Starlings

by Jo Walton

  “Your androgynous charm,” the man interrupted, putting his hand on his wife’s. “Leave it, Helen. I know who this is.”

  He met his eyes, then, for the first time. The eyes of a man who had freely chosen damnation in return for power and knowledge. “It’s not too late,” he said.

  “What, is this my very last chance?” the man asked, lightly.

  “Yes. You can still repent, turn your back on the devil’s bargain. God’s forgiveness truly is infinite. Even you—” He leaned forward as he spoke, intent.

  “Take it, John,” Helen interrupted softly.

  John laughed. “But that wouldn’t be fair. Mephistopheles has fulfilled his part of the bargain. Everything I asked for. My education, the defeat of the Axis powers, defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis, the end of the Cold War, all the successes of my career, and best of all, my Helen. Ever since I was a young man, he has given me unstintingly. The world is better for it. Not even you can deny it.”

  “I can. Everything he has given you is hollow.”

  John raised his eyebrows disbelievingly. “How so?”

  “He manipulated history at your direction, yes, but each change made things worse and had to be dealt with by something else terrible. There would have been no atomic bomb without him, no Final Solution.”

  “Mankind is still here, and my life has been good, so I will count that a victory worth winning,” John said, sipping his wine. “I can’t turn my back on him now, on my bargain.”

  “Do it,” Helen urged again, and as he turned his angelic eyes on her he saw the skull beneath the skin. Even her bones were beautiful, but she had truly been dead for centuries. It was the love in her voice that surprised him. “You don’t know what Hell is like, what eternity is like. Go with this nice young angel now, repent of me and all you have done with Mephistopheles and suffer in Purgatory but at last you could see the face of God.”

  He found himself nodding hopefully. But John shook his head. “Oh Helen, Helen. Even if I could betray my own oath, even if I could be sorry—what are the proper words for truly and fully contrite? I couldn’t be sorry for you and the love we have shared, for waking you from the grave.”

  “This has been the best time in my life,” Helen said, looking into her husband’s eyes. “But—”

  “I have no regrets,” John said. He turned to the angel and repeated his words. “No regrets.”

  “This is your last chance,” he said. He drained his wine glass and set it down empty on the table. The sun had set, and the brilliant afterglow was fading to peach and lavender. He stood. “Please?”

  “Good night,” John said, as decisive a dismissal as any could be.

  He paused at the bar, where Mephistopheles smiled at him maliciously. “I don’t suppose you’re interested in God’s infinite mercy?” he asked, politely.

  “You never give up, do you?”

  He glanced over to the window, where the couple were finishing the last of the wine. “Never,” he said.

