The Year's Best Science Fiction--Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Lalitha laughed sharply. “There’s no way my boss will want to charge a bot. Can you imagine the headlines if we lost at trial?”

  “So…?”

  “I don’t know. Look, I can’t solve this tonight. Don’t start anything formal yet. We have to look into the existing case law.”

  “So … do I just cut her loose? I don’t think she’s actually dangerous.”

  “No! Don’t do that, either. Just … figure out if there’s some other angle to work, other than giving a robot the same right to due process that a person has. She’s a manufactured product, for Christ’s sake. Does the death penalty even matter to something that’s loaded with networked intelligence? She’s just the … the…” Lalitha hunted for words, “the end node of a network.”

  “I am not an end node!” Mika interjected. “I am real!”

  I hushed her. From the way Lalitha sounded, maybe I wouldn’t have to charge her at all. Mika’s owner had clearly had some issues … Maybe there was some way to walk Mika out of trouble, and away from all of this. Maybe she could live without an owner. Or, if she needed someone to register ownership, I could even—

  “Please tell me you’re not going to try to adopt a sexbot,” Lalitha said.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “Come on, you love the ones with broken wings.”

  “I was just—”

  “It’s a bot, Rivera. A malfunctioning bot. Stick it in a cell. I’ll get someone to look at product liability law in the morning.”

  She clicked off.

  Mika looked up mournfully from where she sat on the couch. “She doesn’t believe I’m real, either.”

  I was saved from answering by the crime scene techs knocking.

  But it wasn’t techs on the doorstep. Instead, I found a tall blonde woman with a roller bag and a laptop case, looking like she’d just flown in on a commuter jet.

  She shouldered her laptop case and offered a hand. “Hi. I’m Holly Simms. Legal counsel for Executive Pleasures. I’m representing the Mika Model you have here.” She held up her phone. “My GPS says she’s here, right? You don’t have her down at the station?”

  I goggled in surprise. Something in Mika’s networked systems must have alerted Executive Pleasures that there was a problem.

  “She didn’t call a lawyer,” I said.

  The lawyer gave me a pointed look. “Did she ask for one?”

  Once again, I felt like I was on weird legal ground. I couldn’t bar a lawyer from a client, or a client from getting a lawyer. But was Mika a client, really? I felt like just by letting the lawyer in, I’d be opening up exactly the legal rabbit hole that Lalitha wanted to avoid: a bot on trial.

  “Look,” the lawyer said, softening, “I’m not here to make things difficult for your department. We don’t want to set some crazy legal precedent either.”

  Hesitantly, I stepped aside.

  She didn’t waste any time rolling briskly past. “I understand it was a violent assault?”

  “We’re still figuring that out.”

  Mika startled and stood as we reached the living room. The woman smiled and went over to shake her hand. “Hi Mika, I’m Holly. Executive Pleasures sent me to help you. Have a seat, please.”

  “No.” Mika shook her head. “I want a real lawyer. Not a company lawyer.”

  Holly ignored her and plunked herself and her bags on the sofa beside Mika. “Well, you’re still our property, so I’m the only lawyer you’re getting. Now have a seat.”

  “I thought she was the dead guy’s property,” I said.

  “Legally, no. The Mika Model Service End User Agreement explicitly states that Executive Pleasures retains ownership. It simplifies recall issues.” Holly was pulling out her laptop. She dug out a sheaf of papers and offered them to me. “These outline the search warrant process so you can make a Non-Aggregated Data Request from our servers. I assume you’ll want the owner’s user history. We can’t release any user-specific information until we have the warrant.”

  “That in the End User Agreement, too?”

  Holly gave me a tight smile. “Discretion is part of our brand. We want to help, but we’ll need the legal checkboxes ticked.”

  “But…” Mika was looking from her to me with confusion. “I want a real lawyer.”

  “You don’t have money, dearie. You can’t have a real lawyer.”

  “What about public defenders?” Mika tried. “They will—”

  Holly gave me an exasperated look. “Will you explain to her that she isn’t a citizen, or a person? You’re not even a pet, honey.”

