Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2008 Edition

by Rich Horton

  Competing restaurant logos flickered on the glass balconies above, and dripped down red and green. The scent of galangal and cilantro implied sinister Cambodian thinkingpins plotting the replacement of western civilization by a rack of cognitive servers. The gleaming cylinders of fish tanks penetrated the floor to their support gear somewhere in the cellar. A grainy red dot from a laser spotter marked out a fish a diner had chosen for lunch. A net dropped through the water and scooped it out, flopping.

  A waiter in a short jacket pushed a cart stacked with covered dishes.

  “Hey!” someone shouted from overhead.

  The waiter stopped.

  “Extra tamarind!” The staffer overhead tossed down a squeeze bottle, which the waiter caught deftly. “Special order.”

  I'd been well and truly gamed—I knew it right then. I watched the waiter trot the cart out into the parking lot and disappear, presumably toward an air-conditioned bus with a well-equipped wet bar. Those B-level guys liked to hunt in style.

  I didn't see the entire plan, not yet, but I knew there had to be one. It was looking more and more like there was an unexpected B-level AI somewhere in that jungle, and that was what Chet and his crew were licensed for. Which meant that it wasn't unexpected to Chet. But if he'd known it was a perfect target for his crew, why hadn't he just gone in to get it? Why involve me and my sad sack colleagues from Gorson's Cog Repo? There had to be a reason.

  Then I remembered what I had come out here for. I bought a mobile from the pushcart vendor. I grabbed a face with a black pageboy and red lips and held it up to the leaf I suspected of being an aicon. Maybe I had jumped to conclusions a bit too quickly and had imagined the whole thing.... The leaf vibrated. I saw a flicker of lights in what suddenly seemed depths within its folds.

  The leaf writhed and tried to grab on to the face. It was so sudden I almost dropped it. Some kind of skin adhesive along the leaf's edge stuck onto my right pinkie. I shook it, disgusted, terrified, but it stuck fast, as if it had become part of my finger. It took an effort of will for me to calm down. It stopped moving after a few seconds, and a few more before it decided autumn had finally come, and dropped off my finger. I shoved the face in my pocket.

  * * * *

  The Bala Cynwyd AI had really been an Ernie.

  It had gotten upgraded to Denise after Gorson himself had lobbied the IRA with processing metrics someone in the examiner's office had found persuasive. “Denise” was pretty much an overgrown home media center hacked up by a neglectful but too-smart parent. No one likes these suburban domestic grabs, but they're bread and butter cases.

  Maybe we got overconfident. Max and I went in as screen installers and managed to slide a real media center in to replace the AI, so none of the kids in the house even noticed. They often get attached to entertainment devices that were smarter than they were. It made choosing channels so much easier.

  But as we were turning out of the cul de sac, a repair van backed out of a driveway and, ignoring our car's frantic envelope-violation signals, smashed right into us. Nothing disabling, but even saving human civilization won't keep you from serious trouble if you leave the scene of an accident. There was a lot of paperwork, and then we found that our fender had been pushed into our front tire, making our minivan undrivable.

  As Max and I tried desperately to pull it back out, a couple of cars pulled up and blocked the street. Teenagers spilled out of them. Some quick action with a 3D printer had given them giant styrofoam turbaned heads with the weary and wise face of their aiconic image. Seemed like this AI had a thing for early twenty-first-century Islamopop preachers. Not real aicons, thank goodness, and they had the merciful side effect of muffling those slogan-chanting voices—but if any of those kids suffocated, it would be our fault. Jesus!

  There was Max, wrestling with one of them. What the hell? He was supposed to be in the back of the van, disabling the AI's comm links, not mixing it up. There were half a dozen minicams out already—a lot of people didn't get out of bed without turning on a video recorder. We were popping up as windows on the screens of every easily distracted cognitive activist in the country. Most of them had nothing but time on their hands, and could hop into their augmented walkers and camel-strut on over here, to pile more workstation flab around us.

  By this time, small remote-control blimps circled above, denouncing us and our attempts to drive the human race back to a pre-post-industrial economy, disempower ethnic variants, and prohibit refraction-correcting eye surgery.

