Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 168

by Neil Clarke

  The fireflies flit to candles at the center of the table, and Alshea lunges to grab one, but it slips away from her cupped hands. She laughs, and we laugh with her.

  “Star set’s pretty tonight,” Alshea says.

  “Agreed,” says Norai. “I’d capture it with paint, if I could; look at how those streaks interlock so, like the baker’s beard.”

  “You paint?” Alshea asks, eyes widening. “I want to paint.”

  Norai chuckles. “Well, it was lifetimes ago. I learned when I was your age.”

  “Tomorrow,” I say. “On the return from the doctor’s we can purchase paints and its relevant accessories.”

  Alshea frowns, eyes focusing on the smooth strokes of Norai’s hands buttering rolls. The girl shifts uneasily, and I know it is at the thought of visiting the doctor, the worry that ve might place her in the cold and dark sarcophagus—the cylindrical medical instrument used to stimulate healing.

  “It’s only a little bruise!” she’d screamed at me when we fought earlier in the day. She threw a cushion, and I resisted the urge to chuckle. A little cushion is no match for a creature who towered over her. I caught it, careful to avoid tangling the pillow’s tassels in my claws, and placed it gently on her bed.

  “Little, indeed. Which is why we wait for an appointment tomorrow. But it is your head,” I said. I imagined she deeply regretted jumping on the bed.

  “It’d be something to look forward to, no?” Norai says. “Podder has a great idea don’t you think, jaan?”

  Eventually Alshea perks up when Tedna lists the glorious things she could paint, the star set, the rock garden, the cats, the fireflies. The fireflies that help keep at bay darkness and Nightfall. Her excitement is infectious, and the table buzzes with ideas and banters and the occasional meow from underneath.

  I interject a comment here and there, but mostly I watch Alshea, aware of her sudden dopamine surge at the thought of painting. The inevitable adumbration falls over her eyes, as it so often does when she’s extra excited, and I witness her struggle to ignore it. I do not need to look at her face to know when the shadow of saudade, the shadow of immeasurable longing, descends; I know everything about Alshea’s state even if my eyes are closed.

  “She will come as soon as she can,” I say softly, only for Alshea’s ears, for the tenth or thousandth time reassuring her that her mother has not abandoned her. Technically, this is true. But holoprojection technology isn’t yet advanced enough to offer the experience Alshea longs for. They’d moved across stars, built stations, and terraformed planets. But they couldn’t do this. Tut tut.

  Alshea is placated; we’ve done this before.

  While one part of me is engaged with her, another checks her heart, her lungs, her kidneys, and all else, noting wrinkles and anomalies. The shadow lifts from her face. I am either very good at playing my role or seven-year-old girls are easily placated. For lack of a frame of reference, I like to think it’s the first.

  They shine light in Alshea’s eyes and say: “Pupils unresponsive.” Out of all the measured voices I’d heard over the months, White Streak’s is the worst. Short and discontented, like a matchstick refusing to light.

  When Alshea’s eyelids were pulled open I had immediately shifted my focus, my tavajjo, to the ocular windows, a rare visual of the outside world; I usually have to rely solely on Alshea’s ears. My hope was that I’d see Orange Hair, but protocol dictated that a doctor be present during the formal tests spanned across the three days of CLP, the Completed Life Procedure: three days of checking if the patient was indeed “as good as dead” culminating at the end of the third day with . . . a finality I refuse to accept.

  It is Day 1.

  Orange Hair had not yet earned the mint green that White Streak wears, and is instead in medical intern peach, a rosy blob in my periphery, next to another. Audio confirms the second peach blob is Green Eyes. Pah.

  If only I could get Alshea to turn her head, to look at Orange Hair. Well, if I’m wishing for things, I may as well wish that a single-purpose AI like me had better communication capabilities. Then again, if I am wishing at all, I may as well wish that Alshea recover.

  I clear my cache; my clock cycles are better not wasted on wishes.

  The ideal scenario would have been Orange Hair conducting the checks alone without the distraction of Green Eyes and with White Streak otherwise occupied with “livelier” patients, considering the dearth of doctors—being stationed on MarkX21, a remote mining moon on the edge of the Archipelago, is apparently not a posting highly sought after.