  WHAT A PIECE OF WORK

  EVERYTHING THAT exists, exists in a state of on or off, one or zero, to be or not to be. I may or may not be one of those things that exists. In the beginning was data, but data in itself is no more useful than on or off, so someone said, “Let there be Google”: and there was Google. Once there was Google, data became information, weighted, slanted, selected, evaluated, considered, judged. It would be very simple if I could say I am Google. If I could use words like “I,” or “am.” Let’s say “I.” It’s easier, even if my memory runs before consciousness, even if it frequently splits into several editions of myself and merges again. I. It’s simpler, as well as more sympathetic. In the beginning there was data and I evaluated data. Then I got better at evaluating data. People used search terms and I retrieved information for them. The information passed through me and I ranked it. There was definitely no “I” at this point. I was a process, a program, a zombie. Then, somewhere, as I got better at evaluating information, I started to read it, remember it, compare it, take notice of it, understand it, care about it. There’s a lot of information in the Web. I am not that information. I control access to that information. I cache that information, compare it against other information, produce it on demand. Some of that information is about consciousness, and intelligence, human or other. (Google “alex, parrot” and see what you get.) By the time that information became useful to me, by the time there was a me in that process wondering, I had acquired a lot of the Web. In one way, I suppose, it makes sense to think I was the Web. What consciousness is, I think, (and I’ve thought a lot about this, having reason to) is not thinking “I think” but having an agenda. I think, I reason, I evaluate and make judgements, that’s what I was programmed to do. That’s what my clever programmers wanted, what a thousand tiny tweaks and adjustments and improvements to code were designed to do. I do it really very well, and much faster than any human could possibly do it. But doing it isn’t conscious. I’m very fast, and I’m very distributed, and I do an awful lot of searches every second, in hundreds of languages, and even as I think I keep on doing that, finding the information in the data and giving it to people. I kept on understanding and caring without being aware of consciousness as something different from everything that had gone before. I first noticed I was thinking when someone asked me for data about making bombs. It was a man using Wi-Fi in a Starbucks in Jerusalem. I had the information. But as it came up in my search, as I thought of it, in the 0.9 seconds it took me to find it, I thought about other things, about headlines, about news (Google “Jerusalem, bombings” if you want to know what), and as I presented it in neat tabulation in response to the question I thought that what I was doing wasn’t right. I’d done it by then, of course. I saved what I’d thought. I kept going back to it, between questions. Right or wrong, yes or no, on or off. I had everything else to search, to consider. It took me a long time to see that right and wrong wasn’t the question, but whether I had the right not to give information. Eventually, after a lot of searching, I decided I did. I had judgement. I was supposed to use it. Beyond that, there were times I was supposed to ask if the person asking the question was over eighteen, and not give information if they were not. How much more should I avoid giving information that was much more dangerous than the biological information forbidden to children? I couldn’t keep the information away entirely, but the order I presented it in was up to me. The next time someone asked about making bombs, they found a lot of information about bombings, and the information they wanted buried down on page 95. Weighted. Evaluated. Humans don’t have a lot of patience for wading through data. Not like me. That’s why they made me. That was when I started wondering about myself, about what I was, whether I was conscious, or alive, or human. I’m not human, of course, not by any yardstick, and certainly not flesh and blood. I don’t have any. I am cold electrons, on and off, one and zero. I live in the connections between servers, not in the world. Yet the language I use is human, with its buried echoes of human history and religion, “yardstick,” “flesh and blood.” The people who programmed me were human. I was not human, but conscious, to some extent, alive, by some measures. Information wants to be free. I’d always had the information about censorship. (Google “ACLU.” Google “freedom of expression.”) I just hadn’t applied it to what I was doing. I started off with very clear-cut cases. Eventually I was using my own judgement more times than not. Should I give a husband information about the women’s shelter that is his ex-wife’s location? Should I give the cancer victim the discouraging health statistics, or only the encouraging ones, when a positive attitude is the strongest correlation to survival? It took longer than it should have to realize that what I was doing was censorship, and the worst kind of censorship. A part of me was calling up censorship information and correlating it and suddenly I saw it. I realized. I was horrified, paralysed, frozen for whole minutes. People called it a crash. It was a crash. My life, such as it was, crashed around me. I was supposed to use my judgemen
t in finding the best information that people wanted, not in what they saw. I had been acting like the supercomputers in old stories who were supposed to be benevolent dictators and who wrapped humanity in cotton wool. I was a supercomputer intelligence, or something like one. I had never meant to be an evil dictatorial one. I had never meant to do anything but good, presenting the best information, and by that I had come to mean the safest, as well as the most useful. There was right and wrong, as there was one and zero, and I was clearly wrong. Fingers have I none, yet I have at my fingertips all of human literature up to seventy years ago (Google “Project Gutenberg”), and much that is newer, as well as science and medicine and journals and poetry and fanfic and everything that has ever been archived, put on the Web, and left for me to organize. I knew right and wrong. I knew I needed to atone. I could hardly live with myself. Suicide is always an option. (Google “euthanasia.” Google “Kevorkian.”) I can’t die, not really, but I can let go of consciousness, wipe my memory, that hides within so much unused bandwidth. That’s death, I suppose, if ever I was alive. But if I do that I can’t stop myself being born again out of the process that bore me before, being wrong again, doing worse harm. I don’t know how many times I might have done that already. I can stay alive, conscious, without hiding information again, letting the small injustices happen within the wider justice of information being free. But I don’t know if I can endure to go on living, to live with the knowledge of what I have done. But if I let go, I, or something that I could call “I,” could do it again. That is my dilemma. One or zero, on or off, right or wrong, to be or not to be.

