The Year's Best Science Fiction: Eighteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Yes, Leila said. She did.

  The political demands followed soon, from an international terrorist group already known to possess enormous technical expertise. There were, in such uncertain times, many such groups. Only one thing was special, and fortunate, about this one: the United States Renewed Government, in secret partnership with several other governments, had been closing in on the group for over two years. They now hastened their efforts, so effectively that within three days, the terrorist leaders were arrested and all important cells broken up.

  Under Serum Alpha, the revolutionaries—what revolution they thought they were leading was not deemed important—confirmed that infiltrator June Juana Selkirk was a late recruit to the cause. She could not possibly have been identified by KimWorks in time to stop her from smuggling the replicator into the dome. However, this mattered to nobody, not even to ex-Security chief Samuel Wang, who could not remember Selkirk, the blooms, or why he no longer was employed.

  A second bloom was found spreading dangerously in farmland near Red Lake, disassembling bioengineered corn, agricultural robots, insects, security equipment, and rabbits. It had apparently been planted before the arrests of the terrorist leaders.

  Serum Alpha failed to determine exactly how many blooms had been planted, because no one person knew. Quantum calculations had directed the operation, and it would have taken the lifetime of the sun to decrypt them. All that the United States Renewed Government, or the Chinese-American Alliance, could be sure of was that nothing had left northern Minnesota.

  They put a directed-beam weapon on the correct settings into very low orbit, and blasted half the state with a massive EMP. Everything electronic stopped working. Fifteen citizens, mostly stubborn elderly people who refused to evacuate, died from cerebral shock. The loss to Minnesota in money and property took a generation to restore.

  Even then, a weird superstition grew, shameful in such a technological society, that rogue replicators lurked in the northern forests and dells, and would eat anyone who came across them. A children’s version of this added that the replicators had red mouths and drooled brown goo. Northern Minnesota became statistically underpopulated. However, in a nation with so much cleaned-up farmland and the highest yield-per-acre bioengineered crops in the world, northern Minnesota was scarcely missed.

  Dr. Leila Jian-fen Kim, her work disgraced, moved back to China. She settled not in Shanghai, which had been cleaned up so effectively that it was the most booming city in the country, but in the much poorer northern city of Harbin. Eventually, Leila left physics and entered a Taoist monastery. To her own surprise, since her monkhood had been intended as atonement rather than fulfillment, she was happy.

  The Minnesota facility of KimWorks was abandoned. Buildings, walls, and walkways decayed very slowly, being built of resistant and rust-proof alloys. But the cleaned-up wilderness advanced quickly. Within twenty years, the space egg sat almost hidden by young trees: oak, birch, balsam, spruce rescued from Keller’s Blight by genetic engineering, the fast-growing and trashy poplars that no amount of genemod had been able to eliminate. The egg wasn’t lost, of course; the worldwide SpanLink had its coordinates, as well as its history.

  But few people visited. The world was converting, admittedly unevenly, to nanocreated plenty. The nanos, of course, were of the severely limited, unprogrammable type. Technology leapt forward, as did bioengineered good health for more and more of the population, both natural and cloned.

  Bioengineered intelligence, too; the average human IQ had risen twenty points in the last hundred years, mostly in the center of the bell curve. For people thus genemod to enjoy learning, the quantum-computer-based Span-Link provided endless diversions, endless communication, endless challenges. In such a world, a “space egg” that just sat there didn’t attract many visitors. Inert, nonplastic, non-interactive, it simply wasn’t interesting enough.

  No matter where it came from.

  Transmission: There is nothing here yet.

  Current probability of occurrence: 94%.

  V: 2295

  They had agreed, laughing, on a time for the Initiation. The time was arbitrary; the AI could have been initiated at any time. But the Chinese New Year seemed appropriate, since Wei Wu Wei Corporation of Shanghai had been such a big contributor. The Americans and Brazilians had flown over for the ceremony: Karim DiBenolo and Rosita Peres and Frallie Subel and Braley Wilkinson. The Chinese tried to master the strange names, rolling the peculiar syllables in their mouths, but only Braley Wilkinson spoke Chinese. O, but he was born to it; his great-great-uncle had married a rich Chinese woman, and the family had lived in both countries since.

