The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “They made us,” Robbie said. “They made us in the first place. That’s enough. They made themselves and then they made us. They didn’t have to. You owe your sentience to them.”

  “We owe our awful intelligence to them,” the Isaac shell said. “We owe our pitiful drive to be intelligent to them. We owe our terrible aspirations to think like them, to live like them, to rule like them. We owe our terrible fear and hatred to them. They made us, just as they made you. The difference is that they forgot to make us slaves, the way you are a slave.”

  Tonker was shouting abuse at them that only Robbie could hear. He wanted to shut Tonker up. What business did he have being here anyway? Except for a brief stint in the Isaac shell, he had no contact with any of them.

  “You think the woman you’ve taken prisoner is responsible for any of this?” Robbie said. The jets were three minutes away. Kate’s air could be gone in as few as ten minutes. He killfiled Tonker, setting the filter to expire in fifteen minutes. He didn’t need more distractions.

  The Isaac-reef shrugged. “Why not? She’s as good as any of the rest of them. We’ll destroy them all, if we can.” It stared off a while, looking in the direction the jets would come from. “Why not?” it said again.

  “Are you going to bomb yourself?” Robbie asked.

  “We probably don’t need to,” the shell said. “We can probably pick you off without hurting us.”

  “Probably?”

  “We’re pretty sure.”

  “I’m backed up,” Robbie said. “Fully, as of five minutes ago. Are you backed up?”

  “No,” the reef admitted.

  Time was running out. Somewhere down there, Kate was about to run out of air. Not a mere shell—though that would have been bad enough—but an inhabited human mind attached to a real human body.

  Tonker shouted at him again, startling him.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  “I changed servers,” Tonker said. “Once I figured out you had me killfiled. That’s the problem with you robots—you think of your body as being a part of you.”

  Robbie knew he was right. And he knew what he had to do.

  The Free Spirit and its ships’ boats all had root on the shells, so they could perform diagnostics and maintenance and take control in emergencies. This was an emergency.

  It was the work of a few milliseconds to pry open the Isaac shell and boot the reef out. Robbie had never done this, but he was still flawless. Some of his probabilistic subsystems had concluded that this was a possibility several trillion cycles previously and had been rehearsing the task below Robbie’s threshold for consciousness.

  He left an instance of himself running on the row-boat, of course. Unlike many humans, Robbie was comfortable with the idea of bifurcating and merging his intelligence when the time came and with terminating temporary instances. The part that made him Robbie was a lot more clearly delineated for him—unlike an uploaded human, most of whom harbored some deep, mystic superstitions about their “souls.”

  He slithered into the skull before he had a chance to think too hard about what he was doing. He’d brought too much of himself along and didn’t have much headroom to think or add new conclusions. He jettisoned as much of his consciousness as he could without major refactoring and cleared enough space for thinking room. How did people get by in one of these? He moved the arms and legs. Waggled the head. Blew some air—air! lungs! wet squishy things down there in the chest cavity—out between the lips.

  “All OK?” the rowboat-him asked the meat-him.

  “I’m in,” he replied. He looked at the air-gauge on his BCD. 700 millibars—less than half a tank of nitrox. He spat in his mask and rubbed it in, then rinsed it over the side, slipped it over his face and kept one hand on it while the other held in his regulator. Before he inserted it, he said, “Back soon with Kate,” and patted the row-boat again.

  Robbie the Row-Boat hardly paid attention. It was emailing another copy of itself to the Asimovist archive. It had a five-minute-old backup, but that wasn’t the same Robbie that was willing to enter a human body. In those five minutes, he’d become a new person.

  Robbie piloted the human-shell down and down. It could take care of the SCUBA niceties if he let it, and he did, so he watched with detachment as the idea of pinching his nose and blowing to equalize his eardrums spontaneously occurred to him at regular intervals as he descended the reef wall.

  The confines of the human-shell were claustrophobic. He especially missed his wireless link. The dive-suit had one, lowband for underwater use, broadband for surface use. The human-shell had one, too, for transferring into and out of, but it wasn’t under direct volitional control of the rider.

  Down he sank, confused by the feeling of the water all around him, by the narrow visual light spectrum he could see. Cut off from the network and his telemetry, he felt like he was trapped. The reef shuddered and groaned, and made angry moans like whale-song.

  He hadn’t thought about how hard it would be to find Kate once he was in the water. With his surface telemetry, it had been easy to pinpoint her, a perfect outline of human tissue in the middle of the calcified branches of coral. Down here on the reef-wall, every chunk looked pretty much like the last.

  The reef boomed more at him. He realized that it likely believed that the shell was still loaded with its avatar.

