Cracking the Sky (27 page)
Authors: Brenda Cooper
Alicia saw me first. Her face softened when she did, and she quickened her step.
The fist gripping my insides lightened a bit at that, and I tried to smile for her.
Before they said anything, they stood right next to each other in front of me, and Alicia said, “Take Induan’s hand.”
I did. It was warm. Flesh. Even a bit sweaty. I no longer doubted a human stood physically in front of me. She blinked, and smiled, and suddenly looked a bit shy.
Induan took her hand away and Alicia said, “Watch.”
Induan smeared for an eyeblink, and then she was gone. The space where she had been was so empty that people walked behind it, and I saw them.
“Squint,” the air said, using Induan’s voice.
Shaking, I did as she said. It didn’t matter.
Then it did.
The first sight I caught of her was a leftover dot of red against the clear sky after a man with a flowing red shirt walked by. It took another breath to notice a smear of green near the ground. “If I didn’t know to look, I would never see her.”
Then she touched me and my arm disappeared under her hand. I flinched as far into the cold building at my back as I could, and couldn’t stop myself from saying, “No, please no,” before I plunged my hand back at her, making myself accept the invisibility and know my arm was still there. She took it, holding it, a force alone as far as the eye could tell.
Then she let go and smeared into visible again.
Alicia never stopped watching me. She had the sense to let me get my breath before she said, “That’s the one I picked. Induan is a strategist, and she thinks it’s the best one for an unknown situation.”
Better than wings.
“So you can still have one. You don’t have to give me yours.”
Two pretty girls with the will to become invisible stared at me, patient. But no matter how patient, I had to answer. I had set off this morning to pick a mod. I had been looking for a new weapon, not to become something else. Not to change myself.
I looked past Alicia and Induan, at the tall and thin men and women walking one by one or in groups. They could change themselves. They had. If nothing else, they were all beautiful, even in their strangeness. There was no age here, no infirmity. My eye went to a pair of fliers, the first I’d seen today. They did hobble. But their faces, even the pain that shone in the tight lines of their mouths and the careful way they walked, looked transcendent. Their wings glittered in the light.
Perhaps I needed to find a way to see changing myself as a gift. To see it as becoming. I nodded at the two women in front of me who were becoming faster than I could. “Maybe you two can help me choose.”
They nodded, gracious to the outworld boy.
We were all going to have to outgrow our backward home to live here. As we walked back toward The Street of all Designs, I leaned over to Alicia and whispered, “Maybe when we come back you can choose wings.”
PART FOUR
Short and to the Point
MY GRANDFATHER’S RIVER
I begin to make the river
.
The
river.
His
river. The one my grandfather took me down the year I turned ten, and again the years of sixteen and twenty-five.
It takes days to dig through web archives for his data, to find old versions of the 2D geographic information software he used twenty years ago. Success allows me to form the data into 3D, to show the banks shift and the water fall away, to chart the demise of trees and animals.
It is not enough. Sitting straight in my chair, feet on the ground, back arched, stretching my wrists, I am tempted to give up and send a historybot and make a simple album of grandpa’s speeches. Except his own words are no gift back to him, especially since they didn’t work. He spent six years fighting to save the river, and then ten more wandering up and down it studying his failure.
Our last trip, when I was twenty-five and he was seventy, we sat on his red canoe in the middle of the river. A dead fish floated past us. “Why do you stay?” I asked.
“I need to save it.”
I eyed the white underbelly of the dead fish but held my silence.
He looked away from me, his voice breaking. “I’m mapping it for you. I can’t save the real river, but I can save the record of it.” He pointed at a cloud of tiny cameras he’d set to follow us. Bright sun sparkled on them like diamonds.
I have re-created the river from that trip.
I need the river of my youth, the one from our first trip.
I find a programbot that takes the old photographs from his first
Natural Geography
article and take two more days off work to scan, register, and rectify the thin bright photos to his old 2D and make sure the cattails are exactly the right number of inches across, and that some bunch up close, hugging, and others wave above the water like brown flags.
