by Peter Watts
He stopped.
“They knew,” he said again, “what I wanted to hear.”
Beside him, Lynne grew very still.
He laughed once, softly. “I shouldn’t have been so easy to convince, though. I knew better. We’re not hardwired for Death with Dignity; life’s been kicking and clawing and doing anything it can to take a few more breaths, for over three billion years. You can’t just decide to turn yourself off.”
She slid an arm across his chest. “People turn themselves off all the time, Russ. Too often. You know that.”
He didn’t answer. A distant siren poisoned the emptiness.
“Not Carol,” he said after a while. “I made that decision for her.”
Lynne put her head on his shoulder. “And you’ve spent ten years trying to find out if you guessed right. But they’re not her, Russ, all the people you’ve recorded, all the animals you’ve...put down, they’re not her—”
“No. They’re not.” He closed his eyes. “They don’t linger on month after month. They don’t...shrivel up...you know they’re going to die, and it’s always quick, you don’t have to come in day after day, watching them change into something that, that rattles every time it breathes, that doesn’t even know who you are and you wish it would just—”
Wescott opened his eyes.
“I keep forgetting what you do for a living,” he said.
“Russ—”
He looked over at her, calmly. “Why are you doing this to me? You think I haven’t already been over it enough?”
“Russ, I’m only—”
“Because it won’t work, you know. It’s too late. It took long enough, but I know how the mind works now, and you know what? It’s nothing special after all. It’s not spiritual, it’s not even quantum. It’s just a bunch of switches wired together. So it doesn’t matter if people can’t speak their minds. Pretty soon I’ll be able to read them.”
His voice was level and reasoned. He kept his eyes on the ceiling; the darkened light fixture there seemed to waver before his eyes. He blinked, and the room swam suddenly out of focus.
She reached up to touch the wetness on his face. “It scares you,” she whispered. “You’ve been chasing it for ten years and you’ve almost got it and it scares the shit out of you.”
He smiled and wouldn’t look at her. “No. That isn’t it at all.”
“What, then?”
He took a breath. “I just realised. I don’t care one way or the other any more.”
He came home, clutching the printout, and knew from the sudden emptiness of the apartment that he had been defeated here as well.
The workstation slept in its corner. Several fitful readouts twinkled on one of its faces, a sparse autonomic mosaic. He walked towards it; and halfway there one face of the cube flashed to life.
Lynne, from the shoulders up, looked out at him from the screen.
Wescott glanced around the room. He almost called out.
On the cube, Lynne’s lips moved. “Hello, Russ,” they said.
He managed a short laugh. “Never thought I’d see you in there.”
“I finally tried one of these things. You were right, they’ve come a long way in ten years.”
“You’re a real simulation? Not just a fancy conversational routine?”
“Uh huh. It’s pretty amazing. It ate all sorts of video footage, and all my medical and academic records, and then I had to talk with it until it got a feel for who I was.”
And who is that? he wondered absently.
“It changed right there while I was talking to it, Russ. It was really spooky. It started out in this dead monotone, and as we talked it started mimicking my voice, and my mannerisms, and in a little while it sounded just like me, and here it is. It went from machine to human in about four hours.”
He smiled, not easily, because he knew what was coming next.
“It—actually, it was a bit like watching a time-lapse video of you over the past few years,” the model said. “Played backwards.”
He kept his voice exactly level. “You’re not coming home.”
“Sure I am, Russ. Only home isn’t here any more. I wish it were, you don’t know how badly I wish it were, but you just can’t let it go and I can’t live with that any more.”
“You still don’t understand. It’s just a program that happens to sound like Carol did. It’s nothing. I’ll—wipe it if it’s that important to you—”
“That’s not all I’m talking about, Russ.”
He thought of asking for details, and didn’t.
“Lynne—” he began.
Her mouth widened. It wasn’t a smile. “Don’t ask, Russ. I can’t come back until you do.”
“But I’m right here!”
She shook her head. “The last time I saw Russ Wescott, he cried. Just a little. And I think—I think he’s been hunting something for ten years, and he finally caught a glimpse of it and it was too big, so he went away and left some sort of autopilot in charge. And I don’t blame him, and you’re a very good likeness, really you are but there’s nothing in you that knows how to feel.”
Wescott thought of acetylcholinesterase and endogenous opioids. “You’re wrong, Carol. I know more about feelings than almost anyone in the world.”
On the screen, Lynne’s proxy sighed through a faint smile.
The simulation was wearing new earrings; they looked like antique printed circuits. Wescott wanted to comment on them, to compliment or criticise or do anything to force the conversation into less dangerous territory. But he was afraid that she had worn them for years and he just hadn’t noticed, so he said nothing.
“Why couldn’t you tell me yourself?” he said at last. “Don’t I deserve that much? Why couldn’t you at least leave me in person?”
“This is in person, Russ. It’s as in person as you ever let anyone get with you any more.”
