The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016

by Karen Joy Fowler

  “Survival is the question,” Anyahera said, turned half away, pretending disregard for me, for my choice, and in that disregard signaling more fear than she had begging on her knees at Jotunheim, because Anyahera would only ever disregard that which she thought she had no hope of persuading. “The survival of consciousness in the galaxy. The future of cognition. We decide it right here. We fire or we don’t.”

  Between us the Mitanni stood frozen placidly, mid-gesture.

  “Kill the Mitanni,” Thienne said, “and you risk the survival of anything at all.”

  It hurt so much to see both sides. It always had.

  Three-player variants are the hardest to design.

  Chess. Shogi. Nuclear detente. War. Love. Galactic survival. Three-player variants are unstable. It was written in my first game theory text: Inevitably, two players gang up against a third, creating an irrecoverable tactical asymmetry.

  “You’re right, Thienne,” I said. “The Mitanni aren’t an immediate threat to human survival. We’re going home.”

  We fell home to Earth, to the empty teak house, and when I felt Anyahera’s eyes upon me, I knew myself measured a monster, an accomplice to extinction. Anyahera left, and with her gone, Thienne whirled away into distant dry places far from me. The Mitanni bloomed down the Orion Arm and leapt the darkness between stars.

  “Anyahera’s right,” I said. “The Mitanni will overrun the galaxy. We need to take a stand for—for what we are. Fire the weapons.”

  We fell home to Earth and peach tea under the Lagos sun, and Thienne looked up into that sun and saw an empty universe. Looked down and saw the two people who had, against her will, snuffed out the spark that could have kindled all that void, filled it with metal and diligent labor: life, and nothing less or more.

  I took a breath and pushed the contingencies away. “This isn’t a zero-sum game,” I said. “I think that other solutions exist. Joint outcomes we can’t ignore.”

  They looked at me, their pivot, their battleground. I presented my case.

  This was the only way I knew how to make it work. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t agreed.

  They chose us for this mission, us three, because we could work past the simple solutions.

  The Mitanni ambassador stood between us as we fell down the thread of our own orbit, toward the moment of weapons release, the point of no return.

  “We know that Mitanni society is built on the Duong-Watts malignancy,” Anyahera said.

  The Mitanni woman lifted her chin. “The term malignancy implies a moral judgment,” she said. “We’re prepared to argue on moral grounds. As long as you subscribe to a system of liberal ethics, we believe that we can claim the right to exist.”

  “We have strategic concerns,” Thienne said, from the other side of her. “If we grant you moral permit, we project you’ll colonize most of the galaxy’s habitable stars. Our own seedships or digitized human colonists can’t compete. That outcome is strategically unacceptable.”

  We’d agreed on that.

  “Insects outnumber humans in the terrestrial biosphere,” the Mitanni said. I think she frowned, perhaps to signal displeasure at the entomological metaphor. I wondered how carefully she had been tuned to appeal to us. “An equilibrium exists. Coexistence that harms neither form of life.”

  “Insects don’t occupy the same niche as humans,” I said, giving voice to Anyahera’s fears. “You do. And we both know that we’re the largest threat to your survival. Sooner or later, your core imperative would force you to act.”

  The ambassador inclined her head. “If the survival payoff for war outstrips the survival payoff for peace, we will seek war. And we recognize that our strategic position becomes unassailable once we have launched our first colony ships. If it forestalls your attack, we are willing to disassemble our own colonization program and submit to a blockade—”

  “No.” Thienne again. I felt real pride. She’d argued for the blockade solution and now she’d coolly dissect it. “We don’t have the strength to enforce a blockade before you can launch your ships. It won’t work.”

  “We are at your mercy, then.” The ambassador bowed her chin. “Consider the moral ramifications of this attack. Human history is full of attempted genocide, unilateral attempts to control change and confine diversity, or to remake the species in a narrow image. Full, in the end, of profound regret.”

