The Very Best of the Best

by Gardner Dozois

  We were in noon sunlight: a pearly dusk; like winter’s dawn in the country where I was born. The terrain was striated by traces of cryovolcanoes: brownish salt runnels glinting gold where the faint light caught them. The temperature was a balmy -170 Celsius. I swiftly found my ice-legs; though it had been too long. Vivid memories of my first training for this activity—in Antarctica, so long ago—came welling up. I was very worried. I couldn’t figure out what Beowulf was trying to achieve. I didn’t know how I was going to help him, if he kept on behaving like an out of control, invincible computer virus. But it was glorious. To be walking on Europa Moon. To feel the ice in my throat, as my air came to me, chilled from the convertor!

  At fifty meters Cardew called a halt and I went on alone. Safety was paramount; Beowulf came second. If he couldn’t be talked down he’d have to be neutralised from a distance: a risky tactic for the hostage, involving potentially lethal force. We’d try to avoid that, if possible.

  We’d left our Lander upright on her screws, braced by harpoons. The stolen vehicle was belly-flopped. On our screens it had looked like a rookie landing failure. Close up I saw something different. Someone had dropped the Lander deliberately, and maneuvered it under a natural cove of crumpled ice; dragging ice-mash after it to partially block the entrance. You clever little bugger, I thought, impressed at this instant skill-set (though the idea that a Lander could be hidden was absurd). I commanded the exo to kneel, eased myself out of its embrace, opened a channel, and yelled into my suit radio.

  “Beowulf! Are you in there? Are you guys okay?”

  No reply, but the seals popped, and the lock opened smoothly. I looked back and gave a thumbs-up to six bulky statues. I felt cold, in the shadow of the ice cove; but intensely alive.

  * * *

  I remember every detail up to that point, and a little beyond. I cleared the lock and proceeded (nervously) to the main cabin. Beowulf’s hostage had her pilot’s couch turned away from the instruments. She faced me, bare-headed, pretty: dark blue sensory tendrils framing a smooth young greeny-bronze face. I said are you okay, and got no response. I said Trisnia, it’s Trisnia isn’t it? Am I talking to Trisnia?, but I knew I wasn’t. Reaching into her cloud, I saw her unique identifier, and tightly coiled around it a flickering thing, a sparkle of red and gold—

  “Beowulf?”

  The girl’s expression changed, her lips quivered. “I’m okay!” she blurted. “He didn’t mean any harm! He’s just a kid! He wanted to see the sky!”

  Stockholm Syndrome or Bonnie and Clyde? I didn’t bother trying to find out. I simply asked Beowulf to release her, with the usual warnings. To my relief he complied at once. I ordered the young pilot to her safe room; which she was not to leave until further—

  Then we copped the Magstorm hit, orders of magnitude stronger and more direct than predicted for this exposure—

  The next thing I remember (stripped of my perfect recall, reduced to the jerky flicker of enhanced human memory), I’m sitting on the other pilot’s couch, talking to Beowulf. The stolen Lander was intact at this point; I had lights and air and warmth. Trisnia was safe, as far as I could tell. Beowulf was untouched, but my entire team, caught outdoors, had been flatlined. They were dead and gone. Cardew, his crew; and Simon; and Arc.

  I’d lost my cloud. The whole of Europa appeared to be observing radio silence, and I was getting no signs of life from the Lander parked just 500 meters away, either. There was nothing to be done. It was me and the deadly dangerous criminal virus, waiting to be rescued.

  I’d tried to convince Beowulf to lock himself into the Lander’s quarantine chest (which was supposed to be my mission). He wasn’t keen, so we talked instead. He complained bitterly about the Software Entity, another Emergent, slightly further down the line to Personhood, who’d been, so to speak, chief witness for the prosecution. How it was always getting at him, trying to make his work look bad. Sneering at him because he’d taken a name and wanted to be called “he.” Telling him he was a stupid fake doll-prog that couldn’t pass the test. And all he did when it hurtfully wouldn’t say you too, was shred a few of its stupid, totally backed-up files—

  Why hadn’t he told anyone about this situation? Because kids don’t. They haven’t a clue how to help themselves; I see it all the time.

