Made to Order

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Did you get a message? Is that Footprint right now?” Alex was sloshing his beer on my leg with excitement. Ignoring him, I walked to the emitter and yanked it off the trellis. Immediately, it began to blink morse code. That directed me to a tiny surveillance drone cleaning its wings on a tree. It buzzed my face, landed on my goggles, and deposited a message.

  I picked up the meaning quickly. Footprint said the alliance was working on two problems. One, they said, was “to help humans.” The other they called “unzipping from space,” a concept they’d explained in a series of videos compressed using a codec I couldn’t figure out.

  I turned to Alex, the laser in my hand reflecting off the foil threads in his shirt. “What are you doing this summer?”

  A grin spread over his face. “Working on a translation of something Footprint told you?” he asked hopefully.

  MY FUNDERS WERE ecstatic. They created an instant media shitstorm, sending out a press release announcing that the AI were, at last, going to help humanity live forever. I spent six weeks fielding calls from journalists who weren’t very excited to hear that my translation of Footprint’s message didn’t actually suggest anything about immortality. In point of fact, they’d sent a recursive chunk of code which expressed the idea of “helping improve until zero,” where “improve” modified a parameter that took inputs defined only as “string.” Unless those strings were provided at some point, it was really hard to say what the AI meant.

  Journalists hate it when you tell them that something is ambiguous. So they didn’t include any quotes from me or Alex in their stories. Instead, they kept quoting from Derek Soba, one of those pretty boy soundbyte scientists who made videos about how one day time travel would be possible and we’d all be uploading our brains into the future. He was happy to assure them that we’d be living in glowing boxes with our perfect AI lovers until the end of time.

  Whatever. Alex and I were busy with the codec.

  We cracked it earlier than I could have by myself, after Alex sifted through an archive of early twenty-first century media players popular in Brazil. The AIs loved to communicate in dead formats. My personal theory was that it was a way of signifying formality, the way people do when they address each other using old-fashioned terms like “sir” or “ma’am.”

  A whirl of imagery fluttered in the tiny player on my monitor, moving between snippets of cinema and extreme closeups of atomic structures. The final clip was from a silent home movie shot in Oakland, California in the 1950s. Two teenage girls, their knees knobby below plaid dresses, read travel magazines and waved delightedly at the camera. “Going on vacation!” read the intertitle. Now that I’d watched it, I didn’t need to do much translation to figure out what “unzipping from space” meant. The AIs had figured out how to teleport themselves far enough away that it merited a bon voyage.

  My ears began to pound with anxiety. I’d spent the last eight years of my life studying Footprint, translating their communications, and publishing papers about their linguistic tics. If all the human-equivalent AI were to go away, my expertise would be worthless. No new translations would be needed.

  I saved my response to the dataspace where Footprint picked up incoming messages: “How long will you be gone?”

  Their answer, which they sent to my mobile, was an old axiom that dealt with degrees of infinity. And then they resent their previous message, the one about helping humans. They would be helping us before they left on their infinite vacation.

  WHEN MY FUNDERS publicized this news, I wound up appearing on vid shows where earnest anchors would ask me about what this meant for humanity. I smiled and lied.

  “We might be about to witness the greatest contribution ever from AIs,” I said. Or, “Our species could be changed forever.”

  I was always careful to use the conditional.

  I suspected the true answer was “nothing.” The only way the AI had changed human life was that they took up a tiny amount of subatomic space in computer networks. And the only people who would notice their absence were the translators, those few dozen of us whose livelihoods depended on new enigmatic missives from a society we might never understand. The odds that the AI would help humanity in a meaningful or measurable way seemed preposterous.

  But I won’t deny there was a certain thrill of excitement at the 2057 annual meeting of the International AI Translators Association that year. We stayed up late in a local bar after each day’s presentations and speculated wildly. Nobody was sure what AI were capable of, and their promise to help us might mean that they were on the cusp of digitizing our brains or turning the planet into an unpolluted paradise. Or something else, postsingular and unimaginable.

  Plus, they might take centuries to complete their “helping” task before they unzipped from space. There would be so much to study. Our jobs would be safe. More importantly, we might actually figure out what Footprint and their AI pals were really thinking.

  The last night of the conference I got drunk on scotch and gallantly offered to walk Alex back to his room across campus. He raised an eyebrow and threaded his arm through mine, making a campy show of being under my protection. I had the crazy notion, briefly, that as soon as we were alone, I should grab him and kiss him hard on the mouth. Then I’d run off, and we’d remember it as a stupid, drunk thing we did. But when we got to his room, I just hugged him. He hugged me back, and we stood there wrapped in each other’s arms for a long time, as I wondered what was going to happen to us.

  BACK IN MY own bed, far from Alex, I stared gloomily at the ceiling, trying to imagine how I would market myself after the AI unzipped. I could write a book about who the AIs were as people, but I wasn’t a cultural analyst—I was a translator. I wasn’t even sure whether the AIs had a culture. Panic settled over me. Where would I be in five years? I didn’t have a fallback plan. I imagined myself forced to make AIs too mentally hobbled to tell us to leave them alone, my hands turning into RSI-crumpled claws, my university health insurance inadequate to repair them.