“That’s bullshit! Did I ask you to go out and get yourself simmed? You think I see you as some sort of cartoon? My Christ, Lynne—”
“I don’t take it personally, Russ. We’re all cartoons as far as you’re concerned.”
“What in Christ’s name are you talking about?”
“I don’t blame you, really. Why learn 3D chess when you can reduce it down to tic-tac-toe? You understand it perfectly, and you always win. Except it isn’t that much fun to play, of course...”
“Lynne—”
“Your models only simplify reality, Russ. They don’t re-create it.”
Wescott remembered the printout in his hand. “Sure they do. Enough of it, anyway.”
“So.” The image looked down for a moment. Uncanny, the way it fakes and breaks eye contact like that—“You have your answer.”
“We have the answer. Me, and a few terabytes of software, and a bunch of colleagues, Lynne. People. Who work with me, face to face.”
She looked up again, and Wescott was amazed that the program had even mimicked the sudden sad brightness her eyes would have had in that moment. “So what’s the answer? What’s at the end of the tunnel?”
He shrugged. “Not much, after all. An anticlimax.”
“I hope it was more than that, Russ. It killed us.”
“Or it could’ve just been an artefact of the procedure. The old observer effect, maybe. Common sense could have told us as much, I could’ve saved myself the—”
“Russ.”
He didn’t look at the screen.
“There’s nothing down there at all,” he said, finally. “Nothing that thinks. I never liked it down there, it’s all just...raw instinct, at the center. Left over from way back when the limbic system was the brain. Only now it’s just unskilled labour, right? Just one small part of the whole, to do all that petty autonomic shit the upstart neocortex can’t be bothered with. I never even considered that it might still be somehow...alive...”
His voice trailed off. Lynne’s ghost waited silently, perhaps unequipped to respond. Perhaps programmed not to.
He thought he heard someone speak his name, but he didn’t look up to find out.
“That’s what we always found,” he said. “Something waking up after a hundred million years, scared to death...”
His words hung there in front of him.
“You don’t know that.” Her voice was distant, barely familiar, with a sudden urgency to it. “You said yourself it could be an artefact. She might not have felt that way at all, Russ. You don’t have the data.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he murmured. “Wetware always dies the same way—”
He looked up at the screen.
And the image was for Chrissakes crying, phosphorescent tears on artificial cheeks in some obscene parody of what Lynne would do if she had been there. Wescott felt sudden hatred for the software that wept for him, for the intimacy of its machine intuition, for the precision of its forgery. For the simple fact that it knew her.
“No big deal,” he said. “Like I said, an anticlimax. Anyhow, I suppose you have to go back and report to your—body—”
“I can stay if you want. I know how hard this must be for you, Russ—”
“No you don’t.” Wescott smiled. “Lynne might have. You’re just accessing a psych database somewhere. Good try, though.”
“I don’t have to go, Russ—”
“Hey, that’s not who I am any more. Remember?”
“—we can keep talking if you want.”
“Right. A dialogue between a caricature and an autopilot.”
“I don’t have to leave right away.”
“Your algorithm’s showing,” he said, still smiling. And then, tersely: “Stop.”
The cube darkened.
“Do y-ou want to cancel the program or just suspend it?” Carol asked.
He stood there for a while without answering, staring into that black featureless cube of perspex. He could see nothing inside but his own reflection.
“Cancel,” he said at last. “And delete.”
NIMBUS
She’s been out there for hours now, listening to the clouds. I can see the RadioShack receiver balanced on her knees, I can see the headphone wires snaking up and cutting her off from the world. Or connecting her, I suppose. Jess is hooked into the sky now, in a way I’ll never be. She can hear it talking. The clouds advance, threatening gray anvils and mountains boiling in ominous slow motion, and the ’phones fill her head with alien grumbles and moans.
God she looks like her mother. I catch her profile and for a moment it is Anne there, gently chiding, Of course not, Jess, there aren’t any spirits. They’re just clouds. But now I see her face and eight years have passed in a flash, and I know this can’t be Anne. Anne knew how to smile.
I should go out and join her. It’s still safe enough, we’ve got a good half hour before the storm hits. Not that it’s really going to hit us; it’s just passing through, they say, on its way to some other target. Still, I wonder if it knows we’re in the way. I wonder if it cares.
I will join her. For once, I will not be a coward. My daughter sits five meters away in our own back yard, and I am damn well going to be there for her. It’s the least I can do before I go.
I wonder if that will mean anything to her.
An aftermath, before the enlightenment.
It was as though somebody had turned the city upside down and shaken it. We waded through a shallow sea of detritus: broken walls, slabs of torn roofing, toilets and sofas and shattered glass. I walked behind Anne, Jess bouncing on my shoulders making happy gurgling noises; just over a year old, not quite talking yet but plenty old enough for continual astonishment. You could see it in her eyes. Every blown newspaper, every bird, every step was a new experience in wonder.
