“As I said last time, these are just base models.” Evergreen comes up behind her. “We have many, many options to consider before you make the transfer.”
“Will it hurt?”
Evergreen shrugs. “A passing moment in a long, long life.”
She snorts in disbelief and turns to him. Rick is staring at the glowing breasts of the bot body, his face flushed bronze. There is a word on his lips that she can’t quite make out.
“What do you think?” she says.
Rick starts as if roused from a daydream. “Don’t ask me.” He sticks his hand into the pocket of his jacket. “I’d love either one.” He turns the pocket inside out and flicks lint onto the showroom floor.
Evergreen’s smile flickers as if from a power surge, and then brightens to maximum again. “Shall we step into my office then?”
She shivers. “It’s a big decision,” she says. “I guess I’m still looking.” Then she tugs at the sleeve of Rick’s jacket.
He scowls. “This can’t go on.”
“But it can.” She pinches his golden cheek.
Reluctantly, he offers her his arm. “You’re wasting our time.”
She propels him toward the exit. “But it’s mine to waste, dear.”
James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus Awards. He podcasts free readings of his work at http://feeds.feedburner.com/freereads.
The Problem of Junior
Swapna Kishore
Positronic circuits, decision algorithms, laws of robotics, fuzzy logic — it wasn’t just difficult, it was boring. Roy would have rather experimented with the recipe in Gourmet Fare (Clara loved fine dining) but the note from Junior’s school (yet again) meant that Roy could not ignore the problem of Junior any more.
Junior chattered away, unrepentant, a bouncy cheer on his chubby face, so scrubbed-clean, an ideal seven year old. Roy kept glancing at him as he drove him back from school. How could Junior just dismiss the scowling principal? Or ignore nanny’s head rolling on the floor, its lips muttering, “Good boys don’t tell lies.”
“Why did you do it?” Roy asked, unable to stop himself.
“Do what?” Junior looked mildly puzzled. “Oh, that stupid nanny. Old version. Head came off so easily, too. The school should get upgrades.”
“Your nanny wasn’t a clunky metal model, or even an icky-plastic one.” That would have been okay. “Nanny was a positronic humanoid.” Roy almost added, like you, but Junior didn’t know, so he took a deep breath and swallowed the words. “Didn’t it hurt you to yank her head off?” Junior’s circuits should have stopped him from violating the third law.
“Forget it,” Junior said. “Say, will Mom get my PlayStation today?”
Clara. Roy’s guts twisted. She would be so unhappy about this.
* * *
Six months ago, Clara said: “I want a son.”
Beethoven background, her favourite symphony. Dark coffee at her elbow, exactly as she liked it. New chairs, the right softness, the right peach shade. Another perfect evening arranged by Roy. So why this?
“Am I not good enough?” he asked, hurt.
“We’ll be a complete family.”
“But you’ll need surgery.”
Clara laughed. “Don’t be funny. Constructs are offering discounts if we try their new version.”
She chose the age (seven, so toilet-trained, distinct personality), gender (boy, no cutie girl), intelligence (high, of course) and docility (low, because a boy must be a boy, or what’s the point?). Roy soaked in her smile, and felt his heart warm up in response.
For past ‘family fun-time memories’, Clara selected parameters for beach holidays and picnics and auto-generated photo albums. When Roy suggested watching the coded-in past, she laughed. “Seven years’ worth? Don’t be silly.” She collapsed salient memories to a three-day capsule, gave the bot a hazy amnesia for the rest.
Junior arrived.
* * *
Clara gave up the pick-him-up-from-school in a week, the let’s-do-homework-together in two. She soon tired of Junior’s prattle about homework, class bullies and maths lessons. Within a month of Junior’s delivery, she shrugged off Roy’s updates (and complaints) on their ‘son’, and reminded him that she needed enough me-time to recharge herself; her job had responsibilities that needed full attention.