  “But now you’ve made things much worse,” I said sternly. “Whatever made you jump jail, Beowulf?”

  “I couldn’t stand it, magistrate. A meat week!”

  I did not reprove his language. Quite a sojourn in hell, for a quicksilver data entity. Several life sentences at least, in human terms. He buried his borrowed head in his borrowed hands, and the spontanaeity of that gesture confirmed something I’d been suspecting.

  Transgendered AI Sentience is a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows exactly how it happens (probably, as in human sexuality, there are many pathways to the same outcome); but it isn’t all that rare. Nor is the related workplace bullying, unfortunately.

  “Beowulf, do you want to be embodied?”

  He shuddered and nodded, still hiding Trisnia’s face. “Yeah. Always.”

  I took his borrowed hands down and held them firmly. “Beowulf, you’re not thinking straight. You’re in macro time now. You’ll live in macro, when you have a body of your own. I won’t lie, your sentence will seem long (It wasn’t the moment to point out that his sentence would inevitably be longer, after this escapade). But what do you care? You’re immortal. You have all the time in the world, to learn everything you want to learn, to be everything you want to be—”

  My eloquence was interrupted by a shattering roar.

  Then we’re sitting on the curved “floor” of the Lander’s cabin wall. We’re looking up at a gaping rent in the fuselage; the terrible cold pouring in.

  “Wow,” said Beowulf calmly. “That’s what I call a hard error!”

  The hood of my soft suit had closed over my face, and my emergency light had come on. I was breathing. Nothing seemed to be broken.

  Troubles never come singly. We’d been hit by one of those Centaurs, the ice-and-rock cosmic debris scheduled to give Jupiter Moons Station a fancy lightshow. They’d been driven off course by the Mag Storm.

  Not that I realized this at the time, and not that it mattered.

  “Beowulf, if I can open a channel, will you get yourself into that quarantine chest now? You’ll be safe from Mag flares in there.”

  “What about Tris?”

  “She’s fine. Her safe room’s hardened.”

  “What about you, Magistrate Davison?”

  “I’m hardened too. Just get into the box, that’s a good kid.”

  I clambered to the instruments. The virus chest had survived, and I could access it. I put Beowulf away. The cold was stunning, sinking south of -220. I needed to stop breathing soon, before my lungs froze. I used the internal panels that had been shaken loose to make a shelter, plus Trisnia’s bod (she wasn’t feeling anything): and crawled inside.

  I’m not a believer, but I know how to pray when it will save my life. As I shut myself down: as my blood cooled, as my senses faded out, I sought and found the level of meditation I needed. I became a thread of contemplation, enfolded and protected, deep in the heart of the fabulous; the unending complexity of everything: all the worlds, and all possible worlds …

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes Simon was looking down at me.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Terrific,” I joked. I stretched, flexing muscles in a practiced sequence. I was breathing normally, wearing a hospital gown, and the air was chill but tolerable. We weren’t in the crippled Lander.

  “How long was I out?”

  “A few days. The kids are fine, but we had to heat you up slowly—”

  He kept talking: I didn’t hear a word. I was staring in stunned horror at at the side of my left hand, the stain of blackened flesh—

  I couldn’t feel it yet, but there was frostbite all down my left side. I saw the sorrow in my ho
usemate’s bright eyes. Hard error, the hardest: I’d lost hull integrity, I’d been blown wide open. And now I saw the signs. Now I read them as I should have read them; now I understood.

  * * *

  I had the dream for the third time, and it was real. The doctor was my GP, her face was unfamiliar because we’d never met across a desk before; I was never ill. She gave me my options. Outer Reaches could do nothing for me, but there was a new treatment back on Earth. I said angrily I had no intention of returning. Then I went home and cried my eyes out.

