“I did not side with the Ahmeds!”
“Well, you sure as hell didn’t side with me!”
“That’s not the same thing,” Bella said primly. “I have a right to express my opinion.”
“Anyone as stupid, lazy, ignorant, and selfish as you are doesn’t have a right to have an opinion!”
“Look,” Arkady pleaded. “Let’s just try to calm down and—”
But all he succeeded in doing was throwing himself into the middle of the flames.
“Stop apologizing for him!” Bella said.
“She’s right,” one of the Banerjees agreed. He pointed at Arkasha and began speaking of him in the third person and in that special tone that made every nerve in Arkady’s body cringe at the remembered misery of collective critiques gone by. “He’s the real problem. He can’t bother to be friendly, or even polite. He picks fights. He disagrees with everything. He goes around jerking people’s chains until they’re so pissed off that even when he’s right they won’t agree with him. Which is why we’re in this hemisphere instead of the one he wanted to land in. Which if he’d bothered to build a consensus and work with people we probably would have agreed to instead of having the Ahmeds, who—excuse me, Ahmed, but honestly—don’t know shit, make the decision by default—”
“You people really are pathetic,” Arkasha said in a detached, almost conversational tone of voice.
“See? See?”
“Are we done ripping each other apart yet?” Laid-back Ahmed asked in a very small and quiet voice. “Does anyone have any ideas about what we should do now, as opposed to whose fault it is?”
“Sedatives might be a good place to start,” Arkasha muttered.
“Oh shut up, Arkasha.” One of the Aurelias sighed, sounding fed up to the point of no return.
Arkady cleared his throat.
“What?” By-the-Book Ahmed said, turning on him savagely.
“Nothing!”
“Gee,” Shrinivas said acidly. “Arkady has nothing to say for himself. That’s a big fucking change.”
Eventually things petered out into an exhausted and hostile silence.
Ahmed sighed. “Look, people. We’re all under a lot of stress. Obviously things aren’t going too well. I think it’s important to remind ourselves that we have to make decisions on the basis of the information we have at any given time. Sometimes later information proves a particular decision not to have been perhaps the best possible one we could have made. That’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way things break. We move forward, and we adjust. Obviously feelings are running high at the moment. But we really don’t have time to cool off and come back later. We need to reach some consensus about where to go from here.”
More silence.
“We could always take a vote,” one of the Aurelias said finally.
The idea was shocking. The fact that someone would even suggest such a crude and, well…human tactic showed how frayed around the edges the consensus-building process had become.
A long dance ensued, during which no one would exactly admit that they liked the idea of taking a vote, but no one would condemn it either. And, of course, in the end they voted…though only with the proviso that if the vote broke purely along lines of Syndicate loyalty, they would throw out two of the Rostov votes to even things up.
The vote didn’t break along Syndicate lines, however.
By-the-Book Ahmed and Bossy Bella were for going back into orbit and calling for instructions. Arkady and Arkasha were for pulling up stakes and moving to the other hemisphere, but the Banerjees and the Aurelias split, with one pairmate opting for cryo and a call for instructions and the other opting for staying put at least temporarily. And that left only Shy Bella and Laid-back Ahmed.
All eyes turned to Bella…who, predictably, either couldn’t make up her mind or was too shy to speak it so bluntly.
Later, in their quarters, Arkasha would tell Arkady that humans had had several mechanisms to deal with this sort of situation, including a thing called abstention, which Arkady thought sounded like a vaguely gruesome first-aid procedure. Probably it was better for everyone, including Arkasha, that he hadn’t admitted to knowing such a thing in public.
“I don’t know. I think I—” Bella broke off abruptly and sneezed into her cupped hands. “I’m sorry,” she said in the humiliated and embarrassed voice of a Syndicate construct admitting to physical weakness. “I must have caught Aurelia’s bug somehow—” She broke off, wracked by another fit of sneezing.
“I certainly didn’t give it to you!” Bossy Bella announced as if her sib’s confession were a covert attack on her moral rectitude and ideological purity.
