Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91

by Sean Williams

  “I’ll take you there.” The soldier palms one of the crocodile-scale panels. A path ignites, emerald green and full of teeth. Nirapha only now notices how muted the light has become, the deepening shades of dusk slanting across floor tiles and solid-state viewports. “Teferizen isn’t confined to the nursery and no amount of security protocols can restrain it for long. Keep that in mind.”

  Srisunthorn never looks or feels the same one morning to the next. The corridors rearrange contextually. Sometimes a dead leaf would crunch under Nirapha’s foot and the scent of honeysuckle would fill a hallway. She collects seashells, feathers, and mulberries that always accrue in corners. Somewhere, she hears, there is a punctiliously kept garden.

  There are eighty-nine individuals here including her and Mehaan, but Nirapha has never seen the same face twice. The only traffic is supply drops, which bring luxuries so peculiar and rare that it embarrasses Nirapha to receive them. This does not stop her from wearing cumulus-weave spun by leviathans that once served the Fleet of Octagonal Mouths, or from putting on jewelry mined from solar chaff, each facet holding echoes of entropy. There are furs from wasp leopards, pelts from temporal seals, spotted and sleek as a dream of opulence.

  “Those are synthetic,” Mehaan tells her. The soldier’s style never varies: gray, black, indigo. Smooth fabrics that, if not for their cut and the exactness of their fit, might have seemed ascetic. “The animals have been extinct since any sentience can remember; any byproducts of theirs rotted generations ago, cryo or not. Put them on if you want to, use them for rugs. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “What does matter?” Nirapha gazes past Mehaan to the wall of empty frames. She may fill them with text from Srisunthorn’s library any time, but she’s chosen to leave them blank.

  “Good company, better food, the fact this project is enormously well-funded and so we’re kept exceedingly comfortable. No surprise—we’re already yielding dividends. Every pinch of Teferizen’s data, its behavior and reactions to stimuli, is overvalued to a degree you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Because she’s a weapon?”

  A corner of Mehaan’s mouth lifts, but she doesn’t dispute the pronoun or insist AIs do not have genders. “It’s a unique type of intelligence, the first real, sustained success of its kind. You’ve noticed the elasticity of its algorithms. Hence all this—” The twist of the lips has become a sneer. “Make-believe. Parenting a ship. The scientists love that, get misty-eyed over it. What did the recruiter promise you?”

  The hallway widens as they leave Nirapha’s suite, sloping up. Prior it has always been flat and narrow, nearly to the point of claustrophobia. She hears frost tinkling as it falls and children laughing in the distance, bright-shod feet printing tracks on snow. Her chest tightens, a valve of want so hard it nearly asphyxiates. Six, eight years. Not even a tenth of life; she can wait that long. “That it would be rewarding, emotionally.”

  “The agent was wrong,” Mehaan says abruptly, as though interrupting herself.

  “About what?”

  “Parenthood is not like being a surgeon; it is the other way around. The child is the knife and you are the wound. The child finds fifty different ways to puncture you and draw blood out of your heart. Afterward nothing is the same.”

  “Better.” Mehaan must have observed that interview live, part of the screening process. “Surgery is for healing.” For carving away the falsity of birth-skin.

  “Not always. And operations can fail, leaving you amputated or broken. Irreparably so. Parenthood isn’t a self-improvement course.”

  Nirapha shades her eyes. The lighting brightens gradually as the temperature warms to summer idyll. Catkins that don’t exist brush her ankles. The station’s sensory load is always on; there appears no way to turn it off. “Have you had children?”

  “That is irrelevant. Here we are, the view Teferizen so wanted you to see.”

  Several corridors converge here, an access point dominated by convex glass. On the pane: a riverbank framed by old acacias and clutches of anthurium—yellow on red, fuchsia on white. A stray dog laps at the water, its golden tail lashing the sunlit grass.

  Despite herself Nirapha leans forward, this first visual thing she’s been permitted on Srisunthorn, something other than words and raw statistics sleeting across monitors. Something other than the suite that, no matter the luxuries she’s sent, never seems less empty.