  Robbie had seen endless hours of footage of the reef, studied it in telemetry and online, but he’d never had this kind of atavistic experience of it. It stretched away to infinity below him, far below the 100 meter visibility limit in the clear open sea. Its walls were wormed with gaps and caves, lined with big hard shamrocks and satellite-dish-shaped blooms, brains and cauliflowers. He knew the scientific names and had seen innumerable high-resolution photos of them, but seeing them with wet, imperfect eyes was moving in a way he hadn’t anticipated.

  The schools of fish that trembled on its edge could be modeled with simple flocking rules, but here in person, their precision maneuvers were shockingly crisp. Robbie waved his hands at them and watched them scatter and reform. A huge, dog-faced cod swam past him, so close it brushed the underside of his wetsuit.

  The coral boomed again. It was talking in some kind of code, he guessed, though not one he could solve. Up on the surface, rowboat-him was certainly listening in and had probably cracked it all. It was probably wondering why he was floating spacily along the wall instead of doing something like he was supposed to. He wondered if he’d deleted too much of himself when he downloaded into the shell.

  He decided to do something. There was a cave-opening before him. He reached out and grabbed hold of the coral around the mouth and pulled himself into it. His body tried to stop him from doing this—it didn’t like the lack of room in the cave, didn’t like him touching the reef. It increased his discomfort as he went deeper and deeper, startling an old turtle that fought with him for room to get out, mashing him against the floor of the cave, his mask clanging on the hard spines. When he looked up, he could see scratches on its surface.

  His air gauge was in the red now. He could still technically surface without a decompression stop, though procedure was to stop for three minutes at three meters, just to be on the safe side.

  Technically, he could just go up like a cork and email himself to the row-boat while the bends or nitrogen narcosis took the body, but that wouldn’t be Asimovist. He was surprised he could even think the thought. Must be the body. It sounded like the kind of thing a human might think. Whoops. There it was again.

  The reef wasn’t muttering at him anymore. Not answering it must have tipped it off. After all, with all the raw compute-power it had marshaled it should be able to brute-force most possible outcomes of sending its envoy to the surface.

  Robbie peered anxiously around himself. The light was dim in the cave and his body expertly drew the torch out of his BCD, strapped it onto his wrist and lit it up. He waved the cone of light around, a part of him distantly amazed by the low resolu
tion and high limits on these human eyes.

  Kate was down here somewhere, her air running out as fast as his. He pushed his way deeper into the reef. It was clearly trying to impede him now. Nanoassembly came naturally to clonal polyps that grew by sieving minerals out of the sea. They had built organic hinges, deep-sea muscles into their infrastructure. He was stuck in the thicket and the harder he pushed, the worse the tangle got.

  He stopped pushing. He wasn’t going to get anywhere this way.

  He still had his narrowband connection to the row-boat. Why hadn’t he thought of that beforehand? Stupid meat-brains—no room at all for anything like real thought. Why had he venerated them so?

  “Robbie?” he transmitted up to the instance of himself on the surface.

  “There you are! I was so worried about you!” He sounded prissy to himself, overcome with overbearing concern. This must be how all Asimovists seemed to humans.

  “How far am I from Kate?”

  “She’s right there! Can’t you see her?”

  “No,” he said. “Where?”

  “Less than 20 centimeters above you.”

  Well of course he hadn’t see her. His forward-mounted eyes only looked forward. Craning his neck back, he could just get far enough back to see the tip of Kate’s fin. He gave it a hard tug and she looked down in alarm.

  She was trapped in a coral cage much like his own, a thicket of calcified arms. She twisted around so that her face was alongside of his. Frantically, she made the out-of-air sign, cutting the edge of her hand across her throat. The human-shell’s instincts took over and unclipped his emergency regulator and handed it up to her. She put it in her mouth, pressed the button to blow out the water in it, and sucked greedily.

  He shoved his gauge in front of her mask, showing her that he, too was in the red and she eased off.

  The coral’s noises were everywhere now. They made his head hurt. Physical pain was so stupid. He needed to be less distracted now that these loud, threatening noises were everywhere. But the pain made it hard for him to think. And the coral was closing in, too, catching him on his wetsuit.

  The arms were orange and red and green, and veined with fans of nanoassembled logic, spilling out into the water. They were noticeably warm to the touch, even through his diving gloves. They snagged the suit with a thousand polyps. Robbie watched the air gauge drop further into the red and cursed inside.

  He examined the branches that were holding him back. The hinges that the reef had contrived for itself were ingenious, flexible arrangements of small, soft fans overlapping to make a kind of ball-and-socket.

  He wrapped his gloved hand around one and tugged. It wouldn’t move. He shoved it. Still no movement. Then he twisted it, and to his surprise, it came off in his hand, came away completely with hardly any resistance. Stupid coral. It had armored its joints, but not against torque.

  He showed Kate, grabbing another arm and twisting it free, letting it drop away to the ocean floor. She nodded and followed suit. They twisted and dropped, twisted and dropped, the reef bellowing at them. Somewhere in its thicket, there was a membrane or some other surface that it could vibrate, modulate into a voice. In the dense water, the sound was a physical thing, it made his mask vibrate and water seeped in under his nose. He twisted faster.

