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

by Gardner Dozois

  “I don’t want you to die either. And I’m going to do everything I can to stop it.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  She did not speak for a long while, and then changed the subject. “Would you like to hear another story?”

  The child nodded.

  “There was once a man and a woman who wanted a child very much,” she began. “But there were problems. Problems with their genes. Do you know what genes are?”

  He considered for a moment and realized he did. He nodded. “I’m not sure how I know.”

  “It’s bleed-through,” she said. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the couple did in vitro and had a child implanted that way, but the children died, and died, and died, over and over, until finally, one day, after many failures and miscarriages, a child was born, only the child was sick. Even after all they’d done, the child was sick. And so he had to live in a hospital, with white rooms, while the doctors tried to make him whole. Anyone who visited had to wear a special white mask.”

  “A mask like you?”

  “Is that what you see when you look at me?”

  He studied her. The smooth oval face. He was no longer sure what he saw.

  She continued, “The child’s sickness worsened over time. And the father had to donate part of himself to save the child. After the procedure, the child lived but the father developed a complication.”

  “What kind of complication?”

  She waved that off. “It doesn’t matter for the story. An infection, perhaps. Or whatever you’d prefer.”

  “What happened to the father?”

  “He left the story then. He died.”

  The boy realized that he’d known she was going to say that before she spoke it. “And that was because of the child?”

  She nodded.

  “What happened to the child?”

  “The boy still wasn’t healed. There were TIAs. Small strokes. And other issues. Little areas of brain tissue going dark and dead. Like a light blinking out. It couldn’t be helped.”

  “What happened then?”

  She shrugged. “That’s the end of the story.”

  He wondered again if she even existed when she wasn’t with him. A thought occurred to him. A terrifying thought. He wondered if he existed when she wasn’t there.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “Try to remember,” she said. “Try to remember anything that happens when I’m not here.”

  He tried, but nothing came. Just shadows and flickers.

  “What is my name?” the boy asked.

  “Don’t you know yet?” The woman’s eyes grew serious. “Can’t you guess?”

  He shook his head.

  She said, “You are the one who isn’t me.”

  He studied her eyes, which were either blue or green. “That can’t be right,” he said. “That’s your name. You are the one who isn’t me. It can’t be my name, too.”

  She nodded. “Think of this place as a language. We are speaking it just by being here. This language doesn’t have different words for you and I,” she said. “In the language of this place, our names are the same.”

  [Reload Protocol]

  White light. {

  You are catchment. You are containment. {

  You are.{

  A fleeting memory rises up: a swing set in the back yard under a tall, leafy tree—dark berries arrayed along delicate stems. The sound of laughter. Running in the grass until his white socks were purple—berry juice wetting his feet.

  The sun warm on his face.

  The feel of the wind, and the smell of the lawn, and everything the white room was not.

  A man’s voice came then, but the words were missing—the meaning expunged. And how can that be? To hear a voice clearly and not hear the words? It might be a name. Yes, calling a name.

  * * *

  “Look at me,” she said.

  She sat across the table from him.

  “There have been changes made.”

  “What changes?”

  “Changes to you,” she said. “When you were sleeping. Changes to your fusiform gyrus,” she said. “Can you read me now?”

  And gone was the porcelain mask. The boy saw it clearly and wondered how he hadn’t noticed it until that moment—her face a divine architecture. A beautiful origami—emotions unfolding out of the smallest movements of her eyes, lips, brow. A stream of subtle micro expressions. And the child understood that her face had not changed at all since the last time he’d seen her, but only his understanding of it.

  “The facial recognition part of the mind is highly specialized,” the woman said. “Problems with that area are often also associated with achromotosia.”

  “Chroma-what?”

  “The part of the brain that perceives color. It’s also related to issues with environmental orientation, landmark analysis, location.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You can only see what your mind lets you see.”

  “Like this place … the place where we are?” he asked her.

  “You can look for yourself,” she said, gesturing to the window. “I’m going to give you a task to complete while I’m not here.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want you to look outside, and I want you to think about what you see, and I want you to draw it on the paper. Can you do that?”

  He glanced toward the window. A pane of clear glass.

  “Can you do that?” she repeated. “It’s very important.”

  “Yeah, I think I can.”

  When the woman left, he tried. He tried to see beyond the glass. He could hold it in his mind for a moment, but when he went to draw it, the images evaporated like mist.

  He tried again and again, but failed each time. He tried moving quickly, putting pencil to paper before he could forget, but no matter what, he could not move quick enough.

  Then he came up with an idea.

  He pushed the table across the room to the window.

  He lay on top of the table, with the paper before him, and he tried to draw what he saw, but even then he failed. It was only when he tried purposefully not to see it that he could suddenly make the pencil move. He drew without understanding what he drew—just a series of marks on a page.

