Nature Futures 2 (23 page)

Of course I'm a Ted, I had myself registered with the agency and everything. Looking the way I do, it was the only way to get a job. No one wants to hire an unlicensed Ted: he might have gone bad since leaving the crèche. But I'm somehow less than a Ted. Because I was not subjected to quality-control scrutiny, I'm not eligible for TedCare. And employers won't give it, not to me. I can't talk with the other Teds about life in the crèches, or the sweaty adolescent orgies inside the tight little blind spots in the network of video cameras. And I'm older than them, much older, and more ugly, and they look at me like I am a stranger.

I'm less than them, when I should be more. But no one is interested in my life. Even nice Dr Avery, he lost his professorship and stays at home all the time now, except for a few meetings a year with Xerogenesis people. He won't even answer my e-mails. I understand. He's ashamed of me. But why? I'm a human being. I'm like them, like all of everyone. No one exploited me. No one enslaved me.

I signed those papers, and I got my pension. I'll get it soon enough. The money's in the account, I can see it. I'm not stupid, though, you know. That's a pretty common misconception. I'm not stupid. I can read the reports. I know that they don't think I will live past 65. But what do they know? They are not gods. They can't predict the future.

I eat right. I exercise. I'm slim and trim and I have just one goal. I'm going to live to be a hundred. We all are. We all have our pensions, guaranteed from birth. That's what the report said. We're going to live to be a hundred, and I'll be the first. I'll show the hundreds of thousands, the millions, the tens of millions, show them all the way.

They'll stop making us, but then it'll be too late. We'll come up from the underground, and oh … not do anything much. I will not remake the world with my doing, I will only remake it with my being. We'll live to be a hundred, and sit at desks behind the doors of tiny rooms. And we'll scratch away at keyboards. But we'll own the desks, and the rooms and the keyboards. We'll own everything.

You're smiling at me, and I know that you're thinking about all the little Teds sitting perfectly quiet for hours at a time, knowing that if they make a move they definitely won't get to eat, and knowing that even if they don't move, they still might not get to eat.

But I will get to eat. I'll eat my fill. I know it.

Rahul Kanakia is a writer whose debut book, a contemporary young adult novel called
Enter Title Here
, will be published in the autumn of 2015. He currently lives in Oakland, California.

Shoppers

James Patrick Kelly

They pass down the row of shops, not exactly together. Rick keeps wandering ahead of her and then pauses to ogle the display windows. He does not notice the cold. He will never notice the cold. Rick lingers over an array of designer sheets in a linen store. He's dressed for another place and a different time, black crushed-velvet jacket, glitter shirt with a whisper of lace at the sleeves, gabardine trousers. He has a smooth young man's face with skin of fourteen-carat gold.

She drags herself after him. She is stooped and as grey as the dirty snow caked along the gutter. When she wheezes, she can see the breath curling out of her mouth into the chill air. Her bulky fur coat clamps her in a bear hug. She slides to his side, feeling for black ice with tiptoes as if it might bite her. If she falls, she might never get up.

“That one.” Rick points at a set of Bellino sheets the colour of blood oranges. “Buy me that.” A label opens on the shop's window: sateen weave thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton.

“Please.” She leans into him as if to propel him down the street. “You have enough.”

“You could be sleeping on them.” He brushes a hand against her withered cheek. “You.”

They stop and start their strolling tango past a dozen stores. She waits outside while he tries on some artful scars at Malade and buys a mink hat at Skarsgård's that costs as much as a geriatric nurse makes in a year. He teases her in front of an ice-cream shop.

“Remember pistachio?” says Rick. “Remember when snacks weren't an IV drip?”

“Why are you being mean?” Her disposable eyes get bright and a little misty; the latest Cibas come with a special-effects package. “It's my fault I'm a hundred and eighty-three?”

“You chose.” Rick slips an arm around her waist. “You're still choosing.”

Their appointment at Evergreens isn't until three and they are early. Rick takes her coat and hangs it up and she sags onto a chair in the waiting room. He leaves her so he can poke around, picking up fingers from their display cases, aiming them at her like guns. There are medfingers, chatfingers, dofingers, sexfingers, mindfingers and glowfingers. There are fingers of rain forest mahogany and fingers of carbon allotropes stronger than high-tensile steel. He reads the label on the vintage Bösendorfer handset in a display case. Its fingers can play Ravel's
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
or the single-hand études of Saint-Saëns.

A salesgirl in a white smock appears at the door at the far end of the room. “Master Evergreen will see you now.” She carries herself with the unconscious ease of someone still in her birth body.

Rick pulls the sexfinger from his manual unit and replaces it in the display case. He crosses the showroom to her.

She tries to get up but she can't. Rick and the salesgirl each take an arm and guide her into the showroom.

Evergreen is a vision of white teeth, dark polyskin and post-retro body design. It is happy to see them, or at least as happy as a bot can get.

“So we're back then,” it says. “Are we any closer to a decision?”

She brushes past it to the two naked bodies suspended from the neural web. One is sleek and hard and eternal; the other soft and warm and human. She touches the chin of the flesh body.

“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 unknown'. 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]