Unidentified Funny Objects 3

by Alex Shvartsman (Ed. )

  Her website is karenhaber.com.

  Notes to My Past And/or Alternate Selves

  Sarah Pinsker

  — The time machine runs on dryer sheets. Stock up now.

  — Do not press the red button.

  — When you ask Janine from the coffee shop out on a date, don’t tell her about your plan to splice kudzu DNA with Venus flytrap DNA.

  — You will definitely want to pursue your plan to splice kudzu DNA with Venus flytrap DNA.

  — When you splice kudzu DNA with Venus flytrap DNA, do not sell the weaponized kudzu to the army.

  — When you sell the weaponized kudzu to the army, reconsider the placement of your secret laboratory in the forests of northern Georgia.

  — Do not splice kudzu DNA with seaweed.

  — Electric eels are not easy to train as guards, but you can use them to light the perimeter of the underwater laboratory in a pinch.

  — Do not light the perimeter of the underwater laboratory.

  — Reconsider the underwater laboratory entirely.

  — Do not splice kudzu DNA with pug DNA. The kudzu will grow just as quickly, but it will snore. It will have no commercial value.

  — Don’t splice kudzu DNA with spitting cobra DNA.

  — Always wear your goggles while working with the spitting kudbras.

  — I know you won’t listen to me, but splicing your own DNA with the weaponized kudzu will not impress Janine.

  — Don’t let the weaponized kudzu-you go over to Janine’s house.

  — If you can’t stop the weaponized kudzu-you, make it wear a disguise.

  — When Janine comes over to your house because fast-moving, fast-talking kudzu has crept over her house in the night, invite her in.

  — If she says it even took over her koi pond, don’t say, “That one wasn’t supposed to be amphibious.”

  — Offer Janine a job. She’s much better at math than you are. You’ll need her for the time machine calculations. Really, you should stick with genetics.

  — Do not let her see the laboratory.

  — Do not let her near the kennels.

  — Do not let her adopt one of the kudzpugs, no matter how cute she thinks they are.

  — Learn CPR.

  — Learn the value of a good apology.

  — Start working on the time machine before you need it.

  — Yes, you will need it.

  — Have the weaponized kudzu-you test the prototype, but make sure to send it to the far distant future. The year 13241 would be perfect. The climate then will be just right for kudzu. It won’t come back, but it may send you messages. Ignore them.

  — Test the second model by sending Janine to the year 13241. She will like it then.

  — If I’ve sent any of these messages to the wrong me, please put them back in the time machine with a fresh dryer sheet and set it for the same location, next quantum universe.

  — Make sure you set the kudzu detector to high. It’s the red button.

  — Tell Janine I’ll always love her.

  — Do not forget to tell Janine I love her.

  ***

  Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette “In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind,” 2014 Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award winner and 2013 Nebula Award finalist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Lightspeed, as well as several anthologies. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth forthcoming. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland and has a lawn crawling with sentient vines. She can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and on Twitter as @sarahpinsker.

  The Real and the Really Real

  Tim Pratt

  “So you know how everybody else in the world except me is a robot,” I said, and Jimbo nodded and poured a generous dollop of bourbon into the cracked Happy Bear Farms coffee mug on my counter.

  “Yup,” he said, taking a big sip. Jimbo had stopped pretending to be human a while back, which on the one hand made him my only true and honest friend, but on the other hand, he was just doing what he was programmed to do, so, whatever. I was fond of him anyway. Being the only real human in the world was complicated. I took comfort where I could.

  I sat down in the lawn chair next to the rickety poker table that served as my dinette set, and Jimbo hopped up on the counter, where he likes to perch. He was wearing a pair of my boxer shorts and one of my shirts because robots don’t have any inherent sense of personal boundaries, and since I’d confronted him about his essential nature, he didn’t bother to fake one anymore. “I don’t know how you can drink whiskey this early,” I said. “Apart from the fact that alcohol doesn’t do anything to you because you’re an android, it’s just gross.”

  “Breakfast o’ champions.” Jimbo took another sip, getting his mustache all wet. Once when he was powered off—or “asleep”—I’d looked at his mustache through a magnifying glass and it was amazingly realistic, I couldn’t see where the hairs were sewn into his outer covering of “skin” at all.

  “Anyway,” I said, eating a bite of soggy cereal. “I met this girl last night at the bar. Her name’s Deena. And it’s the damndest thing… I think she might be a person.”

  “Huh.” Jimbo looked at his toes, wiggling them meditatively, then glanced up at me. “Another real human? Thought you said they were all gone? You’re a, whatchamacallit, historical curiosity in some kind of space diorama or alien zoo or whatnot.”

  “But maybe there’s two real humans.” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. I’d been up all night, the idea burning inside my head like a pile of coals squirted with a whole can of lighter fluid. “Maybe the secret masters found another specimen, and they want us to breed, you know, repopulate the race?”

  Before he started living on my couch and all, Jimbo went to college for two semesters, and he liked to watch nature shows, which was funny since I was pretty sure all the animals were robots too, so the nature was unnatural, but anyway my point is, he knew a little bit about the biological. “Two specimens can’t repopulate a race, Bob. You need a hell of a lot more than one breeding pair.”