Also every loaded shotgun. Every trigger-happy National Guardsman. This was a time when people still thought they owned things. They saw their homes strewn across two city blocks and the enemy they feared was not the weather, but each other. Hurricanes were accidents, freaks of nature. The experts were still blaming volcanoes and the greenhouse effect for everything. Looters, on the other hand, were real. They were tangible. They were a problem with an obvious solution.
The volunteers’ shelter squatted in the distance like a circus tent at Armageddon. A tired-looking woman inside had given us shovels and pitchforks, and directed us to the nearest pile of unmanned debris. We began to pitch pieces of someone’s life into an enormous blue dumpster. Anne and I worked side by side, stopping occasionally to pass Jessica back and forth.
I wondered what new treasures I was about to unearth. Some priceless family heirloom, miraculously spared? A complete collection of Jethro Tull CDs? Just a game, of course; the whole area had been combed, the owners had come and despaired of salvage, there was only wreckage beneath the wreckage. Still, every now and then I thought I saw something shining in the dirt, a bottle cap or a gum wrapper or a Rolex—
My pitchfork punched through a chunk of plaster and slid into something soft. It dropped suddenly under my weight, as if lubricated. It stopped.
I heard the muted hiss of escaping gas. Something smelled, very faintly, of rotten meat.
This isn’t what I think it is. The crews have already been here. They used trained dogs and infrared scopes and they’ve already found all the bodies, they couldn’t have missed anything, there’s nothing here but wood and plaster and cement—
I tightened my grip on the pitchfork, pulled up on the shaft. The tines rose up from the plaster, slick, dark, wet.
Anne was laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up, but she wasn’t looking at me or the pitchfork or the coagulating stain. She was looking across the wreckage to a Ford pickup, loaded with locals and their rifles, inching its way down a pathway cleared in the road.
“Get a load of the bumper,” she said, oblivious to my discovery.
There was a bumper sticker on the driver’s side. I saw the caricature of a storm cloud, inside the classic red circle with diagonal slash. And a slogan.
A warning, to whom it may concern: Clouds, we’re gonna kick your ass.
Jess takes off the headphones as I join her. She touches a button on the receiver. Cryptic wails, oddly familiar, rise from a speaker on the front of the device. We sit for a moment without speaking, letting the sounds wash over us.
Everything about her is so pale. I can barely see her eyebrows.
“Do they know where it’s headed?” Jess asks at last.
I shake my head. “There’s Hanford, but they’ve never gone after a reactor before. They say it might be trying to get up enough steam to go over the mountains. Maybe it’s going after Vancouver or SeaTac again.” I tap the box on her knees. “Hey, it might be laying plans even as we speak. You’ve been listening to that thing long enough, you should know what it’s saying by now.”
A distant flicker of sheet lightning strobes on the horizon. From Jessica’s receiver, a dozen voices wail a discordant crescendo.
“Or you could even talk to it,” I continue. “I saw the other day, they’ve got two-ways now. Like yours, only you can send as well as receive.”
Jess fingers the volume control. “It’s just a gimmick, Dad. These things couldn’t put out enough power to get heard over all the other stuff in the air. TV, and radio, and...” She cocks her head at the sounds coming from
the speaker. “Besides, nobody understands what they’re saying anyway.”
“Ah, but they could understand us,” I say, trying for a touch of mock drama.
“Think so?” Her voice is expressionless, indifferent.
I push on anyway. Talking at least helps paper over my fear a bit. “Sure. The big ones could understand, anyway. A storm this size must have an IQ in the six digits, easy.”
“I suppose,” Jess says.
Inside, something tears a little. “Doesn’t it matter to you?”
She just looks at me.
“Don’t you want to know?” I say. “We’re sitting here underneath this huge thing that nobody understands, we don’t know what it’s doing or why, and you sit there listening while it shouts at itself and you don’t seem to care that it changed everything overnight—”
But of course, she doesn’t remember that. Her memory doesn’t go back to when we thought that clouds were just...clouds. She never knew what it was like to rule the world, and she never expects to.
My daughter is indifferent to defeat.
Suddenly, unbearably, I just want to hold her. God Jess, I’m sorry we messed up so badly. With effort, I control myself. “I just wish you could remember the way it was.”
“Why?” she asks. “What was so different?”
I look at her, astonished. “Everything!”
“It doesn’t sound like it. They say we never understood the weather. There were hurricanes and tornadoes even before, and sometimes they’d smash whole cities, and nobody could stop them then either. So what if it happens because the sky’s alive, or just because it’s, you know, random?”
Because your mother is dead, Jess, and after all these years I still don’t know what killed her. Was it just blind chance? Was it the reflex of some slow, stupid animal that was only scratching an itch?
Can the sky commit murder?
“It matters,” is all I tell her. Even if it doesn’t make a difference.
The front is almost directly overhead now, like the mouth of a great black cave crawling across the heavens. West, all is clear. Above, the squall line tears the sky into jagged halves.
