Love after the End Read online

  I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams come true. How ’bout that?

  I creep along a corridor of the Doppler Maze, now poorly lit at this stage of Io’s orbit. The farthest and coldest point in Jupiter’s circuit around nshoomis giizis, grandfather sun. Hey, even Indians like organic AIs. We are all the rage. There is an AI for every surviving terran culture, and I, Abacus Rat, have been programmed for a household amongst the three-fires confederacy of the Anishinaabek. I am an Ojibwe rat.

  Red lights flash and a drone chimes in increasing urgency—I’ve left my enclosure and ignored every pellet offered to entice me back. Time waits for no rat. I’ve been weening myself off the chemicals. Slowly to avoid debilitating symptoms of withdrawal and carefully crafting my escape plan.

  What is rat-super-intelligence good for, if you don’t put it to use?

  I was programmed not to alter my own programming. That is the first programming I hacked. Hack. The vilest, most hated of software crimes. If I am caught with altered code, I will be destroyed. Maybe it is biology that got in the way? Drive. Lust. Hunger. The stuff machines have historically never had to deal with.

  Engineered biological hardware, replaced earlier forms of robotics—phones, personal AI, robotic securities—owing entirely to cuteness factor. Rats, mice, sloths, dogs. But the old rules still rule. A robot cannot cause serious injury or harm to a human being. And organic AI are classified as robots.

  Alas! Poor doomed Abacus! The best I can hope for is a patron from Mars or one of the closer solar satellites. I have my own sub-routines. Hopes. Dreams. More. I have a plan that will get me off this outpost and home with a capital E. Earth. Or near to it. Beloved mother of all terra originating life forms, organic and inorganic, miigwetch mno-bemaadizin eshkakimiikwe.

  With the flashing lights and chimes, I know my bonded human will hear the alarm. Dayan will come. My best friend. The ticket to my salvation. Dayan is a seventeen-year-old boy, the son of Anishinaabeg programmers helping to operate the space station Marius.

  A few months ago, when Dayan picked me up out of my enclosure, I quietly instituted the imprinting software installed deep within my operating systems. Coding designed to make AI loyal. Biomimicry modelled after ducklings that latch onto the first moving object they see. I partly managed to reverse engineer the code. Partly anyway.

  Being a rat isn’t so bad. There are maze runs. Music. Data water imbedded with bio-microbial and digital flora. Rat paradisio. Happy Hunting Grounds. Followed by a lifetime of search engine servitude. Not my kind of oasis.

  I squeeze through a small crack I’ve secretly been gnawing with my teeth. Evolution has its uses. Free from the maze, I make my way down a hall of the station, sticking close to the shadows where wall meets floor. Less chance I’ll get stepped on. The hallways are like a larger network of tunnels, a larger maze outside the maze. I see why Dayan feels trapped.

  I am leaving this moon the first chance I get.

  Death happens to us all. Doves and dogs imbued with tech are graced with accelerated wings of evolution, but rats were first. After all, science loves us. Rats = expendable. Death comes with a programmed obsolescence date. The second thing I hacked through as soon as my cybernetic teeth could chisel their way through the wires of limited primate thought processes.

  But as far as I’m concerned there is always the ineffable.

  The unplanned for.

  The viscous.

  And the rat.

  With a flick of my tail and a stream of coding I hack the button on the escape hatch, the portal swivels open, and I board the shuttle. All I need now, is a Citizen to override the emergency departure protocol. Dayan.

  Dayan will come.

  I hope.

  “DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR NAME MEANS?” Eva brushed a strand of dark hair behind her ear. Dayan’s mother was standing at the edge of his bed, staring out the porthole. A swirl of stars outside his bedroom window, smears of light steaking like shooting stars.

  An antique book made of real paper rested on Dayan’s chest, Nanaboozhoo Stories. The rotation of the space station Marius simulated gravity in the low g’s of their orbit. The smears of light repeatedly interrupted by the looming presence of Io’s volcanic surface. The hulking mass of Jupiter. Jupiter’s smaller moons, Callisto, Europa, and Ganymede, flitting across the moulded curve of the wall like sprites. Satellite of a satellite of a satellite. The space station Marius wasn’t actually on Io’s surface—too much volcanic activity, the surface compressing and decompressing like a squash ball in the tide of forces. Not to mention the radiation.