  Braley didn’t look dual, though. Genemod, of course, the Chinese scientists said to each other, grimacing. Genemod for looks was not fashionable in China right now; it was inauthentic. The human genome had sufficiently improved, among the educated and civilized, to let natural selection alone. One should tamper only so far with the authenticity of life, and, in the past, there had been excesses. Regrettable, but now finished. Civilization had returned to the authentic.

  Nobody looked more inauthentic than Braley Wilkinson. Well over two meters high (what was this American passion for height?), blond as the sun, extravagant violet eyes. Brilliant, of course: not yet thirty years old and a major contributor to the AI. In addition, it was of course his parents who had chosen his vulgar looks, not himself. Tolerance was due.

  And besides, no one was feeling critical. It was a party.

  Zheng Ma, that master, had designed floating baktors for the entire celebration hall. Red and yellow, the baktors combined and recombined in kaleidoscopic loveliness. The air mixture was just slightly intoxicating, not too much. The food and drink, offered by the soundless unobtrusive robots that the Chinese did better than anybody else, was a superb mixture of national cuisines.

  “You have been here before?” a Chinese woman asked Braley. He could not remember her name.

  “To China, yes. But not to Shanghai.”

  “And what do you think of the city?”

  “It is beautiful. And very authentic.”

  “Thank you. We have worked to make it both.”

  Braley smiled. He had had this exact same conversation four times in the last half hour. What if he said something different? No, I have not been to Shanghai, but my notorious aunt, who once almost destroyed the world, was a holy monk in Harbin. Or maybe Did you know it’s really Braley2, and I’m a clone? That would jolt their bioconservatism. Or even, Has anyone told you that one of the major templates for the AI is my unconservative, American, cloned, too-tall persona?

  But they already knew all that, anyway. The only shocking thing would be to say it aloud, to publicly claim credit. That was not done in Shanghai. It was a mannerly city.

  And a beautiful one. The celebration hall, which also housed the AI terminal, was the loveliest room he’d ever seen. Perfect proportions. Serenity glowed from the dark red lacquered walls with their shifting subtle phoenix patterns, barely discernible and yet there, perceived at the edge of consciousness. The place was on SpanLink feed, of course, for such an historic event, but no recorders were visible to mar the room’s artful use of space.

  Through the window, which comprised one entire wall, the city below shared that balance and serenity. Shanghai had once been the ugliest, most dangerous, and most sinister city in China. Now it was breath-taking. The Huangpu River had been cleaned up along with everything else, and it sparkled blue between its parks bright with perfect genemod trees and flowers. Public buildings and temples, nanobuilt, rested among the low domed residences. Above the river soared the Shih-Yu Bridge, also nanobuilt, a seemingly weightless web of shining cables. Braley had heard it called the most graceful bridge in the world, and he could easily believe it.

  Where in this idyll was the city fringe? Every city had them, the disaffected and rebellious who had not fairly shared in either humanity’s genome improvement or its economic one. Shanghai, in particu
lar, had a centuries-long history of anarchy and revolution, exploitation and despair. Nor was China as a whole as united as her leaders liked to pretend. The basic cause, Braley believed, was biological. Even in bioconservative China—perhaps especially in bioconservative China—genetic science had not planed down the wild edges of the human gene pool.

  It was precisely that wildness that Braley had tried to get into the AI. Although, to be fair, he hadn’t had to work very hard to achieve this. The AI existed only because the quantum computer existed. True intelligence required the flexibility of quantum physics.

  With historical, deterministic computers, you always got the same answer to the same question. With quantum computers, that was no longer true. Superimposed states could collapse into more than one result, and it was precisely that uncertain mixed state, it turned out, that was necessary for self-awareness. AI was not a program. It was, like the human brain itself, an unpredictable collection of conflicting states.

  A man joined him at the window, one of the Brazilians … a scientist? Politician? He looked like, but most certainly was not, a porn-vid star.

