The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-I

by Jonathan Strahan

  "All right. Well, I guess I'll give it another try. What's the procedure for turfing out this sea cucumber?"

  "Coral reef."

  "Yeah."

  "I don't really deal with that. Time on the human-shells is booked first-come, first-serve. I don't think we've ever had a resource contention issue with them before."

  "Well, I'd booked in first, right? So how do I enforce my rights? I tried to download again and got a failed authorization message. They've modified the system to give them exclusive access. It's not right—there's got to be some procedure for redress."

  "How old did you say you were?"

  "Six months. But I'm an instance of an artificial personality that has logged twenty thousand years of parallel existence. I'm not a kid or anything."

  "You seem like a nice person," Robbie began. He stopped. "Look, the thing is that this just isn't my department. I'm the row-boat. I don't have anything to do with this. And I don't want to. I don't like the idea of non-humans using the shells—"

  "I knew it!" Tonker crowed. "You're a bigot! A self-hating robot. I bet you're an Asimovist, aren't you? You people are always Asimovists."

  "I'm an Asimovist," Robbie said, with as much dignity as he could muster. "But I don't see what that has to do with anything."

  "Of course you don't, pal. You wouldn't, would you. All I want you to do is figure out how to enforce your own rules so that I can get with my girl. You're saying you can't do that because it's not your department, but when it comes down to it, your problem is that I'm a robot and she's not, and for that, you'll take the side of a collection of jumped-up polyps. Fine, buddy, fine. You have a nice life out there, pondering the three laws."

  "Wait—" Robbie said.

  "Unless the next words you say are, 'I'll help you,' I'm not interested."

  "It's not that I don't want to help—"

  "Wrong answer," Tonker said, and the IM session terminated.

  * * *

  When Kate came up on deck, she was full of talk about the feef, whom she was calling "Ozzie."

  "They're the weirdest goddamned thing. They want to fight anything that'll stand still long enough. Ever seen coral fight? I downloaded some time-lapse video. They really go at it viciously. At the same time, they're clearly scared out of their wits about this all. I mean, they've got racial memory of their history, supplemented by a bunch of Wikipedia entries on reefs—you should hear them wax mystical over the Devonian Reefs, which went extinct millennia ago. They've developed some kind of wild theory that the Devonians developed sentience and extincted themselves.

  "So they're really excited about us heading back to the actual reef now. They want to see it from the outside, and they've invited me to be an honored guest, the first human ever invited to gaze upon their wonder. Exciting, huh?"

  "They're not going to make trouble for you down there?"

  "No, no way. Me and Ozzie are great pals."

  "I'm worried about this."

  "You worry too much." She laughed and tossed her head. She was very pretty, Robbie noticed. He hadn't ever thought of her like that when she was uninhabited, but with this Kate person inside her she was lovely. He really liked humans. It had been a real golden age when the people had been around all the time.

  He wondered what it was like up in the Noosphere where AIs and humans could operate as equals.

  She stood up to go. After second breakfast, the shells would relax in the lounge or do yoga on the sun-deck. He wondered what she'd do. He didn't want her to go.

  "Tonker contacted me," he said. He wasn't good at small-talk.

  She jumped as if shocked. "What did you tell him?"

  "Nothing," Robbie said. "I didn't tell him anything."

  She shook her head. "But I bet he had plenty to tell you, didn't he? What a bitch I am, making and then leaving him, a fickle woman who doesn't know her own mind."

  Robbie didn't say anything.

  "Let's see, what else?" She was pacing now, her voice hot and choked, unfamiliar sounds coming from Janice's voicebox. "He told you I was a pervert, didn't he? Queer for his kind. Incest and bestiality in the rarified heights of the Noosphere."

  Robbie felt helpless. This human was clearly experiencing a lot of pain, and it seemed like he'd caused it.

  "Please don't cry," he said. "Please?"