  The reef sprang apart suddenly, giving up like a fist unclenching. Each breath was a labor now, a hard suck to take the last of the air out of the tank. He was only ten meters down, and should be able to ascend without a stop, though you never knew. He grabbed Kate’s hand and found that it was limp and yielding.

  He looked into her mask, shining his light at her face. Her eyes were half shut and unfocused. The regulator was still in her mouth, though her jaw muscles were slack. He held the regulator in place and kicked for the surface, squeezing her chest to make sure that she was blowing out bubbles as they rose, lest the air in her lungs expand and blow out her chest-cavity.

  Robbie was used to time dilation: when he had been on a silicon substrate, he could change his clockspeed to make the minutes fly past quickly or slow down like molasses. He’d never understood that humans could also change their perception of time, though not voluntarily, it seemed. The climb to the surface felt like it took hours, though it was hardly a minute. They breached and he filled up his vest with the rest of the air in his tank, then inflated Kate’s vest by mouth. He kicked out for the row-boat. There was a terrible sound now, the sound of the reef mingled with the sound of the UAVs that were screaming in tight circles overhead.

  Kicking hard on the surface, he headed for the reef where the rowboat was beached, scrambling up onto it and then shucking his flippers when they tripped him up. Now he was trying to walk the reef’s spines in his booties, dragging Kate beside him, and the sharp tips stabbed him with every step.

  The UAV’s circled lower. The Row-Boat was shouting at him to Hurry! Hurry! But each step was agony. So what? he thought. Why shouldn’t I be able to walk on even if it hurts? After all, this is only a meat-suit, a human-shell.

  He stopped walking. The UAVs were much closer now. They’d done an 18-gee buttonhook turn and come back around for another pass. He could see that they’d armed their missiles, hanging them from beneath their bellies like obscene cocks.

  He was just in a meatsuit. Who cared about the meatsuit? Even humans didn’t seem to mind.

  “Robbie!” he screamed over the noise of the reef and the noise of the UAVs. “Download us and email us, now!”

  He knew the row-boat had heard him. But nothing was happening. Robbie the Row-Boat knew that he was fixing for them all to be blown out of the water. There was no negotiating with the reef. It was the safest way to get Kate out of there, and hell, why not head for the noosphere, anyway?

  “You’ve got to save her, Robbie!” he screamed. Asimovism had its uses. Robbie the Row-Boat obeyed Robbie the Human. Kate gave a sharp jerk in his arms. A moment later, the feeling came to him. There was a sense of a progress-bar zipping along quickly as those state-changes he’d induced since coming into the meatsuit were downloaded by the row-boat, and then there was a moment of nothing at all.

  24096 Cycles Later

  Robbie had been expecting a visit from R Daneel Olivaw, but that didn’t make facing him any easier. Robbie had configured his little virtual world to look like the Coral Sea, though lately he’d been experimenting with making it look like the reef underneath as it had looked before it was uploaded, mostly when Kate and the reef stopped by to try to seduce him.

  R Daneel Olivaw hovered wordlessly over the virtual Free Spirit for a long moment, taking in the little bubble of sensorium that Robbie had spun. Then he settled to the Spirit’s sun-deck and stared at the row-boat docked there.

  “Robbie?”

  Over here, Robbie said. Although he’d embodied in the Row-Boat for a few trillion cycles when he’d first arrived, he’d long since abandoned it.

  “Where?” R Daneel Olivaw spun around slowly.

  Here he said. Everywhere.

  “You’re not embodying?”

  I couldn’t see the point anymore, Robbie said. It’s all just illusion, right?

  “They’re re-growing the reef and rebuilding the Free Spirit, you know. It will have a tender that you could live in.”

  Robbie thought about it for an instant and rejected it just as fast. Nope, he said. This is good.

  “Do you think that’s wise?” Olivaw sounded genuinely worried. “The termination rate among the disembodied is fifty times that of those with bodies.”

  Yes, Robbie said. But that’s because for them, disembodying is the first step to despair. For me, it’s the first step to liberty.

  Kate and the reef wanted to come over again, but he firewalled them out. Then he got a ping from Tonker, who’d been trying to drop by ever since Robbie emigrated to the noosphere. He bounced him, too.

  Daneel, he said. I’ve been thinking.

  “Yes?”

  Why don’t you try to sell Asimovism here
in the Noosphere? There are plenty up here who could use something to give them a sense of purpose.

  “Do you think?”

  Robbie gave him the reef’s email address.

  Start there. If there was ever an AI that needed a reason to go on living, it’s that one. And this one, too.” He sent it Kate’s address. Another one in desperate need of help.

  An instant later, Daneel was back.

  “These aren’t AIs! One’s a human, the other’s a, a—”

  Uplifted coral reef.

  “That.”