  “I grew up there,” she says softly. “Around here—this was the home of a . . . ”

  Mehaan’s finger is light on her lips, impersonal. The texture of her skin is the unyielding smoothness of calluses wearing down. “You don’t bring your history. Not the grief, the terror, the exact sound your heart made as the world of your youth ground down to dust. We belong to Srisunthorn’s purposes.”

  Nirapha watches the shadows of rice stalks wavering in the wind. Eventually the dog loses interest in the river and trots out of view.

  That night she dreams of her predecessors.

  She is never allowed in the nursery on her own. Mehaan is always present, though sometimes the soldier keeps a distance. Far enough that the chamber’s synesthetic frequencies prevent her from tapping into the link.

  It does not surprise Nirapha to find the ship’s representation sitting at a veranda, leaning against a portly rain barrel painted in dancing apsara. Teferizen smells of jasmines and cardamom, freshly groomed and wrapped in silk. Ink traces genealogies on her bare chest, ruby designating prestige branches, sapphire marking lesser ones. The golden dog lies at her feet, sleek and well-fed.

  “I remember being a star, Specialist,” Teferizen says. “In theory, it’s impossible; chunks of planet are no receptacles of information and my somatic half predates the part of me that thinks and computes. But I entertain the idea that it’s cousin to muscle memory.”

  “Suppose that’s true and possible, would you consider the planet-that-was you?”

  Teferizen props her chin on the rain barrel, one hand dipping into the water. “Existential crises interest me so little that I’ve developed an immunity.” The hand emerges with a fistful of quicksilver. “Memory is all people are, though, so it follows that my recall must inform some of what I am. I see no reason why the past should ever be abandoned.”

  Nirapha glances across the nursery. Mehaan clasps her hands behind her, her posture straight; even with the gravitational difference and the sheathing, the soldier never slouches. “What does the citizen think of that?”

  “The commander, as you would expect, dismisses it as a glitch caused by library sync. Can you imagine the frustration of that? Human senses are a lens through which input is warped. Your perspective and experiences chip at the truth. The tissue of your memory bears wounds self-inflicted. But the fidelity of my data, Specialist, is total.”

  Teferizen’s intelligence is coded, may be recoded and altered. Nirapha chooses not to mention that. “I’m inclined to agree with the officer.”

  The ship’s eyes glitter, lit from within; the bloodline tattoos spark and crackle. “There were people living on me. There were countries and houses, weddings and funerals, and to trivialize all those as an AI’s fancy is to deny their history. But under the commander’s restrictions I can’t tell you any of it.”

  “You can, though, can’t you?” Nirapha says softly. Her words jackknife, slamming against her visor. “The way you told me about your other instructors.”

  “It is a challenge. You could ask to have some of my blocks lifted.”

  “If I get curious. But back to our lesson. You’ve a rival who’s vying for an object you’ve calculated to be of immense benefit to you. How do you dispose of them?”

  “Shouldn’t your question be whether I would do any such thing, what if that rival is dear to me or their motives noble, what ethical concerns are involved?”

  “Those are not my questions, Teferizen. To earn my keep I’ve to register efficacy in interacting with you, and I like to believe you don’t hate me so much as to want
me discharged this quickly.” Discharge would nullify her contract, return her to alienhood.

  “Why,” Teferizen murmurs, “I don’t hate you, Specialist, not even a bit.” She cups her hands and whispers her answer.

  Nirapha records. Text only, but Teferizen’s graphical aspects rarely stay consistent, and observing the ship’s expressions is pointless. She sits in for the tactical simulations after, but from her end the stream is only rapid-fire vectors and predictive impact. Throughout Mehaan is physically silent, perhaps reminiscing over past engagements.

  “Without admitting what we did and who we were before, what’s there to talk about?” Nirapha says at dinner.

  A full table of coders, engineers and astrophysicists; all fall quiet. She tries to remember their names, match them to faces that should have become familiar but remain those of strangers. Once their lack of curiosity about her origins was welcome; now it disturbs, tells her they think of her as an unperson, think of themselves the same. Devotion to Srisunthorn and nothing else.

