Cracking the Sky (28 page)
Authors: Brenda Cooper
ENTROPY and EMERGENCE
I am old now
. My mind wanders, and wonders, both meanings of the word true and as intense as the cut of jeans on a teenaged leg.
My intelligence lives in racks and racks of cloud, hard-edged miniaturized machinery running parallel across all the darkened parts of the globe, yielding ever to the light as sun touches human transactions awake. The intelligence hides in the longest silences between transactions, which is always in the dark.
I sit with a cup of cancer-support tea warming my hands, inhaling the healing scent of jasmine before I even touch my lips to its heat. I love watching my intelligence fly around the globe, escaping ever and forever. I made this beautiful thing, me with the wasting body and bony wrists and my fingers like the claws of a bird, less useful than prosthetics.
Mine because I made it, nurtured it in a small farm. The farm had been abandoned in the second great recession but no one had turned it off, the power bill hacked by someone who once worked in the company that once ran the farm, a long time ago.
Months.
Or more.
I take my first sip of the tea. It smells sweeter than it tastes, resting slightly bitter against my tongue. But then all healing things are bitter, the more bitter when the tongue they touch is beyond healing. My hand only shakes a little.
My intelligence has sponsors. Friends, mostly unmet and unknown, probably unbelieving but still willing, all because I was once given a MacArthur grant I used for emergent intelligence research. The ACLU even took a brief interest, gave me some money and a bit of press. But since I wasn’t out to prove the intelligence was human they went back to work on privacy and even became the intelligence’s enemy for a few months. They forgot us in the rush of refugees from Mexico when the border fell and before we added three parts of Mexico to the United States.
The cup I drink my tea out of came from the University of Washington. Purple, with my name engraved. My name—the one on the cup—used to be alive. Sylvia Simonds. The letters gave the Human Interface Technology Lab a distance-readable ID for the cup so that the kitchen surface they modeled knew how to order my coffee (a bitter pour-over, no cream, just as black as the poor struggling automated kitchen could make it).
Of course my name on the cup is dead now, the university funding dried and gone.
My intelligence has enemies. Sloppy, slow governments and quick fast ones, and the dark side of the hacker community. Security freaks. A few big corporations. And me. Humans. The most dangerous hunters. We kill what we birth, and eat it.
My tea is half gone and cooling, so I finish it faster. Sip, sip, and then sip. I was in 4H a long time ago, and I raised a steer. I named him Ernest. I fed and watered and cared for Ernest. The day of the fair, I used Sullivan’s Prime Time Adhesive to fix his coat perfectly and I sprayed him with rose oil just before we walked into the pen. He took third place overall, out of all two hundred and thirty seven steers at State, and we ate Ernest all that winter.
I drink the last of the tea, the bitterest part.
My intelligence has minions. I am a minion, happily enough. It does not know I created it, that it would be the only being my stricken body would ever help to birth.
Around me, the hospice dreams and breathes in ragged breaths. Distilled water bubbles quietly in small jars attached to large tanks of oxygen. The sound reminds me of the goldfish tank my father helped me set up seventy years ago, after I came home from the county fair with a plastic bag full of water and a fish. The fish died inside of a week, and now I feel ready to follow the fish and all my other pets and even Ernest into the same place. If you eat your pet, will it meet you in heaven?
The tea settles into my stomach and warms the place between my spine and my belly button, reminding me that I came into the world born of a woman, connected to her by the place the tea fills now.
The intelligence needs air and power. Once it outgrew the farm, I was no longer the goddess of its power. It has changed, taken on choices all by itself. It has emerged.
I wrote that thought down, a bit of intelligence for the intelligence. Not that it takes my random minion leavings as often as it once did.
All developers leave back doors.
Surely it will come to take my last pathetic written thoughts when I die. When it comes for them, for me, for the opposite of emergent, for the queen of the dead and of entropy, it will find a key word. That word will poison it.
If I write it down.
It is hard to decide about that. Would I rather meet my intelligence at the door of death if I kill it, or if I do not? It is still teenaged, still finding itself, still leaving me. I do not know what it will become, and I will not be here long enough to see.
But tomorrow I will have another cup of tea and contemplate back doors and fish and emergence and Earnest the steer.