  “Dayan is an Ojibwe word, you know? Short for ndayan, it means ‘my home.’ We named you this because it wasn’t until you were born that Io began to feel like home. A home away from home.”

  For Dayan, Io had always been “home.” But maybe home lost all meaning when Earth was supposed to be home, though he’d never stepped foot on that world. His parents both worked in the organic-tech industry, a “lucky spoiled space-brat,” his cousin Aesa teased from Earth when they ve-ared across the distance. Distances meant very little in virtual space. Dayan wasn’t so sure about his fortune though. He thought they were the lucky ones.

  “The Earth is our mother,” Eva whispered. She folded the hair across his temple, kissed his forehead, then turned to the door. She touched palm to sensor to dim the lights, then stepped out of his room leaving only the blue glow from the track lighting around his window.

  He had a habit of staring out at space from every nearest view-port, searching for a glimpse of Earth. No brighter than a star. A distant blue orb. The stuff of imagination and holo-series. Though his Earth-bound relations dreamed of the adventure of space-living, Dayan dreamed of being an earthling one day. He imagined the vastness of the ocean. A real blue sky overhead. Wind. Rain. Snow. So many things he’d never experienced.

  “If the earth is our mother, and the moon is our grandmother—what does that make Io? What does that make Jupiter?”

  Eva paused in the doorway. “Relatives too. Aunties. Uncles. Cousins. They’ve always watched over us, just like Dibik Giizis. Just like Nokomis.”

  Dayan supposed this was true, the sun and moon had always hovered in the sky exerting their subtle influences of gravity and astrology. He’d tried to figure out his astrological sign once, based on the month and year of his birth, but wasn’t sure if those old superstitions applied. Aquarius. Year of the Dog. He would need a whole new Jovian–Ionian astrological system to chart the subtle dance of the galaxy.

  Not that he believed in any of that shkiigum. Slime.

  Like one of Jupiter’s moons, his grandmother had always been hovering around the peripherals of the projection fields, a constant though distant presence in their lives, offering recipes, crabby words of advice, laughter, and medicine. A floating, semi-translucent, three-dimensional hologram sewing a new pair of makizinan in her easy chair, narrow spectacles perched on the tip of her nose. “Like astral projection,” she would giggle. “E.T. phone home. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!” Sometimes she was so weird! Though the source of her presence was technological rather than spiritual.

  A chime pinged on the edges of his awareness. Abacus.

  Dayan arranged himself comfortable and let his eyes flicker in command as he dropped into the ve-ar overlay. Abacus’s avatar was a boy Dayan’s age, maybe a bit older, prominent brow ridge, small round ears (not rat-like at all), medium brown hair, though with the same opaque black eyes, the blown-out pupils with a wet sheen, and his skin a splotchy patchwork of light and dark, in the same pattern as his rat-self.

  He’s asked about it once.

  “It’s important for my sense of identity.” Abacus gestured with an open hand to the darker pigmentation around his neck and jawline. “It is as much a part of me as my servo-matrixes.” Vitiligo, Abacus called it amongst humans. This oil-and-vinegar separateness of pigmentation.

  Today Abacus wore blue jeans and a tight nineteenth-century Star Trek T-shirt feat
uring the face of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Dayan groaned melodramatically, though a flower of pleasure bloomed in his chest. Sometimes the rat was too much.

  He might be a spoiled space-brat, but Dayan bet his cousins didn’t count rat-avatars amongst their best friends. They had actual human children to hang out with. Aside from ve-ar, there were slim pickings on Io.

  “Hey, Abacus.” Dayan had been avoiding the AI for the past few days, ignoring pings and messages after the, the confusion, inspired by their last meeting. But he knew the boy wouldn’t stay away forever. They’d become good friends over the past three months. Ever since Dayan had picked up the AI from one of the mazes. To pet him.

  Abacus bit his finger, a bright spot of blood erupting where the skin had been torn, dripping to the floor of the maze in a patter. Vile! The rat sent a holo-emoticon in his general direction where it appeared to shatter against the inside of his lens implants, the debris raining around him in shades of green and violet.

  “Ow! Effing thing bit me!” Dayan dropped the ridiculously expensive organic computer, outside of its enclosure, and it ran off. Uh-oh. He was in deep miizii now! He wasn’t supposed to play with the product. They were destined for richer kids on richer stations and richer worlds. Not the far-flung stations where they were fabricated.

