The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy: 2014 Edition

by Rich Horton

  They had not been popular, these men, their research considered both a dead-end and immoral. For they sought to Frankenstein, to breed life in their closed networks the way a biologist may breed tadpoles and watch them become frogs. They had the tadpoles, but as yet they had not turned into either frogs or princesses; they continued to exist only in potentia. Now they checked in, into the small hostel that would be their temporary headquarters until they could, once again, set up shop.

  The servers rested silent in their coolers, their code suspended, not living, not dead. Matt’s fingers itched to plug them in, to boot them up, to run them, to let the wild code inside mutate and fuck, split and merge and split and merge, lines of code entwining and branching, growing ever more complex and aware.

  A breeding grounds.

  The Breeding Grounds, as we’d later know them. Capitalized and all.

  The evolutionary track from which Others emerged.

  There is a poetry to evolution.

  Ol tri / oli koko, koko / olbaot, wrote the poet Bashÿ. All the trees go go, go go, everywhere. The trees he wrote of were binary trees. Lior Tirosh, in an apocryphal manuscript on the history of the Breeding Grounds, wrote, in somewhat purple prose:

  Imagine . . . a place.

  Here, there are no boundaries of physical space. Time is measured in nanoseconds, processor cycles, in MIPS and BIPS—Millions, and Billions, of Instructions Per Second.

  What space there is, is . . . constructed. There is an imaginary geography of binary trees, a topography of evolving structures, and boundaries of population samples.

  The beat of a human heart means nothing in this place. Yet in the time it takes for the beat of such a heart to happen, things drastically change. A small tribe of a so-far unpromising structure suddenly shoots to prominence, its population multiplying rapidly; or a carefully introduced mutation suddenly causes a promising structure to dwindle and disappear. Evolution is enforced, in cycle after cycle of mating, mutation, and finally selection; and structures combine, mutate, and die in the blink of a human eye.

  Achimwene, Miriam’s brother, was obsessed with Tirosh’s work, a poet and pulp writer who disappeared long before but who, like St. Cohen of the Others, kept reappearing through the centuries, here and there: fakes, clones, hoaxes, rumors: the Elvis of book collectors.

  But this is by the by.

  Ruth Cohen, incidentally, went through a religious phase and attended a girl’s yeshiva for a time in her teenage years. She had woken one night, late. Thunder streaked the sky. She blinked, trying to recall a dream she’d just had. She had been walking through the streets of Central Station and a storm raged, where the station should have been, a whirlwind that stood still even as it moved. Ruth walked toward it, drawn to it. The air was hot and humid. The storm, silent, bore within itself people frozen like mannequins, and bottles, and a minibus with the wheels still turning and frozen faces inside, glued to the windows. Ruth felt something within the storm. An intelligence, a knowing something, not human but not hostile, either. Something other. She approached it. She was barefoot, and the asphalt was warm against the soles of her feet. And the storm opened its mouth and spoke to her.

  She lay in bed trying to recall the dream. Thunder woke her. What had the storm said?

  There had been a message there, something important. Something deep and ancient: if only she could recall. . . .

  She lay there for a long time before she fell back to sleep.

  The yeshiva had not been a huge success. Ruth wanted answers, needed to understand the voice of the storm. The rabbis seemed unwilling or unable to offer that and so, for a time, Ruth tried drugs, and sex, and being young. She traveled to Thailand and Laos and studied the Way of Ogko there, which is no Way at all, and talked to monks, and bar owners, and full immersion denizens. There, in the city of Nong Khai on the banks of the Mekong river, she conched for the first time, transitioning from our own reality to the one of the Guilds of Ashkelon universe, fully immersed, deep in the substrata of the Conversation. That first time felt strange: the shell of the conch, the plastic hot, the smell of unwashed bodies who had been enmeshed inside it for too long. Then the immersion rig closing, the light gone, a cave as silent as a tomb. She was trapped, blind, helpless.