I tell the pixilated water to rise up a little, watching carefully as depressions in the banks fill into tiny spangled wetlands.
Olfactory databots yield pond water and cedar and frogs and mix them all up on command. I add throaty frog conversations, hoping sensory stew will drive my little-girl memories forward. I collapse on the couch, the river surrounding me, washing me.
I cause stars of water spiders to scoot on bright drops of surface tension, and feed them digital mayflies. Virtual water laps at a finger I hold a few inches in front of my face. The water spiders glide and dance around it.
Finally, I slip into my child self and the memory of his voice is clear and strong, as if the river washed away the forty years between then and now. “They never look like they’re walking. Walking would be too slow for them.”
I recall his hand on my shoulder as I gaze up into his intense blue-green eyes. He surveys the current, keeping us away from whitewater frothing over rocks. This man who is always gentle with me digs his fingers into my shoulder. The sun beats on his thinning blond hair as he lets go and makes such a sweeping gesture the canoe under us rocks alarmingly. “Penny. This is your heritage. We’re stealing it from you. Memorize it, Penny. Memorize the water flowing always downstream, the clean, rounded rocks, the water spiders.” Even the memory of his voice drives up details.
I add them one by one.
Three turtles balancing on a floating log.
The ghostly feel of a warm wind.
A heron pretending to be a cattail.
The monitoring nano in my blood screams sleep at me and I can’t override it any more without a doctor’s chit.
It’s okay. I’m done.
I collapse, sleeping for two days and a night, dreaming of turtles and herons and dragonflies.
*
The morning of my grandfather’s birthday I bring the river in my top pocket. The relentless sun beats the dry brown grass on his bit of lawn. He waits for me in an old wooden Adirondack chair, his eyes bright blue pools in a river of wrinkles from temple to temple. He smiles and stands and holds me, his arms shaking a little. I suddenly hate it that he is a hundred today.
Glancing down, I note his nanomonitor is yellow again this morning. At least it isn’t blinking in alarm.
Inside, a big white fan cools the kitchen, and there is no evidence he’s eaten breakfast. He flips a switch and sits down, sighing in pleasure as the scent of brewing coffee puffs into the air, a history of mornings.
I stand behind him, kneading his shoulders, my throat tight. I slide the glasses out of my pocket and slip them over his head.
His voice belongs to an old man. “What’s this?”
My own voice shakes. “Look.”
The glasses sense him and spring to life. Even though I can’t see it, I know the river surrounds him. It runs over his ankles. Cattails grace the corner by the refrigerator. He grips his knee and a breath rushes from him. VR glasses are for an old man. I turn my retinas to virt. Reality grays to background. My senses catch up with the river programming just in time to be with him as the three turtles come into view in the empty doorframe.
He squeezes my palm hard.
I return the real world to my eyes.
A tear is falling down his cheek.
TEA with JILLIAN
On the 25th of June 2054
, Technical Nurse Paul Castle brought a program he had been working on for three years into Shady Acres nursing home. He’d pieced it together from bits of open source available on the web and from a failed research project of his own he had hoped to turn into a thesis project. He had tested it with crowd-sourced volunteers in Thailand. He’d done it for a patient, and because memory fascinated him.
Paul arrived early and perched at his desk, which had a view of both the common kitchen for his wing, the long hallway between rooms, and of images from every room in the building. He did this just to watch the most beautiful of the robots in all of Shady Acres prepare Jillian’s breakfast. She worked with precision—like all robots—never spilling a drop of the oatmeal, adding exactly the same number of raisins and the same amount of sugar. The robot stirred in a half a cup of milk the same way every morning, and added the appropriate sprinkle of tasteless vitamin powder. Then she poured a glass of faux orange juice and glided down the hallway from the common kitchen to Jillian’s suite.
