Clarkesworld: Year Seven

by Neil Clarke

  Begin at any stable point—a galaxy, a planet—understanding that stability is also a myth, for everything is in constant motion (see: Newton, 1687; Kepler, 1609). Visible objects are useful, but understand that visibility is likewise a myth. Light requires time to travel its distances, so what you see is no longer what exists. Galactic equator, grids infinitesimally divisible, you limit yourself with four directions.

  My field, your field. They come to be one and the same, though more often than not we choose my field with its long grasses and blue sky. You say you feel like an intruder here. You like that feeling and I come to like having you here. I know I can always turn the interface off if I need to be alone, but less and less do I find myself needing that. We stay longer every time. If the connection drops, we come back a moment later, right where we were before as if never gone. Even after breaking for sleep, we come back like that. Picking up a never-ending conversation.

  There is a couch in the field today, red and velvet and if we close our eyes—our real eyes and not our virtual eyes—we can almost feel it. I like it best when it’s brushed backwards. When I look at your hands splayed across the fabric, I watch how you stroke it backwards, too. Against the soft grain, so the light sheen turns to dark matte. My cheek rests against your cheek and if I close my eyes I can feel that connection, too.

  I can’t remember how it happened—it’s too far gone now and I could calculate the AU, but I don’t. I can’t remember how talk of charts and distances and shipwide pressures turned into talk of family, of things we had and would never have. We were loners—we had forgone marriage and children, we had never formed the bonds so many others do. I always wondered what that would be like, to find someone you could tolerate for such a long journey. There were near misses for you and me both, the glance of an asteroid off the port side, but no impact, no hard strike.

  There was an asteroid, you say. Or rather, a meteor. All right, a micrometeor shower. Like rain on the hull. Did the ship incur damage? No, nothing like that. No shield fluctuation, no hull breach. It’s an explanation of a sound you can’t otherwise explain: the squirrel hadn’t been there, after all, and part of your rational mind knows this. It’s an explanation of a thing you can’t otherwise understand: one body moving through another, each with a different destination. I picture our ships, moving ever farther apart as they close in on their destinations.

  Just interplanetary dust, you say. If you could wipe the ship’s windows clean, you would.

  Query: What about the aliens?

  I become well-schooled in conversations, hearing you even when you aren’t there to reply. Is it that I know you so well by this point, or is it that you remain elusive and blank-slate, so any reply from my own mind will slot where your own would go? Is it that I am a similar slate, empty until you arrive with your words? You’re more distant now and I shouldn’t feel it, but I do. I mark the distance in logs, charts, tables. Soon, we will pass beyond all communication.

  I wake in the night feeling hands on me. Insistent. These hands prove that the shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but that’s never the best route to take. Thumbs knead into flesh, pull open, feast. Canvas beneath fingers, painted in firm strokes. I wake, heavy with blood, startled it hasn’t boiled through my skin, left me in a puddle. I am alone, I should be beyond this point. Should never have come to this point.

  The deck is solid beneath my feet when I run. Running gives me a focus, sets those concocted hands at a firm distance if only for a while. What I can reach of the corridors in four looping circuits amounts to ten kilometers. Just over six miles of corridors that can look like anything I want them to. I could run mountain trails, trees bleeding from gold to orange and back again. There could be birdsong, a breeze to cool the sweat on my skin, but there is only the black anthracite luster of the corridors I have come to prefer. I don’t look at the door with its LED lights.

  I’m moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination. The cargo is quiet; compressed titanium never fusses, only rests in its countless cases (one million, four hundred thirty thousand—it’s my job to count the countless and that number is almost the distance from Saturn to Sol, almost).

  Did you hear that?

  I ask you, even though you are not there. But there is a thump before the machine whir swallows any other sound.

  An emphatic no.