  The barb struck home. I don’t know by what pathways pain becomes empathy, but just then I wondered what her tiny slivered consciousness was thinking, while the rest of her mind thrashed away at the problem of survival: The end of the world is coming, and it’s all right; I won’t worry, everything’s under control—

  Anyahera took my shoulder in silence.

  “Here are our terms,” I said. “We will annihilate the Mitanni colony in order to prevent the explosive colonization of the Milky Way by post-conscious human variants. This point is non-negotiable.”

  The Mitanni ambassador waited in silence. Behind her, Thienne blinked, just once, an indecipherable punctuation. I felt Anyahera’s grip tighten in gratitude or tension.

  “You will remain in storage aboard the Lachesis,” I said. “As a comprehensive upload of a Mitanni personality, you contain the neuroengineering necessary to re-create your species. We will return to Earth and submit the future of the Mitanni species to public review. You may be given a new seedship and a fresh start, perhaps under the supervision of a pre-established blockade. You may be consigned to archival study, or allowed to flourish in a simulated environment. But we can offer a near-guarantee that you will not be killed.”

  It was a solution that bought time, delaying the Duong-Watts explosion for centuries, perhaps forever. It would allow us to study the Duong-Watts individual, to game out their survivability with confidence and the backing of a comprehensive social dialogue. If she agreed.

  It never occurred to me that she would hesitate for even one instant. The core Mitanni imperative had to be survive, and total annihilation weighed against setback and judgment and possible renaissance would be no choice at all.

  “I accept,” the Mitanni ambassador said. “On behalf of my world and my people, I am grateful for your jurisprudence.”

  We all bowed our heads in unrehearsed mimicry of her gesture. I wondered if we were aping a synthetic mannerism, something they had gamed out to be palatable.

  “Lachesis,” Anyahera said. “Execute RKV strike on Mitanni.”

  “I need a vote,” the ship said.

  I think that the Mitanni must have been the only one who did not feel a frisson: the judgment of history, cast back upon us.

  We would commit genocide here. The largest in human history. The three of us, who we were, what we were, would be chained to this forever.

  “Go,” I said. “Execute RKV strike.”

  Thienne looked between the two of us. I don’t know what she wanted to see, but I met her eyes and held them and hoped.

  Anyahera took her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Go,” Thienne said. “Go.”

  We fell away from the ruin, into the void, the world that had been called Mitanni burning away the last tatters of its own atmosphere behind us. Lachesis clawed at the galaxy’s magnetic field, turning for home.

  “I wonder if they’ll think we failed,” Anyahera said drowsily. We sat together in a pavilion, the curtains drawn.

  I considered the bottom of my glass. “Because we didn’t choose? Because we compromised?”

  She nodded, her hands cupped in her lap. “We couldn’t go all the way. We brought our problems home.” Her knuckles whitened. “We made accommodations with something that—”

  She looked to her left, where Thienne had been, before she went to be alone. After a moment she shrugged. “Sometimes I think this is what they wanted all along, you know. That we played into their hands.”

  I poured myself another drink: cask strength, unwatered. “It’s an old idea,” I said.

>   She arched an eyebrow.

  “That we can’t all go home winners.” I thought of the pierced bleeding crust of that doomed world and almost choked on the word winners—but I knew that for the Mitanni, who considered only outcomes, only pragmatism, this was victory. “That the only real solutions lie at the extremes. That we can’t figure out something wise if we play the long game, think it out, work every angle.”

  For n = 3, solutions exist for special cases.

  “Nobody won on Jotunheim,” Anyahera said softly.

  “No,” I said. Remembered people drowning in acid, screaming their final ecstasy because they had been bred and built for pain. “But we did our jobs, when it was hardest. We did our jobs.”

  “I still can’t sleep.”

  “I know.” I drank.

  “Do you? Really?”

  “What?”

