The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

Daniel summoned Lucien and they sought a way forward. It was easy to tweak the Phites’ anatomy to grant them the ability to generate more subtle vocalisations, but that alone was no more useful than handing a chimp a conductor’s baton. What was needed was a way to make sophisticated planning and communications skills a matter of survival.

  Eventually, he and Lucien settled on a series of environmental modifications, providing opportunities for the creatures to rise to the occasion. Most of these scenarios began with famine. Lucien blighted the main food crops, then offered a palpable reward for progress by dangling some tempting new fruit from a branch that was just out of reach. Sometimes that metaphor could almost be taken literally: he’d introduce a plant with a complex life cycle that required tricky processing to render it edible, or a new prey animal that was clever and vicious, but nutritionally well worth hunting in the end.

  Time and again, the Phites failed the test, with localised species dwindling to extinction. Daniel watched in dismay; he had not grown sentimental, but he’d always boasted to himself that he’d set his standards higher than the extravagant cruelties of nature. He contemplated tweaking the creatures’ physiology so that starvation brought a swifter, more merciful demise, but Lucien pointed out that he’d be slashing his chances of success if he curtailed this period of intense motivation. Each time a group died out, a fresh batch of mutated cousins rose from the dust to take their place; without that intervention, Sapphire would have been a wilderness within a few real-time days.

  Daniel closed his eyes to the carnage, and put his trust in sheer time, sheer numbers. In the end, that was what the crystal had bought him: when all else failed, he could give up any pretence of knowing how to achieve his aims and simply test one random mutation after another.

  Months went by, sending hundreds of millions of tribes starving into their graves. But what choice did he have? If he fed these creatures milk and honey, they’d remain fat and stupid until the day he died. Their hunger agitated them, it drove them to search and strive, and while any human onlooker was tempted to colour such behaviour with their own emotional palette, Daniel told himself that the Phites’ suffering was a shallow thing, little more than the instinct that jerked his own hand back from a flame before he’d even registered discomfort.

  They were not the equal of humans. Not yet.

  And if he lost his nerve, they never would be.

  Daniel dreamt that he was inside Sapphire, but there were no Phites in sight. In front of him stood a sleek black monolith; a thin stream of pus wept from a crack in its smooth, obsidian surface. Someone was holding him by the wrist, trying to force his hand into a reeking pit in the ground. The pit, he knew, was piled high with things he did not want to see, let alone touch.

  He thrashed around until he woke, but the sense of pressure on his wrist remained. It was coming from his watch. As he focused on the one-word message he’d received, his stomach tightened. Lucien would not have dared to wake him at this hour for some run-of-the-mill result.

  Daniel rose, dressed, then sat in his office sipping coffee. He did not know why he was so reluctant to make the call. He had been waiting for this moment for more than twenty years, but it would not be the pinnacle of his life. After this, there would be a thousand more peaks, each one twice as magnificent as the last.

  He finished the coffee then sat a while longer, massaging his temples, making sure his head was clear. He would not greet this new era bleary-eyed, half-awake. He recorded all his calls, but this was one he would retain for posterity.

  “Lucien,” he said. The man’s image appeared, smiling. “Success?”

  “They’re talking to each other,” Lucien replied.

  “About what?”

  “Food, weather, sex, death. The past, the future. You name it. They won’t shut up.”

  Lucien sent transcripts on the data channel, and Daniel perused them. The linguistics software didn’t just observe the Phites’ behaviour and correlate it with the sounds they made; it peered right into their virtual brains and tracked the flow of information. Its task was far from trivial, and there was no guarantee that its translations were perfect, but Daniel did not believe it could hallucinate an entire language and fabricate these rich, detailed conversations out of thin air.

  He flicked between statistical summaries, technical overviews of linguistic structure, and snippets from the millions of conversations the software had logged. Food, weather, sex, death. As human dialogue the translations would have seemed utterly banal, but in context they were riveting. These were not chatterbots blindly following Markov chains, designed to impress the judges in a Turing test. The Phites were discussing matters by which they genuinely lived and died.

  When Daniel brought up a page of conversational topics in alphabetical order, his eyes were caught by the single entry under the letter G. Grief. He tapped the link, and spent a few minutes reading through samples, illustrating the appearance of the concept following the death of a child, a parent, a friend.

  He kneaded his eyelids. It was three in the morning; there was a sickening clarity to everything, the kind that only night could bring. He turned to Lucien.

  “No more death.”

  “Boss?” Lucien was startled.

  “I want to make them immortal. Let them evolve culturally; let their ideas live and die. Let them modify their own brains, once they’re smart enough; they can already tweak the rest of their anatomy.”

  “Where will you put them all?” Lucien demanded.

  “I can afford another crystal. Maybe two more.”

  “That won’t get you far. At the present birth rate—”

  “We’ll have to cut their fertility drastically, tapering it down to zero. After that, if they want to start reproducing again they’ll really have to innovate.” They would need to learn about the outside world, and comprehend its alien physics well enough to design new hardware into which they could migrate.

