21st Century Science Fiction (34 page)

It’s so lonely in his office he thinks about turning on Galatea, just for company.

(He’s no better than some.)

LiveScribe: MORI PRESS CONFERENCE—VESTIGE, PT 1.

SEARCH PARAMETERS—BEGIN: 10:05:27, END: 10:08:43

PAUL WHITCOVER:
From the company that brought you Memento, which has not only pioneered the Alpha series real-time response interface, but has also brought comfort to grieving families across the world.

It’s this focus on the humanity behind the technology that is Mori’s greatest achievement, and it is what has made possible what I am about to show you. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present: Galatea.

[MORIVESTIGE00001.img available through LiveSketch link]

[APPLAUSE, CALLS, SHOUTS]

PAUL WHITCOVER:
Galatea isn’t human, but she’s the nearest thing. She’s the prototype of our Vestige model, which shifts the paradigm of robotics in ways we have only begun to guess—if you can tear your eyes away from her long enough.

[LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE]

PAUL WHITCOVER:
Each Vestige features critical-thinking initiatives so advanced it not only sustains the initial personality, but allows the processor to learn from new stimuli, to form attachments—to grow in the same way the human mind does. This Vestige is built on a donor actress—anonymous, for now, though I suspect some in the audience will know who she is as soon as you talk to her.

[LAUGHTER]

In seriousness, I would like to honor everyone at Mori who participated in the development of such a remarkable thing. The stock market will tell you that this is an achievement of great technical merit, and that’s true. However, those who have honored loved ones with a Memento doll will tell you that this is a triumph over the grieving heart, and it’s this that means the most to Mori.

Understandably, due to the difficulty of crafting each doll, the Vestige is a very limited product. However, our engineers are already developing alternate uses for this technology that you will soon see more of—and that might yet change your world.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here today. It is not only my honor, but my privilege.

[APPLAUSE]

Small-group interviews with Vestige will be offered to members of the press. Check your entrance ticket. Thank you again, everyone, really, this is such a thrill, I’m glad you could be here. If you’d—

• • • •

The phone call comes from some internal extension he’s never seen, but he’s too distracted by the streaming press-conference footage to screen it.

Paul is made for television; he can practically see the HR people arranging for his transfer to Public Relations.

(He can’t believe Paul carried through with Nadia the Aesthetic Consultant. He can absolutely believe Paul named her Galatea.)

“This is Mason.”

There’s nothing on the other end, but he knows it’s her.

He hangs up, runs for the elevator.

• • • •

Nadia’s on the floor in the library, twitching like she got fifty thousand volts, and he drops to his knees and pulls the connecting cable out of her skull.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” he says, which is the stupidest thing that’s ever come out of his mouth (he watches too many movies). What she needs is an antivirus screen in one of the SysTech labs.

Maybe it’s for her sake he says it, so they can keep pretending she’s real until she tells him otherwise.

“It’s the baseline,” she says, and he can’t imagine what she was doing in there.

He says, “I’ll get you to an Anti-V, hang on.”

“No,” she manages.

Then her eyes go blank and flat, and something inside her makes an awful little click.

He scoops her up without thinking, moves to the elevator as fast as he can.

He has to get her home.

• • • •

He makes it in seven minutes (he’ll be paying a lot of tickets later), carries her through the loft. She’s stopped twitching, and he doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.

He assumes she’s tougher than she looks—God knows how many upgrades Paul’s put her through—but you never know. She’s light enough in his arms that he wonders how she was ever expected to last.

He sets her on one of the chaises the Mori designer insisted mimicked the lines of the living room, drags it through the doorway to his study.

He finds the socket (behind one ear), the same place as Memento; rich people don’t care for visible flaws.

He plugs her into his program.

It feels slimy, like he’s showing her into his bedroom, but at least Mori won’t monitor the process.

Her head is limp, her eyes half-lidded and unseeing.

“Hold on,” he says, like some asshole, pulls up his program.

(Now he’s sorry he deleted her avatar; he could help her faster if he had any framework ready to go.)

The code scans. Some of it is over his head—some parts of her baseline Paul got from the black market. (Black-market programmers can do amazing work. If he gets out of this alive, he might join up with them.)

He recognizes a few lines of his own code that have integrated, feels prouder than he should.

He recognizes some ID stamps that make his whole chest go tight, and his eyes ache.

Paul’s an idiot, he thinks, wants to punch something.

Then he sees the first corruption, and his work begins.

• • • •

He’s never worked with a whole system. It’s always been lines of code sent to points unknown; Galatea was the first time he’d worked with anything close to a final product.

Now Nadia is staring at the ceiling with those awful empty eyes, and his fingers shake.

If he thinks of this as surgery he’s going to be ill. He turns so he can’t see her.

After a while he hits a stride; it takes him back to being twelve, recreating their apartment in a few thousand lines of code, down to the squeak in the hall.

(“That’s very . . . specific,” his mother said, and that was when he began to suspect his imagination was wanting.)

When he finishes the last line, the code flickers, and he’s terrified that it will be nothing but a string of zeros like a flatline.

But it cycles again, faster than he can read it, and then there’s a boot file like Galatea’s, and he thinks,
Fuck, I did it
.

Then her irises stutter, and she wakes up.

She makes an awful, hollow noise, and he reaches for her hand, stops—maybe that’s the last thing you need when you’re having a panic reboot.

She looks at him, focuses.

“You should check the code,” he says. “I’m not sure if I got it all.”

There’s a brief pause.

“You did,” she says, and when her eyes close he realizes she’s gone to sleep and not shorted out.

After some debate he carries her to the bed, feeling like a total idiot. He didn’t realize they slept.

(Maybe it was Paul’s doing, to make her more human; he had planned for better things.)