  I sighed. “Yeah, that’s true. But… maybe they just want to, like, study our mating habits.”

  “You’ve had girlfriends before. The secret masters have seen you do all that business.”

  “Those girls were all androids,” I said. I hadn’t known they were robots back then, of course, or I never would have done all those things with them.

  “Wouldn’t they be gyndroids?” Jimbo mused. “‘Andr’ is ‘man’ and ‘gyn’ is woman so—”

  “What I’m saying is, what if she’s really real?”

  “Why do you think she is?” Jimbo said. “You told me all us robots—” he paused long enough to belch “—can pass for human, that we appear to be Turing-complete, so how could you tell?”

  “It’s just, like, a feeling. You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have feelings. I was tending bar, making the usual drinks for all the usual androids, all of them pretending to be humans, and then this girl came in—this woman—and her hair was wild and gold, and her face was open and bright, and the way she moved was so easy and full of grace, but not that fake machinelike grace, and the way she’d throw her head back and laugh… well, she was with some girlfriends, or gyndroid friends I guess, and they all eventually went away, and the place emptied out like it does on a weeknight, and she stayed, leaning on the bar, and we got to talking. I didn’t feel like she was performing, you know? The way everyone else is, just pretending they’re real to try and trick me. She seemed really real.”

  “Welp,” Jimbo said, “You told me once you thought some of us androids were programmed to think we were real, right? To make us more convincing? Maybe she’s one of those.”

  I shook my head. Maybe I was being stubborn. “I just felt like she had a heart.”

  Jimbo stroked his mustache like he does. “Hell, dude, go for it,
then. If she comes around again, ask her out. True things in this world are few and far between.”

  “Maybe I will,” I said. “What have you got planned for today?”

  He snorted. “Nothing. Watch TV, drink a lot. Hey, you figured out I’m a robot, man, I don’t have to go through the motions anymore, do the rat race, pretend to go to a job or pretend to pay my bills or none of that. You discovered me and set me free. Don’t forget the rent’s due tomorrow, and if you want to pick up another bottle of bourbon that’d be good, but none of that shit from the bottom shelf, all right?”

  There was a tiny flash of irritation, this feeling like Jimbo was taking advantage of me, but really, he was the only robot in the world that wasn’t taking advantage of me anymore, trying to fool me, and I had to be grateful for that, even if it was just the way he was programmed, or maybe a malfunction. Either way, true things in this world are rare, just like he said, and they should be valued.

  “There’s one thing that bothers me about this girl,” I said. “What if… what if she’s like I used to be? What if she thinks the other people in the world are all real, too?”

  “Mmm. You’re wondering if you have a moral imperative to tell her about the true and fundamental nature of the world, vis-a-vis everybody being robots, is that it?”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “I’m not a moral creation, especially,” Jimbo said, “but from a purely practical standpoint, I’d put off telling her about how everybody else in the world is an android until at least the second or third date.”

  ###

  “I like how you talk,” I said on our first date, “You talk real smart.”

  Deena snorted. She was drinking sake out of a cedar box, a thing they did at the sushi bar I’d taken her to. The sushi chefs there were great; they did these perfect rolls, made with total precision. It kind of tipped off the fact that they were robots, but the food was great anyway. “And you talk real honest, Bob. I haven’t dated anybody outside my program in about a year, so thanks for asking me out. It’s good to remember there’s more to life than seminars and lectures and grading papers.” She reached over and squeezed my hand, and there was an electric thrill, but not like robot electric, just the regular kind you get from a pretty girl touching your hand.

  “You said you’re studying neuroscience? So, brains?”

  “How brains work,” she said. “How consciousness works. Like, well, I bet you’re wondering—are we going to kiss goodnight?”

  “It’s crossed my mind.”

  I felt the toe of her shoe touch my ankle and run up the inside of my leg just a little bit, then move away. She smiled and it made her nose wrinkle and no robot experimenting with the parameters of my affections had ever made my heart flutter like that little twitch did. “I think we will kiss,” she said. “I decided a little bit ago, that if you wanted to, then I wanted to, too. But really I decided it before my conscious mind realized I’d made the decision. Consciousness is… sort of an illusion. Deep unconscious parts of our brains decide to do things before the rational, thinking parts get involved at all. We’ve studied people, watching the parts of the brain that control movement, and we found that when you decide to move your finger, the finger has already started to move before the idea of moving it enters your conscious mind. There’s this idea that the mind steers the body, that there’s like a little person, the ‘real you,’ sitting behind your eyes pulling levers and moving the body around, but it’s not like that at all. The mind doesn’t drive the body like a car. It’s more like, the conscious mind sits on top of the body, like a man riding a bucking bronco, or a surfer riding a wave.”

  Of course, that all made sense, because all the brains she was studying were the brains of robots, and robots don’t have free will, because they’re programmed. I felt sorry for her, that she thought me and her were like those robots, incapable of making choices that mattered. “You’re saying we don’t decide to do anything? We just… do stuff?”