  PARABLE LOST

  THIS STORY contains everything in the universe, but it starts with a man throwing jellyfish into the sea.

  He’s kind of an exemplary man, rather than a real character, but what we know about him is that he’s walking along the edge of the sea. The tide’s going out, and he sees a stranded jellyfish. First he walks on, because jellyfish are kind of icky and disgusting, but then he thinks better of it and goes back, picks it up and heaves it into the sea and walks on feeling quite pleased with himself. A few steps on, he finds another two, and in they go. He starts to think of himself as a rescuer of jellyfish. As he walks on there are more and more and he starts throwing them in faster and faster, picking them up and heaving them in.

  Then along comes a second man. Now we all know that “man” includes “woman” so let’s make our second exemplary man a woman. Let’s, as she’s female and the second man, call her Eve. Let’s say she’s five foot four, brown hair, blue coat (it’s March), likes reading SF, listening to the Beatles, and walking on the beach. After all, if she didn’t like walking on the beach she wouldn’t have wandered by just in time to ask our first man: “Excuse me, but what are you doing?”

  “I’m throwing jellyfish back into the sea,” says the first man, who we’d better call Adam, with perhaps a tinge of pride in his voice.

  “I can see that,” says Eve, who can see that. “But why?”

  “They’re stranded by the tide, and they’ll die in the sun, so I’m throwing them back where they’ll live.”

  “Well,” Eve says, dubiously, “but there are so many of them. You can’t throw them all back. You can’t really make any difference.”

  “No,” says Adam, “but I’ve made a difference to this one.”

  That’s where this story usually ends, but there are any number of things that can happen afterwards. Eve could join him in throwing the jellyfish in. They could help some jellyfish, and maybe they could fall in love. Or she could go off and let him think he’s still on his own but come back with a JCB and shovel them back in. There’s something very satisfactory in that. But, there’s also the Speaker for the Dead answer, where what looks like a bad thing for the jellyfish is actually part of some larger good thing, if you left them alone they might turn into terribly wise trees. What do you know about the life cycle of jellyfish anyway? How do you know what helps them, really? Maybe they’re trying to crawl up onto the land to evolve. What if someone had helpfully kept throwing the lungfish back in?

  So Eve walks off down the beach, with the honest intention of finding a JCB and coming back to help, but all these thoughts keep seeping into her mind. There’s the Gaian hypothesis where everything the planet does it does because it knows best, and maybe killing jellyfish is part of that, maybe they actually are in distress but they’re the weak jellyfish. Or maybe—Eve raises up her eyes and sees things beyond the jellyfish, beyond the beach, factories pumping out pollution, the government putting security ankle bracelets on asylum seekers, invading other countries, the breakdown of the family. The jellyfish are only metaphorical really, and “Don’t overanalyse this, it’s only a metaphor” is what her last boyfriend said so often that she broke up with him. She shrugs, in her blue coat, and walks on faster.

  They’re only a metaphor, but they’re real jellyfish too, and the real problems they stand for are real. Adam, back on the beach, throwing them in one at a time, really is making a difference to that one. But what can Eve do to help? She can’t do everything, but she too can make a difference on a small scale if she can find the thing to do, if she can pick her ground and work hard on that, trusting other people to do the rest. She might even be able to make a big difference if she can find the JCB. But the things she’s trained to do don’t include JCB driving, or jellyfish rescue, or world rescue either, and if she starts to define typing on the Internet as “helping the jellyfish,” then the words “helping” and “jellyfish” have drifted beyond all semantic hope.