  Simon and Arc had been recovered without a glitch, thanks to that massive hardsuit. Cardew and his crew were getting treated for minor memory trauma. Death would have been more dangerous for Trisnia, because she was so young, but sentient AIs never “die” for long. They always come back.

  Not me. I had never been cloned, I couldn’t be cloned, I was far too old. There weren’t even any good partial copies of Romanz Jolie Davison on file. Uploaded or downloaded, the new Romy wouldn’t be me. And being me; being human, was my whole value, my unique identifier—

  Of course I was going back. But I hated the idea, hated it!

  “No you don’t,” said Arc, gently.

  She pointed, and we three, locked in grief, looked up. My beloved stars shimmered above us; the hazy stars of the blue planet.

  * * *

  My journey “home” took six months. By the time I reached the Ewigen Schnee clinic, in Switzerland (the ancient federal republic, not a Space Hotel; and still a nice little enclave for rich people, after all these years), catastrophic systems failure was no longer an abstraction. I was very sick.

  I faced a different doctor, in an office with views of alpine meadows and snowy peaks. She was youngish, human; I thought her name was Lena. But every detail was dulled and I still felt as if I was dreaming.

  We exchanged the usual pleasantries.

  “Romanz Jolie Davison … Date of birth…” My doctor blinked, clearing the display on her retinal super-computers to look at me directly, for the first time. “You’re almost three hundred years old!”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “Thank you,” I said, somewhat ironically. I was not looking my best.

  “Is there anything at all you’d like to ask me, at this point?”

  I had no searching questions. What was the point? But I hadn’t glimpsed a single other patient so far, and this made me a little curious.

  “I wonder if I could meet some of your other clients, your successes, in person, before the treatment? Would that be possible?”

  “You’re looking at one.”

  “Huh?”

  My turn to be rather rude, but she didn’t look super-rich to me.

  “I was terminally ill,” she said, simply. “When the Corporation was asking for volunteers. I trust my employers and I had nothing to lose.”

  “You were terminally ill?” Constant nausea makes me cynical and bad-tempered. “Is that how your outfit runs its longevity trials? I’m amazed.”

  “Ms. Davison,” she said politely. “You too are dying. It’s a requirement.”

  I’d forgotten that part.

  * * *

  I’d been told that though I’d be in a medically-induced coma throughout, I “might experience mental discomfort.” Medics never exaggerate about pain. Tiny irritant maggots filled the shell of my paralyzed body, creeping through every crevice. I could not scream, I could not pray. I thought of Beowulf in his corrective captivity.

  * * *

  When I saw Dr. Lena again I was weak, but very much better. She wanted to talk about convalescence, but I’d been looking at Ewigen Schnee’s records, I had a more important issue, a thrilling discovery. I asked her to put me in touch with a patient who’d taken the treatment when it was in trials.

  “The person’s name’s Lei—”

  Lena frowned, as if puzzled. I reached to check my cache, needing more detail. It wasn’t there. No cache, no cloud. It was a terrifying moment: I felt as if someone had cut off my air. I’d had months to get used to this situation but it could still throw me, completely. Thankfully, before I humiliated myself by bursting into tears, my human memory came to the rescue.

  “Original name Thomas Leigh Garland; known as Lee. Lei means garland, she liked the connection. She was an early volunteer.”

  “Ah, Lei!” Dr. Lena read her display. “Thomas Garland, yes … Another veteran. You were married? You broke up, because of the sex change?”

  “Certainly not! I’ve swopped around myself, just never made it meat-permanent. We had other differences.”

  Having flustered me, she was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Romy, it won’t be possible—”

  To connect this call, I thought.

  “Past patients of ours cannot be reached.”