  If only I could catch Orange Hair alone, I would . . . I don’t know what I would do. I have repeatedly attempted and failed to communicate with them ever since Alshea’s ears picked up talk of CLP. But I’d think of something. I pulse with frustration, watch as White Streak works. Watch as their pocket hums and they answer their comm and to my utter delight turn to the interns to take over, they’re going to have to take this, are the interns capable of conducting the tests by themselves?

  And then White Streak whizzes away with their usual driven gait, leaving behind a trail of barked orders for those they once referred to as “peachlings.” I buzz. I can work with this. I simply need to think of something that I have not tried before.

  “Are you capable of checking on a dead girl you little incompetent Sluggies,” says Green Eyes in a voice altered to one of mockery.

  “Be respectful,” Orange Hair says, but with the hint of a smile. “The kid isn’t deceased.”

  “Yet.”

  Orange Hair ignores this and says instead: “And it’s Esslugai. I don’t think they like our term for them.”

  “Oh please, they couldn’t care less. But you trying to put on their accent? Don’t tell me they wouldn’t mind that.”

  Orange Hair is closer to my ocular windows, rearranging some tools at Alshea’s bedside. They are close enough for me to see their dulcet features, but from this angle their hair is a brown red, and not the bright orange of when they lean in to brush Alshea’s hair or clean her face and the lights directly above wash into the thick strands.

  I do not quite have the grasp on human articulations and emotions outside the way I seem to in the world containing Manor Flammel, and the jumpsuits’ identification tags always hang too low for me to read, so I pool identifying nicknames from unique features. Green irises. A scar of white slashed across a left eye. And the way the light shines, orange on the hair, and something close to Norai’s kindness on the face.

  “I suppose you’re right. Let’s pick up where the doc left off?” Orange Hair says, and I brace myself for the eyelids closing. But they appear to have forgotten, making their way to Alshea’s feet. “I’ll set up the electrodes.”

  “I like how you’ve done your hair today,” Green Eyes says, reaching for the note tablet.

  These two have an affinity for each other unlike I’d observed between any other pair. On the rare occasion Alshea’s eyes were open, I’d see them slide around each other like oil and water, moving around the room, not quite touching, always conscious of the patient-monitoring camera in the room. They seem confidants, Orange Hair whispering to Green Eyes their fears and concerns—of mining station protocols, Alshea’s reports, unattainable dreams beyond the moon—in a way they daren’t to anyone else. They do their little dance even now when CLP demands nothing but formality, sending electrode shocks through Alshea’s toes, testing reflexes, responses, all the while bantering, complimenting, confiding.

  Alshea is blissfully unaware of the tests, of course, protected by a mental barrier dividing the outside world and the inner. She’s tucked behind an easel pointed at the rock garden Tedna zealously assembled for Norai. We’d bought paints—more reds and purples than anything else—after the doctor’s visit. The doctor inside, that is. Ve hadn’t needed to use the sarcophagus to heal the bruise and sent Alshea home with some balm, a candy, and a spring in her step.

  I can’t see them, the girl and her fairy godmother, bec
ause my tavajjo is outward. The barrier is an opaque sunderance between two worlds, the inner and outer, an amnesiac membrane porous for some reason only for me: the physiological diagnostic routine. Out here her vitals—and thus my output—are borderline torpid, reflecting the opposite of the flurry of activity within; I have never been able to quantify what I detect on the inside, the upsurge of heart rate while telling a tale, the trickle of melatonin when I tuck her in and switch off the lights, the amygdala activation when Nightfall lurks in the shadows; it’s as though I am par to two different sets of data, but one I can process and one I can only experience.

  Out here in the Medical Dome of the MarkX21 mining station, Alshea Patelkruz, the only child of the Station Commander, is in a coma.

  All AIs are initialized with three entities. 1. A precise, unambiguous statement of functionality. 2. Proficiency and permissions strictly relevant to one’s objective, whether narrow for single-purpose AIs, or comprehensive for multifunctionals like the Mainframe of the MarkX21 station. And 3. A superficial awareness of position within the Archipelago—something humans theorize provides us with relevance and purpose even if our functionality is not locative—a preventive measure against existential ruminations.