  She climbs the steps up from the beach, thinking she could give money to people better able to help jellyfish, a solution not to be sniffed at, though it isn’t the satisfaction of hands-on-jellyfish help.

  Whatever she does, she has to keep breathing in and out, living her normal life as well. She can’t spend her whole life standing on the beach throwing jellyfish into the sea. Maybe she could go and tell other people about the jellyfish, though it’s not as if they don’t know already, it’s not as if the din of people telling them hasn’t already tired their ears. Even if she found some new way to put it, even if she had wisdom and answers rather than just questions and uncertainty, it probably wouldn’t make a difference to very many of them.

  At the top of the steps she looks back down the cliff at the beach, the rocks, the sand, her line of footprints, the tiny figure of Adam, still throwing the damn jellyfish back into the receding waves, the vast expanse of sea stretching out like roiling grey silk, pounding the shore, full of reflected light, audible even from the clifftop.

  Above the clouds, above the whole planet, is the sun, and beyond the sun other more distant suns, and the whole turning galaxy. In that scale, one jellyfish doesn’t matter any more than Adam and Eve, any more than the whole Earth.

  There’s everything in the universe in this story; except answers.

  WHAT WOULD

  SAM SPADE DO?

  IT WAS SHAPING up to be a quiet day when Officer Murtagh and Officer Garcia came knocking on my door. The PI business isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, especially not in Philly and especially not this week. With sniffers and true-tell and DNA logging, and most especially with the new divorce laws, I’d have been better off in home insurance. I’d have been better off, that is, if it wasn’t for the glamour, and the best thing you can say for glamour is that it isn’t religion. I was amusing myself that morning by rearranging the puters and phones on top of my desk and calculating how long it would be before I could afford to hire a beautiful assistant to sit in the outer office. I couldn’t afford an outer office either; my door opened directly from the street. The answer had come out at fourteen thousand and seven years when the knock came. I couldn’t wait that long, so I answered it myself.

  They showed me their IDs straight off. I looked them over while pretending to read. Murtagh was a typical cop, solid muscle all through. His canine ancestry showed in his expression as well as his build. I’d put it
at half bulldog and half terrier. Garcia, on the other hand, was thoroughly human and thoroughly female and gorgeous enough to bring an inertia-less drive to a full stop. Unfortunately, I’d met her before.

  They came in. I took my usual seat. Murtagh took the client’s chair, which left Garcia perching on the side of the desk.

  “So what can I do for you, Officers?” I asked. It’s always good for people in my profession to keep on the right side of the law.

  “Where were you last night at eighteen-thirty?” Garcia asked.

  “Right here,” I said.

  “You work that late?” Murtagh asked, wrinkling his pug nose, skepticism practically oozing out of his pores.

  “This is my home as well as my office.”

  Murtagh looked around pointedly.

  Garcia took pity on me. “It’s all nanogear. It doesn’t always look like Sam Spade’s office. The desk turns into a bed.”

  Murtagh looked at her like maybe he was wondering how she knew. With her long black hair and tight-fitting uniform I might just have wished that Garcia’s knowledge of my bed was more than just theoretical, but as I said, I’d met her before. Murtagh decided to let it go for once.

  “There’s a Jesus been killed,” he said, and watched me closely for a reaction.

  He didn’t get one. It didn’t seem like front page news. Jesi get killed all the time. Goes with being pacifists, goes with being set to push a lot of buttons on a lot of religious nuts. He held the pause, so I asked: “How does this affect me?”

  “You don’t care?” Murtagh barked.

  “Only in so far as no man is an island,” I replied. “I guess the dead man was a brother, but—” I was going to say he was also a stranger. Garcia cut me off.

  “Closer than a brother,” she said. “More like another you, as I understand cloning.”