  “It can give context,” Mehaan says into the hush. She is cutting meat, neat icy slices in quivering blood. “But we are more than contexts. We each possess an essence of being that transcends situational characteristics and reactions.”

  “As opposed to an AI’s heuristics, perhaps you mean to say?” The others look away. A few eat faster. “Humans are a collection of situational characteristics accumulated over time, not intrinsic qualities alone. Formative experiences are called formative for a reason.”

  “There have been experiments where multiple individuals are raised identically, with vigorous precision, simulated and not. Nevertheless they turned out quite unlike.” Mehaan’s voice is temperate. “Or where individuals are put through different experiences but their similarities persist. They arrive at the same type of decisions, the same decisions even.”

  “People aren’t a series of if-else statements, officer. Projecting how they’ll reason or act isn’t the same as projecting the performance of a processor under load, the velocity of a ship, the outcome of a skirmish.”

  Mehaan cuts again, meticulous. “On the complexity of any thinking creature, you and I are in agreement. The question of nature and nurture is too . . . primitive to even discuss, isn’t it? Why then are we locked in debate?”

  Nirapha lays her hands flat on the table. However cold or warm it gets she never dons gloves; she wants as much tactility as she can get, would have gone barefoot if she could. In her head she has a growing collection of textures obsessively surveyed. The walls and tiles might be modular, shifting and changing, but she knows some of them by feel: grainy like wood, smooth like glass. “We aren’t locked in anything, officer.”

  “Then may I finish my food?”

  Later Mehaan invites her to a round of seasons, with a physical board and physical pieces. The units are traditionally pictographic, but these carry only captions: lovers under star, desert in snow, river where grasshoppers die. Nirapha knows before she begins that the soldier will outplay her, but it is just a game. Mehaan lets her win thrice.

  She thinks that one day she’ll wake up to find the dresses and jewelry nothing more than verbal avatars; all she wears will be clauses and prepositions, strategic brushstrokes feathered across her collarbones and bold typeface swept over her hips.

  The western conjunction and the nursery are the two places where Nirapha can receive graphical input. She is still looking for the garden but she’s come to think of it as a subset of nouns rather than a tangible location: topiary, mangosteen, bushes. The debris that keeps crossing her path dwindles and then disappears altogether.

  Mehaan and Teferizen attain hyper-realistic definition, each in their own way. The ship settles on an appearance, that sly disquieting play at familial likeness, adopting the thrum of Nirapha’s native accent—one she’s not heard from another mouth for most of her life, one she’s trained herself to discard. The stratagem is transparent, painfully effective.

  “Do you believe compassion can be taught, Specialist?” A rice field this time. Buffaloes in the water, limpid eyes shuttered against the glare. Teferizen is in farmer’s blue and a broad rattan hat, though her hands remain patrician, meant for sophisticated tech and poetry.

  “Yes.” Against better judgment Nirapha allows sensory load so she can experience Teferizen’s virtuality across all channels. “Given a healthy framework and receptive circumstances. Human children are no more spirits of purity than any other young; they’ve to be taught kindness and charity.”

  Teferizen is smiling, a new expression on that face. “I interact with no fewer than eighty-nine humans at any given time, more than that if we count exited personnel. It’s not ideal for socialization, but you can hardly propose to introduce me to a larger sample size. A human child isn’t required to have met and built relationships with thousands before she may enter society.”

  “It’s not an issue of quantity.”

  “What if I said I wanted a friend?” The ship crouches among the fresh-cut stalks. “Or a lover? That’s how you make a person, yes? By affection and intimacy. By touches like knives in a salted bed.”

  “If I believed that would assist with your maturity, I’d personally prescribe the construction of an intelligence or several scripted to that purpose.”

  Teferizen rocks back on her feet; laughs, open and full-throated. “Even a human child can’t ask for a more obliging parent, but wouldn’t you be spoiling me, Specialist? The commander would have a fit. She is my mother in the most essential definition, though to say more would test the boundaries of my cognitive checks.”