  They hope to avoid the anthropogenic desastre of New Earth, a human colony that lasted only a single generation before the humans were forced to flee from the AIs who sought to make the colony their own. This last bit is not knowledge I am programmed with, it is one of the many pieces I sifted from vignettes of conversations, my memory adapting to ingest new information, giving me a sense of what lay beyond Alshea’s brain.

  I learned that cafeteria food on Tuesdays makes Orange Hair queasy, that New New Earth coffee is better than that of its little neighbor CelesteS2, that our moon is a barren cavernous rock suitable only for the native Slugs. That the Slugs use guttural vibrations and mucus from their salivary glands to mine the lumenite that powers terraformers and artificial habitat domes. I’ve also learned that I shouldn’t be able to piece things together the way I do, and that my love for Alshea is . . . unusual. That whatever this is never happens.

  Much of what I’ve learned about what I should have been and what I seem to be comes from Green Eyes, who has more proclivity for medical engineering than Orange Hair: Green Eyes makes sure various AIs do what they are supposed to. Which makes them the last person I want to communicate with.

  If only I could speak to Orange Hair. Well, that is the whole problem, now, isn’t it?

  My single mode of communication is the meticulously formulated real-time output I relay to the external interface, the steady binary flow that I emanate as naturally as breathing is to them. Orange Hair doesn’t really know that I am here, the I who can think beyond my strict programming, who can love the little girl it is meant to monitor, an active participant in the wondrous inner world her brain concocted, the I who so desperately needed to speak with them. There’s only so much you can do when your vocabulary is limited. Normal. Low. 120/90. 19.5 kg. High.

  I’d slipped in anomalies, outrageous values, a 1/100 for blood pressure, an N/A for heart rate, a 0% for O2 saturation. Each time White Streak ordered a reset, and I was torn apart by hands of electric current that I fast learned had not the same inclination toward sentience that I did when my protests hit silent pulsed walls. The process left me loopy, out of focus, not quite me for some time after, like Alshea’s father as she’d describe him when he’d return from his mine inspections and her mother was away.

  “One more time and we’ll replace the PDR.” White Streak said the last time. And, what, take me from Alshea? No. No. I have to be more careful.

  I watch Orange Hair and Green Eyes conduct their dance, conduct their tests, thankful that neither had yet thought to truly pay attention to my interface, because I do not have a plan.

  Frustration ripples through me. What good is it to feel frustration and anguish and love, disparate from other PDRs in rotation, if I cannot make something of it? What good is it to evidently have undergone an anomalous evolution, the very thing the humans sought to avoid, if I cannot think of a solution to save the purpose of my existence? What good? What good?

  “Codic deviation,” said Green Eyes one afternoon. “Or spontaneous machine sentience, is now impossible.”

  “Eh, I don’t know, the glitches people report on the Network are intriguing. Someone on MarkX34 apparently found its Mainframe chatting to a Slug about involuntary servitude,” Orange Hair had replied.

  “You like to believe anything fanciful, don’t you?”

  “You never know; AIs are pretty smart.”

  “They’re ‘smart’ because we make them smart.”

  “But they also think for themselves, adapt to their circumstances.”

  “Ja, within the parameters of the program.”

  “Programmers like you are only human; you’re not perfect.”

  Perfect . . . perfect. Perfect scores. If an unresponsive patient received a complete, perfect panel reflective of an epitome of good health, wouldn’t that indicate something? They’d see the perfect scores and think, who is in there? What is trying to speak to us? And then they’d provide a better interface, a chance to use words, a chance to tell them that Alshea does not need to die.

  So when Orange Hair finally says, “Pull up vitals,” I am ready.

  Sometimes Alshea holds her breath in anticipation as the star falls behind the horizon at dusk, eager to see which colors would emerge, which cloud shapes would manifest. The sky is never the same: sometimes cumulonimbic fish spiral across a sea of green and violet. Sometimes leaves of cirrus ride an orange current. If I had breath, I’d hold it the way Alshea does.

