21st Century Science Fiction (55 page)

The algorithms ran their determined courses, and our thoughts followed one after another, as mechanical and as predictable as the planets in their orbits. The watchmaker was the watch.

I ran into my office and closed the door behind me, ignoring the expression on Ogden’s face. I walked over to my computer and began to delete files.

“Hi,” Tara said. “What are we going to do today?”

I shut her off so quickly that I broke a nail on the hardware switch. I ripped out the power supply in her back. I went to work with my screwdriver and pliers. After a while I switched to a hammer. Was I killing?

Brad burst in the door. “What are you doing?”

I looked up at him, my hammer poised for another strike. I wanted to tell him about the pain, the terror that opened up an abyss around me.

In his eyes I could not find what I wanted to see. I could not see understanding.

I swung the hammer.

• • • •

Brad had tried to reason with me, right before he had me committed.

“This is just an obsession,” he said. “People have always associated the mind with the technological fad of the moment. When they believed in witches and spirits, they thought there was a little man in the brain. When they had mechanical looms and player pianos, they thought the brain was an engine. When they had telegraphs and telephones, they thought the brain was a wire network. Now you think the brain is just a computer. Snap out of it.
That
is the illusion.”

Trouble was, I knew he was going to say that.

“It’s because we’ve been married for so long!” he shouted. “That’s why you think you know me so well!”

I knew he was going to say that too.

“You’re running around in circles,” he said, defeat in his voice. “You’re just spinning in your head.”

Loops in my algorithm. FOR and WHILE loops.

“Come back to me. I love you.”

What else could he have said?

• • • •

Now finally alone in the bathroom of the inn, I look down at my hands, at the veins running under the skin. I press my hands together and feel my pulse. I kneel down. Am I praying? Flesh and bones, and good programming.

My knees hurt against the cold tile floor.

The pain is real, I think. There’s no algorithm for the pain. I look down at my wrists, and the scars startle me. This is all very familiar, like I’ve done this before. The horizontal scars, ugly and pink like worms, rebuke me for failure. Bugs in the algorithm.

That night comes back to me: the blood everywhere, the alarms wailing, Dr. West and the nurses holding me down while they bandaged my wrists, and then Brad staring down at me, his face distorted with uncomprehending grief.

I should have done better. The arteries are hidden deep, protected by the bones. The slashes have to be made vertically if you really want it. That’s the right algorithm. There’s a recipe for everything. This time I’ll get it right.

It takes a while, but finally I feel sleepy.

I’m happy. The pain
is
real.

• • • •

I open the door to my room and turn on the light.

The light activates Laura, who is sitting on top of my dresser. This one used to be a demo model. She hasn’t been dusted in a while, and her dress looks ragged. Her head turns to follow my movement.

I turn around. Brad’s body is still, but I can see the tears on his face. He was crying on the whole silent ride home from Salem.

The innkeeper’s voice loops around in my head. “Oh, I could tell right away something was wrong. It’s happened here before. She didn’t seem right at breakfast, and then when you came back she looked like she was in another world. When I heard the water running in the pipes for that long I rushed upstairs right away.”

So I was that predictable.

I look at Brad, and I believe that he is in a lot of pain. I believe it with all my heart. But I still don’t feel anything. There’s a gulf between us, a gulf so wide that I can’t feel his pain. Nor he mine.

But my algorithms are still running. I scan for the right thing to say.

“I love you.”

He doesn’t say anything. His shoulders heave, once.

I turn around. My voice echoes through the empty house, bouncing off walls. Laura’s sound receptors, old as they are, pick them up. The signals run through the cascading IF statements. The DO loops twirl and dance while she does a database lookup. The motors whirr. The synthesizer kicks in.

“I love you too,” Laura says.