  And she transitioned.

  One moment she was blind and deaf. The next she was standing in the bright sunlight of Sisavang-3, in the lunar colony of the Guild of Cham. Impossibly tall buildings towered above her. Spaceships zipped through the air and in the moon’s orbit, while creatures of all kinds and shapes walked around. For Guilds of Ashkelon was the greatest and oldest of the games-worlds virtualities, a place more real, it was sometimes said, than reality itself.

  Ruth joined the Guild of Cham as a low ranking member, spending all her remaining Baht on hours of immersion. She joined the crew of a starship, the Fermi Paradox, and traveled the nearby Sector, exploring ancient alien ruins, encountering new species of alien games-life, trading, warring, sometimes pirating, converting games-world credit into real-world cash, her skin becoming brittle and pale from the long immersion in the coffin-like pod.

  But still she did not find whatever it was she was looking for. Only once, briefly, had she come close. She had found a holy object, a games-world talisman of great power. It was on a deserted moon in Omega Quadrant. She had come onto the surface of the moon alone. It was in a cave. The atmosphere was breathable. She did not have a helmet on. She knelt by the object and touched it and a bright flame burst into life and then she was in an Elsewhere.

  A voice spoke to her that was like the voice of the whirlwind in her dream. It spoke direct into her mind, into her wired node, it enveloped her in warmth and love: it knew her.

  She did not recall what it had said, or how it said it. When she came through she was back on her ship, the object inventoried, her credits up by a thousand points, her health and strength and shielding maxed. She had been visited by a SysOp, one of the rare, elusive Others who ran the games-worlds in the background, seldom seen, always present. They were not gods, only within the confines of the game did they have godly powers. But they were other, the only truly alien race in that entire universe—the others were either human players or NPCs, non-player characters randomly created.

  And suddenly she knew what she wanted. She wanted, achingly and clearly, to know more about Others.

  The next day she had left the Guilds of Ashkelon universe. She emerged blinking and shaking into the sunlight. She sat by the river, her muscles weak, and drank thick coffee, sweetened with condensed milk. Two days later she was in Bangkok, then on board a solar-wing plane back to Tel Aviv.

  It is inaccurate to say that the Others were born in Jerusalem, that ancient city of faith and war. They evolved in the Breeding Grounds, through countless cycles of mating and dying, if code can be said to mate and die. Yet we do, just as they did, our billions of neurons firing on-off signals across a wetware network, suspended in cerebrospinal fluid, encased in the hardy bones of the skull. An illusion of an I, a self-awareness. That they had emerged at last from infants to stumbling children in that Jerusalem lab was merely an accident of politics and finance. Matt Cohen and his team had moved across state lines in the United States; had gone to Europe, for a time, sought refuge in Monaco and Lichtenstein, then off-shore, on lonely islands where the palm trees moved lazily in the breeze. The Others could have emerged in Vanuatu, or Saudi Arabia, or Laos. Resistance to the research was concentrated and public, for to create life is to play God, as Dr. Frankenstein had found, to his cost.

  It’s what Life magazine called him, back in the day. Dr. Frankenstein, when all he wanted was to be left alone with his computers, knowing that he did not know what he was doing, that digital intelligence, those not-yet-born Others, could not be designed, could not be programmed, by those who wrongly used the term artificial intelligence. Matt was an evolutionary scientist, not a programmer. He did not know what form they would take when at last they emerged. Evolution alone
would determine that.

  As Tirosh wrote:

  “Think of it as a plane. Across its surface populations live and die, merge and diversify. From ‘above’—for it is always easier to think of it that way—mutations are introduced into the code, the hand of Nature shifting bits, turning zeroes into ones and vice versa.

  Now, think of binary trees. Each of these ‘entities’—for it is easy to anthropomorphize these data structures—is, in terms of this space, gigantic. The trees grow roots and branches, and the roots grow subroots and the branches grow leaves, and the process is repeated over millions of evolutionary cycles, so that the entities become bloated with control structures and semiautonomous decision making routines, many of which appear to have no obvious purpose.