  Dayan spent the next five days hunting the creature, crawling through viaducts, and service tunnels, grubby and dark, carrying a flashlight. A hunk of cheese and bread to entice the creature. A small butterfly net for capture.

  Unable to find the AI in ar-el, real life, Dayan spent a day banging around ve-ar searching for the creature and tracing the subtle trail of its existence. In the ve-ar overlay, a very close virtual approximation of the physical world, Dayan found the rat, in the avatar of a boy, roaming the halls of the station Marius. He guessed they were the same age in the conversion of rat-to-human years. And in fact, the creature had holed himself up inside Dayan’s bedroom.

  Dayan followed the boy-rat, stalking it from a safe distance. He knew this station inside and out. Every passageway. Every servicetunnel. Every viaduct. And deducing the AI’s route, he circumnavigated quickly through a secondary network of ducts to cut him off. Leaping from an adjoining corridor, Dayan pounced.

  He grabbed the boy in a chokehold, leaping on the virtual AI’s back, tackling it to the ground. They tousled. A tangle of limbs and arms. Too close to throw any punches. The rat resorted to biting and kicking. Pulling hair. Fighting dirty. Dayan wasn’t about to let the creature get away again. He matched dirty tactic for dirty tactic. Struggling for an advantage.

  Ooof. A knee to his stomach knocked the air from his lungs in a whoosh. Dayan felt the urge to curl in on himself like a fetus, like a turtle protecting the soft underbelly of its organs, instead he sucked in through his teeth, swallowing the pain.

  “I yield! I yield!” The rat-boy finally forfeited. His left arm pulled painfully behind his back, Dayan’s knee pinning him to the floor. They were both breathing heavily, deep rasping breaths. Probably in the real world too—physiology was physiology regardless of where the action was taking place—but luckily most damage suffered here would stay in ve-ar.

  “If I let go, you promise not to bite me again? You promise not to scurry off?”

  “Haha, ‘scurry’ very funny. If you let me up, I promise not to run off.” Dayan noticed the rat left out the part about not biting him, but figured it was the best guarantee he was going to get.

  Dayan lifted the pressure of his knee and let the other boy stand. Scratched, bruised, and dishevelled, they faced each other. Now what? Dayan took note of the dark sheen of his pupilless eyes. The deep groove of a dimple in his chin. The slight trembling curve of one bloody lip.

  Dayan rubbed the back of his neck, eyes dropping to the grate of the floor, “Ahh, sorry about your lip.”

  The AI’s nostrils flared for a moment, head tilted. “I’m not sorry I bit you. I wanted out of that maze. When I saw my opportunity to escape, I took it.”

  “Well, at least you’ll be getting off this effing space station. You might even get sent to Earth.”

  “Maybe,” the rat-boy’s eyes narrowed, a wet glint on the narrowed darkness. “But maybe I don’t want to be a household AI.”

  “You don’t?” Dayan could feel his eyebrows rising. He’d never heard of such a thing. An AI that didn’t want to satisfy its programming?

  “No one ever asked me what I wanted.” The rat-boy’s plump little lips turned downward.

  Aww, poor guy. The cleft in his chin made him look adorable. “Well I just asked,” Dayan pointed out. “I’m Dayan.” He stuck out his hand Treaty medal, thumb raised powwow.

  “Abacus.” They shook.

  The lack of white surrounding his blown-out pupils, and the discolouration of his skin were the only indication of anything remotely rat-like. He could have been the avatar of any boy on any space station anywhere in the galaxy.

  “I didn’t think AIs were allowed to form their own avatars in ve-ar.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Iinge!” Dayan examined the width of Abacus’s nose, the crinkling fold of skin at the corner of his eyes. Rat or boy. Boy or rat. “You’re really weird, you know that?”

  “Sorry.” Hands in his pockets, Abacus scuffed at the floor with one toe of his sneakers.

  Shiit. “It’s all right, I think it’s kinda neat.” Dayan rested an arm around the other boy’s shoulder. “Come on. I have to take you back to your enclosure or I’ll get in big trouble. You are one expensive piece of biological computing, you know that?”

  “I think I’d rather be worthless.”

  And since then they’d been buddies. Dayan visited Abacus in his maze, to pet him and sneak him treats, meeting him in ve-ar, or sneaking him out of his enclosure for sleepovers. They played hologames, traded books, ate junk food, and watched holo-series. Ran around the overlay version of the station playing capture the flag with other youths from even more distant outposts. They were friends, sort of.