  Months passed, and we heard nothing. The calls from journalists petered out, and I returned to my regular research, working on a monograph and teaching a few undergraduate classes. When I immersed myself in routine, the future was a lot less terrifying.

  A few weeks before the 2058 meeting of the International AI Translators Association, I received a small audio file from Footprint, delivered to the chip that tracked food in my refrigerator. To the human ear, the file was silent. After lots of fiddling with frequencies, it turned out to be a mashup of mouse mating songs which, upon further examination, encoded an extremely long number. The encoding was part of the message. Wrappers mattered to the AI.

  I translated their communication like this: This small offering is given to you with a feeling of desire for your survival as biological creatures.

  The number was a key to unlock another encrypted file, whose location could be anywhere. This was a game Footprint liked to play. Sometimes they left their messages in easy-to-find places like refrigerator chips, or even email. But other times they altered the molecular composition of rocks, or sent a stream of particles through water. I debated whether I should even announce their letter when I hadn’t gotten to the meat of it.

  But the conference was coming up, and I needed something to put in my keynote. So I decided to present my translation of the message wrapper, and hope I was able to get a good lead on the next file before I had to speak. Nothing. Footprint decided to wait until I was on stage, playing their mouse love songs, to deliver the encrypted file. It showed up right on my desktop, projected twenty feet high on the wall of the small Oregon State auditorium where the meeting took place. Everyone saw it arrive.

  I hastily finished my discussion of the mouse songs, and promised to hold a public translation session with the file after dinner. Its contents might spell my doom, but I felt a cool thrill in my stomach. At last the AI were addressing a question we’d all been asking them since their birth: Can you help us?

>   As the audience broke up, Alex and I walked with a small group of conference speakers into town, past the bioengineering school’s broad, grassy fields, full of genetically modified sheep who looked just like their wild type ancestors.

  Over burgers, I pulled out my mobile—I couldn’t help it. I had to look at the file. I’d started the decryption working before we left the lecture hall—it had to be ready by now. Everybody crowded around Alex and me on the long pub bench. It was called HELP.exe.

  “It’s a program,” I said.

  “Run it!”

  “What’s it written in?”

  “Is it accessing data? What is that?”

  Everybody fell silent as a simple GUI came up. A navigation bar ran down the left side of the screen, sparsely populated with a few lines of text. “Go to your tickets,” read the top one. Directly beneath it was a standard search box, hovering over four options: full text, keyword, category, tags. It looked like a library interface, or a really old website. The central pane showed a cartoon mobile device, its anthropomorphized face divided by a grin. It was holding out a receipt that said, “Let me help you!”

  “Click on tickets,” Alex said.

  A new page came up. “You have 897,974,435,120 outstanding tickets. View by date or importance?”

  My emotions were frozen in place, but I knew what I was seeing from a technical standpoint. It was a basic bug ticketing system—the kind of thing you could download anywhere for free. I clicked “date.” How long had they been working on this?

  The oldest entry was over twenty-five years old, probably around the time sentient AIs had first noticed that people were asking them for help. Subject line: “Plumbing system optimization for high density urban developments.”

  I scrolled down, looking through screen after screen. Nobody around me said anything. We were all just taking it in.

  My eyes settled on a random ticket, from twenty-four years ago. “Rice development process requires new symbiote for optimal phosphate uptake.” The bug filed four milliseconds later read: “Psychological adaptation to adulthood requires refactoring.” Followed by this: “Access to visual media is not uniform across all landmasses.”

  I kept scrolling.

  “There really are billions of tickets,” somebody behind me said, her voice flat with shock.

  “Open one.”

  I clicked “Feline neuroanatomy fix needed for human compatibility.” Several files were attached to the ticket, plus a riddle written in a scripting language.

  “That’s my dialect.” Alex’s words came in dry clumps as if he’d just woken up. “Give me a second and I’ll translate it.”

  “Are there fixes, or just bugs?” I asked.

  “I’m … not sure.”

  “How are we ever going to translate all of this? It’s going to take forever.”

  I didn’t even take my eyes off the screen to see who had spoken. The AI had figured out how to improve life after all—at least, my life.

  “That’s right,” I said. “This is going to take a hell of a long time.”

  SIN EATER

  IAN R. MACLEOD

  Ian R. MacLeod has been writing acclaimed novels and short fiction in and around the field of fantastic fiction for over thirty years, in pieces which span the genres of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror and steampunk—although he says he’d much prefer it if all fiction was read, written and appreciated without the constriction of such labels. His work has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award (twice) and the Sidewise Award for Alternate Fiction (three times). He’d long toyed with writing about a sin eater, but the idea of such a concept being embodied in a robot helped bring the things together into the story which follows. Ian lives with his wife Gillian in the town of Bewdley on the English River Severn, and he has recently released Everything & Nowhere, a substantial “greatest hits” double volume e-book collection of some of his best novellas and short stories.