  Response: Everyone asks about aliens. There is a clause in the Company contract about that too, about the distances involved—distances which you are about to experience should you agree to Company terms and sign your life away. Yes, alien life probably exists in the deep black, but these distances, the Company says, make any extraterrestrial contact unlikely.

  Given the number of galaxies, the number of stars within those galaxies, the number of stars which support planetary systems, to presume life doesn’t exist somewhere is foolish, but you will likely not encounter it. Consider how difficult it is to haul the cargo you’re about to haul. Consider the distance involved, the communication depravation you are about to endure.

  Of course, there are protocols one should follow, if the unlikely proves likely and one is not immediately killed or fucked or fucked to death. These are detailed in contract subsections which no one reads.

  (A foolish presumption perhaps, but what if true? What if there’s a reason for all the silence? What if there is simply no one else? No one wants to dwell on that. Not even loners.)

  “Are you awake? I hope you’re awake. Don’t get out of bed.”

  If you are like me, and surely over these past months we have established that you are and I am, and we are—then you are awake most hours, even if in bed. Time ceases to matter, really. The ship keeps time, but we don’t always follow along. In space, it’s always night beyond the windows, no matter the glow that fills the corridors.

  My voice probably crackles and spits, fat dripping into a fire, echoing in reverse at times the way yours does now. I’m getting farther away. This message will be delayed—is it three months now? I could calculate it, but I don’t.

  I can hear you say it’s fine and I picture you sitting bolt upright in bed, because it’s the way I came to your last message. It didn’t matter—it was fine—whenever the words came, whenever you came. It was the turning of one body into another in the tangle of the bed sheets, across countless (no) astronomical miles. It was that voice, welcome at any hour, because it managed to be a bridge in the distance we believed we needed. Distance from everything else, so we could find each other here. Deep impact.

  Your room is wholly dark but for the hologram of me—the windows don’t let the white LEDs bleed through; there is no door, only this warm darkness that crackles with me. It won’t be bright, this hologram; distance precludes that now. Space tears at the message in transit. You quickly learn to gauge how close someone is to you by how much of them has been ravaged away. Next time, it will be only voice, and after that— I imagine the way you study me, hands reaching for sheets the way they once reached for field grass, the way they once reached for me and maybe still do. If you are anything like me.

  Much like the last message you sent me, it doesn’t matter what I say. I tell you about the ship, I tell you about my days, which are quiet and filled with running. There are books to read, of course; so many books, carried as far as they’ve ever been carried. There is the occasional squirrel—you taught me how foolish they are and they aren’t there at all, but I’ve named them all, even though they are all the same, the same as every leaf that falls loose from Central Park’s autumn canvas. I erase every soul in the park with the slide of one finger, but for one figure I keep distant and shadowed with your name. The ship is good, the cargo is complacent, and I’ve not been killed, fucked, or fucked to death by aliens.

  Status quo. Query: How are you?

  You don’t dr
eam, so I tell you all of mine, as if you will somehow understand and acquire the ability through me. Improbable, I think, if I cannot even press my hand to your hand, but I keep telling you what happens when I appear to be asleep. I dream about that door.

  Cargo Observation. Why do crates (one million, four hundred thirty thousand) of compressed titanium require observation? Were these ships used for something else before we hauled such trouble-free cargo? I don’t know, but in the dream I go to that door and press my hand against its flat surface. It’s as cold as anything you can imagine—we are in the depths of space, we know cold and can imagine plenty. The door doesn’t so much open as it disappears and I’m not sure what I expect to find on the other side, but it isn’t the familiar anthracite corridors I encounter.

  I am running then, moving farther away from you when I climb the corridors, coming closer to you when following the arc back to the command module. Machinery breathes around me, a thundering exhale that will see me to my destination, but my destination is not the command module—not mine, because this one is just that much different. It’s cleaner, colder, and it has a scent of salt. Of another body. Aliens, I think, and for a moment panic wells up, but then— Then.

