The Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1
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•European Union Announces Border Closures; Extra-European Economic Migrants Not Welcome
•Bill to Restrict Immigration to “Extraordinary Circumstances” Passes Senate; Majority of Working Visas to Be Revoked
•Protestors Demanding Jobs Clash with Police in New York and Washington, D.C.
•Developing Nations Press UN Security Council for Resolution Denouncing Efforts to Restrict Population Migration by Developed Economies
•Collapse of Leading Asian Economies Predicted as Manufacturing Sector Continues Contraction Due to Back-Shoring by Europe and the US
•Everlasting Inc. Refuses to Explain Purpose of New Data Center
You still there?
??
???????????
Sorry, I’m still under-compensating for how slow your cycles are. I’ll leave you to it. Ping me when you’re done.
Mist’s consciousness operated at the speed of electric currents fluctuating billions of times a second instead of slow, analog, electrochemical synapses. Her experience of time must be so different, so fast that it made Maddie a little bit envious.
And she came to appreciate just how patient her father had been with her when he was a ghost in the machine. In every exchange between him and Maddie, he probably had had to wait what must have felt like eons before getting an answer from her, but he had never shown any annoyance.
Maybe that was why he had created another daughter, Maddie thought. Someone who lived and thought like him.
Everlasting is where I tracked them dragging - those fragments of the gods.
Way ahead of you, sister. I took care of burying the pieces of Dad as soon as it calmed down.
Adam Ever, the founder of Everlasting, Inc. was one of the foremost experts on the Singularity. He had been a friend of Dad’s, and Maddie vaguely recalled meeting him as a little girl. Ever was a persistent advocate of consciousness uploading, even after all the legal restrictions placed on his research after the crisis. Maddie’s curiosity was tinged with dread.
Not that easy. I tried to go through Everlasting’s system defenses a few times, but the internal networks are completely isolated. They’re paranoid over there—I lost a few parts when they detected my presence on the external-facing servers.
Maddie shuddered. She recalled the epic fights between her father, Lowell, and Chanda in the darkness of the network. The phrase “lost a few parts” might sound innocuous, but for Mist it probably felt like losing limbs and parts of her mind.
I did manage to copy the pieces of the gods they took. I’ll give you access to the encrypted cloud cell now. Maybe we can figure out what they’re doing at Everlasting by looking through these.
Maddie made dinner that night. Her mother texted her that she was going to be late, first thirty minutes, then an hour, and then “not sure.” Maddie ended up eating alone and then spent the rest of the evening watching the clock and worrying.
“Sorry,” Mom said as she came in, close to midnight. “They kept me late.”
Maddie had seen some of the reports on TV. “Protestors?”
Mom sighed. “Yes. Not as bad as in New York, but hundreds showed up. I had to talk to them.”
“What are they mad about? It’s not like—” Maddie caught herself just as she was about to raise her voice. She was feeling protective of her mother, but her mother had probably had enough shouting for one day.
“They’re good people,” Mom said vaguely. She headed for the stairs without even glancing at the kitchen. “I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed.”
But Maddie was unwilling to just let it go. “Are we having supply issues again?” The recovery was jittery, and goods were still being rationed. It was a constant struggle to get people to stop hoarding.
Mom stopped. “No. The supplies are flowing smoothly again, maybe too smoothly.”
“I don’t understand,” said Maddie.
Mom sat down on the bottom of the stairs, and patted the space next to her. Maddie went over and sat down.
“Remember how during the crisis, when we were coming to Boston, I told you about layers of technology?”
Maddie nodded. Her mother, a historian, had told her the story behind the networks that connected people: the footpaths that grew into caravan routes that developed into roads that turned into railroad tracks that provided the right-of-way for the optical cables that carried the bits that made up the Internet that routed the thoughts of the gods.
“The history of the world is a process of speeding up, of becoming more efficient as well as more fragile. If a footpath is blocked, you just have to walk around it. But if a highway is blocked, you have to wait until specialized machinery can be brought to clear it. Just about anyone can figure out how to patch a cobblestone road, but only highly trained technicians can fix a fiberoptic cable. There’s a lot more redundancy with the older, inefficient technologies.”
“Your point is that keeping it simple technologically is more resilient,” said Maddie.
“But our history is also a history of growing needs, of more mouths to feed and more hands that need to be kept from idleness,” said Mom.
Mom told Maddie that America had been lucky during the crisis: very few bombs had struck her shores and relatively few people had died during the riots. But with much of the infrastructure paralyzed across the country, refugees flooded into the big cities. Boston’s own population had doubled from what it was before the crisis. With so many people came spiking needs: food, clothing, shelter, sanitation. . . .
“On my advice, the governor and the mayor tried to rely on distributed, self-organizing groups of citizens with low-tech delivery methods, but we couldn’t get it to work because it was just too inefficient. Congestion and breakdowns were happening too frequently. Centillion’s automation proposal had to be considered.”