  Lucien scowled. “How will we control them? How will we shape them? If we can’t select the ones we want—”

  Daniel said quietly, “This is not up for discussion.” Whatever Julie Dehghani had thought of him, he was not a monster; if he believed that these creatures were as conscious as he was, he was not going to slaughter them like cattle—or stand by and let them die “naturally”, when the rules of this world were his to rewrite at will.

  “We’ll shape them through their memes,” he said. “We’ll kill off the bad memes, and help spread the ones we want to succeed.” He would need to keep an iron grip on the Phites and their culture, though, or he would never be able to trust them. If he wasn’t going to literally breed them for loyalty and gratitude, he would have to do the same with their ideas.

  Lucien said, “We’re not prepared for any of this. We’re going to need new software, new analysis and intervention tools.”

  Daniel understood. “Freeze time in Sapphire. Then tell the team they’ve got eighteen months.”

  4

  Daniel sold his shares in WiddulHands, and had two more crystals built. One was to support a higher population in Sapphire, so there was as large a pool of diversity among the immortal Phites as possible; the other was to run the software—which Lucien had dubbed the Thought Police—needed to keep tabs on what they were doing. If human overseers had had to monitor and shape the evolving culture every step of the way, that would have slowed things down to a glacial pace. Still, automating the process completely was tricky, and Daniel preferred to err on the side of caution, with the Thought Police freezing Sapphire and notifying him whenever the situation became too delicate.

  If the end of death was greeted by the Phites with a mixture of puzzlement and rejoicing, the end of birth was not so easy to accept. When all attempts by mating couples to sculpt their excess beads into offspring became as ineffectual as shaping dolls out of clay, it led to a mixture of persistence and distress that was painful to witness. Humans were accustomed to failing to conceive, but this was more like still birth aft
er still birth. Even when Daniel intervened to modify the Phites’ basic drives, some kind of cultural or emotional inertia kept many of them going through the motions. Though their new instincts urged them merely to pool their spare beads and then stop, sated, they would continue with the old version of the act regardless, forlorn and confused, trying to shape the useless puddle into something that lived and breathed.

  Move on, Daniel thought. Get over it. There was only so much sympathy he could muster for immortal beings who would fill the galaxy with their children, if they ever got their act together.

  The Phites didn’t yet have writing, but they’d developed a strong oral tradition, and some put their mourning for the old ways into elegiac words. The Thought Police identified those memes, and ensured that they didn’t spread far. Some Phites chose to kill themselves rather than live in the barren new world. Daniel felt he had no right to stop them, but mysterious obstacles blocked the paths of anyone who tried, irresponsibly, to romanticise or encourage such acts.

  The Phites could only die by their own volition, but those who retained the will to live were not free to doze the centuries away. Daniel decreed no more terrible famines, but he hadn’t abolished hunger itself, and he kept enough pressure on the food supply and other resources to force the Phites to keep innovating, refining agriculture, developing trade.

  The Thought Police identified and nurtured the seeds of writing, mathematics, and natural science. The physics of Sapphire was a simplified, game-world model, not so arbitrary as to be incoherent, but not so deep and complex that you needed particle physics to get to the bottom of it. As crystal time sped forward and the immortals sought solace in understanding their world, Sapphire soon had its Euclid and Archimedes, its Galileo and its Newton; their ideas spread with supernatural efficiency, bringing forth a torrent of mathematicians and astronomers.

  Sapphire’s stars were just a planetarium-like backdrop, present only to help the Phites get their notions of heliocentricity and inertia right, but its moon was as real as the world itself. The technology needed to reach it was going to take a while, but that was all right; Daniel didn’t want them getting ahead of themselves. There was a surprise waiting for them there, and his preference was for a flourishing of biotech and computing before they faced that revelation.

  Between the absence of fossils, Sapphire’s limited biodiversity, and all the clunky external meddling that needed to be covered up, it was hard for the Phites to reach a grand Darwinian view of biology, but their innate skill with beads gave them a head start in the practical arts. With a little nudging, they began tinkering with their bodies, correcting some inconvenient anatomical quirks that they’d missed in their pre-conscious phase.

  As they refined their knowledge and techniques, Daniel let them imagine that they were working towards restoring fertility; after all, that was perfectly true, even if their goal was a few conceptual revolutions further away than they realised. Humans had had their naive notions of a Philosopher’s Stone dashed, but they’d still achieved nuclear transmutation in the end.

  The Phites, he hoped, would transmute themselves: inspect their own brains, make sense of them, and begin to improve them. It was a staggering task to expect of anyone; even Lucien and his team, with their God’s-eye view of the creatures, couldn’t come close. But when the crystal was running at full speed, the Phites could think millions of times faster than their creators. If Daniel could keep them from straying off course, everything that humanity might once have conceived of as the fruits of millennia of progress was now just a matter of months away.

  5

  Lucien said, “We’re losing track of the language.”

  Daniel was in his Houston office; he’d come to Texas for a series of face-to-face meetings, to see if he could raise some much-needed cash by licensing the crystal fabrication process. He would have preferred to keep the technology to himself, but he was almost certain that he was too far ahead of his rivals now for any of them to stand a chance of catching up with him.