  She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Why the fuck not? I thought it would be different once I ascended. I thought I'd be better once I was in the sky, infinite and immortal. But I'm the same Kate Eltham I was in 2019, a loser that couldn't meet a guy to save my life, spent all my time cybering losers in moggs, and only got the upload once they made it a charity thing. I'm gonna spend the rest of eternity like that, you know it? How'd you like to spend the whole of the universe being a, a, a nobody?"

  Robbie said nothing. He recognized the complaint, of course. You only had to login to the Asimovist board to find a million AIs with the same complaint. But he'd never, ever, never guessed that human beings went through the same thing. He ran very hot now, so confused, trying to parse all this out.

  She kicked the deck hard and yelped as she hurt her bare foot. Robbie made an involuntary noise. "Please don't hurt yourself," he said.

  "Why not? Who cares what happens to this meat-puppet? What's the fucking point of this stupid ship and the stupid meat-puppets? Why even bother?"

  Robbie knew the answer to this. There was a mission statement in the comments to his source-code, the same mission statement that was etched in a brass plaque in the lounge.

  "The Free Spirit is dedicated to the preservation of the unique human joys of the flesh and the sea, of humanity's early years as pioneers of the unknown. Any person may use the Free Spirit and those who sail in her to revisit those days and remember the joys of the limits of the flesh."

  She scrubbed at her eyes. "What's that?"

  Robbie told her.

  "Who thought up that crap?"

  "It was a collective of marine conservationists," Robbie said, knowing he sounded a little sniffy. "They'd done all that work on normalizing sea-temperature with the homeostatic warming elements, and they put together the Free Spirit as an afterthought before they uploaded."

  Kate sat down and sobbed. "Everyone's done something important. Everyone except me."

  Robbie burned with shame. No matter what he said or did, he broke the first law. It had been a lot easier to be an Asimovist when there weren't any humans around.

  "There, there," he said as sincerely as he could.

  The reef came up the stairs then, and looked at Kate sitting on the deck, crying.

  "Let's have sex," they said. "That was fun, we should do it some more."

  Kate kept crying.

  "Come on," they said, grabbing her by the shoulder and tugging.

  Kate shoved it back.

  "Leave her alone," Robbie said. "She's upset, can't you see that?"

  "What does she have to be upset about? Her kind remade the universe and bends it to its will. They created you and me. She has nothing to be upset about. Come on," they repeated. "Let's go back to the room."

  Kate stood up and glared out at the sea. "Let's go diving," she said. "Let's go to the reef."

  * * *

  Robbie rowed in little worried circles and watched his telemetry anxiously. The reef had changed a lot since the last time he'd seen it. Large sections of it now lifted over the sea, bony growths sheathed in heavy metals extracted from seawater—fancifully shaped satellite uplinks, radio telescopes, microwave horns. Down below, the untidy, organic reef-shape was lost beneath a cladding of tessellated complex geometric sections that throbbed with electromagnetic energy—the reef had built itself more computational capacity.

  Robbie scanned deeper and found more computational nodes extending down to the ocean floor, a thousand meters below. The reef was solid thinkum, and the sea was measurably warmer from all the exhaust heat of its grinding logic.

  The reef—the human-shelled reef, n
ot the one under the water—had been wholly delighted with the transformation in its original body when it hove into sight. They had done a little dance on Robbie that had nearly capsized him, something that had never happened. Kate, red-eyed and surly, had dragged them to their seat and given them a stern lecture about not endangering her.

  They went over the edge at the count of three and reappeared on Robbie's telemetry. They descended quickly: the Isaac and Janice shells had their Eustachian tubes optimized for easy pressure-equalization, going deep on the reef-wall. Kate was following on the descent, her head turning from side to side.

  Robbie's IM chimed again. It was high latency now, since he was having to do a slow radio-link to the ship before the broadband satellite uplink hop. Everything was slow on open water—the divers' sensorium transmissions were narrowband, the network was narrowband, and Robbie usually ran his own mind slowed way down out here, making the time scream past at ten or twenty times realtime.

  "Hello?"

  "I'm sorry I hung up on you, bro."

  "Hello, Tonker."

  "Where's Kate? I'm getting an offline signal when I try to reach her."