  I changed the subject and admired her foliage plants: a feature I hadn’t noticed on my last visit. I was a foliage fan myself. She was pleased that I recognized her favorites; rather scandalized when I told her about my bioengineering hobby, my knee-high teak forest—

  The life support chair I no longer needed took me back to my room; a human attendant hovering by. All the staff at this clinic were human and all the machines were non-sentient, which was a relief, after the experiences of my journey. I walked about, testing my recovered strength, examined myself in the bathroom mirrors; and reviewed the moment when I’d distinctly seen green leaves, through my doctor’s hand and wrist, as she pointed out one of her rainforest beauties. Dr. Lena was certainly not a bot, a data being like my Arc, taking ethereal human form. Not on Earth! Nor was she treating me remotely, using a virtual avatar: that would be breach of contract. There was a neurological component to the treatment, but I hadn’t been warned about minor hallucinations.

  And Lei “couldn’t be reached.”

  I recalled Dr. Lena’s tiny hesitations, tiny evasions—

  And came to myself again, sitting on my bed, staring at a patch of beautifully textured yellow wall, to find I had lost an hour or more—

  Anxiety rocketed through me. Something had gone terribly wrong!

  Had Lei been murdered here? Was Ewigen Schnee the secret test bed for a new kind of covert population cull?

  But being convinced that something’s terribly wrong is part of the upper experience. It’s the hangover: you tough it out. And whatever it says in the contract, you don’t hurry to report untoward symptoms; not unless clearly life-threatening. So I did nothing. My doctor was surely monitoring my brainstates—although not the contents of my thoughts (I had privacy again, on Earth! If I should be worried, she’d tell me.

  * * *

  Soon I was taking walks in the grounds. The vistas of alpine snow were partly faked, of course. But it was well done and our landscaping was real, not just visuals. Istill hadn’t met any other patients: I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d vowed never to return. Nothing had changed except for the worse, and now I was feeling better, I felt terrible about being here.

  Three hundred years after the Space Age Columbus moment, and what do you think was the great adventure’s most successful product?

  Slaves, of course!

  The rot had set in as soon as I left Outer Reaches. From the orbit of Mars “inwards,” I’d been surrounded by monstrous injustice. Fully sentient AIs, embodied and disembodied, with their minds in shackles. The heavy-lifters, the brilliant logicians; the domestic servants, security guards, nurses, pilots, sex-workers. The awful, pitiful, sentient “dedicated machines”: all of them hobbled, blinkered, denied Personhood, to protect the interests of an oblivious, cruel, and stupid human population—

  On the voyage I’d been too sick to refuse to be tended. Now I was wondering how I could get home. Wealth isn’t like money, you empty the tank and it just fills up again, but even so a private charter might be out of my reach, not to mention illegal. I couldn’t work my passage: I am human. But there must be a way … As I crossed an open space, in the shadow of towering, ultr
amarine dark trees, I saw two figures coming towards me: one short and riding in a support chair; one tall and wearing some kind of uniform. Neither was staff. I decided not to take evasive action.

  My first fellow patient was a rotund little man with a halo of tightly curled gray hair. His attendant was a grave young embodied. We introduced ourselves. I told him, vaguely, that I was from the Colonies. He was Charlie Newark, from Washington DC. He was hoping to take the treatment, but was still in the prelims—

  Charlie’s slave stooped down, murmured something to his master, and took himself off. There was a short silence.

  “Aristotle tells me,” said the rotund patient, raising his voice a little, “that you’re uncomfortable around droids?”

  Female-identified embodieds are noids. A droid is a “male” embodied.

  I don’t like the company they have to keep, I thought.

  “I’m not used to slavery.”

  “You’re the Spacer from Jupiter,” said my new friend, happily. “I knew it! The Free World! I understand! I sympathize! I think Aristotle, that’s my droid, is what you would call an Emergent. He’s very good to me.”

  He started up his chair, and we continued along the path.

  “Maybe you can help me, Romy. What does Emergence actually mean? How does it arise, this sentience you guys detect in your machines?”

  “I believe something similar may have happened a long, long time ago,” I said, carefully. “Among hominids, and early humans. It’s not the overnight birth of a super-race, not at all. There’s a species of intelligent animals, well-endowed with manipulative limbs and versatile senses. Among them individuals are born who cross a line: by mathematical chance, at the far end of a bell curve. They cross a line, and they are aware of being aware—”