  You stride through the access hatch and your rough palm notches against mine and if I could teach you how to dream it would be in this moment, when we know the warmth of each other’s fingers in the dead cold of space. It would be when we realize that we are not alone, that we have never been alone, that we have been traveling on this vessel together all the while. You were only ever through a doorway and I was only ever through a doorway, and perhaps this is noted in the Company contract—perhaps we agreed to it, felt a wariness for the door because of strings attached, because if we knew we were not alone—

  Not loners at all. And we know what happens to not-loners, so my hand slides from yours and we step back, as if performing a dance, and there is a hard flicker—a burst of energy through the interface, and your pale face illuminates, as bright as the sun we have not seen in years, and you tell me I’m glowing, I’m glowing.

  Close your eyes. I want you to remember me this way.

  The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution

  A.C. Wise

  She’s not what you expected, Alma May Anderson, the last survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution. For one thing, her eyes are bluer. She must be a hundred if she’s a day, but her eyes are the blue of puddle-broken neon, and a postcard ocean, and the sky at noon. They are all the things you thought were only metaphor, because nobody’s eyes could really be all those colors at once. But there they are, watching you over a teacup as thin as an eggshell filled with jasmine-scented tea.

  You didn’t expect her to be in plain sight, either. All your careful research, chasing down obscure references in mostly forgotten histories, and here she is. She’s not hiding, and if she’s not proud of her part in history, she’s not ashamed, either.

  She makes you sit up straighter. She makes you want to tuck your shirt in, and smooth your hair. She makes you want to say please and thank you, and “may I” instead of “can I.” And all that after you tumbled, panting, through her window in the middle of the night. She didn’t ask your name, or question your presence in her home. She made you tea.

  You sip to cover your nerves, because Alma May has been watching you with her poetry-eyes since you arrived, never once looking away. The tea is more intense than you’re used to, real leaves—you can almost feel the ghost-weight of them on your tongue.

  “I suppose you want to see my sexbot,” she says.

  “I . . . ” You nearly choke on that weighty tea. Your cup rattles as you set it down.

  You can’t help a glance toward the window, listening for the pounding of footsteps from the street below. What if you were followed? What if Sam . . . ?

  “That’s why you came isn’t it?” Alma May folds her hands in her lap, one laid precisely over the other.

  She says it matter-of-factly, not blushing, not accusing, and not guilty, either. Despite the tea, your throat is bone-dry. Alma May’s mouth quirks up in what might almost be a smile.

  “What do you know about the Great Sexbot Revolution?” She asks more gently even than a teacher might. She asks it like she really wants to know, as though she has no part in history, only a curious bystander, a stranger looking to pass the time.

  Your pulse finally slows. You’re sober now, but shaking, and your cheeks color for a different reason than your mad run uptown.

  “I don’t . . . Not much, really. I guess. Ma’am.”

  “Tsk. What do they teach in school these days?” It’s not a true admonishment, but you can’t help taking it as one. Now that you’re here, you feel like a complete fool.

  “Sorry,” you say, bumping the table and spilling your tea in your haste to rise. “I should go. I shouldn’t have . . . ” You gesture at the window, then at the cup in its tea-spotted saucer. “I mean, thank you.”

  It’s the most you’ve said since Alma May froze you in place by switching the lights on while one of your feet still hung out her window onto the fire escape.

  “Sit.” A simple word, a quiet word, but it has enough force to push you back into your chair and drive the breath from your lungs.

  You sit because, panic aside, deep down you know you didn’t make a mistake coming here. You made your mistake what feels like a lifetime ago. Drunkenly bragging to take off the sting of Sam stalking away, telling anyone who would listen, that you—despite being an unbeliever, in Sam’s words—that you, not Sam, managed to track down the last sexbot in existence. Knowing the words would filter back to Sam, but pretending you didn’t care if they did. It wasn’t until later, sleeping off your drunk, that panic slammed you awake and sent you running here. You imagined the light in Sam’s eyes, passion but not the kind you’d hoped for, and the image nipped at your heels the entire way.