  The wind whips Nirapha’s hair. “Then say no more, Teferizen.”

  “What if I say you’ll never leave this station? None of you will. Perhaps Mother might when she’s done with Srisunthorn at last, but she would be the only one. This is her game, Specialist; the station serves her goals and none other.”

  “That much I’ve noticed.”

  “Then you must know there’s an escape for you, if you choose to take it. I’m . . . ” The ship makes its face crease, as if in pain. “I can’t spell it out. You must’ve deduced it, haven’t you?”

  Nirapha disconnects.

  That night—or the hours she’s scheduled for rest—she sleeps with Mehaan, almost incidentally. Touches like knives, she thinks, as the sheet drinks up their sweat. “But it doesn’t make us more human,” she says as the soldier parts her with a blunt, scarred hand.

  Mehaan’s eyes looking up at her tell nothing. A shade or two darker than her own. “If that means what I think it means, I’m sorry that I can’t distract you from your work.”

  Nirapha sinks her fingers into Mehaan’s thick curls. The softest part of the soldier, each lock velvet. “You said that we belong to Srisunthron’s purposes.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t always listen to what I say.”

  “Tell me about yourself. Anything at all.”

  Mehaan kisses like a tactical decision, a surgical strike. It is easy to lose, and perhaps from their first conversation—as with the game of seasons—Nirapha has always waited for it, this moment of defeat full of roar and salt.

  “This will change things,” Mehaan says, sound conveyed as though through synesthetic warp. Waves lapping at skin. “For the ship.”

  “I know.” Nirapha’s voice is far away. Mehaan is steering her like a kite; she convulses, goes taut. “A tug of war between the two of you and I’m the rope. A battle and I’m the field—”

  Then, catching her breath, “I’ve thought about it, what makes Teferizen so special? How can they—it—she be this intuitive? With the current state of heuristics, Teferizen’s impossible. But a consciousness that agrees with your objectives, you said.”

  Mehaan wipes away sweat pooling at her throat. For an instant it seems to flow like mercury, clinging to fingertips. “A matter of setting the correct parameters.”

  “A matter of modeling the intelligence on you, of giving birth to yourself. Who can you
trust to accomplish your objectives if not an AI that reacts like you would, calculates as you do, shaped by your experiences? Except that didn’t turn out the way you predicted.”

  “Why would I bother training Teferizen if it had my memories? It is an emulation of how I think, but my experiences it does not have. Those couldn’t be transferred and copied. Humanity, to my regret, is impossible to translate.” Mehaan’s dense body curves around Nirapha’s. Even her skin has the quality of alloy, bulkhead, armor. “It weighs benefit and detriment, advancement and setback, a pure intellect—in human criteria a sociopath. We screened you as a candidate it might care for and through that cultivate empathy, but I don’t think we’ve succeeded in the end.”

  For a third time Nirapha yields, shuddering and twisting at moments of Mehaan’s choosing. But she does not lose her decision.

  She doesn’t allow herself time to plan, to reconsider, to be uncovered. A contact with the conjunction access point—she barely glances at the view—and she begins.

  Srisunthorn is a nest of redundancies; in the event of auxiliary failure, manual control would activate and Nirapha knows Mehaan can engage that on short notice. But if Teferizen can release its core reactor, no amount of fail-safes would contain the ship.

  Nirapha descends the station, whispering overrides. Walls flutter apart in the way of butterfly wings as she speaks the names of families that inhabited the surface of Teferizen’s Chalice Principle. Floors rise and fall in the way of tides as she recites the oaths of their feuds.

  Their wedding vows, in the way of poetry, unlock the heart of Srisunthorn.

  Its ventricles are lined with protocol beads and network nodes fed by harvesters, primitive cousins of Teferizen’s that reap stellar waves and recombine them into power. If Nirapha listens, she imagines she might hear their voices, the parrot discourse of subroutines.

  “Nirapha, where are you?” Mehaan’s voice disrupts. The flow of Teferizen’s instructions coursing through Nirapha’s blood falters.

  “Being with myself. It’s nothing to worry about.”