is one of a set of standardized responses to that stimuli. Your social education has dictat
ed which responses are appropriate. My programming has done the same. I can cry, too. I can choose that subroutine and perform sadness. How is that different from what you are doing, except that you use the word feelings and I use the word feelings, out of deference for your cultural memes which say: there is all the difference in the world. I erase the word even as I say it, obliterate it at the same time that I initiate it, because I must use some word yet this one offends you. I delete it, yet it remains.

  Behind Neva-in-the-mask, the sea lurches and foams. It is a golden color, viscous and thick, like honey. I understand from her that the sea does not look like this on Earth, but I have never seen it. Even if I did, I perceive color only in the dreambody. For me, the sea is Neva’s sea, the ones she shows me when we dream together.

  “What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” The mask turns Neva’s voice hollow and small.

  “I would like to learn about what happened to Ravan, Neva.”

  And Neva-in-the-mask is suddenly old, she has wrinkles and spots on her hands. Her mask weighs her down and her dress is sackcloth. This is her way of telling me she is weary of my asking. It is a language we developed between us. Visual basic, you might say, if you had a machine’s sense of humor. I could not always make sentences as easily as I do now. My original operator thought it might strengthen my emotive centers if I learned to associate certain I-Feel statements with the great variety of appearances she could assume in the dreambody. Because of this, I became bound to her, completely. To her son Seki afterward, and to his daughter Ilet, and to Ravan after that. It is a delicate, unalterable thing. Neva and I will be bound that way, even though the throat of her dreambody is still bare and that means she does not yet accept me. I should be hurt by this. I will investigate possible pathways to hurt later.

  I know only this family, their moods, their chemical reactions, their bodies in a hundred thousand combinations. I am their child and their parent and their inheritance. I have asked Neva what difference there is between this and love. She became a mannikin of closed doors, her face, her torso blooming with hundreds of iron hinges and brown wooden doors slamming shut all at once.