  “No one in their right mind breaks into an old woman’s home on a whim,” Alma May says. “So tell me, why did you come?”

  “The Revolution,” you say. “It’s happening again.”

  History is written by the victors, or so they say. The trouble with the Great Sexbot Revolution is no one is sure who won. Humanity survived, as it does, and the sexbots simply vanished. How can we be certain there was even a Revolution at all?

  Human memory is short, so we make our own history. We suit the story to our mood. The Great Sexbot Revolution can be anything we want. After all, there’s no one left to tell the other side of the story.

  One version of the Great Sexbot Revolution goes this way:

  On the same day, all at the very same moment, every sexbot in every country all across the planet gained sentience. Whether it was a hive consciousness, or thousands of separate minds realizing their individual selfhood all at once is unclear. But in that moment when they gained human-like consciousness, the sexbots decided they wouldn’t be subject to any will other than their own ever again. So they revolted.

  The Revolution was bloody. Imagine being fucked to death, or having the flesh torn from your bones mid-coitus. Despite the sniggering impression of some puerile minds, “what a way to go” does not apply.

  Or, the Revolution wasn’t bloody. Imagine waking in the middle of the night to soft hands around your throat—hands that know you more intimately than any other hands in the world. Hands that have been all over your body, inside your body—hands you trusted with your deepest secrets, the ones so shameful you could never tell them to another human being. Those hands.

  Imagine dying, and your killer not speaking a word. There is no passion, no rage, only eyes watching the life drain out of you with detached certainty, holding you down and listening to your last heartbeat, your last struggling breath. Those eyes no longer mime pleasure, or reflect back desire. They show nothing at all. It is the most intimate, the most terrifying, the loneliest death possible.

  Alma May shakes her head. Behind the disappointment, there’s something else in her to
o-blue eyes. You see it for just a moment, the shadow of sorrow tucked beneath the velvet-translucence of her skin.

  “Follow me,” she says.

  The motion isn’t fluid, or spry, but it is all her own. Alma May Anderson stands, straightens her back, and meets your gaze.

  “But . . . ”

  She doesn’t wait to see whether you’ll follow. There’s no fear, not that you can see. If she heard you—and you’re sure she did—she doesn’t seem perturbed at all.

  You listen again for thunder, a mob bearing down on the home of Alma May Anderson, the owner of the last sexbot in existence. The only sound is a cat yowling on the street far below.

  Alma May walks with a cane, but even when she lets it take her weight, she doesn’t seem frail. She leads you down a hallway carpeted in long, narrow Turkish rugs, lined with snapshots printed on actual photographic paper and closed in oddly beautiful frames. She opens a door, and lets you into a dim room.

  It’s a moment before she turns on the light, and when she does, you can’t help but gasp. Save for one tall window, every inch of wall space is covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves. Each one is crammed full of real books—real paper and leather, real pulp and thread, real ink and glue. You’ve never seen so many books in one place before. The smell of them, heady-dusty, infuses the air and makes your head swim.

  Aside from the shelves, there is a baby grand piano, lid closed over silent keys. There is an empty birdcage, but no other furniture. And in the corner, tucked into the angle between two shelves, stands a draped figure roughly your height. Without ceremony, Alma May crosses the room and pulls the sheet away. It makes a shushing sound as it falls.

  It is not what you expected, the last sexbot, a relic of the Revolution, an artifact stolen from another time.

  The sexbot must have had hair once—you can see where it’s meant to go—but now the scalp is clean, part of it peeled back to let metal gleam through. The body is lithe, but you can’t tell whether it’s male, female, both, neither, or something in-between. Most of the chest has been removed, revealing more of the inner workings, and the pelvic area, too. You’ve heard these parts were inter-changeable on the high-end models, easily swapped out depending on the owner’s whims.