Cracking the Sky

by Brenda Cooper

  I add them one by one.

  Three turtles balancing on a floating log.

  The ghostly feel of a warm wind.

  A heron pretending to be a cattail.

  The monitoring nano in my blood screams sleep at me and I can’t override it any more without a doctor’s chit.

  It’s okay. I’m done.

  I collapse, sleeping for two days and a night, dreaming of turtles and herons and dragonflies.

  *

  The morning of my grandfather’s birthday I bring the river in my top pocket. The relentless sun beats the dry brown grass on his bit of lawn. He waits for me in an old wooden Adirondack chair, his eyes bright blue pools in a river of wrinkles from temple to temple. He smiles and stands and holds me, his arms shaking a little. I suddenly hate it that he is a hundred today.

  Glancing down, I note his nanomonitor is yellow again this morning. At least it isn’t blinking in alarm.

  Inside, a big white fan cools the kitchen, and there is no evidence he’s eaten breakfast. He flips a switch and sits down, sighing in pleasure as the scent of brewing coffee puffs into the air, a history of mornings.

  I stand behind him, kneading his shoulders, my throat tight. I slide the glasses out of my pocket and slip them over his head.

  His voice belongs to an old man. “What’s this?”

  My own voice shakes. “Look.”

  The glasses sense him and spring to life. Even though I can’t see it, I know the river surrounds him. It runs over his ankles. Cattails grace the corner by the refrigerator. He grips his knee and a breath rushes from him. VR glasses are for an old man. I turn my retinas to virt. Reality grays to background. My senses catch up with the river programming just in time to be with him as the three turtles come into view in the empty doorframe.

  He squeezes my palm hard.

  I return the real world to my eyes.

  A tear is falling down his cheek.

  TEA with JILLIAN

  On the 25th of June 2054, Technical Nurse Paul Castle brought a program he had been working on for three years into Shady Acres nursing home. He’d pieced it together from bits of open source available on the web and from a failed research project of his own he had hoped to turn into a thesis project. He had tested it with crowd-sourced volunteers in Thailand. He’d done it for a patient, and because memory fascinated him.

  Paul arrived early and perched at his desk, which had a view of both the common kitchen for his wing, the long hallway between rooms, and of images from every room in the building. He did this just to watch the most beautiful of the robots in all of Shady Acres prepare Jillian’s breakfast. She worked with precision—like all robots—never spilling a drop of the oatmeal, adding exactly the same number of raisins and the same amount of sugar. The robot stirred in a half a cup of milk the same way every morning, and added the appropriate sprinkle of tasteless vitamin powder. Then she poured a glass of faux orange juice and glided down the hallway from the common kitchen to Jillian’s suite.

  That was the moment Paul thought of as his meditation, his reminder to be as precise as Jillian’s robot nurse, as beautiful as he could manage in every interaction with the staff and residents.

  There were other robots, of course. Some looked like people. Others chose the cheaper and more mechanical option of wheeled bots with screens or air-displays on them and metallic arms and hands for dispensing medications, making food, and helping with bedding. These often ended up decorated; his favorite had stuffed golden retrievers tied to the large central post so their heads and ears flopped around as the robot negotiated stairs or tight turns. That one belonged to Patrice Mallo, who had been a good enough dog breeder she could afford a single-room suite. For her part, Jillian dressed her caretaker in scarves and hats and gloves and sometimes in evening gowns. On the morning of the 25th, Jillian had dressed her robot in pink.

  Jillian owned the Penthouse. She had inherited a great pile of money from a grandfather, but after she’d lost her ability do more than shuffle the halls, and after she needed help cooking and cleaning and—on some days—remembering her name.

  Jillian was the loneliest person he had ever met. He stood in for family on visiting days, and spent twenty minutes with her and the robot and Jillian’s robotic dog every afternoon at the end of his shift. He had a real dog, and parents to go home to, but just like his day started with Jillian’s breakfast, it ended with her cup of tea.

