Something Wicked Anthology, Vol. One Read online

  Margery dropped the rest of her stitches. “True AI?”

  “Now you see why I called you. Can you make next Wednesday?”

  She shook her head. “Not a chance, I’d have to read all the files. Earliest I can do is Thursday. Not that I’m doing it. I’m no longer qualified for interviews.” The knitting slipped onto her lap as she remembered. She hadn’t been there when it happened, but arriving with the clean-up crews had been enough.

  “I was thinking about that. How do you feel about Decision-Beads?”

  “What?”

  “A Decision-bead. It’s an implant you can get, to measure the physiological factors that indicate discomfort and cancel any communication between you and the Sci-Reg server when you’re even a little upset. That way you can never make a decision unless you’re happy with it, physiologically.”

  “…How do they work?”

  “That’s where we differed from Proxenos and Khumalo,” the doctor said. “They took Gerriety’s proposal as proof that the human casing was flawed. It wouldn’t give you true AI, they said. It would be corrupted, influenced by the organic, the human.”

  “The Frankenstein Solution, Khumalo called it, I believe, neither one thing nor the other, just a monstrous hybrid - his words.”

  Doctor Marlowe made a face. “He did say that. It’s a misnomer though. The process wouldn’t work with dead parts. Proxenos was kinder. She still thought it was a waste of time, and yes, as a way of communicating with the exact mind that had evolved on your mainframe, it is, because by the time you can achieve meaningful interaction, it’s already…changed. But the change didn’t matter, whether she was pure AI or not, it didn’t matter to us. Just so long as she was Other.”

  Margery frowned; this was a side of Alistair she’d never seen. His eyes were shining and his words tumbled into each other and he drummed his fingers on the table constantly. “‘Other’, Doctor Marlowe?”

  The Doctor’s voice was low but even. He lifted his glass cup, letting his coffee catch the afternoon light, and spoke as if addressing it, not Margery. “Don’t you think that we’re lonely? Humans I mean, as a species? Why else would we chase so desperately the hope of other intelligences out among the stars? The longest scientific endeavours without results are all to find extra-terrestrial life. Why do we listen with such dedication, such hope? I think it’s because, as a species, we’re totally isolated, and I think…” Here his voice grew hesitant, personal, “I think that if it doesn’t come, if there really is no one else out there, then our loneliness and our hope will drive us, as a species, mad.

  “So my team and I turned inward. We dreamed of a safety net of machines that saw us, between us and this incredible, cosmic void. We dreamed of building an Other. You ask why the most important thing about Kore is that she’s Other. Your answer is in why we’ve always tried to build AIs, even though they sometimes frighten us.”

  “I...” And suddenly Margery remembered being six years old, looking at the desert stars from the window of one of her father’s trains, back when passengers were allowed in the engine room on freight runs.

  “What’chu looking at girlie-girl? You been staring that way for hours now.”

  “I’m looking at the stars, daddy.” Or something like that, and it had been a lie. She’d been dreaming about meeting aliens and wondering how they told their stories.

  “The human casing is the only practical option for communication that we have now, the best chance against our loneliness, and Kore is the only success. Three decades of experiment and theory and only one small sound against the endless silence of the universe.” He put the cup down and met her eyes. “That’s why she’s important, Margery, that’s why you have to find a way to save her.”

  “Yes.” She half whispered, half breathed the answer. Now was the time. The further the space exploration pushed, the less they found. No one was talking about shutting down the projects or the dedicated receiving dishes planetside, but the chances of finding something kept dwindling.

  An Other to see and be seen by. She looked up again. The Project was reaching over the sides of her chair to run her fingers through the grass. One small sound against all the silence of the Universe. Margery shook herself. She was a Regulator first. She had to be. “There’s still the contravention, Doctor, the behaviour you hadn’t foreseen. Tell me about that.”

  He laughed, and Margery couldn’t tell how much was bitterness.

  “Of course, the damned contravention. You know, she only told me about it two days before the mandatory Appraisal Interview? If she’d just waited…” He didn’t finish the thought. Above the house, the building storm clouds growled. He looked away, smiling, and spoke slowly. “She surprised me, the way she said it, so calmly, with no idea that nothing in her code, nothing we’d programmed her with, should have allowed her to do this. She was sitting there, sitting just where you are now, and eating that terrible blue stuff, that children’s cereal that she makes me buy for her because the donor body liked blue.”

