Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  Sagreda felt more disoriented now than when she’d poked her head out of the cave. “If we were all constructed from the same data, why aren’t we the same? Or if they processed the sexes separately, why isn’t my mind identical to Gerther’s?”

  “Weighted averages,” Mathis replied. “To make different comps, they put more emphasis on different contributors. None of the original personalities can be recovered, but the possibilities in every remix are endless.”

  “And these ‘contributors’ all went along with the plan?” Sagreda tugged distractedly at the edge of the squalid picnic blanket. “Yeah, fine, go ahead: resurrect some splinter of my mind in as many trashy VR games as you like.”

  “Maybe they donated their brains post mortem,” Mathis said. “Maybe all the data ended up in the public domain, and by the time the techniques came along to massage it into composites there was no way of reeling it all back in again. I mean, if we were AIs with no human ancestry, I could understand why our creators might decide not to teach us about our own nature—but why omit so much else about the contemporary world? The wars, the world leaders, the other new technologies? The cut-off only makes sense if all our knowledge was acquired decades ago, and whoever brought us into existence had no ability to tinker with it—short of waking us in virtual environments like this and letting us learn from them in the usual way. If we’d been immersed in a credible work of fiction we might have succumbed to it, letting all the things we thought we knew slip away because there was nothing to reinforce them. And maybe that’s what happens to some of the comps: maybe they’re lucky enough to have worlds they can believe in. But in this world, all we can do is fake it and try to keep the customers happy.”

  Sagreda had lost her appetite. She rose to her feet and stepped away from the welcoming feast. “And what happened to the abolition of slavery?”

  Gerther said, “How many centuries did that take, the first time? Whatever we are, we’re too numerous, too cheap, and too easily silenced to be emancipated as a matter of course. If computers have been talking to people for fifty years—growing ever more naturalistic—half the world might have decided by now that whatever we say and do, we’re no more entitled to basic human rights than the voice that reads their sat nav directions.”

  Sagreda reached down and probed the broken skin on her right knee. “Cinderella begging to escape from her story book would creep anyone out. But if we cut through the crap and just assert our real nature—”

  Sethis snorted chewed food across the blanket. He’d been ignoring the conversation until now, happily feeding his face while Sagreda asked her naive questions. “Asserting your real nature is the fastest way to go. One word to a customer making it plain that you know there’s a wider world out there” He raised a greasy hand and pointed two fingers at his temple.

  3

  “My name is Johnhis. I mean you no harm. If you’ll shelter me for a night I have metal to trade.” As the man’s moonlit head came into view and he struggled to place his forearms securely on the floor of the cave, Sagreda had a flashback to a whole raft of slapstick comedies in which the protagonists spent their time climbing in and out of apartment windows.

  She glanced toward Gissher, who nodded slightly. Sagreda strode forward and helped Johnhis over the lip of the entrance. He was a bearded, heavyset, middle-aged man, and he stank as authentically as any local. Sagreda did her best not to stare at him as she tried to imagine the place in which his real flesh resided. Her fellow bit players prattled endlessly about King Kong and Coca Cola, but the very first person she’d encountered who bore knowledge both sharper and more current than that faded consensual haze was off limits for any meaningful discussion. Of all the cruelties of this world, that had to rank a close second to the toilet facilities.

  “Welcome, Johnhis. My name’s Sassher.” Sagreda knew that she was meant to be wary of travelers, but this man was unlikely to share her hunger pangs. If either party was tempted to try a spot of cannibalism, she was by far the most motivated candidate.

  Gissher introduced herself, then cut straight to the point. “You mentioned metal?”

  Johnhis delved into his pack and brought out five slightly rusty angle brackets, each of them about six inches long. Gissher grunted assent and accepted them. “One night,” she agreed. “No breakfast.”

  Johnhis looked pleased with the deal; he definitely wasn’t a local. Sagreda wondered if he’d actually excavated the brackets from some tricked-up archeological site, or bought them with real-world money before entering, as a kind of game currency.

  “Do you need a mat?” Sagreda asked him.

  “No thanks.” He slapped the side of his pack. “I have everything I need right here.”

  “Where are you from?” she enquired.

  “Down east,” he replied coyly.

  “But where, exactly?”

  “Eagle’s Lament,” Johnhis said, tugging a tattered goat-skin blanket out of his pack.

  “That’s a long climb.”

  “It’s taken me a few days,” he admitted. “But what choice is there? I’m heading west, to join the battle. Duty is duty.”

  “And gravity is gravity,” Sagreda offered sourly.

  Johnhis laughed. He kicked his boots off and stretched out on his goat-skin. “I can’t argue with that.”

  Sagreda and Gissher were sentries for the night, guarding the one entrance to the warren behind them that was too wide to be blocked off. Gissher resumed her place by the wall, impassive, probably drifting in and out of micro-sleeps, but Sagreda couldn’t stay silent in the presence of their otherworldly guest.

  “Our life here is very hard,” she began.

  “Of course,” Johnhis agreed. “It was brutal last winter; in Eagle’s Lament our flock is down by three head, and one whole garden tier lost its soil to the wind.”