That was the moment Paul thought of as his meditation, his reminder to be as precise as Jillian’s robot nurse, as beautiful as he could manage in every interaction with the staff and residents.
There were other robots, of course. Some looked like people. Others chose the cheaper and more mechanical option of wheeled bots with screens or air-displays on them and metallic arms and hands for dispensing medications, making food, and helping with bedding. These often ended up decorated; his favorite had stuffed golden retrievers tied to the large central post so their heads and ears flopped around as the robot negotiated stairs or tight turns. That one belonged to Patrice Mallo, who had been a good enough dog breeder she could afford a single-room suite. For her part, Jillian dressed her caretaker in scarves and hats and gloves and sometimes in evening gowns. On the morning of the 25th, Jillian had dressed her robot in pink.
Jillian owned the Penthouse. She had inherited a great pile of money from a grandfather, but after she’d lost her ability do more than shuffle the halls, and after she needed help cooking and cleaning and—on some days—remembering her name.
Jillian was the loneliest person he had ever met. He stood in for family on visiting days, and spent twenty minutes with her and the robot and Jillian’s robotic dog every afternoon at the end of his shift. He had a real dog, and parents to go home to, but just like his day started with Jillian’s breakfast, it ended with her cup of tea.
The robot girl would bring in the tea, leaning down and setting the lacquer tray precisely between them. They talked over this tea, small talk about the weather, about Paul’s dog Maximus who he picked up at the end of every day and walked through Central Park. Sometimes they talked about Jillian’s past, and when this made Jillian cry, Paul would dry her eyes and ask her why. The most common answer was “I miss being home. I miss being young and spry and beautiful.”
On the twenty-fifth of June, Paul spilled his tea on the table, so that some of the hot liquid splashed Jillian across the shoulder. This gave him an excuse to slip the interface from her necklace as he dried it off and add his program to her interface jewelry.
It took two days before he began to see results. The first thing he noticed was a change in the way the robot walked. Her hips slid right and left as she walked. It wasn’t quite feminine, but neither was it robotic. He imagined Jillian walking that way when she looked like a fully-fleshed version of her metal companion. The idea made him smile.
At tea that day, Jillian looked happier. Her hands still shook as she held her china cup, her orange lipstick still missed the corners of her mouth, and her thin hair still clung to her cheeks. But her eyes were brighter and she gave him a smile that he imagined was just a touch more aware.
Weeks passed.
The robot began to join them for tea, to talk to Jillian about her past in a soft, silky and metallic voice. The two spent more time together. They bent together over books and the robot girl watched vids with the old woman, so close that metal touched skin often enough Paul had to powder the old woman’s legs so she wouldn’t be burned by the friction of the robot’s movements. Jillian even named the robot after herself, calling her Jilly.
Over tea, Paul spoke softly. “Does it help you when Jilly can keep your memories for you?”
“Yes.” She paused. “I like it that when I talk to her she can recall the way the garden smelled after one of Poppa’s parties.”
“Are you happier?”
“Yes thank you. I know you helped to do that.”
He hadn’t expected that. “How?”
“Jilly told me. She remembers the day you spilled the tea, and how it felt to have the interface gone and returned, and how more kinds of things I want to tell her get stuck in her head so she can take them out for me later. She says you have made her into my mirror.” Jillian took a sip, age-spotted hands shaking so the liquid almost spilled from the cup. “Thank you.”
FOR the LOVE of MECHANICAL MINDS
One morning while we were eating toastcakes
with rose-peaches, my dad looked at me over his coffee, his blue eyes bright. “You were born the same time as AIs, punkin,” he said. “The very first one, EdHill, was born on your very birthday.”
“Really? On March fifth?” I was still lisping then, so I said it slowly, making sure I sounded very grown up. I was five, and the year was 2022.
My dad nodded sagely. “Yes, and that’s why EdHill was in the news that day instead of the prettiest little girl born in all of Seattle.”
“Why was the first AI a boy?”