Maddie thought of how impatient Mist had been with her “slow cycles,” and she imagined the roads packed with self-driving trucks streaming bumper-to-bumper at a hundred miles an hour, without drivers who had to rest, without the traffic jams caused by human unpredictability, without the accidents from drifting attentions and exhausted bodies. She thought of tireless robots loading and unloading the supplies necessary to keep millions of people fed and warm and clothed. She thought of the borders patrolled by machines with precise algorithms designed to preserve precious supplies for the use of people with the right accents, the right skin colors, the luck to be born in the right places at the right times.
“All the big cities are doing the same thing,” said Mom, a trace of defensiveness in her voice. “It’s impossible for us to hold out. It would be irresponsible, as Centillion put it.”
“And the drivers and workers would be replaced,” said Maddie, understanding finally dawning on her.
“They showed up on Beacon Hill to protest, hoping to save their jobs. But an even bigger crowd showed up to protest against them. ” Mom rubbed her temples.
“If everything is handed over to Centillion’s robots, wouldn’t another god—I mean a rogue AI—put us at even more risk?”
“We have grown to the point where we must depend on machines to survive,” said Mom. “The world has become too fragile for us to count on people, and so our only choice is to make it even more fragile.”
With Centillion’s robots taking over the crucial work of maintaining the flow of goods into the city, a superficial calmness returned to life. The workers who lost their jobs were given new jobs invented by the government: correcting typos in old databases, sweeping corners of streets that Centillion’s robots couldn’t get to, greeting concerned citizens in the lobby of the State House and gi
ving them tours—some grumbled that this was just a dressed-up form of welfare and what was the government going to do when Centillion and PerfectLogic and ThoughtfulBits and their ilk automated more jobs away?
But at least everyone was getting a paycheck that they could use to buy the supplies brought into the city by the fleet of robots. And Centillion’s CEO swore up and down on TV that they weren’t developing anything that could be understood as “rogue AI,” like the old, dead gods.
That was good, wasn’t it?
Maddie and Mist continued to gather pieces of the old gods and study them to see what Everlasting might want with them. Some of the fragments had belonged to her father, but there were too few of them to even dream of trying to resurrect him. Maddie wasn’t sure how she felt about it—in a way, her father had never fully reconciled to his existence as a disembodied consciousness, and she wasn’t sure he would want to “come back.”
Meanwhile, Maddie was working on a secret project. It would be her present to Mist.
She looked up everything she could online about robotics and electronics and sensor technology. She bought components online, which Centillion drones cheerfully and efficiently delivered to her house—straight to her room, even: she kept the window of her room open, and tiny drones with whirring rotors flitted in at all hours of the day and night, dropping off tiny packages.
What are you doing?
I’ll give you today’s headlines then.
•Hundreds Die in Attempt to Scale “ Freedom Wall” near El Paso
•Think Tank Argues Coal Should be Reevaluated as Alternative Energy Fails to Meet Promise
•Deaths from Typhoons in Southeast Asia Exceed Historical Records
•Experts Warn of Further Regional Conflicts as Food Prices Soar and Drought Continues in Asia and Africa
•Unemployment Numbers Suggest Reconstruction Has Benefited Robots (and Their Owners) More Than People
•Rise of Religious Extremism Tied to Stagnating Developing Economies
•Is Your Job at Risk? Experts Explain How to Protect Yourself from Automation
They’ve been quiet.
Maddie plugged her new creation into the computer.
The lights near the data port on the computer began to blink.
Maddie smiled to herself. For Mist, asking Maddie a question and waiting for her slow cycles to catch up and answer was probably like sending snail mail. It would be far faster for her to investigate the new contraption herself.
The motors in Maddie’s creation spun to life, and the three wheels in the base turned the four-foot-tall torso around. The wheels provided 360° of motion, much like those roving automatic vacuum cleaners.
At the top of the cylindrical torso was a spherical “head” to which were attached the best sensors that Maddie could scrounge up or buy: a pair of high-def cameras to give stereoscopic vision; a matched pair of microphones to act as ears, tuned for the range of human hearing; a sophisticated bundle of probes mounted at the ends of flexible antennae to act as noses and tongues that approximated the sensitivity of human counterparts; and numerous other tactile sensors, gyroscopes, accelerometers, and so on to give the robot the experience of touch, gravity, presence in space.
Away from the head, near the top of the cylindrical body, however, were the most expensive components of them all: a pair of multi-jointed arms with parallel-elastic actuators to recreate the freedom of motion of human arms that ended in a pair of the most advanced prosthetic hands covered in medical-grade plastiskin. The skin, embedded with sensors for temperature and force, were said to approach or even exceed the sensitivity of real skin, and the fingers modeled human hands so well that they could tighten a nut on a screw as well as pick up a strand of hair. Maddie watched as Mist tried them out, flexing and clenching the fingers, and without realizing it, she mirrored the movements with her own fingers.
“What do you think?” she said.