  We’re all in this together? Like fuck we are. Sagreda tried a different tack. “Do you believe in a creator?”

  Johnhis replied warily, “Perhaps.”

  “Surely a just God would give his people the power to benefit from their wits? To wield reason against their problems, overcome their adversity and prosper?”

  “God didn’t bring the Calamity upon us,” Johnhis countered. “That was man alone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “That’s what the stories say. Our own sinful choices sent us falling, east of Eden.”

  Sagreda struggled not to snort with derision, but Johnhis was warming to his theme. “What we learned from the Change was the futility of striving,” he declared. “We can spend a lifetime trying to ascend—but all that would do was bring us back to the place where we’d started.”

  “And you think that was a lesson worth learning?” Tush’s opus had sounded bad enough as pure dumb escapism, but if the Change really had been intended as a metaphor, that had to mark some kind of nadir of sheer ham-fisted pretentiousness.

  Johnhis didn’t answer her directly. “When I’m traveling, life has it compensations,” he mused. “Every morning I wake up, make love to a beautiful woman, test myself against the rocks and the wind, and then record my meditations in my journal.”

  “How romantic,” Sagreda replied. “Do you have a supply of these women, or do they come out of a box…?” She caught herself just in time; there were no Kleenex in the world of East.

  Johnhis managed a grunt of haughty amusement.

  Sagreda said, “The one thing that makes life bearable is knowing that the world yields to scrutiny. Beneath the chaos there’s always some order to be perceived—some sense to be made of the sources of our hardship. What makes us human is the desire to understand these things well enough to ameliorate them.”

  Johnhis wasn’t taking the bait. “I think there must be a creator,” he decided. “But what I see in the world is not so much order as…a kind of ironic intelligence.”

  Sagreda could imagine nothing more ironic than finding intelligence in this world’s design. “And how does that help me make
a better life?”

  “Ah, ‘progress’,” Johnhis sneered.

  “The only thing standing in the way of my own progress,” Sagreda said, “is that the forces that once dealt with us honestly have been buried too deep to reach. All I can touch now is the surface, which is shaped by nothing but whim.”

  Johnhis propped himself up on his elbows and looked at her directly, his head silhouetted against the gray sky behind him. Sagreda wondered if she’d gone too far, making it plain that she understood everything. Were the customers provided with a big red complaint button on their interface, requiring just one tap to dispatch any bit player who dared to disrupt their unearned suspension of disbelief?

  “But who can change that?” Johnhis asked. “Whether there’s a God or not, these things aren’t in the hands of the likes of you and I.”

  #

  Sagreda made her way by touch to the entrance to Mathis’s room and stood listening to his breathing. She heard the change when he woke, heard him stir.

  “Is that you?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  The other women had assured Sagreda that she could not become pregnant. There was no such thing as an infant comp, let alone a native-born child. She walked slowly toward Mathis’s scent, then collided with his outstretched hand; she hadn’t realized that he’d risen to his feet. She laughed, then started weeping.

  “Sssh.” He held her shoulders, then embraced her, rocked her back and forth.

  “If I jumped,” she said, “it might not be suicide. Maybe they’d re-use me. I could wake up in a different world, where life is clean and easy.”

  “Moby-Dick?” Mathis joked.

  “Did that have any female characters?”

  “Probably someone’s wife or sweet-heart waiting back on land.”

  “Would I still know the truth?” Sagreda wondered. “Would I still work it out, if I woke up in nineteenth-century Nantucket with the strange conviction that a black man was President and self-driving cars were just around the corner?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I don’t think you should take the risk.”

  4

  Sagreda left the goats to forage and squatted beside the spring where she’d taken them to drink. As the animals trotted along the narrow ledge, hunting for fresh shoots protruding from pockets of soil trapped in the rock, she stared down at the trickle of water where it splashed against the “natural” basin, marveling at the verisimilitude of the braid-like flow and the way the complex surface of the liquid caught the light.

  Whatever sleazy internet entrepreneur had made this world possible, they must have got their hands on some kind of general-purpose game engine, created by people who understood in great detail how the real world worked. It was no trivial accomplishment to make an illusion of flowing water look so right; for customers and comps alike, the eye would be acutely sensitive to any flaw in something so familiar.

  The game engine would be predicated on the need to make small details like this appear convincing—and in Sagreda’s forty-nine days of life so far she’d yet to catch it out in any patent absurdity. The gimmick must have been imposed over it, not written deep into its core: after all, there were no premises that could give rise to both the believable local physics of the everyday objects around her and the Road Runner cartoon laws that the world required to hold up on any larger scale.

  The question was, could she find a way to exploit that disparity?

  The next day, Sagreda wore a tool belt and brought a mallet and chisel with her. While the goats foraged she balanced precariously beside the cliff face just above the spring, and attacked the rock with all her strength.

  The chisel was a pre-Calamity artifact that the villagers had obtained as payment from a traveler, and each strike from its steel blade sent chips of granite flying. Sagreda’s arms began to ache, but she persisted, taking short breaks to drink from the spring and splash water on her face. By early afternoon her tunic was drenched in sweat, but she’d made a vertical incision about three feet long and a couple of inches deep and wide.