  He waved a hand at the garden and continued. “She sat here, with the grass and the omnitrees and the synth-soil and she said: ‘I dreamed of a green place where I could no longer go.’”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all so far, but… You see what it means? It means that she can develop outside what we programmed for her. It means that she’s more than just a chat-bot, that she’s true Other. There are things she can never know because she isn’t human, and there are things that we can never know because we are not her. If she is allowed to grow up she will be able to do things that we cannot, do things by virtue of the uniqueness of her being.”

  Involuntarily, Margery’s stomach tightened. She saw again the small black body bag and the woman weeping. Then she shook her head. That had been an exceptional case. There was no chance, statistically none, of that happening here. Regulators were expected to be sensible, not paranoid. One small voice to stop our ache for companionship driving us mad. She’d have to be monitored, Sci-Reg would have to send a team, but it would be worth it. Some things were worth it.

  “Regulator Fallows: Project status update…” There was suddenly a sharp burst of static.

  “Cancellation noted, Regulator Fallows.”

  Margery froze, paused and tried again. “Regulator Fallows: Project status upd-”

  Again the static and: “Cancellation noted, Regulator Fallows.”

  The realization came slowly, heavily. She flipped her wrist, staring intently at the small bump under the skin, just beside the vein. It was flashing red.

  This can’t be happening, Margery thought. Not now, not with this. She closed her eyes.

  “Marge, is something wrong?”

  “It’s this, Doctor.” She showed him the red flash in her wrist.

  He blinked at it. “I didn’t know that Sci-Reg used Decision-beads…”

  Margery shook her head, panic growing in her voice. “We don’t normally. I…requested one for today.”

  The Doctor raised his hands, making calming gestures. “That’s no problem, surely we just wait until you feel less uncomfortable with-”

  “You don’t understand, Doctor. Sci-Reg has a security policy. If a cancelled status update is not completed within a given time, the server deems it a threat situation and dispatches a Decommission and Containment team with orders to ignore any instructions from the Regulator.”

  He slumped back in his chair, stunned. “But... but how can they? Decision beads take time-”

  Again she interrupted him, shaking her head. “Like I said, we don’t normally use them. Central doesn’t even know they exist yet. The laws haven’t adapted.”

  “How long?” His face was turned away from her.

  “From now, we have, I guess, about eighteen minutes.”

  The Project had wheeled itself off the path to pick pomegranates. It looked up to watch Margery’s approach. An unknowable intellect swirled and pooled behind its eyes, lighting them strangely. Thought
was there, Margery saw, and emotion, if the records were to be believed, but not a drop of it escaped. The construct smiled and she shivered. It was like suddenly discovering the sentence you were trying to read was in French. The letters were so disarmingly familiar that you felt betrayed by their absolute meaninglessness.

  Kore stuck out an arm abruptly, presenting one of the fruits to Margery, who smiled back despite herself and took it. It was surprisingly heavy, sticky in places from small splits in its blushing skin. Fruit of the Dead, Margery thought to herself, the chain binding Persephone to Hades. She looked at the Project over the top of the pomegranate. What was it like in your mainframe, Kore? Do you miss it?

  The teenager held the second fruit, licking its rutted skin and frowning at the taste.

  Do you wish you could return to your mechanical womb of cables and electricity? I suppose you’re not really what you were there. A green place you could no longer go? Your body remembers, and knows that it isn’t what it was before, either. Woman between worlds. A completely singular being. Frankenstein’s monster was singular too. I hope we haven’t made you as lonely as him. She glanced at her pocket-screen. Thirteen minutes.

  Margery had always loved Frankenstein’s monster. So eloquent, even if it was terrifying. Thinking suddenly, she looked up at the Project. The Decision-bead flickered…

  Kore raised her pomegranate with both hands and flung it into the ground so hard that it smashed into fleshy shards of red.

  …and remained flashing crimson. Margery tried not to throw up.

  The Project push-flopped herself out of the chair and, mindless of the dirt, drag-crawled herself to the smashed pomegranate. She licked it then, examining it with tongue, lip and fingers. After a while, she seemed to lose interest and haul-wriggled back into her chair. Margery had never seen shoulder muscles bunch and twist like that. She wished the rain would just start already. Suddenly the last thing in the world she wanted to be staring at was the oozing pips that Kore had sorted into groups of ascending prime numbers.

  “But surely she’s not so frightening, Marge? She’s just like a little girl in so many ways. You can’t be upset by that. You just can’t!”

  “There was an… incident a while ago. With a robot. It killed people, Alistair… and I just can’t…”

  The Doctor was shaking his head, very slowly, as though it were suddenly very heavy. “But she’s no robot, Marge.”