  There was only one thing to do now. I yanked Max off his victim and shook him. “Run!” I said.

  “Wha—?” He looked around, as if seeing the yelling mob around us for the first time.

  “Come on!”

  We sprinted. No one had expected us to abandon our AI so quickly, and it took them a couple of seconds to react. I jumped over a car hood, leaving dents in the soft metal. Two guys managed to grab Max, but he shrugged out of his flight jacket, leaving them with nothing but fleece and leather.

  We'd lost the AI. We were alive, we were free, but we were without income for the month. Like any bounty organization, Gorson's worked on a Paleolithic reimbursement schedule: mammoth-stuffed, or starving. Petra, our brand-new boss, wasn't happy to feel her belly rubbing up against her spine quite so soon.

  “Oh, man.” Max shook his head at his own stupidity. “Don't know what came over me. Little weasel. Couldn't stand seeing his overpriviliged protesting butt out there while I'm working to save him from the futility of his own existence, you know what I'm saying?”

  “Yeah, buddy. I do.”

  “Man, I loved that jacket. This sucks.”

  “Yeah. It does.”

  It wasn't too long after that that Chet took me out to Tonle Sap and, while stuffing his face with oversauced pork, had slipped me the location of a so-far unidentified AI that wasn't worth his company's while to go after.

  * * * *

  Maureen dropped from a tree onto me as I reentered Limpopo. She might have been able to take me out right then and there, but she miscalculated. An angled branch deflected the force of her attack and I was just knocked to the side. I rolled off the soft undergrowth and came to my feet to pursue.

  She'd already recovered. I caught a flash of flared nostrils and staring eyes. “You luddite terrorists can try to stop us, but you will fail!” Her kick caught me in the solar plexus and threw me back into the undergrowth. “You're just a taxicab for a DNA helix, you stupid meat processor!”

  She had the singularity-sucking rhetoric down so well she could spout it while showing off her aikido moves. That was fine. She was confirming a few things for me. My job now was to stay conscious long enough to do something useful with my conclusions.

  No time for pride. She'd be on me in a second.

  I tore at the nonlethal restraints on my equipment vest. Stickum, slippem, oopsy, barfem: stuff named by preschoolers, and that did things preschoolers would have found amusing. This gal moved like a martial arts expert, so I figured a vestibular disruptor like oopsy was the best choice. Extremely coordinated people have always pissed me off anyway. I flicked the galvanic grenade at her and ducked.

  She took another kick at me, but spun around and fell with a desperate wail as her vestibular system sensed random tilts and accelerations.

  Now, where the hell was she?

  She was only a few feet away—I could hear her crawling through the underbrush—but no matter which way I turned, huge elephant's-ear leaves were in my way. They pressed in, thick, fleshy, damp.

  I felt one unfurl against my cheek. I scrunched my face up like a baby refusing a spoonful of mashed peas. Like that was going to do any good. I unsquinted one eye. The leaf was covered with hairs, each three inches long. No. Not hairs. Needles, incredibly thin needles.

  “I have trouble,” I said. Petra said something in my ear, but I couldn't understand it.

  Then I remembered the face. I reached down along my side, almost dislocating my shoulder. There.
I could feel it in my pocket. I got two fingers in, almost dropped it, and managed to pull it out.

  Everything had gone silent. The leaves formed a globe around my head, shutting out all sound and light. It should have been dark, but the surface of the leaf flickered. And now I could hear a sound, like the whispering of distant voices. They were saying something immensely important, something I absolutely had to hear ... I jammed my elbow back, and got the face from the child's mobile up.

  Human beings sample, and use cheesy makeshift heuristics, because we just don't have any brain capacity. If we tried to deal with the universe full on, our craniums would explode. AIs are different. They dispose of orders of magnitude more processing power, so they can see, hear, and know everything.