• • • •

He sits in front of his computer for a long time, looking at the code with his finger on the Save button, deciding what kind of guy he is.

(That’s the nice thing about programs, he always thought; you only ever deal in absolutes—yes, or no.)

• • • •

When he finally turns in his chair, she’s in the doorway, watching him.

“I erased it,” he says.

She says, “I know,” in a tone that makes him wonder how long she’s been standing there.

She sits on the edge of the chaise, rolls one shoulder like she’s human and it hurts.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?” he asks.

She pulls a face.

He flushes. “No, not that I want—I just, have a game I play, and in the game you jumped. I’ve always been worried.”

It sounds exactly as creepy as it is, and he’s grateful she looks at his computer and doesn’t ask what else he did with her besides watch her jump.

I would have jumped if I were you and knew what I was in for
, he thinks,
but some people take the easy way out
.

Nadia sits like a human gathering her thoughts. Mason watches her face (can’t help it), wonders how long she has.

The prototype is live; pretty soon, someone at Mori will realize how much Vestige acts like Nadia.

Maybe they won’t deactivate her. Paul’s smart enough to leverage his success for some lenience; he can get what he wants out of them, maybe.

(To keep her, Mason thinks, wonders why there’s no way for Nadia to win.)

“Galatea doesn’t remember her baseline,” Nadia says, after a long time. “She thinks that’s who she always was. Paul said I started with a random template, like her, and I thought I had kept track of what you changed.”

Mason thinks about her fondness for libraries; he thinks how she sat in his office for months, listening to them talk about what was going to happen to her next.

She pauses where a human would take a breath. She’s the most beautiful machine in the world.

“But the new Vestige prototype was based on a remnant,” she says. “All the others will be based on just one person. I had to know if I started as someone else.”

Mason’s heart is in his throat. “And?”

She looks at him. “I didn’t get that far.”

She means,
You must have
.

He shrugs. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” he says. “I’m not Paul.”

“I didn’t call Paul,” she says.

(She had called him; she knew how he would respond to a problem. People are easy to predict.

It’s how you build preferences.)

If he were a worse man, he’d take it as a declaration of love.

Instead he says, “Paul thought you were standard. He got your baseline from the black market, to keep Mori out, and they told him it was.”

He stops, wonders how to go on.

“Who was I?” she says, finally.

“They didn’t use a real name for her,” he says. “There’s no knowing.”

(The black-market programmer was also a sucker for stories; he’d tagged her remnant “Galatea.”

Mason will take that with him to the grave.)

She looks at him.

He thinks about the first look she ever gave him, wary and hard in an expression he never saw again, and the way she looked as Galatea fell in love with Paul, realizing she had lost herself but with no way of knowing how much.

He thinks about her avatar leaping over the balcony and disappearing.

He’d leave with her tonight, take his chances working on the black market, if she wanted him to. He’d cover for her as long as he could, if she wanted to go alone.

(God, he wants her to live.)

“I can erase what we did,” he says. “Leave you the way you were when Paul woke you.”

(Paul won’t notice; he loves her too much to see her at all.)

Her whole body looks betrayed; her eyes are fixed in middle space, and she curls her fingers around the edge of the chair like she’s bracing for the worst, like at any moment she’ll give in.

He’s reminded for a second of Kim Parker, who followed him to the Spanish Steps one morning during the Mori Academy study trip to Rome when he was fifteen. He sat beside her for a long time, waiting for a sign to kiss her that never came.

He’d felt stupid that whole time, and lonely, and exhilarated, and the whole time they were sitting together part of him was memorizing all the color codes he would need to build the Steps back, later, in his program.

Nadia is blinking from time to time, thinking it over.

The room is quiet—only one of them is breathing—and it’s the loneliest he’s felt in a long time, but he’ll wait as long as it takes.

He knows how to wait for a yes or a no; people like them deal in absolutes.

I
AN
C
REASEY
Born in Yorkshire, where he has lived all his life, Ian Creasey began selling short SF in 1999, after (as he tells it) “rock and roll stardom failed to return my calls.” His spare-time interests include hiking, gardening, and environmental conservation work—anything to get him outdoors and away from the computer screen.

In “Erosion,” a man who has had himself physically altered so he can survive on other planets tells the story of his last week on Earth, during which he had an accident. The narrative brilliantly manages point of view in the service of plot. Many SF stories have examined the question of human augmentation, wondering at what point the augmented cease to be human. “Erosion” is a standout, not least because it is left unclear which side of that line it’s told from.

L
et me tell you about my last week on Earth. . . .

Before those final days, I’d already said my farewells. My family gave me their blessing: my grandfather, who came to England from Jamaica as a young man, understood why I signed up for the colony program. He warned me that a new world, however enticing, would have its own frustrations. We both knew I didn’t need the warning, but he wanted to pass on what he’d learned in life, and I wanted to hear it. I still remember the clasp of his fingers on my new skin; I can replay the exo-skin’s sensory log whenever I wish.

My girlfriend was less forgiving. She accused me of cowardice, of running away. I replied that when your house is on fire, running away is the sensible thing to do. The Earth is burning up, and so we set forth to find a new home elsewhere. She said—she shouted—that when our house is on fire, we should stay and fight the flames. She wanted to help the fire-fighters. I respected her for that, and I didn’t try to persuade her to come with me. That only made her all the more angry.

The sea will douse the land, in time, but it rises slowly. Most of the coastline still resembled the old maps. I’d decided that I would spend my last few days walking along the coast, partly to say goodbye to Earth, and partly to settle into my fresh skin and hone my augments. I’d tested it all in the post-op suite, of course, and in the colony simulator, but I wanted to practice in a natural setting. Reality throws up challenges that a simulator would never devise.