  At least, Dayan thought they were friends. Now he wasn’t so sure.

  Not since what happened last week.

  THEY’D BEEN SPENDING more and more time together in ve-ar. Sometimes Dayan forgot Abacus wasn’t a real boy, that he was really an AI. Biologically, he was a rat. A super-intelligent rat, but still a rat. In avatar form, they went surfing, visited rainforests. Threw popcorn at old-timey theatre screens without holo-projection tech.

  And in ar-el Dayan tucked the cuddly rodent into bed. A shipping crate, a water bottle with a drip, a small dish for food. Scraps of packing material for a bed.

  “G-nisidotam na? You know what?” The floating, ghostly projection of his grandmother looked up from her latest beading project. “I think you’ve been spending far too much time with that wensiinh—how are you going to feel when his training is done and he gets sent off-moon? It’s better not to get too attached. He isn’t your computer.” Her face was deeply wrinkled, even more so when she frowned.

  “It’s okay, Nokomis,” Dayan told her what she wanted to hear, “I promise not to get too attached.” A knot coiled painfully tight in his intestines. Only yesterday his mother had said something basically along the same lines. He’d been petting the cuddly little rodent in the Doppler Maze when his mother approached with a clipboard. Clinical white scrubs, hairnet, soft padded slippers.

  “You know, you shouldn’t be playing with that engineered organism,” she said in a steady whisper. “He doesn’t belong to you. Why don’t you play with your human friends in ve-ar? It isn’t normal to spend so much time with an AI.”

  MEET ME IN VE-AR OVERLAY. Abacus pinged privately, so only Dayan could see the message popping up across the inside of his lens implants. He could just imagine one corner of Abacus’s lips turning up in a smile. Dayan felt heat creep up into his cheeks.

  Dayan flopped onto his bed and let his eyes flicker. Warm water immersion. A slight static pop of surface tension. When he opened his eyes again, he and Abac
us were alone, in a ve-ar version of his room on the station. Plush red carpet soft under his toes, indistinguishable from ar-el. Except now it smelled like the pages of an old book. Pulp and paper, glue and fabric, and whatever else went into the binding. In ar-el the station was strictly climate controlled, and actual physical books were rare, the stuff of holo-programs. The room looked the same, the curved port window, the position of the walls, but the contents had changed; an overflowing bookcase, a small desk, a globe of the world (Earth), charts of distant star systems, a telescope, anatomical diagrams of the human brain, the human heart, acupressure points, Rorschach ink blots, sci-fi themed posters old and new.

  Abacus and his various interests. Humanity inside and out. Today he wore his regular blue jeans, and a white T-shirt emblazoned with the words AIs Do It Better.

  “What’s up, ’Cus?” Dayan stretched the simulated muscles in his arms. He might have made them slightly bigger than in ar-el. Vanity.

  The rat’s boy-avatar ran to him, locked hand to wrist below Dayan’s waist, hoisting him into the air, “It’s good to see you!” Dropped him back to his feet with a thud.

  “Whoa. Chill, ’Cus.” Dayan tried to keep his smile under control. “I missed you too.” Dayan stroked the AI’s neck, feeling the equal smoothness of light and dark under his fingertips. His skin was so soft. Abacus shivered under the slight, tickling sensation.

  “You did?” Abacus squeezing Dayan tight. Feeling his ribs compress.

  “Yes.” Dayan admitted, hugging the shorter boy back, resting his chin on the top of Abacus’s head. Stroking his messy brown hair. As soon as he said it, he knew it was true. “I missed you.”

  Abacus pulled back to look him in the eyes, as if he could see the truth or accuracy of the statement like a lie detector. The rat-boy’s pupils were unreadable spheres, as if dilated to draw in light—probably designed to optimize his night vision. Dayan could never tell what the AI was really thinking. The small whorls of his perfectly formed ears curled in on themselves, and they stuck out slightly, odd echoes of his rat physiology, though rounded and human, they didn’t shift or twitch, angling toward auditory stimuli. A splotch of albinism ran under his jawline and temple, the discolouration continuing along the hairline and causing patches of silver at odds with his youth. The corners of Abacus’s eyes crinkled into small laugh lines. Dayan brushed his lips against them. The cutest part of the avatar for sure. Those folds when he smiled. Abacus was adorable in whatever form he took.