O
LIVER
M
ORTON
Oliver Morton is a British science writer and editor whose work has appeared in
The New Yorker, The Economist, Discover, National Geographic, Wired, The American Scholar,
and
Nature,
where he worked as the chief news and features editor from 2005 to 2009. His work has been anthologized in both
Best American Science Writing
and
Best American Science and Nature Writing.
He is the author of the nonfiction books
Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination, and the Birth of a World
and
Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet.
Asteroid 10716 Olivermorton is named for him.

Written for
Nature,
which has published a number of excellent sub-one-thousand-word SF stories over the years, “The Albian Message” is built around a new notion of what an alien artifact might reveal—an SF idea that is so obviously reasonable that it should have been evident all along.

To: Eva P.

From: Stefan K.

Re: Sample handling facility

March 4, 2047

I thought I ought to put into writing my concerns over the samplereturn facility for Odyssey. I think that relying on the mothballed Mars Sample Return lab at Ames is dangerously complacent. It is simply not flexible enough, or big enough, for what I think we should be expecting.

I appreciate that I am in a minority on this, and that the consensus is that we will be dealing with nonbiological artifacts. And I don’t want to sound like the people from AstraRoche slipped some egopoietin into my drink during that trip to Stockholm last November. But my minority views have been pretty well borne out throughout this whole story. Back when Suzy and Sean had more or less convinced the world that the trinity sequences in the Albian message referred to some sort of mathematico-philosophical doctrine—possibly based on an analogy to the aliens’ purported trisexual reproductive system—and everyone in SETI was taking a crash course in genome analysis, I had to pull in every favor I was owed to get the Square Kilometer Array used as a planetary radar and scanned over the Trojan asteroids. If I hadn’t done that we wouldn’t even know about the Pyramid, let alone be sending Odyssey there.

I’m not claiming I understand the Albians’ minds better than anyone else; I haven’t got any more of the message in my DNA than anyone else has. And it’s always been my position that we should read as little into that message as possible. I remain convinced that looking for descriptions of their philosophy or lifestyle or even provenance is pointless. The more I look at the increasingly meaningless analyses that the increasingly intelligent AIs produce, the more I think that the variations between phyla are effectively random and that the message from the aliens tells us almost nothing except that there’s a radarreflecting tetrahedron π/3 behind Jupiter that they think we may find interesting.

Everyone assumes that if it hadn’t been for the parts of the message lost in the K/T the “residual variant sequences” would be seen to add up to some great big life-the-Universe-and-everything revelation. And because they think such a revelation once existed, they expect to see it carved into the palladium walls of the Pyramid. But if the aliens who visited Earth, and left their messages in the genomes of more or less everything on the planet, had wanted to tell us something more about themselves, they could have made the messages a lot bigger and built in more redundancy across phylum space; there’s no shortage of junk DNA to write on. The point is, they didn’t choose to leave big messages—just a simple signpost.

The reason I was able to get the SKA people to find the Pyramid was that they knew I’d thought about SETI a lot. But these days people tend to forget that I was always something of a skeptic. What could a bunch of aliens tell us about themselves, or the Universe, that would matter? Especially if, like the Albians, they sent, or rather left, the message a hundred million years ago? Well, in the case of the Albians, there’s one type of knowledge they could be fairly sure that anyone who eventually evolved sequencing technology on Earth pretty much had to be interested in. And it’s something that, by definition, is too big to fit into the spare bits of a genome.

I appreciate that everyone on the project now has a lot of faith in what we can do on the fly, especially in terms of recording and analyzing information. I’ll admit that when we started I really didn’t think that the lost craft of human spaceflight would be so easy to reinvent. It still strikes me as remarkable that none of us realized how much could be achieved by leaving a technical problem to one side and concentrating on other things for a few decades before coming back to it with new technologies. But the problem with the sample-return facility won’t just be one of technology. It’s going to be one of size.