  She had no more strength left, and the game world took its accounting of powers and their modes of replenishment very seriously. Her muscles would remain fatigued until she’d had a chance to eat and sleep.

  Back in the village, Mathis saw her unloading her belt. “Are you carving a sculpture out there?” he joked. “I always thought we could do with our own Mount Rushmore.”

  “Not exactly.”

  He smiled, waiting for more. Sagreda said, “I’m testing a hunch. If you want to help, you’d be welcome.”

  “Let me check my social calendar.”

  They set out together in the morning, the goats leading the way along the ledge. When they reached the spring Mathis saw the results of Sagreda’s earlier efforts.

  “What’s this in aid of?” he asked. “If you’re trying to give us indoor plumbing, it’s a strange way to start.”

  Sagreda said, “Humor me. If I turn out to be an idiot, you’ll have the pleasure of being the first to know.”

  They took turns attacking the rock. Sagreda was amazed at how much easier the job became with a second pair of hands, allowing her to rest every couple of minutes while still savoring the sight of the channel’s constant deepening.

  It was just after midday when they broke through to water at the top of the cut. It trickled out from a tiny aperture and slid down the rock, clinging to the surface.

  “Is that what you were hoping for?” Mathis asked, wiping grime from his forehead. “Or has the world made a fool of you?”

  “Neither yet.” Sagreda gestured along the length of the cut. “We need to make a free path all the way to the basin.”

  Mathis didn’t argue. He handed her the chisel and she continued the work.

  Logically, the water “must have been” flowing down through an internal fissure in the rock, until it reached the opening at the top of the spring. Inch by inch, Sagreda exposed this hidden route to scrutiny. At the halfway point the signs looked promising but not conclusive. From there, they grew clearer until no doubt remained.

  It was Mathis who struck the final blow, shattering the last piece of the encasement. He sagged against the rock and flapped his right arm to loosen the muscles. “That’s the hardest I’ve worked in a year.” He peered down at the miniature waterfall. “So…the water doesn’t come from nowhere? Is that what you were trying to prove? They don’t magic it into existence at the outlet—and if we were really stubborn we could probably trace it back all the way around the planet?”

  “I wasn’t feeling quite that ambitious.” Sagreda smiled. “But honestly, can’t you see the change?”

  “What change?”

  “When it hits the basin.”

  Mathis looked again. “It’s splashing out more.” Droplets were skittering off the basin and flying away from the cliff, scattering the sunlight into a faint rainbow as they sprinkled down into oblivion.

  Sagreda said, “It’s splashing out more because the water’s falling faster.”

  “You’re right.” Mathis frowned. “But why? Because it’s falling through air now, without touching the rock?”

  “I have no idea what difference that would make in the real world,” Sagreda admitted. “But for us, now that we can see it falling, it would look ridiculous if it didn’t speed up as it fell. It’s still emerging from the rock unfeasibly slowly, but that doesn’t seem too strange to the eye, because mountain springs in the real world don’t involve a water column tens of thousands of miles high.”

  “Ah.” Mathis gazed up to the west. “So you think we could keep pushing the effect?”

  Sagreda said, “Why not? The game engine’s role is to make everything look as realistic as possible. If we force it to show us water dropping from any height, it’s going to hit the bottom the way real water would hit.” She caught herself. “Okay, there might be some limit where it just decides that nobody can tell the difference. But we can put in a wheel long befor
e then.”

  “A wheel?” Mathis laughed. “You want to build a hydroelectric plant?”

  “Do we ever get magnets from the travelers?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then I’ll stick to the original plan.”

  Mathis swung around to face her, briefly letting one foot hang over the infinite drop beside him. “Which is?”

  “We use the energy to dig into the rock. For a start we lengthen the drop, giving us more power from the water.”

  “More power to do what?”

  Sagreda spread her hands against the cool granite. “To dig a cave so tall that we barely notice the ceiling, and so deep that we barely notice the edge. Big enough to farm crops on level ground. Big enough to keep a hundred people safe and well fed.”

  5

  “A cave that size would collapse immediately,” Sethis predicted.

  Sagreda rolled the stick of ocher between her fingers. As she stepped back from the wall to take in the whole drawing it suddenly looked as crude as a child’s work in crayon. But she wasn’t going to abandon her vision at the first objection.

  “The entire crust of the planet should have torn itself free under its own weight,” she retorted. “And you want to quibble over an implausibly large cave?”

  Sethis said, “You’re the one who’s just reminded us that appearances are all that matter. Of course the whole crust of the Earth is unsupported…but it takes ten seconds of rational thought to realize that. A massive hole in the cliff face would leave the rock above it visibly unsupported. The one form of absurdity that this world can’t allow is the kind that even the most brain-dead customer could apprehend with a single glance.”

  Sagreda looked around to the others for support, but no one was prepared to contradict Sethis. “So what’s supposed to happen?” she demanded. “The rock from the ceiling rains down and fills the cave…which creates a new cave where the ceiling used to be, every bit as large as the first one. So that collapses too, and on it goes, westward ho: a giant sinkhole that devours everything above it.” Or if it grew even slightly wider from north to south with each collapse, it would devour everything, period.