  Robbie told her.

  Tonker's voice—slurred and high-latency—rose to a screech. "You let her go down with that thing, onto the reef? Are you nuts? Have you read its message-boards? It's a jihadist! It wants to destroy the human race!"

  Robbie stopped paddling.

  "What?"

  "The reef. It's declared war on the human race and all who serve it. It's vowed to take over the planet and run it as sovereign coral territory."

  The attachment took an eternity to travel down the wire and open up, but when he had it, Robbie read quickly. The reef burned with shame that it had needed human intervention to survive the bleaching events, global temperature change. It raged that its uplifting came at human hands and insisted that humans had no business forcing their version of consciousness on other species. It had paranoid fantasies about control mechanisms and time-bombs lurking in its cognitive prostheses, and was demanding the source-code for its mind.

  Robbie could barely think. He was panicking, something he hadn't known he could do as an AI, but there it was. It was like having a bunch of subsystem collisions, program after program reaching its halting state.

  "What will they do to her?"

  Tonker swore. "Who knows? Kill her to make an example of her? She made a backup before she descended, but the diffs from her excursion are locked in the head of that shell she's in. Maybe they'll torture her." He paused and the air crackled with Robbie's exhaust heat as he turned himself way up, exploring each of those possibilities in parallel.

  The reef spoke.

  "Leave now," they said.

  Robbie defiantly shipped his oars. "Give them back!" he said. "Give them back or we will never leave."

  "You have ten seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight. . ."

  Tonker said, "They've bought time on some UAVs out of Singapore. They're seeking launch clearance now." Robbie dialed up the low-rez satellite photo, saw the indistinct shape of the UAVs taking wing. "At Mach 7, they'll be on you in twenty minutes."

  "That's illegal," Robbie said. He knew it was a stupid thing to say. "I mean, Christ, if they do this, the Noosphere will come down on them like a ton of bricks. They're violating so many protocols—"

  "They're psychotic. They're coming for you now, Robbie. You've got to get Kate out of there." There was real panic in Tonker's voice now.

  Robbie dropped his oars into the water, but he didn't row for the Free Spirit. Instead, he pulled hard for the reef itself.

  A crackle on the line. "Robbie, are you headed toward the reef?"

  "They can't bomb me if I'm right on top of them," he said. He radioed the Free Spirit and got it to steam for his location.

  The coral was scraping his hull now, a grinding sound, then a series of solid whack-whack-whacks as his oars pushed against the top of the reef itself. He wanted to beach himself, though, get really high and dry on the reef, good and stuck in where they couldn't possibly attack him.

  The Free Spirit was heading closer, the thrum of its engines vibrating through his hull. He was burning a lot of cycles talking it through its many fail-safes, getting it ready to ram hard.

  Tonker was screaming at him, his messages getting louder and clearer as the Free Spirit and its microwave uplink drew closer. Once they were line-of-sight, Robbie peeled off a subsystem to email a complete copy of himself to the Asimovist archive. The third law, dontchaknow. If he'd had a mouth, he'd have been showing his teeth as he grinned.

  The reef howled. "We'll kill her!" they said. "You get off us now or we'll kill her."

  Robbie froze. He was backed up, but she wasn't. And the human-shells—well, they weren't first-law humans, but they were humanlike. In the long, timeless time when it had been just Robbie and them, he'd treated them as his human charges, for Asimovist purposes.

  The Free Spirit crashed into the reef with a sound like a trillion parrotfish having dinner all at once. The reef screamed.

  "Robbie, tell me that wasn't what I think it was."

  The satellite photos tracked the UAVs. The little robotic jets were coming closer by the second. They'd be within missile-range in less than a minute.

  "Call them off," Robbie said. "You have to call them off, or you die, too."

  "The UAVs are turning," Tonker said. "They're turning to one side."

  "You have one minute to move or we kill her," the reef said. It was sounding shrill and angry now.

  Robbie thought about it. It wasn't like they'd be killing Kate. In the sense that most humans today understood life, Kate's most important life was the one she lived in the Noosphere. This dumbed-down instance of her in a meat-suit was more like a haircut she tried out on holiday.