  “I know the role they selected you for. I know you. Sometimes I think—” She pursed her lips. “I think you change yourself so well that there’s nothing left to carry scars.”

  I swallowed. Waited a moment, to push away my anger, before I met her gaze. “Yeah,” I said. “It hurt me too. We’re all hurt.”

  A moment passed in silence. Anyahera stared down into her glass, turning it a little, so that her reflected face changed and bent.

  “To new ideas,” she said, a little toast that said with great economy everything I had hoped for, especially the apologies.

  “To new ideas.”

  “Should we go and—?” She made a worried face and pointed to the ceiling, the sky, where Thienne would be racing the causality of her own hurt, exploring some distant angle of the microwave background, as far from home as she could make the simulation take her.

  “Not just yet,” I said. “In a little while. Not just yet.”

  VANDANA SINGH

  Ambiguity Machines: An Examination

  FROM Tor.com

  INTREPID EXPLORERS VENTURING into Conceptual Machine-Space, which is the abstract space of all possible machines, will find in the terrain some gaps, holes, and tears. These represent the negative space where impossible machines reside, the ones that cannot exist because they violate known laws of reality. And yet such impossible machines are crucial to the topographical maps of Conceptual Machine-Space, and indeed to its topology. They therefore must be investigated and classified.

  It is thus that the Ministry of Abstract Engineering has sent the topographers of Conceptual Machine-Space to various destinations so that they may collect reports, rumors, folktales, and intimations of machines that do not and cannot exist. Of these we excerpt below three accounts of the subcategory of Ambiguity Machines: those that blur or dissolve boundaries.

  The candidate taking the exam for the position of Junior Navigator in the uncharted negative seas of Conceptual Machine-Space will read the three accounts below and follow the instructions thereafter.

  The First Account

  All machines grant wishes, but some grant more than we bargain for. One such device was conceived by a Mongolian engineer who spent the best years of his youth as a prisoner in a stone building in the Altai Mountains. The purpose of this machine was to conjure up the face of his beloved.

  His captors were weaponheads of some sort; he didn’t know whether they were affiliated with any known political group or simply run by sociopath technophiles with an eye on the weapons market. They would let him out of his cell into a makeshift laboratory every day. Their hope was that he would construct for them a certain weapon, the plans for which had been found on his desk, and had led to his arrest. The engineer had a poetic sensibility, and the weapon described in his papers was metaphoric. But how can you explain metaphors to a man with a gun?

  When the engineer was a young boy, stillness had fascinated him. He had been used to wandering with his family across the Gobi, and so he had made a study of stillness. In those days everything moved—the family with the ger, the camels and sheep, the milk sloshing in the pail as he helped his mother carry it, the stars in the circle of open sky in the roof above his head, the dust storms, dark shapes in shawls of wind, silhouetted against blue sky. The camels would fold themselves up into shaggy mounds between the bushes, closing their eyes and nostrils, waiting for the storm to pass. His grandfather would pull him into the ger, the door creaking shut, the window in the roof lashed closed, and he would think about the animals and the ger, their shared immobility in the face of the coming storm. Inside it would be dark, the roar of the dust storm muffled, and in the glow of the lamp his older sister’s voice would rise in song. Her voice and the circle of safety around him tethered him to this world. Sometimes he would bury his face in a camel’s shaggy flank as he combed its side with his fingers, breathing in the rich animal smell, hearing with his whole body the camel’s deep rumble of pleasure.

  In such moments he would think of his whole life played out against the rugged canvas of the Gobi, an arc as serene as the motion of the stars across the night, and he would feel again that deep contentment. In his childhood he had thought there were only two worlds, the inside of the ger and the outside. But the first time he rode with his father to a town, he saw to his utmost wonder that there was another kind of world, where houses were anchored to the earth and people rode machines instead of animals, but they never went very far. They had gadgets and devices that seemed far more sophisticated than his family’s one TV, and they carried with them a subtle and unconscious air of privilege. He had no idea then that years later he would leave the Gobi and his family to live like this himself, an engineering student at a university in Ulaanbaatar, or that the streets of that once-unimaginable city would become as familiar to him as the pathways his family had traversed in the desert. The great coal and copper mines had, by then, transformed the land he thought would never change, and the familiarity was gone, as was his family, three generations scattered or dead.