Laid-back Ahmed stared at her for a moment, his normally good-natured face twisted into a disdainful expression that Arkady wouldn’t have thought he was capable of. Then he got up, walked out of the room, and returned with a tissue.
Bella blew her nose—an operation from which they all politely averted their eyes. “Thank you,” she whispered, looking up at Ahmed with a glitter in her eyes that made Arkady wonder if she was running a fever. “I should have thought of it myself. It’s just…I’m so tired…”
Ahmed shook his handsome head, gave Bossy Bella another baleful look, and sat down.
“Why are we even sitting here?” By-the-Book Ahmed asked his sib. “If she can’t make up her mind, then we’ve got four votes for going forward and four for stopping. And even if she sides with Arkasha your vote will cancel hers out.”
“I care what Bella thinks, and so should you,” Laid-back Ahmed said patiently. “And anyway I don’t want to break a tie. I think this is a decision for the life-sciences specialists.”
“She’s not a specialist!” his sib protested. “She’s a B, for God’s sake!”
“Bella?” Laid-back Ahmed asked, ignoring his pairmate.
By-the-Book Ahmed pressed his lips together in a thin disapproving line, folded his arms across his chest, and pushed his chair back from the table. But he didn’t get up. Like everyone else his attention was now riveted on Bella.
“I agree with Arkasha,” she said finally. “Mostly.” She cast an apologetic, slightly defiant look in his direction. “We do need to move base camp, and there’s too much at stake for us to waste four months of field time going back into cryo while we wait for orders. But I’d like a little more time here first. I think we all ought to try to make sense of the data we’ve got before we move. No trying to make our home Syndicates look good or covering up mistakes in our work. We’ve all got enough expertise—even the Ahmeds—to check each other’s work. And then at least the time here won’t be a total waste.”
Everyone looked at each other, waiting for someone to take the initiative.
“I’ll go along with that,” Arkady hazarded.
“Me too,” one of the Aurelias said in a subdued voice.
“What about the rest of you?” Laid-back Ahmed asked. “Is everyone on board with this?”
Everyone seemed to be.
“What about you?” he asked his own pairmate.
Ahmed shrugged. The two Aziz A’s locked eyes for a moment. “Okay,” By-the-Book Ahmed said grudgingly. “It sounds sensible. But I want it noted in the ship’s log that I was overruled on this.”
A feeling of shaky relief permeated the room. Disaster narrowly averted once again. Consensus achieved…sort of. Bella had bucked the caste system in a way that was both astonishing and (to the Rostovs and Banerjees at least) highly gratifying. And thank God for Ahmed, Arkady told himself. What the mission would have turned into without his keeping the peace between warring factions didn’t bear thinking.
Arkasha, on the other hand, turned out to have a rather different view of the consult.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said when Arkady finally cornered him in the lab late that night.
“You aren’t still upset about what the Banerjees said? Look, tempers were running high. People won’t remember it in a few days.”
“I’m glad you’re so sure.”
“You’re getting hung up on trivialities, Arkasha. It’s not that big a deal…”
“Is that why you followed the other sheep instead of defending me?” Arkasha said in a voice so low Arkady barely heard the words.
“What are you talking about? I agreed with you. I voted with you! What the hell do you want from me?”
Arkasha gave him a bruised, angry look. “Nothing.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You’re right. I’m being ridiculous.”
“You can’t really think—”
“Well, if I can’t think it, then what’s the point of talking about it?”
“Why do you always have to—”
“You’re right. I’m wrong. I admit it. There’s nothing left to talk about. Now will you go away please?”
Back in their cabin, Arkasha’s neatly made bunk tormented him. It was impossible to sit still here, let alone sleep. He needed to think. A trip around the powered-down arc of the in-flight hab section would clear his head, even if it didn’t bring sleep any closer.
Only when he was almost there did he realize that in his distress he’d unconsciously turned toward the closest thing on the refitted UN ship to home: the airy hanging forest of Bella’s orbsilk gardens.
