The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1

by Unknown

  “A woman,” she said, when she had breath. “A woman this time, please . . .”

  Afterward, she spoke into the silence and the warmth, her voice absent, wondering: “They trusted the three of us to last. They thought we were the best crew for the job.” She made absent knots with my hair. “Does that ever make you wonder?”

  “The two-body problem has been completely solved,” I said. “But for n=3, solutions exist for special cases.”

  She laughed and pulled me closer. “You’ve got to go talk to Anyahera,” she said. “She never stays mad at me. But you . . .”

  She trailed off, into contentment, or back into contemplation of distant, massive things.

  Duong-Watts malignant, I thought to myself. I couldn’t help it: my mind went back to the world ahead of us, closing at relativistic speeds.

  Mitanni’s explosive growth matched the theory of a Duong-Watts malignant. But that was just correlation. The malignancy went deeper than social trends, down to the individual, into the mechanisms of the mind.

  And that was Anyahera’s domain.

  “We can’t destroy them,” Thienne murmured. “We might need them.”

  Even in simulation we had to sleep. Lachesis’s topological braid computer could run the human being in full-body cellular resolution, clock us up to two subjective days a minute in an emergency, pause us for centuries—but not obviate the need for rest.

  It didn’t take more than an overclocked instant. But it was enough for me to dream.

  Or maybe it wasn’t my dream—just Duong Phireak’s nightmare reappro-priated. I’d seen him lecture at Lagos, an instance of his self transmitted over for the night. But this time he spoke in Anyahera’s voice as she walked before me, down a blood-spattered street beneath a sky filled with alien stars.

  “Cognition enables an arsenal of survival strategies inaccessible to simple evolutionary selection,” she said, the words of Duong Phireak. “Foresight, planning, abstract reasoning, technological development—we can confidently say that these strategies are strictly superior, on a computational level, at maximizing individual fitness. Cognition enables the cognitive to pursue global, rather than local, goals. A population of flatworms can’t cooperate to build a rocket unless the ‘build a rocket’ allele promotes individual fitness in each generation—an unlikely outcome, given the state of flatworm engineering.”

  Memory of laughter, compressed by the bandwidth of the hippocampus. I reached out for Anyahera, and she looked up and only then, following her gaze, did I recognize the sky, the aurora of Jotunheim.

  “But with cognition came consciousness—an exaptative accident, the byproduct of circuits in the brain that powered social reasoning, sensory integration, simulation theaters, and a host of other global functions. So much of our civilization derived in turn from consciousness, from the ability not just to enjoy an experience but to know that we enjoy it. Consciousness fostered a suite of behaviors without clear adaptive function, but with subjective, experiential value.”

  I touched Anyahera’s shoulder. She turned toward me. On the slope of her bald brow glittered the circuitry of a Jotunheim slave shunt, bridging her pleasure centers into her social program.

  Of course she was smiling.

  “Consciousness is expensive,” she said. “This is a problem for totalitarian states. A human being with interest in leisure, art, agency—a human being who is aware of her own self-interest—cannot be worked to maximum potential. I speak of more than simple slave labor. I am sure that many of your professors wish you could devote yourselves more completely to your studies.”

  Overhead, the aurora laughed in the voices of Lagos undergraduates, and when I looked up, the sky split open along a dozen fiery fractures, relativistic warheads moving in ludicrous slow-motion, burning their skins away as they made their last descent. Lachesis’s judgment. The end I’d withheld.

  “Consciousness creates inefficient behavior,” Anyahera said, her smile broad, her golden-brown skin aflame with the light of the falling apocalypse. “A techno-tyranny might take the crude step of creating slave castes who derive conscious pleasure from their functions, but this system is fundamentally inadequate, unstable. The slave still expends caloric and behavioral resources on being conscious; the slave seeks to maximize its own pleasure, not its social utility. A clever state will go one step further and eliminate the cause of these inefficiencies at the root. They will sever thought from awareness.