  Margery looked down at her hands. “You tell me that Al, and I want to believe you. I do but... there’s my gut. My gut isn’t so easily convinced. And it’s not like I could just ask her either, is it?”

  “Kore can’t speak English. She only barely communicates in a sort of broken sign language that it’s taken both of us nearly a year to learn.”

  “That’s what the records say.”

  He looked up at her, pleading. “Maybe if you just went to watch her for a while...”

  Margery stood. “Maybe, Al. Who knows?”

  Neither of them believed it.

  The wheelchair was heavier than Margery had expected. It took them nearly three minutes to cross just half of the rain-wet lawn. Suddenly there was a jerk as the Project grabbed the wheels, stopping them. The Regulator sighed and began walking alone. Even with this tiny, trivial task, she couldn’t give Kore what she needed. Four minutes.

  The Doctor waited for her on the porch, his eyes resigned. She was about to start up the ramp when there was a sound. Startled, she looked up at the Doctor.

  The old man just pointed.

  In the rain, the machine was singing, holding out its fingers to the light, soft drops.

  “You said she couldn’t speak!”

  “Speaking and singing are two totally different mental processes. It could be straight up imitation. Or that she just likes the way it feels. All I know is that she taught herself how.”

  The song rose gently through the rain: silver cities and clockwork gardens.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  In the garden a girl’s voice, untrained and cracking on the high notes, spiralled the words skyward: windup dreams and mirror-bright futures.

  The Decision-bead flickered for a second and began to glow green.

  “Regulator Fallows: Project status update: Authorised.”

  “Authorisation confirmed, Regulator.”

  Shaking, Margery checked her pocket-screen. In time, one minute to spare.

  Behind her, the machine sang of cogs turning wisdom and umbrella-spoke wings.

  Margery Fallows leant on the railing of the Doctor’s porch. It was full night now. The suburb’s mainframe had a virus that had killed all the streetlights.

  Much more than just Project photograph regulations would have to change now.

  Bugs thumped into the lit upstairs windows where the Doctor was putting Kore to bed.

  There was too much pollution this deep in the city to see the stars, but the night was full of noise: whirring and rustling as the omnitrees reset themselves, budding something new for the morning.

  Margery closed her eyes and just listened for a while, enjoying the sound.

  UNSTITCHED LOVE

  By Michael Bailey

  She had saved his eyes for last. A glimpse of their emptiness before inverting the skin, filling his insides, and stitching together the open gap between his legs. As if confused about why Sally insisted on poking a needle through his hollow head, the incomplete stuffed bear twisted in her hands. Aren’t you finished with me yet? Sunlight from the morning sky beamed through the blinds in parallel rays; dancing life reflected on its button eyes.

  Sally hated making the toy bears, but it was her punishment for pushing her sister. She had pushed her hard this time. Megan had backpedalled over a toy on the floor and fallen against the coffee table, breaking her collar bone. “She could have hit her head,” her mother had said. “You could have paralyzed your sister, or worse!”

  “Make me a teddy bear. Make me another one, a better one,” her sister insisted every few months. It had become a problem, this bear making. Megan had found a way to exploit Sally’s punishments with requests. “I want a big, blue one this time. With a big smile and button eyes.”

  Megan was only six--half Sally’s age--but couldn’t care less about the little bears Sally crafted for her. Sometimes she’d play with them and then toss them on the floor out of spite. The stuffed creatures were usually small, no bigger than her hand; but this one would stand just over a foot tall, as requested.

  Megan could be so demanding. “I want it to have droopy arms and floppy legs. It has to have silver eyes, too.”

  Earlier that morning, Sally had stolen a pair of Megan’s pants, a pair of tattered jeans. After cutting the pant legs along their seams, Sally had salvaged two ideal pieces of material. With a black felt pen she drew the outline of a bear with droopy arms and floppy legs, and a round head with semi-circular bumps for ears. There wasn’t a body to the bear. He was mainly arms and legs connected to a head. Skinny appendages belled for hands and feet; all four met at the neck. She had looked it over once, pleased, and cut out the design using her mother’s scissors. Then she had set the first section of material onto the second, traced it with the pen, and cut out a nearly identical, two-dimensional figure.

  That’s when Megan came barging into the room. Sometimes Sally had to remind herself that Megan was only six. Still, she could at least be courteous.

  “Mom says not to use any more of my pants if you’re making another bear.”

  “Well, it’s a little late to tell me now.” Sally held up the ruined jeans. “But they’re your old pants, so Mom won’t care.”

  “I’m still telling,” Megan said. She slammed the door as she left the room.

  Sally sighed.

  Stupid sister. Stupid parents. Stupid bear.