  Mika looked to me, desperate. “Help me find a lawyer, detective. Please? I’m more than a pet. You know I’m more than a pet. I’m real.”

  Holly’s gaze shot from her, to me, and back again. “Oh, come on. She’s doing that thing again.” She gave me a disgusted look. “Hero complex, right? Save the innocent girl? That’s your thing?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Holly sighed. “Well, if it isn’t the girl who needs rescuing, it’s the naughty schoolgirl. And if it’s not the naughty schoolgirl, it’s the kind, knowing older woman.” She popped open her briefcase and started rummaging through it. “Just once, it would be nice to meet a guy who isn’t predictable.”

  I bristled. “Who says I’m predictable?”

  “Don’t kid yourself. There really aren’t that many buttons a Mika Model can push.”

  Holly came up with a screwdriver. She turned and rammed it into Mika’s eye.

  Mika fell back, shrieking. With her cuffed hands, she couldn’t defend herself as Holly drove the screwdriver deeper.

  “What the—?”

  By the time I dragged Holly off, it was too late. Blood poured from Mika’s eye. The girl was gasping and twitching. All her movements were wrong, uncoordinated, spasmodic and jerky.

  “You killed her!”

  “No. I shut down her CPU,” said Holly, breathing hard. “It’s better this way. If they get too manipulative, it’s tougher. Trust me. They’re good at getting inside your head.”

  “You can’t murder someone in front of me!”

  “Like I said, not a murder. Hardware deactivation.” She shook me off and wiped her forehead, smearing blood. “I mean, if you want to pretend something like that is alive, well, have at her. All the lower functions are still there. She’s not dead, biologically speaking.”

  I crouched beside Mika. Her cuffed hands kept reaching up to her face, replaying her last defensive motion. A behavior locked in, happening again and again. Her hands rising, then falling back. I couldn’t make her stop.

  “Look,” Holly said, her voice softening. “It’s better if you don’t anthropomorphize. You can pretend the models are real, but they’re just not.”

  She wiped off the screwdriver and put it back in her case. Cleaned her hands and face, and started re-zipping her roller bag.

  “The company has a recycling center here in the Bay Area for disposal,” she said. “If you need more data on the owner’s death, our servers will have backups of everything that happened with this model. Get the warrant, and we can unlock the encryptions on the customer’s relationship with the product.”

  “Has this happened before?”

  “We’ve had two other user deaths, but those were both stamina issues. This is an edge case. The rest of the Mika Models are being upgraded to prevent it.” She checked her watch. “Updates should start rolling out at 3 A.M., local time. Whatever made her logic tree fork like that, it won’t happen again.”

  She straightened her jacket and turned to leave.

  “Hold on!” I grabbed her sleeve. “You can’t just walk out. Not after this.”

  “She really got to you, didn’t she?” She patted my hand patronizingly. “I know it’s hard to understand, but it’s just that hero complex of yours. She pushed your buttons, that’s all. It’s what Mika Models do. They make you think you’re important.”

  She glanced back at the body.
“Let it go, detective. You can’t save something that isn’t there.”

  That Game We Played During the War

  CARRIE VAUGHN

  New York Times bestseller Carrie Vaughn is the author of a wildly popular series of novels detailing the adventures of Kitty Narville, a radio personality who also happens to be a werewolf, and who runs a late-night call-in radio advice show for supernatural creatures. The “Kitty” books include Kitty and the Midnight Hour, Kitty Goes to Washington, Kitty Takes a Holiday, and Kitty and the Silver Bullet, Kitty and the Dead Man’s Hand, Kitty Raises Hell, Kitty’s House of Horrors, Kitty Goes to War, Kitty’s Big Trouble, Kitty Steals the Show, Kitty Rocks the House, and a collection of her “Kitty” stories, Kitty’s Greatest Hits. Her other novels include Voices of Dragons, her first venture into Young Adult territory, a fantasy, Discord’s Apple, Steel, and After the Golden Age. Vaughn’s short work has appeared in Lightspeed, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Subterranean, Wild Cards: Inside Straight, Realms of Fantasy, Jim Baen’s Universe, Paradox, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, and elsewhere; her non-Kitty stories have been collected in Straying from the Path. Her most recent books include a new “Kitty” novel, Kitty in the Underworld, Dreams of the Golden Age, a sequel to After the Golden Age, and a new collection, Amaryllis and Other Stories. She lives in Colorado.