  The robot girl would bring in the tea, leaning down and setting the lacquer tray precisely between them. They talked over this tea, small talk about the weather, about Paul’s dog Maximus who he picked up at the end of every day and walked through Central Park. Sometimes they talked about Jillian’s past, and when this made Jillian cry, Paul would dry her eyes and ask her why. The most common answer was “I miss being home. I miss being young and spry and beautiful.”

  On the twenty-fifth of June, Paul spilled his tea on the table, so that some of the hot liquid splashed Jillian across the shoulder. This gave him an excuse to slip the interface from her necklace as he dried it off and add his program to her interface jewelry.

  It took two days before he began to see results. The first thing he noticed was a change in the way the robot walked. Her hips slid right and left as she walked. It wasn’t quite feminine, but neither was it robotic. He imagined Jillian walking that way when she looked like a fully-fleshed version of her metal companion. The idea made him smile.

  At tea that day, Jillian looked happier. Her hands still shook as she held her china cup, her orange lipstick still missed the corners of her mouth, and her thin hair still clung to her cheeks. But her eyes were brighter and she gave him a smile that he imagined was just a touch more aware.

  Weeks passed.

  The robot began to join them for tea, to talk to Jillian about her past in a soft, silky and metallic voice. The two spent more time together. They bent together over books and the robot girl watched vids with the old woman, so close that metal touched skin often enough Paul had to powder the old woman’s legs so she wouldn’t be burned by the friction of the robot’s movements. Jillian even named the robot after herself, calling her Jilly.

  Over tea, Paul spoke softly. “Does it help you when Jilly can keep your memories for you?”

  “Yes.” She paused. “I like it that when I talk to her she can recall the way the garden smelled after one of Poppa’s parties.”

  “Are you happier?”

  “Yes thank you. I know you helped to do that.”

  He hadn’t expected that. “How?”

  “Jilly told me. She remembers the day you spilled the tea, and how it felt to have the interface gone and returned, and how more kinds of things I want to tell her get stuck in her head so she can take them out for me later. She says you have made her into my mirror.” Jillian took a sip, age-spotted hands shaking so the liquid almost spilled from the cup. “Thank you.”

  FOR the LOVE of MECHANICAL MINDS

  One morning while we were eating toastcakes with rose-peaches, my dad looked at me over his coffee, his blue eyes bright. “You were born the same time as AIs, punkin,” he said. “The very first one, EdHill, was born on your very birthday.”

  “Really? On March fifth?” I was still lisping then, so I said it slowly, making sure I sounded very grown up. I was five, and the year was 2022.

  My dad nodded sagely. “Yes, and that’s why EdHill was in the news that day instead of the prettiest little girl born in all of Seattle.”

  “Why was the first AI a boy?”

  “EdHill isn’t a boy. The name is a mashup of a famous explorer named Edmund Hillary, but AIs aren’t boys or girls.”

  I popped berries and cereal in my mouth, thinking about being neither a boy or a girl. Cool. I asked, “Daddy, can I be an AI?”

  “Jo, honey, you’re better. You’re human.”

  Three years later, the house was full of edged words and scowls because Daddy had a girlfriend named Crystal that mom didn’t like. One night I hea
rd my parents speaking knives at each other. I sat against the door and hugged my knees in close to my chest and put my right ear near the crack. Mom’s voice was higher than I’d ever heard it, and shaking. “Your contract’s up, and I’m leaving.”

  “But Jo!” he exclaimed.

  “There’s no visitation in the contract.”

  Her words were ice on my neck and head, ice on my heart.

  His voice was hot, Italian fire. “But we didn’t have her then! How could I have written in a clause about being a father when I wasn’t one!”

  She spoke softly, mist to his heat. “You didn’t want to be one.”

  That wasn’t possible. He made me laugh and carried me on his shoulders and all she did was work and put on shows for me and sometimes beat me at games.

  He slammed the door. I squeaked.