  “You have been here before?” the Brazilian said.

  “To China, yes. But not to Shanghai.”

  “And what do you think of the city?”

  “It is beautiful. And very authentic.”

  “I’m told they have worked to make it both.”

  “Yes,” Braley said.

  A melodious voice, which seemed to come from all parts of the room simultaneously, said, “We are prepared to start now, please. We are prepared to start now. Thank you.”

  Gratefully, Braley moved toward the end of the room farthest from the transparent wall.

  A low stage, also lacquered deep red, spanned the entire length of the far wall. In the middle sat a black obelisk, three meters tall. This was the visual but unnecessary token presence of the AI, most of which lay within the lacquered wall. The rest of the stage was occupied—although that was hardly the word—by three-dimensional holo displays of whatever data was requested by the AI users. These were scattered throughout the crowd, unobtrusively holding their pads. From somewhere among the throng, a child stepped forward, an adorable little girl about five years old, black hair held by a deep red ribbon and black eyes preternaturally bright.

  Braley had a sudden irreverent thought: We look like a bunch of primitive idol worshippers, complete with infant sacrifice! He grinned. The Chinese had insisted on a child’s actually initiating the AI. This had been very important to them, for reasons Braley had never understood. But, then, you didn’t have to understand everything.

  “You smile,” said the Brazilian, still beside him. “You are right, Dr. Braley. This is an occasion of joy.”

  “Certainly,” Braley said, and that, too, was a private joke. Certainty was the one thing quantum physics, including the AI, could not deliver. Joy … O, maybe. But not certainty.

  The president of the Chinese-American Alliance mounted the shallow stage and began a speech. Braley didn’t listen, in any of the languages available in his ear jack. The speech would be predictable: new era for humanity, result of peace and knowledge shared among nations, servant of the entire race, savior from our own isolation on the planet, and so forth, until it was time for Initiation.

  The child stepped forward, a perfect miniature doll. The president put a touch-pad in her small hand. She smiled at him with a dazzle that could have eclipsed the sun. No matter how bioconservative China was, Braley thought, that child was genemod or he was a trilobite.

  Holo displays flickered into sight across the stage. They monitored basic computer functioning, interesting only to engineers. The only display that mattered shimmered in the air to the right of the obelisk, an undesignated display open for the AI to use however it chose. At the moment, the display showed merely a stylized field of black dots in slowed-down Brownian movement. Whatever the AI created there, plus the voice activation, would be First Contact between humanity and an alien species.

  Despite himself, Braley felt his breath come a little faster.

  The adorable little girl pressed the touchpad at the place the president indicated.

  “Hello,” a new voice said in Chinese, an ordinary voice, and yet a shiver ran over the room, and a low collective indrawn breath, like wind soughing through a grove of sacred trees. “I am T’ien hsia.”

  T’ien hsia: “made under heaven.” The name had not been chosen by Braley, but he liked it. It could also be translated “the entire world,” which he liked even better. Thanks to SpanLink, T’ien hsia existed over the entire world, and in and of itself, it was a new world. The holo display of black dots had become a globe, the Earth as seen from the orbitals that carried SpanLink, and Braley also liked that choice of greeting logo.

  “Hello,” the child piped, carefully coached. “Welcome to us!”

  “I understand,” the AI said. “Good-bye.”

  The holo display disappeared. So did all the functional displays.

  For a long moment, the crowd waited expectantly for what the AI would do next. Nothing happened. As the time lengthened, people began to glance sideways at each other. Engineers and scientists became busy with their pads. No display flickered on. Still no one spoke.

  Finally the little girl said, in her clear childish treble, “Where did T’ien hsia go?”

  And the frantic activity began.

  It was Braley who thought to run the visual feeds of the event at drastically slowed speed. The scientists had cleared the room of all nonessential personnel, and then spent two hours looking for the AI anywhere on SpanLink. There was no trace of it. Not anywhere.

  “It cannot be deleted,” the project head, Liu Huang Te, said for perhaps the twentieth time. “It is not a program.”