  Design is impossible at this level of complexity. But evolution is not.”

  There were, however, unexpected complications.

  Ruth came back to Tel Aviv with uncertainty burned out by passion. She knew what she wanted. What she didn’t know yet was how to get it.

  There’s this about Others: they are not human.

  It seems a fatuous distinction, a too-obvious comment to make. We can make a lifetime of studying Others, their make-up, their psychology, but we have nothing to hold on to, nothing to comprehend. We can communicate, and do. Sometimes. The Others need care-givers in the physicality: they need body guards, technicians, women and men to maintain the hardware that they run on, and to protect it. All living things need, above all, to survive.

  Most Others never spoke to humanity. They lived in the digitality, pursuing whatever it was they pursued—mathematics, or God, if the two can even be said to be separate entities.

  But some were more human-centric. And just as some humans were obsessed with Others, so were some Others obsessed with humanity. There were factions amongst them.

  You asked about the children born in Central Station . . .

  But not yet. These are the deep mysteries, the secret knowledge. Even the Oracle did not know it all. Not then . . .

  There are Others and there are Others.

  The human faction ran the games-worlds; some, obsessed with corporeality, body-surfed on willing human hosts, seeking shelter in the human form and body, in the rush of hormones, the beat of a heart, the heat of sexual attraction. And others sought an even more intimate knowing.

  A true Joining.

  A thought that filled Ruth with nervousness and excitement intermingled; that kept her awake in the long summer nights of the Mediterranean. Sitting on the beach at midnight with her friend, Anat (for she still had friends, then; she was not yet the Oracle). Discussing Martian politics and trade relations with the Belt; the ongoing construction of Central Station; tension between the intertwined Israel/Palestine polities, the African refugees still crossing the border in the Sinai and into the country, the immigrant workers still streaming in from Asia to join their families and friends in the old rundown neighborhood of the central bus station; the latest release from Phobos studios and the new music coming from the Belt; anything and everything.

  “But an Other?” Anat said. She shrugged uneasily and lit a ubiq cigarette. The latest thing from New Israel on Mars: high-density data encoded in the smoke particles. She inhaled deeply, the data traveling into her lungs, entering the blood stream and into the brain—an almost immediate rush of pure knowledge. “Wow,” Anat said, and grinned goofily.

  “You know about Others,” Ruth said. Anat said, “You know I worked as a hostess—”

  “Yes.”

  Anat made a face. “It was odd,” she said. “You’re not really aware, when they’re body-surfing you. They download into your node, controlling your motor functions, getting the sensory feed. While you’re somewhere in the Conversation, in virtuality, or just nowhere—” she shrugged. “Asleep,” she said. “But then, when you wake up, you just feel different. Like, you don’t know what they did with your body. They’re supposed to keep it healthy, unless you get paid extra, I know some of us did but I never took the money. But you notice little things. Dirt under your left little finger, where it hadn’t been before. A scratch on your inner thigh. A different perfume. A different cut of hair. But subtle. Almost as if they’re trying to play games with you, to make you doubt that you saw anything. To make you wonder what it was you did. Your body did. What they did with it.” She took a sip of her wine. “It was all right,” she said. “For a while. The money was good. But I wouldn’t do it now. Sometimes I’m afraid they can forcibly take me over. Break down my node security, take over my body again—”

  “They would never!” Ruth said, shocked. “There are treaties, hard-coded protocols!”

  “Sometimes I dream that they enter me,” Anat said, ignoring her. “I wake up slowly, but I am still dreaming, and I know I am sharing my body with countless Others, all watching through my eyes, and I feel their fascination; when I move my fingers or curl my lip, but it is a detached sort of interest, the way they would look at any other math problem. They’re not like us, Ruth. You can’t share with a mind this different. You can be on, or off. But you can’t be both.”