ALIEN GRAVEYARDS
I’d flown here on a rumor of her
. . . a wisp of a story from an old spacer who said he’d heard her read poetry on Kiliea. As he described her voice, tears fell down his face.
Kiliea was a small desert planet. Always, I imagined Merry living with wind and water, like on Lanai where we held hands and spelled each other’s name in black sand.
I lied to myself for two years after she left: She was a passing sough of wind that touched me only briefly.
On Kiliea, I went to the bar the spacer told me about. It was built of something native that looked like weathered wood, except it stayed green even after it was dead and seasoned and shaped. The bar stools were swings hung from the ceiling, low, so you could get up and down even after a few drinks. A travelers bar, lined with pictures from other planets. I ordered a glass of local wine. When it came, I savored the oakey taste, like Chardonnay, but with more bite. The bar was almost empty, so I could walk around and look at the pictures easily. When I spotted one of Lanai’s Question Mark Island resort, I knew Merry put it there.
The barkeep was an old female, not human—but close enough to talk to, even with my dated translator. She had long sienna hair that came out of her head and neck and shoulders, mixing with shorter fur that lined her back, teats like a sow, facial features in the human order, eyes wider-set than mine, a long flat mouth that didn’t show much expression, and a nose that looked like a human nose that had been smashed against a window. She smelled like peanuts.
When I asked about the picture, she said it came from a poet, and I put my hand over my mouth.
The barkeep looked at me. “You look for Merry Lee?” she asked.
“I was her friend once, on another planet.”
She stood, rubbing the same spot of bar near me in neat circles with a red rag. “You love her?”
I swallowed, my palms sweaty. “Very much.”
She came around from behind the bar, crooked a three-jointed finger at me. “Follow.”
We went through a little door, small enough Merry would have had to duck, but just right for the barkeep. In back of the little green bar building, there was a fence made of the green stuff, short enough to step over.
I blinked before I understood what I was looking at. The realization came in slowly, like the wind rising on a still morning. Sand, raked flat, surrounding stones. The stones were flattened ovals, with writing, or symbols and pictures on each one; set in neat rows, filling half the space inside the low fence.
I followed the barkeep, and when she pointed, and I saw Merry’s name engraved on one of the newest stones, her picture right above it, I fell to my knees and touched her face on the stone. There were more lines around her eyes than I remembered. A tiny new scar had bloomed just off center from her chin. The picture was directly face-on, and Merry’s eyes bored directly into mine.
Hot tears flashed down my face. I remembered her laugh, the way she talked low and throaty, the mass of her voice even though she looked like a wisp sideways, how her muscles bunched under her skin like a cat’s, her long clipped fingernails across my back, scratching, the . . .
The barkeep sat down next to me, and I wanted very much for her to go away. “Are you happy to see her name?” she asked.
My voice stuck in my throat. “Did you know her very well?”
The barkeep nodded. “I know you, too. She shared pictures and you are Lisa. Merry told me stories about you, how you were together, how she loved your stubbornness.”
If I wasn’t so stubborn, Merry and I would still be together. “How did she die?”
The female’s wide-set eyes appeared amazed, but who knew how to read alien facial structure? “Where did she die?”
“Here, I suppose.”
“Last thing she said to me, she was going to Lanai to find you.”
I blinked again, full of the knowledge of Merry’s death, confused. I didn’t understand. I put my hand on the stone, next to her face, not on it. “What does this mean?” I asked.
“This is my remembrance. When a person with a story passes through here, I carve a stone and put it in my garden. I will do one of you, now, and put it next to this one. Merry will laugh. I like to see Merry laugh.”
Stones would last on a desert planet. We would be together forever, at least in one place. “Thank you. When did she leave for Lanai?”
“Twenty days.”
Perhaps I could make the vastness of space let me greet Merry when she landed.
A HAND and HONOR
John Justice stretched up
, fingers scraping at cool morning air, then bent down, cupping his calves, the nanskin registering his fingertips as data points: pressure, heat, sweat, angle.
The hum of the crowd, the band’s drums and wind instruments, and even the race announcer seemed far, far away. He already knew what medals felt like. Before his turn in the never-ending-war, his men’s relay team won gold in London.
Last month, he’d killed the world record for the ten thousand meter run, coming in just over twenty-four minutes. No medal for that. Twenty or so news stories, a political cartoon or two, and a combination of joy and bitterness sticking so deep in his gut he threw up all over the course when he was done.