The screen mounted atop the head of the robot came to life, showing a cartoonish pair of eyes, a cute button nose, and a pair of abstract, wavy lines that mimicked the motion of lips. Maddie was proud of the design and programming of the face. She had modeled it on her own.
A voice came out of the speaker below the screen. “This is very well made.” It was a young girl’s voice, chirpy and mellifluous.
“Thank you,” said Maddie. She watched as Mist moved around the room, twisting her head this way and that, sweeping her camera-gaze over everything. “Do you like your new body?”
“It’s interesting,” said Mist. The tone was the same as before. Maddie couldn’t tell if that was because Mist was really pleased with the robotic body or that she hadn’t figured out how to modulate the voice to suit her emotional state.
“I can show you all the things you haven’t experienced before,” said Maddie hurriedly. “You’ll know what it’s like to move in the real world, not just as a ghost in a machine. You’ll be able to understand my stories, and I can take you on trips with me, introduce you to Mom and other people.”
Mist continued to move around the room, her eyes surveying the trophies on Maddie’s shelves, the titles of her books, the posters on her walls, the models of the planets and rocketships hanging from the ceiling—a record of Maddie’s shifting tastes over the years. She moved toward one corner where a basket of stuffed animals was kept, but stopped when the data cable stretched taut, just a few centimeters too short.
“The cable is necessary for now because the amount of data from the sensors is so large. But I’m working on a compression algorithm so we can get you wireless.”
Mist moved the swiveling screen with her cartoonish face forward and backward to simulate a nod. Maddie was grateful that she had thought of such a thing—a lot of the robotics papers on robot-human interactions emphasized that rather than simulating a human face too closely and falling into the uncanny valley, it was better sticking to cartoonish representations that exaggerated the emotional tenor. Sometimes an obviously virtual representation was better than a strict effort at fidelity.
Mist paused in front of a mess of wires and electronic components on Maddie’s shelf. “What’s this?”
“The first computer that Dad and I built together,” said Maddie. Instantly, she seemed to have been transported to that summer almost a decade ago, when Dad showed her how to apply Ohm’s Law to pick out the right resistors and how to read a circuit diagram and translate it into real components and real wires. The smell of hot solder filled her nostrils again, and she smiled even as her eyes moistened.
Mist picked up the contraption with her hands.
“Be careful!” Maddie yelled.
But it was too late. The breadboard crumbled in Mist’s hands, and the pieces fell to the carpet.
“Sorry,” said Mist. “I thought I was applying the right amount of pressure based on the materials used in it.”
“Things get old in the real world,” said Maddie. She bent down to pick up the pieces from the carpet, carefully cradling them in her hand. “They grow fragile.” She looked at the remnants of her first unskilled attempt at soldering, noticing the lumpy messes and bent electrodes. “I guess you don’t have much experience with that.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mist again, her voice still chirpy.
“Doesn’t matter,” said Maddie, trying to be magnanimous. “Think of it as a first lesson about the real world. Hold on.”
She rushed out of the room and returned a moment later with a ripe tomato. “This is shipped in from some industrial farm, and it’s nowhere as good as the ones Grandma and I grew back in Pennsylvania. Still, now you can taste it. Don’t talk to me about lycopene and sugar content; taste it.”
Mist took the tomato from her—this time her mechanical hands held it lightly, the fingers barely making an impression against the smooth fruit skin. She gazed at it, the lenses of her camer
as whirring as they focused. And then, decisively, one of the probes on her head shot out and stabbed into the fruit in a single motion.
It reminded Maddie of a mosquito’s proboscis stabbing into the skin of a hand, or a butterfly sipping nectar from a flower. A sense of unease rose in her. She was trying so hard to make Mist human, but what made her think that was what Mist wanted?
“It’s very good,” said Mist. She swiveled her screen toward Maddie so that Maddie could see her cartoonish eyes curving in a smile. “You’re right. It’s not as good as the heirloom varieties.”
Maddie laughed. “How would you know that?”
“I’ve tasted hundreds of varieties of tomatoes,” said Mist.
“Where? How?”
“Before the war of the gods, all the big instant meal manufacturers and fast food restaurants used automation to produce recipes. Dad took me through a few of these facilities and I tried every variety of tomato from Amal to Zebra Cherry—I was a big fan of Snow White.”
“Machines were making up the recipes?” Maddie asked. She had loved watching cooking shows before the war, and chefs were artists, what they did was creative. She couldn’t quite wrap her head around the notion of machines making up recipes.
“Sure. At the scale these places were operating, they had to optimize for so many factors that people could never get it right. The recipes had to be tasty and also use ingredients that could be obtained within the constraints of modern mechanized agriculture—it was no good to discover some good recipe that relied on an heirloom variety that couldn’t be grown in large enough quantities efficiently.”
Maddie thought back to her conversation with Mom and realized that it was the same concept that now governed the creation of ration packets: nutritious, tasty, but also effective for feeding hundreds of millions living with a damaged grid and limited resources.