  That's the theory, but shortcuts appeal, no matter how smart you are. If there's something more valuable to use your processing on, you'll do it. It's comparative advantage. Some thoughts are just more worth having. So, if these aicons were something the acolytes put on to communicate with their AIs, the mechanism wouldn't necessarily run a full analysis every time. I'd guessed the leaf responded to simple facial features like eyes, nose, eyebrows, mouth, and, like a child, like anyone, responded more strongly to the high signal-to-noise-ratio fake than the noisy, self-contradictory, and contingent real.

  It clamped on the face and, for an instant, the rest of the leaves relaxed. I dropped and twisted, then elbow-crawled through the underbrush, following the trail of broken stems left by the redhead. Behind me, leaves rustled as they missed further confirming data, and failed to find cranial nerves, or chakras, or acupuncture meridians, or whatever it was they were looking for.

  She was on the ground, minimizing the need for balance. And the disruption was temporary. She'd be on her feet in less than a minute. I crawled toward her and got a hand on her foot.

  “Please comply,” I managed to groan. “This is just a routine security operation. No ideological purification required....”

  She twisted away and kicked me in the head. Fortunately her gum boots softened the hit. I sucked muck but didn't lose my grip. I crawled forward onto her.

  “You don't understand.” Maureen was near tears. “You're going to break the Gardener down into processing units and use her to ... manage an oil refinery, or something.”

  “Hey, it's relaxing work. I hear it's kind of like being a bartender. Surprisingly high job satisfaction ratings, when you look at the numbers—”

  “The Gardener is an artist, not a piece of iron-age industrial control apparatus! You're not getting her. She's staying free.”

  A few inches farther and I could restrain her—a thick vine slipped off the tree that had been holding it up and fell across my shoulders. The damn thing was heavier than it looked. I tried to shrug it off, but it pushed down harder. By the time I realized what it was up to it had braced itself against some huge roots on one side and an irrigation pipe on the other, and pinned me to the ground. I dug my hips into the dirt and tried to squeeze out under it. Its pressure increased.

  I tore holes in the soft soil, but didn't move an inch. I was having trouble breathing. Maureen slipped out of my grasp and disappeared ... back up the tree, it seemed.

  I didn't care about that anymore. I was really feeling the lack of oxygen by this point. My vision was contracting, and I could no longer see anything out to the sides.

  What had led me to this miserable situation? It might just have been the oxygen deprivation, but as I gasped for breath, I remembered something.

  After our dinner, Chet had slapped me on the shoulder and said. “Hey, Taibo, if you ever run into any trouble, be sure to call me. I value your contribution, you know that. Whatever happens, it will be worth your while.”

  It hadn't made any sense when I thought about it, but it had been perfectly fine as part of the flow of flattery and moral support that Chet had been offering me. He'd told me that I could still make some money, if less than I had hoped, by calling him and his team in. Great guy, Chet. I hoped I'd live to thank him.

  “Hey, man, what you doing on the floor?” Max stood over me, vaguely puzzled.

  I tried to talk, but now there really was nothing in my lungs. I tried to point.

  “What, this fall on you?” He yanked at it, grunted when it wouldn't move. “You get yourself in another mess, man? Sheesh. Petra's scrubbing the mission. You hear that? Whole thing's a big botch. I can't use any of my gear now. I could lose my license, you know that? Man. I need it. Car needs a new transmission, and there's a frickin’ colony of squirrels in my kitchen exhaust fan. I try to chop ‘em up with the blades, but they just dance around ‘em. Gotta get pest control in there. Those guys cost.”

  So that was it. The last thing I would ever hear would be Max bitching about his household budget.

  “Just a second, man.” He stepped away, then reappeared, holding a shovel. He jammed it under the root and levered. The pressure on my chest lessened enough for me to catch a breath, but not enough for me to get out. He grunted and dropped his weight on the handle. I was able to scrabble out just before the handle snapped and the vine fell back down.

  I rolled onto my back. “What's going on, Max?” I asked, as soon as I got my breath back.

  “Ah, a big screwup. Not your fault man, you just got bad information. Happens. Happens to everyone.”

  “Gee, thanks for being so understanding.”