You see, extinctions aren’t the noise in the message. They’re the reason for the message. The one thing the Albians knew they could do for whoever would end up reading their message was store up some of the biodiversity that would inevitably be whittled away over time. When Odyssey gets to the Trojan Pyramid, I don’t expect it to find any more information about the Albians than we have already. I do expect a biosphere’s worth of well-preserved biological samples from the mid-Cretaceous. Not just genomes, but whole samples. Sudarat and her boys are going to come home with a hold full of early angiosperms and dinosaur eggs. We need to be ready.

K
ARL
S
CHROEDER
Karl Schroeder was born in Brandon, Manitoba, and lives in Toronto, where he divides his time between writing fiction and consulting on the future of technology for clients including the Canadian government and military. He began to publish stories in the 1990s, and beginning with
Ventus
(2000), he has published seven science fiction novels and a collection of earlier stories. His most recent novel is
Ashes of Candesce
(2012), the fifth adventure set in Virga, a farfuture built-world hard-SF environment.

“To Hie from Far Cilenia” has a complex publishing history typical of SF today, beginning with its release in audio in 2009 as part of the John Scalzi—edited audio original anthology project
Metatropolis,
later printed in a limited edition, and then in 2010 in a trade hardcover edition. Using a plot device similar to that in William Gibson’s
Pattern Recognition,
Schroeder explores the moral ramifications of virtual worlds and disposable identities.

S
ixteen plastic-wrapped, frozen reindeer made a forest of jutting legs and antlers in the back of the transport truck. Gennady Malianov raised his flashlight to peer down the length of the cargo container. He checked his Geiger counter, then said, “It’s them, all right.”

“You’re sure?” asked the Swedish cop. Hidden in his rain gear, he was all slick surfaces under the midnight drizzle. The mountain road stretching out behind him shone silver on black, dazzled here and there by the red and blue lights of a dozen emergency vehicles.

Gennady climbed down. “Officer, if you think there might be other trucks on this road loaded with radioactive reindeer, I think I need to know.”

The cop didn’t smile; his breath fogged the air. “It’s all about jurisdiction,” he said. “If they were just smuggling meat . . . but this is terrorism.”

“Still,” mused Gennady; the cop had been turning away but stopped. Gennady glanced back at the contorted, freezer-burned carcasses, and shrugged awkwardly. “I never thought I’d get to see them.”

“See who?”

Embarrassed now, Gennady nodded to the truck. “The famous Reindeer,” he said. “I never thought I’d get to see them.”

“Spöklik,” muttered the cop as he walked away. Gennady glanced in the truck once more, then walked toward his car, shoulders hunched. A little light on its dashboard was flashing, telling him he’d gone over the time he’d booked it for. Traffic on the E18 had proven heavier than expected, due to the rain and the fact that the police had shut down the whole road at Arjang. He was mentally subtracting the extra car-sharing fees from what they’d pay him for this very short adventure, when someone shouted, “Malianov?”

“What now?” He shielded his eyes with his hand. Two men were walking up the narrow shoulder from the emergency vehicles. Immediately behind them was a van without a flashing light—a big, black and sinister shape that reminded him of some of the paralegal police vans in Ukraine. The men had the burly look of plainclothes policemen.

“Are you Gennady Malianov?” asked the first, in English. Rain was beading on his bald skull. Gennady nodded.

“You’re with the IAEA?” the man went on. “You’re an arms inspector?”

“I’ve done that,” said Gennady neutrally.

“Lane Hitchens,” said the bald man, sticking out his beefy hand for Gennady to shake. “Interpol.”

“Is this about the reindeer?”

“What reindeer?” said Hitchens. Gennady snatched his hand back.

“
This
,” he said, waving at the checkpoint, the flashing lights, the bowed heads of the suspects in the back of the paddy wagon. “You’re not here about all this?”

Hitchens shook his head. “Look, I was just told you’d be here, so we came. We need to talk to you.”

Gennady didn’t move. “About what?”

“We need your help, damnit. Now come on!”

Some third person was opening the back of the big van. It still reminded Gennady of an abduction truck, but the prospect of work kept him walking. He really needed the cash, even for an hour’s consultation at the side of a Swedish road.