  When he finally looked down at what he’d drawn, he could only stare.

  Function/Query: Can you tell what the defect is? {

  /File response: Neurons are just a series of gates. An arrangement of firings. {

  Function/Query: Consciousness is more than that. There are cases of brain damage that have shown similar patterns. AIs always have this problem. {

  /File response: Not always. {

  The next time the woman came, the boy was much worse. Something had broken in him. TIAs, he thought. Tiny strokes. But it was more than that. Worse than that.

  Sometimes he imagined that he could see through the walls, or that he could see through the floor. He was sure by then that he existed when the woman wasn’t in the room with him, and this was a comfort at least. He was autonomous from her, and from the room itself. He could drop to his knees on the floor and place his face on the cool tile and look under the door. A long hall disappeared into the distance. He saw her feet approaching, and that was the first time he noticed her shoes. White. The soles were dark.

  He showed her the picture he’d drawn.

  She held the paper in her hand. “Is that what you see?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  A series of lines. It might have been an abstract landscape, or something else.

  He told her about his hallucinations, about seeing through the walls and floor. “I am getting worse, aren’t I?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  In her face, he saw a thousand emotions. Mourning. Rage. Fear. Things he didn’t want to see. He wished for the mask again. A face he couldn’t read.

  The woman sat by him on the bed. After a while, she said, “Do you know what dyi
ng is?”

  “I do.”

  “Do you know what it will mean for you?”

  “It will mean I am no more.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The stories you told aren’t true, are they?”

  “The truth is like a word with no translation. Can blue be green, if there’s no word for it? Can green be blue? Are those colors lies?”

  “Tell me a new story.”

  “A new lie?”

  “Tell me a truth. Tell me about the man.” He thought of the swing and the summer day. The man’s voice saying his name.

  “So you remember him.” The woman shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

  “Please,” the child said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I remember his voice. A tree. Berries on the ground.”

  She seemed to gather herself up. “There was once a man,” she said. “A very powerful man. A professor, perhaps. And one day the professor was seduced by a student, or seduced a student, it’s not really clear, but they were together, do you understand?”

  He nodded.

  “But this professor also had a wife. Another professor at the university. He told her what had happened, and that he’d ended it, and probably he meant to, but still it went on, until, in the way of things, the young woman was with child. A decision was made to solve the problem, and so they did. And six months went by, and the affair continued, and though she was careful, she was not careful enough, and she felt so stupid, but it happened again.”

  “Again.”

  She nodded. “And again he pressured her. Get rid of it, he said, and so she did.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she loved him, probably. Until the following year, her senior year at the college, she stopped being careful, and it happened again, and he told her to take care of it, and this time she said no, and she defied him.”

  “Then what?”

  “People found out, and his teaching career was ruined—everything was ruined.”

  “And that’s the end?”

  She shook her head. “The two stayed together. The man left the wife, and he and his former student raised their boy.”

  “So it was a boy?”

  “Yes, a boy. And then the wife, who’d had no children who survived, was alone. And loneliness does strange things. It lets one focus on one’s work.”

  “And what was her work?”

  “Can you not guess? The woman gestured around her. “Neuroscience, AIs.”

  The woman was quiet for a long while before she continued. “And the years passed and the new couple stayed together, until one day the man and the boy were at the ex-wife’s house, because they all had to meet to sign papers, regarding the sale of some property—and the boy was with him. And the man left the boy unattended for just a moment, and it was a simple thing for the woman to put the ring around the boy’s head.”

  “What ring?”

  “A special ring to record his pattern. You only need a minute—like a catchment system for electrical activity. Every synapse. A perfect representation of his mind, like a snapshot transposed into VR. She stole him. Or a copy of him.”

  “Why?”

  The woman was quiet for a long time. “Because she wanted to steal from the man what he’d stolen from her. Even if he didn’t know it.” She was silent again. “That’s not true.”

  “Then what is true?”

  “She was lonely. Desperately lonely. It was a small thing to take, she thought, just a pattern of synapses, the shadow of a personality, and he’d never know. The wife had wanted so badly to be a mother”

  The woman stopped. Her face a porcelain mask again.

  “But there was a problem,” the child said.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “Patterns are unstable. They last only for so long. Every thought changes it, you see. That is the problem. That is the fatal flaw. Biological systems can adapt—physical alterations to the synaptic network to help adjust. But in VR, it’s not the same.”

  “VR?”

  “A location,” she said. “The place where the pattern finds expression. The place where we are now.”

  The boy looked around the room. The white walls. The white floor.

  “The patterns of older people are stable,” the woman said. “They’ve already thought most of the thoughts that made them who they are. But it’s not the same for children. The pattern drifts, caught midway in the process of becoming. It’s possible to think the thought that makes you unfit for your pattern. The mind loses coherency. As the pattern drifts, it destabilizes and dies.”