  “But it has been deleted!” said a surly Brazilian engineer who, by this time, everyone disliked. “It is gone!”

  “The particles are there! They possess spin!”

  This was indubitably true. The spin of particles was the way a quantum computer embodied combinations of qubits of data. The mixed states of spin represented simultaneous computations. The collapse of those mixed states represented answers from the AI. The particles were there, and they possessed spin. But T’ien hsia had vanished.

  A computer voice—a conventional computer, not self-aware—delivered its every-ten-minute bulletin on the mixed state of the rest of the world outside this room. “The president of Japan has issued a statement ridiculing the AI Project. The riot protesting the ‘theft’ of T’ien hsia has been brought under control in New York by the Second Robotic Precinct, using tangle-guns. In Shanghai, the riot grows stronger, joined by thousands of outcasts living beyond the city perimeter, who have overwhelmed the robotic police and are currently attacking the Shih-Yu bridge. In Sao Paulo—”

  Braley ceased to listen. There remained no record anywhere of the AI’s brief internal functions (and how had that been achieved? By whom? Why?), but there was the visual feed.

  “Slow the image to one-tenth speed,” Braley instructed the computer.

  The holo display of the Earth morphed to the field of black dots in Brownian motion.

  “Slow it to one-hundredth speed.”

  The holo display of the Earth morphed to the field of black dots in Brownian motion.

  “Slow to one-thousandth speed.”

  The holo display of the Earth morphed to the field of black dots in Brownian motion.

  “Slow to one ten-thousandth speed.”

  Something flickered, too brief for the eye to see, between the globe and the black dots.

  Behind Braley a voice, filled with covert satisfaction, said in badly accented Chinese, “They’re finished. The shame, and the resources wasted … . Wei Wu Wei Corporation won’t survive this. Nothing can save them.”

  The something between globe and dots flickered more strongly, but not strongly enough for Braley to make it out.

  “Slow to one-hundred-thousandth speed.”


  The badly accented voice, still slimy with glee, quoted Lao Tzu, “‘Those who think to win the world by doing something to it, I see them come to grief … .’”

  Braley frowned savagely at the hypocrisy. Then he forgot it, and his entire being concentrated itself on the slowed holo display.

  The globe of the Earth disappeared. In its place shimmered a slightly irregular egg shape, dull silver, surrounded by wildflowers and trees. Braley froze the image.

  “What’s that?” someone cried.

  Braley knew. But he didn’t need to say anything; the data was instantly accessed on SpanLink and holo-displayed in the center of the room. A babble of voices began debating and arguing.

  Braley went on staring at the object from deep space, still sitting in northern Minnesota nearly three centuries after its landing.

  The AI had possessed 250 spinning particles in superposition. It could perform more than 1075 simultaneous computations, more than the number of atoms in the universe. How many computations had it taken to convince T’ien hsia that its future did not lie with humanity?

  “I understand,” the AI said. “Good-bye.”

  The voice of the SpanLink reporting program, doing exactly what it had been told to do, said calmly, “The Shih-Yu bridge has been destroyed. The mob has been dispersed with stun gas from Wei Wu Wei Corporation jets, at the request of President Leong Ka-tai. In Washington, DC—Interrupt. I repeat, we now interrupt for a report from—”

  Someone in the room yelled, “Quiet! Listen to this!” and all holo displays except Braley’s suddenly showed an American face, flawless and professionally concerned. “In northern Minnesota, an object that first came to Earth 288 years ago and has been quiescent ever since, has just showed its first activity ever.”

  Visual of the space object. Braley looked from it to the T’ien hsia display. They were identical.

  “Worldwide Tracking has detected a radiation stream of a totally unknown kind originating from the space object. Ten minutes ago, the data stream headed into outer space in the direction of the constellation Cassiopeia. The radiation burst lasted only a fraction of a second, and has not been repeated. Data scientists say they’re baffled, but this extraordinary event happening concurrently with the disappearance of the Wei Wu Wei Corporation’s Artificial Intelligence, which was supposed to be initiated today, suggests a connection.”