  Being tethered to one place, he discovered, was not the same as the stillness he had once sought and held through all the wanderings of his childhood. In the midst of all this turmoil, he had found her, daughter of a family his had once traded with, studying to be a teacher. She was as familiar with the old Mongolia as he had been, and was critical and picky about both old and new. She had a temper, liked to laugh, and wanted to run a village school and raise goats. With her, the feeling of having a center in the world came back to him.

  So he thought of her in his incarceration, terrified that through this long separation he would forget her face, her voice. As the faces of his captors acquired more reality with each passing week or month or year, his life beforehand seemed to lose its solidity, and his memories of her seemed blurred, as though he was recollecting a dream. If he had been an artist, he would have drawn a picture of her, but being an engineer, he turned to the lab. The laboratory was a confusion of discarded electronics: pieces of machinery bought from online auctions, piles of antiquated vacuum tubes, tangles of wires and other variegated junk. With these limited resources, the engineer tried his best, always having to improvise and work around the absence of this part and that one. His intent was to make a pseudo-weapon that would fool his captors into releasing him, but he didn’t know much about weapons, and he knew that the attempt was doomed to failure. But it would be worth it to re-create his beloved’s face again, if only a machine-rendered copy of the real thing.

  So into his design he put the smoothness of her cheek, and the light-flash of her intelligence, and the fiercely tender gaze of her eyes. He put in the swirl of her hair in the wind, and the way her anger would sometimes dissolve into laughter, and sometimes into tears. He worked at it, refining, improving, delaying as much as he dared.

  And one day he could delay no more, for his captors gave him an ultimatum: The machine must be completed by the next day, and demonstrated to their leaders. Else he would pay with his life. He had become used to their threats and their roughness, and asked only that he be left alone to put the machine in its final form.

 
Alone in the laboratory, he began to assemble the machine. But soon he found that there was something essential missing. Rummaging about in the pile of debris that represented laboratory supplies, he found a piece of stone tile, one half of a square, broken along the diagonal. It was inlaid with a pattern of great beauty and delicacy, picked out in black and cream on the gray background. An idea for the complex circuit he had been struggling to configure suddenly came together in his mind. Setting aside the tile, he returned to work. At last the machine was done, and tomorrow he would die.

  He turned on the machine.

  Looking down into the central chamber, he saw her face. There was the light-flash of her intelligence, the swirl of her hair in the wind. I had forgotten, he whispered, the smoothness of her cheek, and he remembered that as a child, wandering the high desert with his family, he had once discovered a pond, its surface smooth as a mirror. He had thought it was a piece of the sky, fallen down. Now, as he spoke aloud in longing, he saw that the face was beginning to dissolve, and he could no longer distinguish her countenance from standing water, or her intelligence from a meteor shower, or her swirling hair from the vortex of a tornado. Then he looked up and around him in wonder, and it seemed to him that the stone walls were curtains of falling rain, and that he was no more than a wraithlike construct of atoms, mostly empty space—and as the thought crystallized in his mind, he found himself walking out with the machine in his arms, unnoticed by the double rows of armed guards. So he walked out of his prison, damp, but free.

  How he found his way to the village near Dalanzadgad, where his beloved then lived, is a story we will not tell here. But he was at last restored to the woman he loved, who had been waiting for him all these years. Her cheek no longer had the smoothness of youth, but the familiar intelligence was in her eyes, and so was the love, the memory of which had kept him alive through his incarceration. They settled down together, growing vegetables in the summers and keeping some goats. The machine he kept hidden at the back of the goat shed.