  “What do you mean, losing track?” Daniel demanded. Lucien had briefed him just three hours before, and given no warning of an impending crisis.

  The Thought Police, Lucien explained, had done their job well: they had pushed the neural self-modification meme for all it was worth, and now a successful form of “brain boosting” was spreading across Sapphire. It required a detailed “recipe” but no technological aids; the same innate skills for observing and manipulating beads that the Phites had used to copy themselves during reproduction were enough.

  All of this was much as Daniel had hoped it would be, but there was an alarming downside. The boosted Phites were adopting a dense and complex new language, and the analysis software couldn’t make sense of it.

  “Slow them down further,” Daniel suggested. “Give the linguistics more time to run.”

  “I’ve already frozen Sapphire,” Lucien replied. “The linguistics have been running for an hour, with the full resources of an entire crystal.”

  Daniel said irritably, “We can see exactly what they’ve done to their brains. How can we not understand the effects on the language?”

  “In the general case,” Lucien said, “deducing a language from nothing but neural anatomy is computationally intractable. With the old language, we were lucky; it had a simple structure, and it was highly correlated with obvious behavioural elements. The new language is much more abstract and conceptual. We might not even have our own correlates for half the concepts.”

  Daniel had no intention of letting events in Sapphire slip out of his control. It was one thing to hope that the Phites would, eventually, be juggling real-world physics that was temporarily beyond his comprehension, but any bright ten-year-old could grasp the laws of their present universe, and their technology was still far from rocket science.

  He said, “Keep Sapphire frozen, and study your records of the Phites who first performed this boost. If they understood what they were doing, we can work it out too.”

  At the end of the week, Daniel signed the licensing deal and flew back to San Francisco. Lucien briefed him daily, and at Daniel’s urging hired a dozen new computational linguists to help with the problem.

  After six months, it was clear that they were getting nowhere. The Phites who’d invented the boost had had one big advantage as they’d tinkered with each other’s brains: it had not been a purely theoretical exercise for them. They hadn’t gazed at anatomical diagrams and then reasoned their way to a better design. They had experienced the effects of thousands of small experimental changes, and the results had shaped their intuition for the process. Very little of that intuition had been spoken aloud, let alone written down and formalised. And the process of decoding those insights from a purely structural view of their brains was every bit as difficult as decoding the language itself.

  Daniel couldn’t wait any longer. With the crystal heading for the market, and other comparable technologies approaching fruition, he couldn’t allow his lead to melt away.

  “We need the Phites themselves to act as translators,” he told Lucien. “We need to contrive a situation where there’s a large enough pool who choose not to be boosted that the old language continues to be used.”

  “So we need maybe twenty-five per cent refusing the boost?” Lucien suggested. “And we need the boosted Phites to want to keep them informed of what’s happening, in terms that we can all understand.”

  Daniel said, “Exactly.”

  “I think we can slow down the uptake of boosting,” Lucien mused, “while we encourage a traditionalist meme that says it’s better to span the two cultures and languages than replace the old entirely with the new.”

  Lucien’s team set to work, tweaking the Thought Police for the new task, then restarting Sapphire itself.

  Their efforts seemed to yield the desired result: the Phites were corralled into valuing the notion of maintaining a link to their past, and while the boosted Phites surged ahead, they also worked hard to k
eep the unboosted in the loop.

  It was a messy compromise, though, and Daniel wasn’t happy with the prospect of making do with a watered-down, Sapphire-for-Dummies version of the Phites’ intellectual achievements. What he really wanted was someone on the inside reporting to him directly, like a Phite version of Lucien.

  It was time to start thinking about job interviews.

  Lucien was running Sapphire more slowly than usual—to give the Thought Police a computational advantage now that they’d lost so much raw surveillance data—but even at the reduced rate, it took just six real-time days for the boosted Phites to invent computers, first as a mathematical formalism and, shortly afterwards, as a succession of practical machines.

  Daniel had already asked Lucien to notify him if any Phite guessed the true nature of their world. In the past, a few had come up with vague metaphysical speculations that weren’t too wide of the mark, but now that they had a firm grasp of the idea of universal computation, they were finally in a position to understand the crystal as more than an idle fantasy.

  The message came just after midnight, as Daniel was preparing for bed. He went into his office and activated the intervention tool that Lucien had written for him, specifying a serial number for the Phite in question.

  The tool prompted Daniel to provide a human-style name for his interlocutor, to facilitate communication. Daniel’s mind went blank, but after waiting twenty seconds the software offered its own suggestion: Primo.

  Primo was boosted, and he had recently built a computer of his own. Shortly afterwards, the Thought Police had heard him telling a couple of unboosted friends about an amusing possibility that had occurred to him.

  Sapphire was slowed to a human pace, then Daniel took control of a Phite avatar and the tool contrived a meeting, arranging for the two of them to be alone in the shelter that Primo had built for himself. In accordance with the current architectural style the wooden building was actually still alive, self-repairing and anchored to the ground by roots.