  My angry tone startled him. “Hey, man, I just rescued you. What are you getting so pissy about?”

  “You knew this thing was a B-level AI when we came in here.”

  “What? No, man, I—”

  I grabbed his shirt. “I shot my mouth off about getting a tip from my buddy Chet. And you knew it was a setup. Right away you knew he wasn't about to be giving me anything valuable without getting something in return.”

  “Well, man, you guys do have this dysfunctional relationship. I don't know why you hang with him.”

  I hung with him because he always bought dinner and because he managed to imply that he thought I was too smart to still be stuck with a one-bedroom apartment near an all-night convenience store and grad-school furniture with beer-can rings on top of the bookcases, without actually ever promising to give me any help in moving up. The information about this clean was the first real thing he'd ever given me.

  “That's why you were carrying all that gear,” I said. “You thought you'd take on a B-level AI with a couple of satchel charges and an electromagnetic pulse grenade? Are you crazy?”

  He had the grace to look shamefaced. “That damn adjustable-rate mortgage is eating me alive. I bought at the top of the market ... so I'm an idiot. But, yeah, I wasn't sure what was going on, but I knew there was money in it.”

  “But I still don't get it,” I said. “Why did Chet give me that information in the first place? What does he get out of it?”

  “I can tell you that,” Petra said above us.

  Both Max and I jerked. I sat up, trying to squeegee some of the mud off my clothes with my hands, and he put what was left of the shovel aside, as if it was a weapon that violated regulations.

  She sat down on a fallen mahogany log. She was my boss, and as a result I didn't particularly like her, but right now she looked young and bony, and as much in the crap as Max and I were.

  “Do you think we're the only ones with money problems?” she said.

  “Hell, things are tough all over,” Max said. “We know that. So what's their game here? Why was Chet setting up poor Taibo?”

  Great. That's the identity I'd been looking for: “Poor Taibo.”

  “Because they're up against it too! They come off smooth, confident, world-beating ... believe me, I know. I smelled it, up there. Beagle & Charlevoix. Great parties, champagne on ice in your hotel room, all that stuff. What was not to like about that? After all, we had a trade secret. Someone in Research had figured out how to turn aicons into one-way trackers. You could detect the AI, while it had no data flow back. Worked great in a couple of maj
or cases. The AIs never knew they were being bugged by their own aicons.

  “But now ... there are too many teams—trained teams, full of cog sci Ph.D.s, anthropologists, former Omega Black assault troops—chasing too few AIs and pushing margins down. Beagle & Charlevoix has monstrous overhead. Big capital investments in equipment, lots of salaried staff, nice downtown offices with wood paneling and marble desktops. They're just as hungry as we are. Hungrier, ‘cause their body is bigger. And they're not meeting their bonding numbers. No one knows that yet, but they couldn't credibly bid on a class B assault. They've been doing Cs recently. Colleen over in Lehigh, and Cornelius way off in Wheeling. They didn't publicize it. Full dress operations, using full staff, just to keep everyone busy—I doubt they made much back, if anything.”

  Petra had burned out at the company. Personality conflicts, I'd heard. That didn't surprise me.

  “But, like anyone else, if they're called in on a job that's going wrong, the bonding requirement is lifted, and the reinsurance is picked up by the Labor Department. So you, my friend, were set up.” She pushed hair off her forehead. “And there's nothing we can do about it. Chet probably encouraged you to call him—”

  “If anything went wrong,” I completed. “Yes. I have his card in my pocket.”

  “Very nice of him to offer,” she said. “I think you should punch him up.”

  “No way! No way!” Max was furious. “We can take this one, man. We got it on the run already. You're ready, ain't you, girl? Ready to blow the floor. I've got the gear. It's hot pursuit. Two can play that ‘got the cognitive level’ game. We got the proper documentation, right? A good-faith Donald. But it's trying to get away. Escape! If we grab it while it's trying to get away, we're totally legit. Oh, maybe a couple of fines here and there, but nothing that will cut too far into our profits. We'll just let our accountants figure out what line of which schedule those expenses go on.”