  “This is what I call the Duong-Watts malignancy. The most efficient, survivable form of human civilization is a civilization of philosophical zombies. A nation of the unconscious, those who think without knowing they exist, who work with the brilliance of our finest without ever needing to ask why. Their cognitive abilities are unimpaired—enhanced, if anything—without constant interference. I see your skepticism; I ask you to consider the ano-sognosia literature, the disturbing information we have assembled on the architecture of the sociopathic mind, the vast body of evidence behind the deflationary position on the Hard Problem.

  “We are already passengers on the ship of self. It is only a matter of time until some designer, pressed for time and resources, decides to jettison the hitchhiker. And the rewards will be enormous—in a strictly Darwinian sense.”

  When I reached for her, I think I wanted to shield her, somehow, to put myself between her and the weapons. It was reflex, and I knew it was meaningless, but still. . . .

  Usually in dreams you wake when you die. But I felt myself come apart.

  Ten light-hours out from Mitanni’s star, falling through empty realms of ice and hydrogen, we slammed into a wall of light—the strobe of a lighthouse beacon orbiting Mitanni. “Pulse-compressed burst maser,” Lachesis told me, her voice clipped as she dissected the signal. “A fusion-pumped flashbulb.”

  Lachesis’s forward shield reflected light like a wall of diamond—back toward the star, toward Mitanni. In ten hours they would see us.

  We argued over what to do. Anyahera wanted to launch our relativistic kill vehicles now, so they’d strike Mitanni just minutes after the light of our approach, before the colonists could prepare any response. Thienne, of course, dissented. “Those weapons were meant to be used when we were certain! Only then!”

  I voted with Thienne. I knew the capabilities of our doomsday payload with the surety of reflex. We had the safety of immense speed, and nothing the Mitanni could do, no matter how sophisticated, could stop our weapons—or us. We could afford to wait, and mull over our strategy.

  After the vote, Anyahera brushed invisible lint from the arm of her couch. “Nervous?” I asked, probing where I probably shouldn’t have. We still hadn’t spoken in private.

  She quirked her lips sardonically. “Procrastination,” she said, “makes me anxious.”

  “You’re leaping to conclusions,” Thienne insisted, pacing the perimeter of the command commons. Her eyes were cast outward, into the blue-shifted stars off our bow. “We can’t know it’s a Duong-Watts malignant. Statistical correlation isn’t enough. We have to be sure. We have to understand the exact mechanism.”

  It wasn’t the same argument she’d made to me.

  “We don’t need to be sure.” Anyahera had finished with the invisible lint. “If there’s any reasonable chance this is a Duong-Watts, we are morally and strategically obligated to wipe them out. This is why we are here. It doesn’t matter how they did it—if they did it, they have to go.”

  “Maybe we need to talk to them,” I said.

  They both stared at me. I was the first one to laugh. We all felt the absurdity there, in the idea that we could, in a single conversation, achieve what millennia of philosophy had never managed—find some way to pin down the spark of consciousness by mere dialogue. Qualia existed in the first person.

  But twenty hours later—nearly three days at the pace of Lachesis‘s racing simulation clock—that was suddenly no longer an abstract problem. Mitanni’s light found us again: not a blind, questing pulse, but a m
icrowave needle, a long clattering encryption of something at once unimaginably intricate and completely familiar.

  They didn’t waste time with prime numbers or queries of intent and origin. Mitanni sent us an uploaded mind, a digital ambassador.

  Even Thienne agreed it would be hopelessly naïve to accept the gift at face value, but after Lachesis dissected the upload, ran its copies in a million solipsistic sandboxes, tested it for every conceivable virulence—we voted unanimously to speak with it, and see what it had to say.

  Voting with Anyahera felt good. And after we voted, she started from her chair, arms upraised, eyes alight. “They’ve given us the proof,” she said. “We can—Thienne, Shinobu, do you see?”

  Thienne lifted a hand to spider her fingers against an invisible pane. “You’re right,” she said, lips pursed. “We can.”

  With access to an uploaded personality, the digital fact of a Mitanni brain, we could compare their minds to ours. It would be far from a simple arithmetic hunt for subtraction or addition, but it would give us an empirical angle on the Duong-Watts problem.