Roy suggested ‘returning’ Junior to Constructs, but Clara sniggered that surely a househusband could handle a small bot? It almost hurt, but he loved her too much to mind for long.
He bought a course on fathering bots.
The law was clear on the nanny episode: boticide by a bot was a severity-3 deviation; Junior should be reprogrammed or destructed.
Problem was, Clara still loved the concept of Junior. His behavioural lapses were, to her, a failure of her specifications, an embarrassment for a top-notch professional. It was as if, by pretending all was well, they would be the ideal happy family.
Roy squirmed. She shouldn’t have requisitioned a high anti-docility.
But he loved her and he wanted her to be happy.
* * *
“Junior destroyed a humanoid nanny,” he told Clara that evening.
She paled.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried my best.”
“No, no, not your fault.” She flipped on her PDA, entered some codes. “This is awful; I hate it.” She got up and began pacing.
That’s when Junior walked in, grinning and muddy, holding a soccer ball. Like nothing had happened.
And Roy got a brainwave: he may have failed as father, but he could save Clara some agony now.
If only Junior didn’t look so real.
Destructing him — it — was legally allowed — no, required — because a bot had destroyed another.
At times like this, when Roy forced himself to do something he hated because of Clara, he suspected this was not what love should be. Then he thought of her smile.
Clara’s PDA lay on the table, with Junior’s destruct code on top.
Damn.
Roy fought his nausea and clicked ‘Confirm.’
Junior froze, and then slumped, limbs tangled in impossible ways. The ball slipped out of his hands and thumped to the floor. A faint smell of burnt circuitry began spreading.
“Roy?” Clara looked at the awkward arrangement of dismantling body parts, and then at Roy. “Why did you…?”
Roy wanted to throw up, but he kept his face expressionless; he didn’t want to alarm Clara. “Junior was dangerous, but you would have hated destroying him.”
Clara blinked rapidly. Her mouth fell open; she closed it.
“Next time, specify less naughtiness, okay?” he said softly.
Tenderness suffused her face. “I really messed up the specifications, huh? So many contradictions.”
He blew her a kiss. His head hurt. “It’s okay.”
“Was it tough destructing Junior?” Clara squeezed his hand. Her gentle, almost wistful smile made the migraine worth it.
“No,” he lied.
Pause.
“I love you,” he added. That, at least, was true.
“Too much, I think.” She sighed. “I loved you.”
She hugged him and stepped back. Something glittered in her hand. Her eyes were moist.
“But your circuits didn’t work either,” she whispered, and everything exploded inside him.
Swapna Kishore is a consultant in Bangalore, India. She has published technical books and a business novel. She also writes speculative fiction.
Warez
David Langford
Annotated audio transcript only.
“We weren’t listening on the right channels. That was the old SETI in-joke. We should be listening to the media we haven’t invented yet.”
“And now we have?”
“Well … not as such, Minister. The artefact is millennia old and spent about a century in the British Museum egyptology collection, labelled ‘ritual object — purpose unknow
n’. One day it got used in a round of dating calibrations, and slow neutron imaging showed an internal structure that wasn’t at all Old Kingdom. The science-fiction fans in our technical team call it an ansible.” [gesture]
“Which would be an anagram of … of…”
“I have not researched that aspect. What it is, though, is a galactic modem. An interstellar access point. We’ve identified thousands of stations, nodes, channels, whatever. A fire-hose blast of information.” [gesture]
“But surely all in a ghastly foreign lingo?”
“Up to a point, Minister. Some communications are sheer Library of Babel — or babble. Many, though, seem designed for transparency. They begin with helpful language lessons, visual teaching aids.” [explanatory gestures]
“Nasty tic you have there. So, Exercise One goes: ‘Take me to your leader?’”
“A little more sophisticated than that, Sir. So much more so, indeed, that there are built-in pitfalls.”
“One has heard rumours.”