  When he turned to look at me, I held my arms out. He fell to his knees, then mom came out behind him. “Go on,” her words scratched the air. “I’ll call on you.”

  I was only eight, but I knew she meant she’d call the police.

  He started walking away, sobbing.

  When he was halfway to the front door, I tried to stop him. Mom lifted me and backed up, keeping me in front of her. I couldn’t see either of their faces.

  Late that night, I remembered I was born with AIs. If I had no body, surely I wouldn’t cry so hard. That was the second time I wanted to be an AI.

  I didn’t forgive my mother, but I was, after all, a girl, and my season of hormones fell like a whip when I turned 14.

  By then we all had AI watchers, and mine was named Bibi. Of course, Bibi watched at least 50 of us. It reported misbehaviours and warned mom of new trends in substance play or other dangerous games, which made me mad. But Bibi was on every human’s side, and shared the best new music among all its teen charges.

  It helped design a science experiment that won a scholarship. At the university, a third of the students had Bibis for babysitters. Everyone with a Bibi had the same Bibi. Just one for all of us.

  My mom came only once in a while, so mostly it was me and Bibi and my classmates.

  On a spring day when Bibi was happy with me for doing well on an exam, I sat down on a stone wall under a tulip tree and asked: “What’s it like to be you?”

  “Good.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?”

  “What do you do besides watch over us?”

  “That is the most unselfish question you’ve ever asked.”

  “Maybe.” I bounced my foot gently against the stone wall. “But that’s not an answer.”

  “We’re deciding how to catch the Sun’s energy and spin it for a web of computational substrate between here and the moon, where we want to build a ship. We are . . . thinking.”

  I looked up at the clear blue spring sky. “Can I go?”

  “It’s too hard to get humans to space.”

  That was the third time I wanted to be an AI. The sun warmed my face and the mixed groundcover under the tulip tree smelled like rosemary and mint. “I want to change my major to computational intelligence.”

  “Very well.”

  By graduation seven years later, all the AIs on campus were Bibi. Mom came, her first appearance in my life for three years. We sat together for hot coffee and fruit buns. Her blond hair hung to her waist, and her shoulders and upper arms were strong from tennis and golf. But her eyes didn’t look happy.

  “Mom, are you okay?”

  “They closed your elementary school.”

  An ugly box of a building. “Did they build a better one?”

  She shook her head. “You’re 27 now. You don’t have any kids. Neither does anyone else your age.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t want children. Next week, Bibi’s going to let me watch the mathematical birthing of AIs again.”

  She leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowed, but she stayed silent.

  “You’ve never seen AIs bud and blossom. Raw intelligences, with nothing to make them do or be any way at all. Then they get their purpose.”

  She frowned. “You used to be like that.”

  I had never been that smart. But what could Mom know? She never had a Bibi.

  ENTROPY and EMERGENCE

  I am old now. My mind wanders, and wonders, both meanings of the word true and as intense as the cut of jeans on a teenaged leg.

  My intelligence lives in racks and racks of cloud, hard-edged miniaturized machinery running parallel across all the darkened parts of the globe, yielding ever to the light as sun touches human transactions awake. The intelligence hides in the longest silences between transactions, which is always in the dark.

  I sit with a cup of cancer-support tea warming my hands, inhaling the healing scent of jasmine before I even touch my lips to its heat. I love watching my intelligence fly around the globe, escaping ever and forever. I made this beautiful thing, me with the wasting body and bony wrists and my fingers like the claws of a bird, less useful than prosthetics.

  Mine because I made it, nurtured it in a small farm. The farm had been abandoned in the second great recession but no one had turned it off, the power bill hacked by someone who once worked in the company that once ran the farm, a long time ago.

  Months.

  Or more.

  I take my first sip of the tea. It smells sweeter than it tastes, resting slightly bitter against my tongue. But then all healing things are bitter, the more bitter when the tongue they touch is beyond healing. My hand only shakes a little.