  Anyahera took me aside, in a space as old as our friendship, the khaya mahogany panels and airy glass of our undergraduate dorm. “Shinobu,” she said. She fidgeted as she spoke, I think to jam her own desire to reach for me. “Have you seen what they’re building in orbit?”

  This memory she’d raised around us predated Thienne by a decade. That didn’t escape me.

  “I’ve seen them,” I said. I’d gone through Mitanni’s starflight capabilities datum by datum. “Orbital foundries. For their own seedships. They’re getting ready to colonize other stars.”

  Neither of us had to unpack the implications there. It was the beginning of a boom cycle—exponential growth.

  “Ten million years,” she said. “I’ve run a hundred simulations out that far. If Mitanni is a Duong-Watts, in ten million years the galaxy is full of them. Now and forever. No conscious human variant can compete. Not even digitized baseline humans—you know what it took just to make Lachesis. Nothing human compares.”

  I nodded in silent acknowledgment. Is that so terrible? I wanted to ask— Thienne’s question, in this memory so empty of her. Is consciousness what we have to sacrifice to survive in the long run?

  She didn’t even need me to ask the question. “I can envision nothing more monstrous,” she said, “than mankind made clockwork. Nothing is worth that price.”

  And I wanted to nod, just to show her that we were not enemies. But I couldn’t. It felt like giving in.

  Sometimes I wondered at the hubris of our mission. Would Mitanni live and die not by the judgment of a jurisprudent mind but the troubled whims of a disintegrating family? We had left Earth as a harmonized unit, best-in-class product of a post-military, post-national edifice that understood the pressures of long-duration, high-stress starflight. No one and nothing could judge better. But was that enough? Was the human maximum adequate for this task?

  Something in that thought chilled me more than the rest, and I wished I could know precisely what.

  We met the Mitanni upload in a chameleon world: a sandboxed pocket of Lachesis’s mind, programmed to cycle from ocean to desert to crowd to solitary wasteland, so that we could watch the Mitanni’s reactions, and, perhaps, come to know her.

  She came among us without image or analogy, injected between one tick of simulation and the next. We stood around her on a pane of glass high above a grey-green sea.

  “Hello,” she said. She smiled, and it was not at all inhuman. She had Thienne’s color and a round, guileless face that with her slight build made me think of Jizo statues from my childhood. “I’m the ambassador for Mitanni.”

  Whatever language she spoke, Lachesis had no trouble with it. Thienne and Anyahera looked to me, and I spoke as we’d agreed.

  “Hello. My name is Shinobu. This is the starship Lachesis, scout element of the Second Fleet.”

  If she saw through the bluff of scouts and fleets, she gave no sign. “We expected you,” she said, calm at the axis of our triplicate regard. “We detected the weapons you carry. Because you haven’t fired yet, we know you’re still debating whether to use them. I am here to plead for our survival.”

  She’s rationally defensive, Thienne wrote in our collective awareness. Attacking the scenario of maximal threat.

  At the edge of awareness, Lachesis’s telemetry whispered telltales of cognition and feedback, a map of the Mitanni’s thoughts. Profiling.

  My eyes went to Anyahera. We’d agreed she would handle this contingency. “We believe your world may be a Duong-Watts malignant,” she said. “If you’ve adapted yourselves to survive by eliminating consciousness, we’re deeply concerned about the competitive edge you’ve gained over baseline humanity. We believe consciousness is an essential part of human existence.”

  In a negotiation between humans, I think we would have taken hours to reach this point, and hours more to work through the layers of bluff and counter-bluff required to hit the next point. The Mitanni ambassador leapt all that in an instant. “I’m an accurate map of the Mitanni mind,” she said. “You have the information you need to judge the Duong-Watts case.”

  I see significant mental reprofiling, Lachesis printed. Systemic alteration of networks in the thalamic intralaminar nuclei and the prefrontal-parietal associative loop. Hyperactivation in the neural correlates of rationalization—

  Anyahera snapped her fingers. The simulation froze, the Mitanni ambassador caught in the closing phoneme of her final word. “That’s it,” Anyahera said, looking between the two of us. “Duong-Watts. That’s your smoking gun.”