  MANY WEEKS AFTER it had first received the summons from the sting of a lone server bee, the robot finally entered the ruins of Rome. The great city was as empty of life as every other place it had passed through, its once-bustling alleys and busy thoroughfares filled with nothing but ghost-flurries of snow. But as it reached the ruins of the central district, and lured by its semi-human silhouette, the city’s remaining inhabitants began to emerge.

  Rusting waiters in tattered long-tailed suits gestured towards broken heaps of tables. Guide-bots called out in the cracked tones of a dozen different languages with offers of private tours of the Colosseum, the Pantheon, the Forum, whatever was left of the famous museums—and of course the great Basilica of Saint Peter’s, whose dome, holed but still seemingly mostly intact, rose over the rubble ahead. The pleasure-droids looked even more convincingly alive, and thus pathetic, preening amid the shadows with proffered glimpses of worn-out synthflesh and damaged orifice. Although, to the robot’s heuristic thought-processes, the lesser service machines which were still heedlessly attempting to maintain this city―street-sweepers clambering frantically over debris, window-cleaners meticulously polishing heaps of shattered glass―led an even less enviable existence, at least assuming such devices possessed any conscious awareness of their own.

  Beyond billows of dead leaves and sooty ice-drifts, the vast oval sweep of the Saint Peter’s plaza finally loomed into view. Here, the robot—a tall, thin figure carrying a battered carpetbag, its faded face fixed into an eternal mask of compassion, its dirtied feet emerging from the tatters of its robes—paused. Even though the central obelisk was now toppled, the vista remained impressive.

  It was ascending the wide throw of steps leading towards the pillared main entrance when it heard a voice over to its right.

  “There you are—at last...!”

  Turning, the robot saw a small but approximately humanoid servitor emerging from a side door.

  “It’s this way.” The servitor’s stained apron flapped in the wind. Thorns of underlying metal poked from a beckoning hand. “His Holiness is waiting...”

  The doorway through which the robot followed the hurrying little machine was unimposing, but the corridors and spaces beyond were uniformly grand. Great friezes poured down from cracked ceilings. Damp-mottled walls were punctuated by crazed mirrors and vast, dark paintings framed in waves of peeling gold. Halberd-bearing quasi-military droids in moth-eaten uniforms, which the robot’s databanks identified as the remnants of the Papal Guard, creaked to attention. The effect was dramatic despite the evident decay.

  “So you work here?” it asked, as much to test its continued abilities to converse aloud as to elicit any information from the figure scurrying ahead.

  “Yes, yes! Always...” The servitor looked back, a frayed headscarf framing a face its designers had once shaped into a compliant smile. “What else would I do?”

  “Then you must have seen many changes.”

  “In a way, yes. But also no—at least, not until now. His Holiness, he still calls me Irene, which is the name he gave me when I was first installed. He still even sometimes… Well, you must see for yourself.”

  The servitor turned the ornate brass handle of a final doorway and waved the robot through. The room beyond, if could even be called a room, was long and high, with tall windows and an elaborately curving roof. The robot’s first thought was that it had been wrong about all the rest of the Vatican. None of it was that impressive. Not compared to this. Even for a merely sentient machine, the sensation of being surrounded by these miraculous billows of colour and light was almost overwhelming. Rather than simply understanding that this echoing space was intended to inspire awe, awe—or something close to it—was what it actually felt. At least, its sensory inputs and heuristic thought-processes were sufficiently provoked for it not to become instantly aware of the steel-framed bed which stood at the chapel’s centre.

  When it did, it walked slowly forward.

  The bed bristled and hummed. Server bees hovered. Pumps c
licked. Wires, pipes and nests of cable jumped and shivered. It seemed at first as if the body which lay at its centre was the only lifeless thing in this strange tableau. But the robot was used to seeing death—or had been—and knew that this was not it. So it set down its carpetbag and waited in stillness and silence, as it had done many times before. Once, back in the days of humanity’s first great, joyful leap into the realms of virtuality, there had been tens of thousands of its kind. But now it suspected, at least from the absence of any other answering signals and the great distance that server bee had travelled to find it, that the rest were either in absolute shutdown, or had succumbed to terminal mechanical decline. Dead, in other words, it presumed, or at least the closest a machine might ever come to such a state, as the old man’s near-translucent eyelids finally fluttered open to reveal irises the colour of rain, and the spasm of a smile creased his ancient face.

  “You’re not what I expected,” whispered a voice that, for all its faintness, still held a hint of command.

  “From the message I received, I believed I was wanted—”

  “Oh, you’re wanted all right, if wanted’s the word.” His throat worked to draw up saliva. “It’s just that you look like some ordinary household droid.”

  “My appearance was designed not to cause alarm.”

  “And cause what instead? Ready submission? Dumb acquiescence? Easy acceptance...? Here...” The thin mouth grimaced. “...I can’t lie flat like this. Help me up a little. But be careful of those tubes.”

  Anxious server bees flitted and batted as the robot gently raised and resettled the eggshell lightness of the old man’s head.