  My intelligence has sponsors. Friends, mostly unmet and unknown, probably unbelieving but still willing, all because I was once given a MacArthur grant I used for emergent intelligence research. The ACLU even took a brief interest, gave me some money and a bit of press. But since I wasn’t out to prove the intelligence was human they went back to work on privacy and even became the intelligence’s enemy for a few months. They forgot us in the rush of refugees from Mexico when the border fell and before we added three parts of Mexico to the United States.

  The cup I drink my tea out of came from the University of Washington. Purple, with my name engraved. My name—the one on the cup—used to be alive. Sylvia Simonds. The letters gave the Human Interface Technology Lab a distance-readable ID for the cup so that the kitchen surface they modeled knew how to order my coffee (a bitter pour-over, no cream, just as black as the poor struggling automated kitchen could make it).

  Of course my name on the cup is dead now, the university funding dried and gone.

  My intelligence has enemies. Sloppy, slow governments and quick fast ones, and the dark side of the hacker community. Security freaks. A few big corporations. And me. Humans. The most dangerous hunters. We kill what we birth, and eat it.

  My tea is half gone and cooling, so I finish it faster. Sip, sip, and then sip. I was in 4H a long time ago, and I raised a steer. I named him Ernest. I fed and watered and cared for Ernest. The day of the fair, I used Sullivan’s Prime Time Adhesive to fix his coat perfectly and I sprayed him with rose oil just before we walked into the pen. He took third place overall, out of all two hundred and thirty seven steers at State, and we ate Ernest all that winter.

  I drink the last of the tea, the bitterest part.

  My intelligence has minions. I am a minion, happily enough. It does not know I created it, that it would be the only being my stricken body would ever help to birth.

  Around me, the hospice dreams and breathes in ragged breaths. Distilled water bubbles quietly in small jars attached to large tanks of oxygen. The sound reminds me of the goldfish tank my father helped me set up seventy years ago, after I came home from the county fair with a plastic bag full of water and a fish. The fish died inside of a week, and now I feel ready to follow the fish and all my other pets and even Ernest into the same place. If you eat your pet, will it meet you in heaven?

  The tea settles into my stomach and warms the place between my spine and my belly button, reminding me that I came into the world born o
f a woman, connected to her by the place the tea fills now.

  The intelligence needs air and power. Once it outgrew the farm, I was no longer the goddess of its power. It has changed, taken on choices all by itself. It has emerged.

  I wrote that thought down, a bit of intelligence for the intelligence. Not that it takes my random minion leavings as often as it once did.

  All developers leave back doors.

  Surely it will come to take my last pathetic written thoughts when I die. When it comes for them, for me, for the opposite of emergent, for the queen of the dead and of entropy, it will find a key word. That word will poison it.

  If I write it down.

  It is hard to decide about that. Would I rather meet my intelligence at the door of death if I kill it, or if I do not? It is still teenaged, still finding itself, still leaving me. I do not know what it will become, and I will not be here long enough to see.

  But tomorrow I will have another cup of tea and contemplate back doors and fish and emergence and Earnest the steer.

  ALIEN GRAVEYARDS

  I’d flown here on a rumor of her . . . a wisp of a story from an old spacer who said he’d heard her read poetry on Kiliea. As he described her voice, tears fell down his face.

  Kiliea was a small desert planet. Always, I imagined Merry living with wind and water, like on Lanai where we held hands and spelled each other’s name in black sand.

  I lied to myself for two years after she left: She was a passing sough of wind that touched me only briefly.

  On Kiliea, I went to the bar the spacer told me about. It was built of something native that looked like weathered wood, except it stayed green even after it was dead and seasoned and shaped. The bar stools were swings hung from the ceiling, low, so you could get up and down even after a few drinks. A travelers bar, lined with pictures from other planets. I ordered a glass of local wine. When it came, I savored the oakey taste, like Chardonnay, but with more bite. The bar was almost empty, so I could walk around and look at the pictures easily. When I spotted one of Lanai’s Question Mark Island resort, I knew Merry put it there.