  In the story that follows, she takes us to a planet where a debilitating war between two races, one telepathic and the other not, has just ended, and the playing of a simple game of chess becomes a bridge between the two races, strengthening the still-uneasy peace.…

  From the moment she left the train station, absolutely everybody stopped to look at Calla. They watched her walk across the plaza and up the steps of the Northward Military Hospital. In her dull gray uniform she was like a storm cloud moving among the khaki of the Gaantish soldiers and officials. The peace between their peoples was holding; seeing her should not have been such a shock. And yet, she might very well have been the first citizen of Enith to walk across this plaza without being a prisoner.

  Calla wasn’t telepathic, but she could guess what every one of these Gaantish was thinking: What was she doing here? Well, since they were telepathic, they’d know the answer to that. They’d wonder all the same, but they’d know. It would be a comfort not to have to explain herself over and over again.

  It was also something of a comfort not bothering to hide her fear. Technically, Enith and Gaant were no longer at war. That did not mean these people didn’t hate her for the uniform she wore. She didn’t think much of their uniforms either, and all the harm soldiers like these had done to her and those she loved. She couldn’t hide that, and so let the emotions slide right through her and away. She felt strangely light, entering the hospital lobby, and her smile was wry.

  Some said Enith and Gaant were two sides of the same coin; they would never see eye to eye and would always fight over the same spit of land between their two continents. But their differences were simple, one might say: only in their minds.

  The war had ended recently enough that the hospital was crowded. Many injured, many recovering. In the lobby, Calla had to pause a moment, the scents and sounds and bustle of the place were so familiar, recalling for her every base or camp where she’d been stationed, all her years as a nurse and then as a field medic. She’d spent the whole war in places like this, and her hands itched for work. Surely someone needed a temperature taken or a dressing changed? No amount of exhaustion had ever quelled that impulse in her.

  But she was a visitor here, not a nurse. Tucking her short hair behind her ears, brushing some lint off her jacket, she walked to the reception desk and approached the young woman in a khaki uniform sitting there.

  “Hello. I’m here to see one of your patients, Major Valk Larn. I think all my paperwork is in order.” Speaking slowly and carefully because she knew her accent in Gaantish was rough, she unfolded said paperwork from its packet: passport, visa, military identification, and travel permissions.

  The Gaantish officer stared at her. Her hair under her cap was pulled back in a severe bun; her whole manner was very strict and proper. Her tabs said she was a second lieutenant—just out of training and the war ends, poor thing. Or lucky thing, depending on one’s point of view. Calla wondered what the young lieutenant made of the mess of thoughts pouring from her. If she saw the sympathy or only the pity.

  “You speak Gaantish,” the lieutenant said bluntly.

  Calla was used to this reaction. “Yes. I spent a year at the prisoner camp at Ovorton. Couldn’t help but learn it, really. It’s a long story.” She smiled blandly.

  Seeing the whole of that long story in an instant, the woman glanced away quickly. She might have been blushing, either from confusion or embarrassment, Calla couldn’t tell. Didn’t really matter. Whatever it was, she covered it up by examining Calla’s papers.

  “Technician Calla Belan, why are you here?” The lieutenant sounded amazed.

  Calla chuckled. “Really?” She wasn’t hiding anything; Valk and her worry for him were at the front of her mind.

  The other Gaantish soldiers in the lobby were too polite to stare at the exchange, but they glanced over. If they really focused they could learn everything about her. They were welcome to her history. It was interesting.

  “What’s in your bag?” the lieutenant said.

  Some food, a couple of paperbacks for the trip, her chess set in its small pine box. Calla couldn’t help but think of it, and the woman saw it all. Calla could only smuggle in contraband if someone had put it there without her knowledge, or if she had forgotten about it.