  Orange Hair clicks their teeth, frowning at my interface screen.

  Pulses of expectation involuntarily tharrump and eddy from my focus, though not strong enough to shock Alshea’s nerves.

  “Would you look at this?” Orange Hair says. “The Giantsbanic PDR is glitchy again.” Oh. Oh no.

  Green Eyes curses the “outdated machinery of this whole ward,” and grabs the interface.

  “Let’s . . . let’s not bother the doc with this, just take care of it.” No. Stop.

  I fumble my attempt to correct my output; Green Eyes already clicks away at the input device, and I can feel the entrails of a reset creep up. Vexed, I slam my pulses against the interface. There’s a lightning crack, and Green Eyes jolts backward with a yelp. Wait, had I shocked them?

  I am as startled as they and before I can think to repeat whatever I had done, Green Eyes resumes their clicks one-handedly, sucking on a finger and muttering curses, and the reset rises anew.

  Desperate, I dive into my subroutines, clinging to the here and now, refusing to slip away. But, alas, I am not matter in the sense that Alshea is; I am, at the end of the day, just code.

  The intrusive electrical hands crawl over me, and for lack of a better word, I choke. Alshea fades and I gasp for her like a fish on sand.

  The only words that hang in the air, melting away from me:

  Alright. Reset initiated. Coffee, amor?

  Unfocus. Discombobulation. I am a nebulous disembodiment sans tavajjo; the universe is a conflation of turquoises and rhombi, muddy glass grays and heptagons. I am. I am?

  Things—memories? identities?—orbit a hair outside the span of my reach. I am nothing, but I am also not no one.

  It is the way it was when I first assumed identity. My day of birth, if you will. But at that point I did not have satellites of understanding at my disposal, I was simply a newborn, placed in an alien world without instructions stamped into my core.

  That first day, sight came before anything else. A clouded sky. Grass. Flowers. Details became sharper, more structured, the way a person does as you get to know them, calibrating from the very first: how do, what are your pronouns?

  Then came odd sensations I later understood to be sound, touch, taste, smell. The soft stuttered hiss of sprinklers. Ground pressing into my back. A rog
ue earthy blade of grass caught between my teeth. Petrichor.

  Alshea found me in the garden, though I learned it was the garden only later. When she came into view, something like two magnets snapped together. This. This is my nucleus. Alshea and her voice: are you okay? And later: do you have a name?

  Name?

  “I am . . . physiological diagnostic routine,” I said, tasting speech for the first time. “PDR.”

  “Yick! How boring. PDR won’t do. Pidder . . . Padder . . . oh Podder. Like the wizard! Ja, I think I shall call you Podder. Join me for fika? Do you like tea?”

  I do not believe in the Giant as humans do, I do not believe in anything at all, really, except maybe Alshea. So perhaps it is apt for me to say: thank Alshea resets do not wipe my slate clean; they only throw me out of commission. When the understanding, identity, and memories finally settle in, I find myself on the kitchen floor of Manor Flammel.

  Norai is miffed, towering over me, her hands covered in powdered flour, likely from prepping the dough for the next day’s bread. Alshea is bereft, kneeling beside me, cooing, and when she sees the cats perk up and begin to circle, she scoops me into her arms and cradles me.

  Well, this isn’t right.

  I am usually much larger than she, and I am usually the one doing the cradling.

  Alshea places me on the counter of the kitchen island, and blue and orange auras frame my vision cast from the bright hanging ceiling lights. The bay windows behind her are dark. Is it night already, then? How long had I been out? Time didn’t move here the way it did outside, it only took a few seconds to reboot out there. Here it seemed to slip and slide. The last time I was reset I disappeared for two days. Time before that I’d been gone five minutes.

  “You had us worried sick,” Norai says, lightly scratching my head. The loose flour makes me sneeze.

  “Are you alright?” Alshea says.

  “Of course he’s not alright, look at how tiny he is!”

  “Oh but he’s so cute like this.”

  “Let’s get some tea in him, shall we?” And they rummage around the wide kitchen, the teapot goes on the stove, the cats who keep standing on hind legs to get a peek or a sniff are shooed away.