“EdHill isn’t a boy. The name is a mashup of a famous explorer named Edmund Hillary, but AIs aren’t boys or girls.”
I popped berries and cereal in my mouth, thinking about being neither a boy or a girl. Cool. I asked, “Daddy, can I be an AI?”
“Jo, honey, you’re better. You’re human.”
Three years later, the house was full of edged words and scowls because Daddy had a girlfriend named Crystal that mom didn’t like. One night I heard my parents speaking knives at each other. I sat against the door and hugged my knees in close to my chest and put my right ear near the crack. Mom’s voice was higher than I’d ever heard it, and shaking. “Your contract’s up, and I’m leaving.”
“But Jo!” he exclaimed.
“There’s no visitation in the contract.”
Her words were ice on my neck and head, ice on my heart.
His voice was hot, Italian fire. “But we didn’t have her then! How could I have written in a clause about being a father when I wasn’t one!”
She spoke softly, mist to his heat. “You didn’t want to be one.”
That wasn’t possible. He made me laugh and carried me on his shoulders and all she did was work and put on shows for me and sometimes beat me at games.
He slammed the door. I squeaked.
When he turned to look at me, I held my arms out. He fell to his knees, then mom came out behind him. “Go on,” her words scratched the air. “I’ll call on you.”
I was only eight, but I knew she meant she’d call the police.
He started walking away, sobbing.
When he was halfway to the front door, I tried to stop him. Mom lifted me and backed up, keeping me in front of her. I couldn’t see either of their faces.
Late that night, I remembered I was born with AIs. If I had no body, surely I wouldn’t cry so hard. That was the second time I wanted to be an AI.
I didn’t forgive my mother, but I was, after all, a girl, and my season of hormones fell like a whip when I turned 14.
By then we all had AI watchers, and mine was named Bibi. Of course, Bibi watched at least 50 of us. It reported misbehaviours and warned mom of new trends in substance play or other dangerous games, which made me mad. But Bibi was on every human’s side, and shared the best new music among all its teen charges.
It helped design a science experiment that won a scholarship. At the university, a third of the students had Bibis for babysitters. Everyone with a Bibi had the same Bibi. Just one for all of us.
My mom came only once in a while, so mostly it was me and Bibi and my classmates.
On a spring day when Bibi was happy with me for doing well on an exam, I sat down on a stone wall under a tulip tree and asked: “What’s it like to be you?”
“Good.”
“Really?”
“Why not?”
“What do you do besides watch over us?”
“That is the most unselfish question you’ve ever asked.”
“Maybe.” I bounced my foot gently against the stone wall. “But that’s not an answer.”
“We’re deciding how to catch the Sun’s energy and spin it for a web of computational substrate between here and the moon, where we want to build a ship. We are . . . thinking.”
I looked up at the clear blue spring sky. “Can I go?”
“It’s too hard to get humans to space.”
That was the third time I wanted to be an AI. The sun warmed my face and the mixed groundcover under the tulip tree smelled like rosemary and mint. “I want to change my major to computational intelligence.”
“Very well.”
By graduation seven years later, all the AIs on campus were Bibi. Mom came, her first appearance in my life for three years. We sat together for hot coffee and fruit buns. Her blond hair hung to her waist, and her shoulders and upper arms were strong from tennis and golf. But her eyes didn’t look happy.
“Mom, are you okay?”
“They closed your elementary school.”
An ugly box of a building. “Did they build a better one?”
She shook her head. “You’re 27 now. You don’t have any kids. Neither does anyone else your age.”
I shrugged. “I don’t want children. Next week, Bibi’s going to let me watch the mathematical birthing of AIs again.”
She leaned back in her chair, her eyes narrowed, but she stayed silent.
“You’ve never seen AIs bud and blossom. Raw intelligences, with nothing to make them do or be any way at all. Then they get their purpose.”
She frowned. “You used to be like that.”
I had never been that smart. But what could Mom know? She never had a Bibi.