  Even Thienne looked shocked. I saw her mouth the words: hyperactivation in the neural—

  The Mitanni hadn’t stripped their minds of consciousness. They’d just locked it away in a back room, where it could watch the rest of the brain make its decisions, and cheerfully, blithely, blindly consider itself responsible.

  —correlates of rationalization—

  Some part of the Mitanni mind knew of its own existence. And that tiny segment watched the programming that really ran the show iterate itself, feeling every stab of pain, suffering through every grueling shift, every solitary instant of a life absent joy or reward. Thinking: This is all right. This is for a reason. This is what I want. Everything is fine. When hurt, or sick, or halfway through unanaesthetized field surgery, or when she drove the euthanasia needle into her thigh: this is what I want.

  Because they’d tweaked some circuit to say: You’re in charge. You are choosing this. They’d wired in the perfect lie. Convinced the last domino that it was the first.

  And with consciousness out of the way, happy to comply with any sacrifice, any agony, the program of pure survival could optimize itself.

  “It’s parsimonious,” Thienne said at last. “Easier than stripping out all the circuitry of consciousness, disentangling it from cognition . . .”

  “This is Duong-Watts,” Anyahera said. I flinched at her tone: familiar only from memories of real hurt and pain. “This is humanity enslaved at the most fundamental level.”

  I avoided Thienne’s glance. I didn’t want her to see my visceral agreement with Anyahera. Imagining that solitary bubble of consciousness, lashed, parasitic, to the bottom of the brain, powerless and babbling.

  To think that you could change yourself. To be wrong, and never know it. That was a special horror.

  Of course Thienne saw anyway, and leapt in, trying to preempt Anyahera, or my own thoughts. “This is not the place to wash your hands of Jotunheim. There’s no suffering here. No crime to erase. All they want to do is survive—”

  “Survival is the question,” Anyahera said, turned half-away, pretending disregard for me, for my choice, and in that disregard signaling more fear than she had begging on her knees at Jotunheim, because Anyahera would only ever disregard that which she thought she had no hope of persuading. “The survival of consciousness in the galaxy. The future of cognition. We decide i
t right here. We fire or we don’t.”

  Between us the Mitanni stood frozen placidly, mid-gesture.

  “Kill the Mitanni,” Thienne said, “and you risk the survival of anything at all.”

  It hurt so much to see both sides. It always had.

  Three-player variants are the hardest to design.

  Chess. Shogi. Nuclear detente. War. Love. Galactic survival. Three-player variants are unstable. It was written in my first game theory text: Inevitably, two players gang up against a third, creating an irrecoverable tactical asymmetry.

  “You’re right, Thienne,” I said. “The Mitanni aren’t an immediate threat to human survival. We’re going home.”

  We fell home to Earth, to the empty teak house, and when I felt Anyahera’s eyes upon me I knew myself measured a monster, an accomplice to extinction. Anyahera left, and with her gone, Thienne whirled away into distant dry places far from me. The Mitanni bloomed down the Orion Arm and leapt the darkness between stars.

  “Anyahera’s right,” I said. “The Mitanni will overrun the galaxy. We need to take a stand for—for what we are. Fire the weapons.”

  We fell home to Earth and peach tea under the Lagos sun, and Thienne looked up into that sun and saw an empty universe. Looked down and saw the two people who had, against her will, snuffed out the spark that could have kindled all that void, filled it with metal and diligent labor: life, and nothing less or more.

  I took a breath and pushed the contingencies away. “This isn’t a zero-sum game,” I said. “I think that other solutions exist. Joint outcomes we can’t ignore.”

  They looked at me, their pivot, their battleground. I presented my case.

  This was the only way I knew how to make it work. I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t agreed.

  They chose us for this mission, us three, because we could work past the simple solutions.

  The Mitanni ambassador stood between us as we fell down the thread of our own orbit, toward the moment of weapons release, the point of no return.

  “We know that Mitanni society is built on the Duong-Watts malignancy,” Anyahera said.