“Our interface software is now blocking channels #207 and #855, which produce undesirable symptoms in most people exposed to the message content. Convulsions, death, that kind of thing. Also #1,023, whose researcher came through in good health but with her former language skills overwritten. Apparently she now thinks in fluent Vegan or Arcturan and is finding it hard to relearn English. In fact…” [several agitated gestures]
“Interesting, but can we be more focused? Less pantomime and more valuable scientific insights that will advance the frontiers of knowledge and turn a whacking profit.”
“Well, #89 is quite intriguing. It claims to offer the secrets of cheap interstellar travel. Some kind of light-pressure drive that relies on destabilizing the local sun.”
“That is, our local Sun?”
“In effect, yes.” [gestures]
“Good lord. Better not tell NASA about that … Something more practical, please.”
“The payload of #387 is allegedly a total-spectrum antibiotic. We didn’t care to investigate too closely, but this would seem to be a replicating catalyst that persists in the environment and is incompatible with carbon-based life. One of those SF fans in our crew thought the target users might be silicon intelligences.” [gestures]
“Caveat emptor. Onward!” [gesture]
“Just for balance, #388 promises the same for semiconductors. No computer viruses, because no surviving computers: the catalysts roll us back to Ohm’s law technology … Now #1,599 has a certain fascination. All-purpose solution to any energy crisis.” [gestures]
“There will, I presume, be a catch.”
“The summary claims that it’s a simple technique of reprogramming the space-time attributes of matter to generate antimatter in arbitrary quantities. 100% conversion efficiency and zero CO2 footprint.”
“The boffins already make that stuff, don’t they? At CERN and suchlike places.” [gesture]
“Exceedingly tiny amounts, Minister, at a rate of billions of years per gram. We are offered the opportunity to make antimatter by the kilogram, with a total energy release of circa 43 megatonnes when that mass encounters normal matter and annihilates. Just as easy to make a tonne for a yield of around 43,000 megatonnes. And it’s supposed to be simple.” [gestures]
“One detects a pattern. Dangerous toys.”
“Yes, Minister. We decided not to unpack full details, just in case it really is simple, but I lost no time putting a block on that channel too. The #1,599 message header, by the way, includes a slogan that seems to translate as ‘MAKE ENERGY FAST!’”
“Likewise, no doubt, ‘Information wants to be free.’ Pray continue your most interesting narrative.” [gestures]
“Of course we don’t know that the actual contents will match the instructions on, as it were, the tin. It may be significant that many of these communications take the general form of #214, which offers immunization against invasive memes, which are allegedly liable to reconfigure one’s entire culture as an ansible broadcasting bot that exists only to relay the original memetic message.”
“That, at least, sounds useful … Ah, maybe not. One has heard of Trojan horses. The benefits of a classical education.” [gestures]
“Yes, Minister. I should have mentioned that our girl who lost her English managed to infect three other people with whatever she’s now speaking, before we isolated everyone concerned … [gestures] There’s a wide range of suspected Trojan channels, mostly rather less ingenious than #214. To paraphrase a typical specimen: ‘Greatly enlarge your species potential!’”
“Or conversely, ‘There’s one born every minute’.”
“The final disappointment, I’m afraid, is that we don’t seem to be detecting any real-time communication out there. Just endlessly repeated broadcasts, most likely from zombie networks. [numerous gestures] Maybe it would have been different if we’d accessed the galactic net thousands of years ago, back when some UFO tourist presumably overflew the Old Kingdom and dropped his mobile phone.”
“You fear the original broadcasters are all gone?” [gestures]
“I am trying my best to be optimistic. In fact I’m working hard to convince myself that although the ansible network may be choked with this junk, a genuine extraterrestrial contact is still possible.” [gestures]
“You mean … [multiple gestures] Go on: I’m beginning to understand.”
“Yes, Minister. We need to learn the trick of listening with another technology that we haven’t invented yet.” [multiple complex gestures]
NOTE: exchange continues solely in nonstandard sign language. Both subjects now segregated as carriers of contagious memetic dactylology tentatively associated with channel #419. Prognosis uncertain.