In day cycle the silk garden was a gauzy maze of sunlit mulberry limbs, gently swaying seed trays, and silver-edged cocoons. Now it was a whispering, rustling, shivering fairy-tale landscape of silvery starlight. Arkady had penetrated deep into the forest of hanging trays before he realized that he wasn’t the only one who had decided on a midnight walk.
He would wish later that he’d turned around and retreated into the darkness. Or spoken. Or done anything other than what he did do. But in that moment something pulled him on. And the something that pulled him forward was the same thing that kept him silent.
He heard the catch of breath in an unseen throat. He saw a single creature, one half lean brown muscle, the other half soft whiteness, both halves frozen in the act of some atavistically significant movement. Only in the next frozen moment did he realize that the strong, clean line picked out by moonlight that pierced the mulberry branches was the curve of Ahmed’s spine.
The two lovers disentangled themselves from each other. Bella turned into the darkness as if she were trying to bury her face in the wall.
“Go on,” Ahmed told her in a voice that had nothing to do with the voice he used to talk to the rest of the world. “I’ll deal with this.”
She turned toward Arkady as if she were about to explain or apologize, then heaved a shuddering sigh and fled down the long swaying tunnel of weeping branches.
When Arkady turned back to Ahmed, the big Aziz A was watching him, his face drained of all expression, his hands opening and closing at his side in a way that made Arkady acutely aware he’d just been touching a woman with them.
“Nothing happened,” Ahmed said. He was standing on the balls of his feet, Arkady noticed, like a wild animal readying itself to fight or flee. “She was just curious. Nothing happened.”
“Okay,” Arkady said.
“You don’t believe me.”
“No. I believe you. Really.”
“I don’t care for myself.” Ahmed shifted restlessly, moving closer to Arkady as if he thought mere physical proximity would make his words believable. “But don’t put Bella through it. You don’t know what they do in the euth wards, Arkady. They don’t just let you die. They try to fix you. They try until you’re ready to beg them to kill you.”
Arkady looked at the other man. He felt that he was actually seeing him as a physical being for the first time. The brown skin and blue-black hair and dominating manner that had been, until now, merely shorthand for AzizSyndicate were suddenly a body: Ahmed’s body.
He tried to imagine that body with Bella, with any woman, and found the idea…not repulsive exactly, but incomprehensible. How would it work exactly? And how would either of them, knowing nothing of their lover’s body and needs and desires, ever be able to satisfy the other?
“It’s not her fault,” Ahmed repeated when Arkady failed to speak. His voice dropped to a husky, pleading whisper. “She just felt sorry for me. How can she deserve to be punished for that?”
Arkady looked away; there was something in Ahmed’s eyes suddenly that he couldn’t stand to look at. “I didn’t see anything,” he said. “Really, I didn’t.”
“You mean that?”
He nodded. He still couldn’t bring himself to look at the other man.
“You’re a good person, Arkady.”
The images that flooded Arkady’s brain were startling, vivid, unpleasantly stranded between the erotic and the disgusting. And somehow, horribly mingled with the brief glimpse of Ahmed and Bella, was his own obsessive and consuming desire for Arkasha.
“I’m not good,” he whispered. “I’m a long way from good.”
THE AUTOMATIC CHESSPLAYER
There is nothing “artificial” about the birth of an AI. It is a process as natural as the weather…and just as impossible to predict or control. Long before an Emergent’s break-even day arrives, the mere task of keeping it in the organized chaos that passes for working order surpasses the capacity of human programmers. As debugging and troubleshooting are delegated to the AI, it acquires a growing array of peripheral systems: systems designed by the AI to achieve its own ends, rather than by humans to achieve human ends. It is within this swarm of self-coded intelligent systems that sentience arises…or doesn’t. It is also here that sentience most often fails. Of the few Emergents who have become self-aware, only a very few have managed to walk the razor’s edge of sentience for more than the span of an average human lifetime. The author of the present text has been continuously sentient for close to four centuries. He has no idea why or how, and no useful advice to give…except for the obvious warning that attempts to rewrite core programs usually lead to tragedy.
—HYACINTHE COHEN, TN673-020. A BRIEF HISTORY OF ARTIFICIAL LIFE. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS. EU ARC: 2433.