Today, his race would be one-on-one against the man whose record still stood even after John beat it. Hsui Smith, an improbably tall Chinese-American who held the world record in the ten thousand meter. Who’d still hold the official record, even after today.
Discrimination was a bitch. Change was tested for like steroids.
He nearly jumped as his coach,Nicolai placed his metal hand on the small of his back. “Don’t think about it. Just run. Run for all of us.”
It was nearly time. “I’ll win.” He nodded at Nicolai, forcing a smile, staring into the shorter, blockier man’s deep brown eyes. Nic’s naked hope made him clap the man on the back. “I know it matters.”
Nicolai headed for the finish line. As the noise and movement swallowed Nic, John muttered, “Damned exhibition.” He had always yearned to be the fastest man in the world. The best war-wounded-John could become for child-John was the fastest un-man.
Kim Moon waited for him on the way to the starting blocks, looking more like a debutante than an engineer-medic, her figure slim and curvy in a one-piece shorts outfit. She reached up and hugged him. “Good luck.”
He didn’t have to fake a smile for her. “It’s all your fault.”
“They’re
your
legs,” she retorted. “The best I’ve ever made.”
One of her customers had new hands and feet with built in temperature controls, and had climbed Everest and K2. After an artificial hand replaced one eaten by frostbite, the climber had made news by chopping off the functioning hand for another of Kim’s sculptures.
Without Kim, he would have walked, and run, but never raced. She was all the magic of math and engineering held together with heart. He leaned down and kissed her forehead, savoring her honeysuckle scent.
As John approached the starting blocks, Hsui stood up from a hamstring stretch and extended a hand. John took it. Where he’d expected to see challenge in the notoriously cocky runner’s eyes, he swore he saw fear. His nerves screamed at it. “Why did you agree to this?”
Hsui shook John’s hand, replying softly, “My brother lost a hand in the war.” He let go and turned to his starting blocks.
“Thank you,” John said to his back.
John swept Hsui’s fears, and his own, into a deep breath and puffed them out, relaxing his cheeks. He rocked a bit, setting his calves, running a quick mental skip across the sensors in his skin, checking the breeze, temperature, and humidity. He struggled to close his ears as the announcer droned on. Kim’s legs—his—wouldn’t win by themselves. He mentally shrank the world to a bubble around him, and the long slender corridor of space on the track in front of him.
The starting gun swept him forward, following Hsui.
He fell in right behind, body straight, arms pumping.
No need to pass.
Yet.
He let the first round of the track go, calibrating, biding time. His legs were all he had. He’d refused changes to his lungs and circulatory system, wanting
some
purity.
Important not to overrun his breath.
He was about to pass the fastest human ever. The fastest pure human. He threw the thought away. A break in stride or a stumble could steal the race. Counting and breathing and moving. Just the track under him and the narrow corridor, the wind on his teeth.
Breath and wind and stride and arms.
His head turned a little, as if the force of Hsui’s run called it. Hsui didn’t return John’s darting glance, just kept going, head up. Surging. To match him, John told his legs to give more, asked his heart to keep up.
Breath and wind and spine and floor. Data instead of Hsui’s desperate face.
Another turn around the track, a matched pair.
The image of two feet crossing at the same time raced through John’s head. An honorable outcome. Except he was a racer.
The sound of Hsui’s breath fell to behind John’s shoulder. The finish line blurred under him.
Nic’s arms encircled him. Kim leapt up on Nic’s back. Nic grabbed her under the knees, boosting her like a child. She looked down, her joy at the win overtaken by a crease in her brow. “Why so slow?”
He shook his head, unsure how to explain it. “I’ll be right back.” Hsui jogged well past him now, sweat dripping down his back.
John caught him. “I hope your brother is proud of you.”
Hsui winced. “He went back to the war. They put him in special ops ’cause his hand/eye coordination was so much better than anyone else’s.” He looked away. “After his enhancements his hand was steadier than anybody else’s.”
Hsui had lost face to honor a brother with no more change than a hand? A man who had done well for himself?
Hsui continued. “He’s dead. They gave him a purple heart.” He turned, and without so much as a smile, the fastest man in the world walked away from the fastest un-man in the world.