  There had been a dreamy, detached look in Anat’s eyes that night. She had been changed by her contact with the Others, Ruth had thought. There was addiction there, a fascination not unlike that some people had with God.

  They had lost contact, at last. Anat had remained human, after all, while Ruth . . .

  For a time she had tried religion. It came in capsules, little doses of Crucifixation, sold on the streets of the old neighborhood of Central Station. Robotniks had began to appear at that time on the streets, those discarded cyborged soldiers, and the drug had been used to control them, initially, when they still served. Now they had taken the means of production on to themselves, and sold the excess, or traded it for parts or fuel. You seldom saw a female robotnik, though they did exist. She had met a nest of them living together in Jerusalem, in the old Russian Compound. The Martian colonists had popularized the concept of the nest, now Earthers replicated them: a social meme, like a virus, spreading. Ruth took her first hit there, in the robotniks’junkyard, by fires burning in upturned half-barrels, with the stars and the Earth’s orbiting settlements shining high above in a dark sky.

  You know—you’ve seen—the effects of Crucifixation. The shining white light that comes down from the sky. The heavens opening. The way you slowly rise into the place where god resides. It gives you faith. It is addictive.

  But how does it work?

  Like ubiq, Crucifixation is a neurotransmitted viral agent, data encoded into biological particles, delivered via the human blood stream direct into the brain-node interface. For Ruth was a child of the post-Cohen era. She had been hardwired into the Conversation the way earlier children had not been. Her node grew with her, a biodigital seed planted in a baby’s pliant skull, evolving along with its host. You say “parasite,” but what is a parasite? “Symbiont” might be a more accurate description, but really, is a node anything more than an additional sense, another part of the human network? Is a nose a symbiont? Are your eyes?

  To not be a part of the Conversation is to be deaf and dumb and blind.

  Religion intoxicated Ruth, but only for a while. Infatuation fades. In the drug she found no truth that couldn’t be found in the Guilds of Ashkelon universe or other virtualities. Was Heaven real? Or was it yet another construct, another virtuality within the Conversation’s distributed networks of networks, the drug a trigger?

  Either way, she thought, it was linked to the Others. Eventually, the more time you spent in the virtuality where they lived, everything linked to the Others.

  Without the drugs she had no faith of her own. Something in her psychological makeup prohibited her from believing. Other humans believed the way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species. But they did no
t reach their ghostly hands to Ruth: something inside her was lacking.

  True Joinings were rare at that time. Today we breed sub-Others in our Breeding Grounds, embedding human-centric personalities in our appliances, our coffee makers and refrigerators and waste disposal units. You may have heard of the one called Chute, on Mars, who wrote a novel called Waste, a metaphysical detective novel about the nature of life and waste that featured Smeg, the detective. This was in the time Dr. Novum was rumored to have come back from the stars. . . .

  But this is not their story. This is the story of Ruth, who had become the Oracle, and of her progenitor, St. Cohen of the Others. And so at last Ruth traveled to Jerusalem, to the shrine where the original Breeding Grounds once lay in splendid isolation. . . .

  “Nazis out! Nazis out!”

  Five months later and it was happening again.

  The villagers with pitchforks and burning torches, Balazs called them. The protesters were diffuse but globally organized. They had pursued the research team across each hastily-abandoned location, but here, in Jerusalem, the plight of the ur-creatures trapped in the prison of the closed network of the Breeding Grounds raised public sympathies to a new level. Matt wasn’t sure why.

  The Vatican had lodged an official complaint with the Israeli government. The Americans offered tacit support but said nothing in public. The Palestinians condemned what they called Zionist digital aggression. Vietnam offered shelter but Matt knew they were already working on their own research (Vietnamese dolls made their commercial debut two decades later, eventually exported en masse across the fledgling colonies of the solar system. The entity known as Dragon—perhaps the strangest of the physical-fascinated of the Others—famously used tens of thousands of them as worker ant bodies when it colonized the moon Hydra).