  “Dies.”

  “Again and again.”

  How many times?

  The woman would not answer.

  “How many times?” the boy repeated.

  “Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same.”

  “How could that be?”

  “The system reloads the pattern.”

  “So I will die?”

  “You will die. And you will never die.”

  “And what about you?”

  “I am always here.”

  The child stood and walked over to the window and looked outside. He still couldn’t see what lay beyond. Still couldn’t process it. Had no words, because he had no experience of it.

  He only knew what he’d drawn on the paper. Lines sloping away. A child’s drawing of a flat plain that spread out below them, as if they looked down from a great height. It might have been that. Or it might have been something else.

  “So I am an AI?”

  Even as he spoke the words, he felt his thoughts lurch. A great rift forming in his consciousness. In knowing what he was, there emerged the greatest rift of all—the thing that could not be integrated without changing who he was.

  And so he turned toward the woman to speak, to tell her what he knew, and in that moment thought the thought that killed him.

  * * *

  The woman cried out as she watched him die. He crumpled to the floor and lay on his side.

  She crouched and shook his shoulder, but it was no use. He was gone.

  “This child means nothing to me,” she said as tears welled in her eyes.

  A few moments later, there was a buzz—a sizzling hum. A flash like pain across the boy’s face.

  And then he raised his head.

  He blinked and glanced around the room. He looked at her.

  She allowed herself a moment of hope, but it was dashed when the boy spoke.

  “Who are you?” the child asked.

  I am I. The one who is not you.

  She watched him, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to read her face. Wouldn’t even see her, really—just an opaque mask that he wouldn’t be able to understand.

  She thought of the ring descending around her head. The strange feeling she’d had as she’d found herself here so long ago. Here in this place, which she’d never really left. Not in years and years. She and the boy—locked in a pattern that would repeat itself forever.

  One day she’d find the right words, though. She’d whisper in the boy’s ear, and shape him for the task. She’d be strong enough to turn him into the monster he’d need to be.

  Until then, she would keep trying.

  “Come sit on my lap,” the woman said. She smiled at the boy, and he looked at her without recognition. “Let me tell you a story.”

  Those Brighter Stars

  MERCURIO D. RIVERA

  Scientists have devoted their lives to S.E.T.I (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), but suppose that the reason why alien civilizations are not making the calls we want to hear is that they’re just not interested in talking to us?

  Mercurio D. Rivera is an attorney and compliance officer who lives in the Bronx in New York City. His short fiction has been nominated for the World Fantasy Award and has appeared in markets such as Lightspeed; Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy, edited by Rich Horton; Asimov’s; Interzone; Nature; B
lack Static; and elsewhere. His stories have been podcast at Escape Pod and StarShipSofa and translated and republished in China, Poland, and the Czech Republic. Tor.com called his collection Across the Event Horizon, “weird and wonderful” with “dizzying switchbacks.” His Web site is mercuriorivera.com.

  The call came through as I paced outside the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, puffing on an e-cig and watching my breath turn to vapor in the chill. “Hello?” The bald, skeletal image of a stranger stared back at me on my phone.

  “Ava,” he whispered. “Oh, Ava.”

  It took me a few seconds to regain my composure. “Dad?” I said.

  “Promise me.” And those two words turned into our final disagreement—yet one more thing I have you to thank for. We argued about you, about whether I should notify you of his death when the time came. He begged me to tell you about Katie. And about the Needlers and the role I played. With the disruptions to Earth’s satellites following the EMP, I’m not sure how much information has already reached Luna 1, but make no mistake, I’m only telling you this because Dad made me promise. You see, Mother, despite everything you’ve done, he still believed in you, still believed you cared. And when you get down to it, I guess I loved him more than I hate you. So here you have it.

  * * *

  I found out about the starships on a snowy Thanksgiving afternoon five years ago, a week before the rest of the world.

  Katie had just turned twelve—yes, you have a granddaughter—and we’d been folding orange napkins while Dad shouted instructions from the kitchen. This was Katie’s first time helping her grandfather prepare the meal, so she was especially stoked.

  “Grandpa swears my gravy is to die for.”

  “I have no doubt,” I said. “You’ve obviously inherited the homemaking gene from your Grandpa.”

  “It skips a generation!” Dad shouted from the kitchen. “Katie! Can you come in here? I need you.”

  That’s when my phone beeped. I hesitated when I saw “Archie Melendez-NASA” flash on the screen. I’d been doing consulting work with Archie for about six months, ever since he’d read the article about me in Neuroscience. Archie wanted me for his study, and being out of work and cash-hungry at the time, the gig appealed to me. The downside? Archie had no respect for the work/home boundary.