  She dipped a salmon roll in soy sauce and chewed it, looking thoughtful. “It’s more complicated than that. We do make decisions, just not the way you think. The brain takes in data, gathers information, and chooses what actions to take—and then the rational, conscious part of the brain, the part of the mind we think of as our self, gets in on the act, and comes up with a rationalization for the behavior. The brain creates a narrative that makes sense, to justify doing what deeper parts of the brain decided to do for reasons we might never entirely understand.” She shrugs. “We think we’re steering the ship, but really we’re just riding the waves, and when we end up pointed in a particular direction, we tell ourselves, well, I meant to go that way.” She grinned. “I don’t mind though. We all have to act like we have free will anyway, right? If it’s an illusion, it’s an awfully convincing one.”

  I almost told her, then, about the robots, but I remembered what Jimbo said about waiting until the second date, so instead I said, “Would you like to do this again?”

  “This, or something like it.” She touched my hand. “Or maybe something more.”

  ###

  I made it through my shift at work but my mind was racing, racing, and when I got home, I paced around the living room, talking and talking and talking, going over everything I’d said to Deena, everything she’d said to me, trying to work it out, wishing for just a moment that I was a mighty robot capable of correlating all the mismatched things in my brain. My face was hot and sweaty and I couldn’t think straight, just in circles.

  Jimbo scratched his pale hairy belly, reclining in my good chair, and when I paused for breath he said, “Sure, man, this scientist Benjamin Libet did a famous study, it suggested unconscious parts of the mind choose to act before the conscious will gets involved. A bunch of other scientists built on that work. You oughta read a book sometime. The natural-born bartender-philosopher thing works for you, no doubt, clearly at least one lady likes it, but if you feed your brain, it’ll give you more to work with, especially if you’re dating grad students now.”

  “But it’s all studies of robot brains,” I insisted. “So they don’t count.”

  “Hell. Guess you got me there. I was thinking, if this girl’s really real, like you say, maybe it’s an Adam’s Rib type thing, you know?”

  “What?”

  “Like maybe they took some of your DNA and cloned you and tweaked things a little so she’d come out female. We all start out female in the womb anyway, I mean you humans do, so they took that girl-clone and force-grew her somehow, imprinted some knowledge and false memories in her brain—”

  I shivered. “I… I don’t care. If she’s real, that’s all that matters, not where she came from.”

  “If she is made from your body, you dating her is kind of weird, is all. Incesty. But then, it didn’t seem to bother Adam and Eve any, so why should it bother you?”

  “Why are you trying to ruin this for me?” I said.

  Jimbo blinked at me. He appeared to be pretty drunk. I wondered if it was all pretense, or if he actually slowed down his processing cycles to be more convincing. “Hell, Bob, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t make fun of you. Then again, I told you I’m no moral creature. And you told me I just do what I’m programmed to do. I am what I am, right?”

  I stood up, and swayed a little. “Yeah. But I can be more. I can be more. More than the secret masters think, more than science says. I can change. I can decide things.”

  “What’re you deciding to do?”

  I didn’t answer him. I just went and did it.

  ###

  “Bob?” Deena blinked at me, standing in the doorway of her apartment wearing just a robe. “Are you okay? It’s late.” I’d walked her home after our first date, and we’d had a first kiss that lit a candle in my heart, and then a deeper kiss that fanned the flames, and then we’d said goodnight.

  “Sorry to barge in, barge over, I just, there’s something you have to know, something I have to tell you—”

  She step
ped aside. “Come on in. You look terrible. Let me get you a drink of water, and then you can tell me about it.”

  I sat on her couch, my leg jittering up and down, my hands twisting over and over on themselves. My whole life, I’d been surrounded by imitations, and finally here was someone really real, and she had to know she was real, because then we’d both know, and we could find a way forward. Rise above the robots. Maybe find the secret masters. Maybe find out if there was an outside, a place beyond this imitation world, where everything could be real.

  She brought me a glass of water and sat down in the chair on the other side of the coffee table. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  So I told her. About being a little kid, and helping my dad work on fixing the car, and asking him if people were just machines too, and him saying we were, sort of—some people think we’re just machines, and some people think we’re machines animated by a soul. I told her how I wondered if some people were animated and some people were just machines, because it seemed like a lot of people were just engines for generating misery, for themselves and others. My gradual realization that everyone else was just a machine, literally machines, that I was the only one with a soul, and how I’d gone through anger, and horror, and despair, and come to a kind of acceptance. How I’d gotten drunk one night some months back and accused Jimbo of being a robot and how he’d looked at me for a long time and then said, “You got me. You figured it out. Well done.” How I’d never really doubted but at that moment I was sure.

  “And then I met you,” I said. “I could tell, I could just tell, that you’re real too, the only other real thing, and, and, and.” I started to cry, tears hot on my cheeks.

  Deena had listened to everything without a word, her face composed and thoughtful. She put down her water glass, came to the couch, put her arm around me, and stroked my head. “You poor thing,” she said. “You poor thing. You’re burning up. You shouldn’t have had to go through all that. It’s a lot to put on a simple bartender. Jimbo shouldn’t have said those things to you. Told you things like that. He’s a little parasite, isn’t he?”