David Langford edits the online SF Encyclopedia and the long-running genre newsletter Ansible. He has received 29 Hugo Awards for his fiction, non-fiction and editorial work.
Stay Special
Susan Lanigan
Merlin’s stepmother Alison looks like the girl in the huge wall-to-wall infomercials that flash and reload in the city’s shopping centres. All the girls look like her, allowing for differences in hair and skin colour.
“Love you too,” she says to her girlfriend on the phone. “Stay special.”
“What does that mean?” Merlin asks when she hangs up.
She glares at him. “What?”
“When you say ‘stay special’?”
“You shouldn’t listen to other people’s phone conversations.”
He’s known he would get into trouble for asking. Alison, like his mother, does not like to be asked the wrong questions. Where do babies came from? What’s the Deterioration?
“Don’t ask Alison questions like that,” his father always says.
* * *
Three years ago, when his mother was still alive, she disappeared one day and Merlin wandered into the nearest Women’s Municipal Powder Room in search of her. He remembers passing through a long, tiled vestibule into the main room, where jets of fragrant fog came out of holes placed high up in the walls. To his left and right, in long aisles, stood line after line of dressing-room tables; all along these aisles, women looked into long mirrors, patting their skins with lavender-smelling creams in opaque glass jars, some crying. Eventually, he saw his mother over in the far corner. She was guiding his sister though a similar routine. “See … like this.” And then she leaned over and whispered: “Stay special, darling, always … stay special.”
“Stay special,” his sister echoed, her thumb in her mouth.
“Mama!” he cried out. His mother turned around, her face darkening. Quickly she picked him up and marched him outside, Lena running along behind, and murmured the same word again and again under her breath: Deterioration.
* * *
Alison has taken him shoe-shopping. “Merlin!” she shouts. “Stop wandering off!”
But Merlin has seen something odd in the mall’s atrium. Alongside the fountain and palm trees, a hunched figure drags its bo
dy towards the café near the entrance. It looks like nothing Merlin has ever seen before. It looks barely human.
“Alison,” he calls.
“Can’t it wait? I’m kinda busy here.”
“There’s a funny person in the mall!”
Alison leaps to her feet and races to the window. When she sees the bent figure, she lets out a sudden shriek that sets Merlin’s heart racing even before she grabs him and pulls him away, almost causing him to pee in his pants as she drags him to the car.
“What’s going on?” he says, as she floors it down the highway.
“Shut up, Merlin.”
He shrinks into the seat.
“A real-life Degraded woman,” she wonders out loud. “I didn’t think there were any left.”
“What’s ‘Degraded’?”
“Degraded is when the Deterioration isn’t caught in time and it progresses to a stage when — a stage when you look like that.”
“But what’s the —”
Alison switches on the radio to stop him asking any more questions. On comes a crooning, mellifluous voice announcing a new face cream. Life can be tough, it says. We all know that changes can occur. But today’s woman can stay safe for longer. Then it chants the chemical compounds: idebenone, dibenzoylmethane, dithiolane-3-pentanoic acid. Then the wrap: Women of the world, remember! Stay special.
* * *
Later, in his room, Merlin hears a gentle knock. He opens the door: it is his father with Alison behind him.
“I hear you had a little trouble earlier,” Merlin’s father says.
“What’s the Deterioration?” Merlin blurts out. There is a silence, but he continues. “No, really, what is it? Everyone talks about it and I don’t know what it means. I don’t know why she’s mad at me.” Merlin is tearful.
His father tightens his arm around Alison’s shoulders. “The Deterioration,” he says heavily, “is a name given by women to the condition of senescence. Simply put, growing older.”
“So does that mean I’ll get it?”
His father sighs. “Merlin, older age in men is seen as normal. As you can see, I…” His voice trails off. He takes a gulp of his drink.
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