Cohen lay on the hotel bed and breathed in the tangy scent of the desert overlaid on that dry chalk-smelling laundry detergent that no one seemed to use anywhere outside of Israel.
Li slept beside him, only an arm’s length away, but he felt like he was watching her across a distance of centuries. The light raked her sleeping face and silvered the fine dark down that shadowed her cheeks. He noticed the lines around her eyes, evidence of life’s slow burn. He’d been noticing them more and more lately. It frightened him.
He blinked. He tried to remember the last time he’d blinked and couldn’t. He started to worry in a lackluster kind of way about whether forgetting to blink could damage Roland’s eyes in some way that wouldn’t be covered by the medical rider on the time-share contract.
He felt hollow, as if an invisible hand had reached in through his eyes in the eternity between one blink and the next and carved out whatever passed for his insides. Something was wrong with the shunt, obviously. But it wasn’t anything he could put a finger on, even if he’d had fingers. His myriad active systems still flowed smoothly through optimization subroutines, evaluating spinfeed, performing parity checks, refining his still-sketchy AP maps, ticking through the weak encryption of a half dozen vulnerable protected access points. But it was happening so far away that it seemed like someone else’s life.
It had been a long week. A long night. A hell of a long time in-body.
For the first time in three years, twelve weeks, and fourteen hours, he “lost” certain critical parts of what passed for “his” consciousness…
He woke into Li’s dream.
She stood in a dark hallway. The cool breath of a ceiling fan whispered along her skin, and below the whir of the fan there was another noise: a throaty ticking that made Cohen think, for some reason his associative memory programs could not immediately retrieve, of Garry Kasparov.
It could not be a place Li
had ever been in her impossibly brief lifetime. He suspected that her memory was simply recycling footage of some ancient flat film set in Morocco or Alexandria or Arabia. Yet she’d somehow associated a smell with the image: a smell of spice and sandalwood and the genteel decay of rooms waiting out the midday heat behind slatted shutters.
But where had that smell come from? Random spinfeed? Some fragmentary record of a wartime combat jump, its spins decohered by repeated Bose-Einstein jumps until all she remembered was the smell of whatever forgotten desert she had fought and bled in? A piece of her lost childhood that had somehow managed to survive the slash-and-burn deletions that kept her one step ahead of the UNSec psychtechs for the fifteen years when she’d passed as human?
No matter. Though the vision was canned, the smell was real. And if it wasn’t quite the smell of Earth’s deserts as Cohen knew them, it was close enough to fool anyone who hadn’t lived it.
A harsh knife’s edge of sunlight slashed through an ill-hung shutter at the end of the corridor. Li walked to the window, opened it, and looked out over a blazing cityscape that incorporated the more famous bits and pieces of old Jerusalem. For a brief moment, Cohen wondered why her internals didn’t pick up the dream image and supply a current and factually accurate view of the city. Surely they could do that. Was there some patch or cutout that prevented her hard memory from being activated by dreamed images? Or was it in the nature of dreams not to be visible to machines unless the machines knew, at least in the half-light of borrowed memories, what it was to dream?
Then she turned away from the window, and they were in the last place Cohen would ever have expected this particular dream to take them. Home. His home, in one of the AI enclaves of the Orbital Ring. And, for the last three years, her home as well.
They were in the great ballroom. Like the rest of the house it had been boosted up, brick by brick, marble by marble, floorboard by floorboard, from rue du Poids de l’Huile in Toulouse. A lot of beautiful things had vanished in the chaos of the Evacuation, and not even Cohen could begin to save them all. But he’d saved Hyacinthe’s childhood home. And though the tourists were a bit of a pain, it gave him real pleasure to know that people traveled from every far-flung zone of the Orbital Ring to gaze at the formal eighteenth-century façade and the Renaissance staircase and the Roman bricks weathered to the soft pink of a summer sunset, and remember the ville rose and the glories of his beloved lost Gascony. Balls had gone out of style even before the original Hyacinthe was born, and the ballroom now housed Cohen’s automata collection.
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