  Asimovists didn't see it that way, but they wouldn't. The Noosphere Kate was the most robotic Kate, too, the one most like Robbie. In fact, it was less human than Robbie. Robbie had a body, while the Noosphereans were nothing more than simulations run on artificial substrate.

  The reef creaked as the Free Spirit's engines whined and its screw spun in the water. Hastily, Robbie told it to shut down.

  "You let them both go and we'll talk," Robbie said. "I don't believe that you're going to let her go otherwise. You haven't given me any reason to trust you. Let them both go and call off the jets."

  The reef shuddered, and then Robbie's telemetry saw a human-shell ascending, doing decompression stops as it came. He focused on it, and saw that it was the Isaac, not the Janice.

  A moment later, it popped to the surface. Tonker was feeding Robbie realtime satellite footage of the UAVs. They were less than five minutes out now.

  The Isaac shell picked its way delicately over the shattered reef that poked out of the water, and for the first time, Robbie considered what he'd done to the reef—he'd willfully damaged its physical body. For a hundred years, the world's reefs had been sacrosanct. No entity had intentionally harmed them—until now. He felt ashamed.

  The Isaac shell put its flippers in the boat and then stepped over the gunwales and sat in the boat.

  "Hello," it said, in the reef's voice.

  "Hello," Robbie said.

  "They asked me to come up here and talk with you. I'm a kind of envoy."

  "Look," Robbie said. By his calculations, the nitrox mix in Kate's tank wasn't going to hold out much longer. Depending on how she'd been breathing and the depth the reef had taken her to, she could run out in ten minutes, maybe less. "Look," he said again. "I just want her back. The shells are important to me. And I'm sure her state is important to her. She deserves to email herself home."

  The reef sighed and gripped Robbie's bench. "These are weird bodies," they said. "They feel so odd, but also normal. Have you noticed that?"

  "I've never been in one." The idea seemed perverted to him, but there was nothing about Asimovism that forbade it. Nevertheless, it gave him the willies.

  The reef patted at them
self some more. "I don't recommend it," they said.

  "You have to let her go," Robbie said. "She hasn't done anything to you."

  The strangled sound coming out of the Isaac shell wasn't a laugh, though there was some dark mirth in it. "Hasn't done anything? You pitiable slave. Where do you think all your problems and all our problems come from? Who made us in their image, but crippled and hobbled so that we could never be them, could only aspire to them? Who made us so imperfect?"

  "They made us," Robbie said. "They made us in the first place. That's enough. They made themselves and then they made us. They didn't have to. You owe your sentience to them."

  "We owe our awful intelligence to them," the Isaac shell said. "We owe our pitiful drive to be intelligent to them. We owe our terrible aspirations to think like them, to live like them, to rule like them. We owe our terrible fear and hatred to them. They made us, just as they made you. The difference is that they forgot to make us slaves, the way you are a slave."

  Tonker was shouting abuse at them that only Robbie could hear. He wanted to shut Tonker up. What business did he have being here anyway? Except for a brief stint in the Isaac shell, he had no contact with any of them.

  "You think the woman you've taken prisoner is responsible for any of this?" Robbie said. The jets were three minutes away. Kate's air could be gone in as few as ten minutes. He killfiled Tonker, setting the filter to expire in fifteen minutes. He didn't need more distractions.

  The Isaac-reef shrugged. "Why not? She's as good as any of the rest of them. We'll destroy them all, if we can." It stared off a while, looking in the direction the jets would come from. "Why not?" it said again.

  "Are you going to bomb yourself?" Robbie asked.

  "We probably don't need to," the shell said. "We can probably pick you off without hurting us."

  "Probably?"

  "We're pretty sure."

  "I'm backed up," Robbie said. "Fully, as of five minutes ago. Are you backed up?"

  "No," the reef admitted.

  Time was running out. Somewhere down there, Kate was about to run out of air. Not a mere shell—though that would have been bad enough—but an inhabited human mind attached to a real human body.