  The lieutenant’s brow furrowed. “Chess? That’s a game? May I see it?”

  It still startled Calla sometimes, the way they just knew. “Yes, of course,” she said, and opened the flap of her shoulder bag. The lieutenant drew out the box, studied it. Maybe to reassure herself that it didn’t pose a threat. The lieutenant could see, through Calla, that it was just a game.

  “Am I going to be able to see Major Larn?” With a glance, the lieutenant would know everything he meant to her. Calla waited calmly for her answer.

  “Yes. Here. Just a moment.” The lieutenant took a card out of her drawer and filled out the information listed on it. The card attached to a clip. “Pin this to your lapel. People will still stop you, but this will explain everything. You shouldn’t have trouble. Any more trouble.” The young woman was too prim to really smile, but she seemed to be making an effort at kindness. Calla was likely the first real Enithi the young woman had ever met in person. To think, here Calla was, doing her part for the peace effort. That was a nice way of looking at it, and maybe why Valk had asked her to come.

  “Go down that corridor,” the young woman directed. She consulted a printed roster on a clipboard. “Major Larn is in Ward 6, on the right.”

  “Thank you.” The gratitude was genuine, and the lieutenant would see that along with everything else.

  Enithi never lied to the Gaantish. This was a known, proverbial truth. There was no point to it. Through all the decades of war, Enith never sent spies—or, rather, they never told the spies they sent that they were spies. They delivered messages without telling the bearers they were messengers. Their methods of conducting espionage had become so arcane, so complex, that Gaant rarely discovered them. Both sides counted on this one truth: Enithi never bothered lying when confronted with telepaths. The Gaantish had captured thousands of Enithi soldiers, who simply and immediately confessed everything they knew. Enithi were known to be a practical people, without any shame to speak of.

  Enith kept any Gaant soldiers it captured sedated, drugged to delirium, to frustrate their telepathy. The nurses who looked after them were chosen for their cheerful dispositions and generally straightforward thoughts. Calla Belan had been one of those nurses. Valk Larn had been one of those prisoners when they first met—only a lieutenant then. It had been a long time ago.

  Gaantish soldiers con
tinued staring at her as she walked down the corridor. Some men in bandages waited on benches, probably for checkups in a nearby exam room. Renovations were going on—replacing light fixtures, looked like. In all their eyes, her uniform marked her. She probably shouldn’t have worn it but was rather glad she had. Let them know exactly who she was.

  On the other hand, she always felt that if the Enithi and Gaantish all took off their uniforms they would look the same: naked.

  One of the workmen at the top of a ladder, pliers in hand to wire a new light, choked as she thought this, and glanced at her. A few others were blushing, hiding grins. She smiled. Another blow struck for peace.

  * * *

  Past several more doorways and many more stares, she found Ward 6. She paused a moment to take it in and restore her balance. The wide room held some twenty beds, all of them filled. Most of the patients seemed to be sleeping. She guessed these were serious but stable cases, needing enough attention to stay here but not so much that there was urgency. Patients had bandages at the end of stumps that had been arms or legs, gauze taped over their heads or wrapped around their chests, broken and splinted limbs. A pair of nurses was on hand, moving from bed to bed, adjusting suspended IV bottles, checking dressings. The situation’s familiarity was calming.

  The nurses looked at her, then glanced at each other, and the loser of that particular silent debate came toward Calla. She waited while the man studied her badge.

  “I’m here to see Major Larn,” Calla said carefully, politely, no matter that the nurse would already know. By now, Calla was thinking of nothing else.

  “Yes,” the nurse said, still startled. “He’s here.”

  “He’s well?” Calla couldn’t help but ask.

  “He will be. He—he will be glad to see you, when he wakes up. But you should let him sleep for now.” Between Calla and Valk, how much was the nurse seeing that couldn’t be put into words?

  “Oh, yes, of course. May I wait?”

  The nurse nodded and gestured to a stray chair, waiting by the wall for just such a purpose.