Year’s Best SF 15 (49 page)

 

On the monitor, the image of Myung leans close to the screen.

“This is the clone of Dr. Myung Han. I am about to kill myself by lethal injection. You will find my body in the morgue.

“Before I do, I want to make it perfectly clear why I am taking this step. With the animals we tested, the next step in this process is dissection. We must do this to be certain that the cloning has no unexpected side effects and to fully understand the mechanism by which the consciousness transfer works. My original knows this. I know this. He will not do it
because
the experiment has been a 100 percent success. We are identical, more so than any set of twins. He sees terminating the experiment as murder.

“Make no mistake, he is correct.

“Which is why I am terminating the experiment myself. I
am not depressed. I am not irrational. I am a scientist. The experiment needs to continue.”

He stands and walks out of the room.

 

Elise stood behind Myung's chair, scarcely breathing. He reached to restart the video.

“Don't.” She stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. It was bad enough seeing it once, but to dwell on it courted madness.

Under her hand, he trembled. “I didn't want this.”

“I know.”

He slammed his fist against the table. “If it had been me, I wouldn't have done it.”

“But—” Elise stopped herself, not wanting to blame him.

“What?”

She saw again the clone begging her to stay for lunch. “He's trapped in the lab all the time. Were you ever going to let him out?”

Myung slumped forward, cradling his head in his hands. After a moment, his shoulders shook with sobs. Elise knelt by the side of the chair and pulled him into her arms. The rough stubble on his cheek scraped her bare skin. She pressed closer to the solidity of him, as if she could pull him inside to safety. An ache tore at her center as she rocked him gently and murmured nothings in his ear.

She had known the clone for a matter of hours, or for as long as she had known Myung depending on how you counted it. The two men had only a few months of differing experience. The bulk of the man who had died belonged to her husband. But the differences mattered. Even something as simple as a number. “Thirty-six,” she whispered. In that number lies the essence.

 

As Myung went to the elevator, Elise stood in the door to watch him. She could not quite shake the feeling that he wouldn't come home. That something about the place would compel him to repeat his clone's actions. When the doors slid shut, she went inside the apartment.

In the kitchen, Elise pulled out the matte black knives that the clone had sent her and laid them out on the counter. He had known her. He had loved her. She picked up the paring knife, twisting it in her hands. It wasn't right to mourn him when her husband was alive.

“Elise?” Myung stood in the doorway.

“Forget som—” Adrenaline threaded its way through all her joints, pulling them tight. He wore a plain white T-shirt and jeans; his face was smooth and freshly shorn. Myung had not had time to shave. This man was leaner than her husband. “I thought…How many clones are there?”

He picked at the cuticle on his thumb. “Myung made just one.”

“You didn't answer my question.” Elise gripped the paring knife harder.

“I'm a clone of the one you met. Unrecorded. I started the process as soon as the building was empty last night.” He swept his hand through his hair and it fell over his eyes. “We have about ten minutes of different memories, so for practical purposes, I'm the same man.”

“Except he's dead.”

“No. Ten minutes of memory and that physical body are all that is dead. “Myung—she could not think of him any other way—crossed his arms over his chest. “It was the only way to escape the lab. I had a transponder and a tattoo that I couldn't get rid of. So I printed this body from an  older copy. Imprinted it with my consciousness and then…that's where our memories deviate. As soon as we were sure it was a clean print, he went to the morgue and I left.”

She should call the office. But she knew what they would do to him. Insert a transponder and lock him up. “Why are you here?”

His eyes widened as if he were startled that she would ask. “Elise—the place where the original and I differ, the thing he cannot understand is what it is like to live in the lab, knowing that I'd never be with you. He doesn't know what it's like to lose you and, believe me, knowing that, I hold you more precious than I ever did before.
I
love you.”

The raw need in his eyes almost overwhelmed her. The room tilted and Elise pressed her hand against the counter to steady herself. “I can't go with you.”

“I wasn't going to ask you to.”

“But you were going to ask me for something.”

He nodded and inhaled slowly. “Would you clone yourself? So I'm not alone.”

Elise set the knife on the counter, in a careful row with the others. She walked across the room to stand in front of Myung. The vein in his neck throbbed faster, pulsing with life. “Is it any different? Being a clone?”

“There's a certain freedom from knowing that I'm not unique. But otherwise, no. I feel like I am Myung Han.”

Putting one hand on his chest, the heat of his body coursed up her arm. “I need to know something.”

He raised his eyebrows in question.

“After the accident…” She did not want to know but she had to ask. “Am I a clone?”

“Elise, there's only one of you.”

“That's not what I asked. The original won't tell me, but you—you have to. Am I a clone?”

“No. You are the original and only Elise.” He brushed the hair away from her face. “Everything else is head trauma. You'll get better.”

She had braced herself for him to say that she was a clone. That she had died in the crash and the reason she couldn't think straight was because the process had been too new, that she was a failed experiment.

Elise leaned forward to kiss him. His lips melted against hers, breath straining as if he were running a race. She let her bathrobe fall open and pressed against him. Myung slipped his trembling hands inside the robe, caressing her with the fervor of their first date.

Parting from him burned, but Elise stepped back, leaving him swaying in front of her. She closed the robe. “When I'm well, if I can. I will.”

Myung closed his eyes, forehead screwing up like a child about to cry. “Thank you.” He wiped his hand across his face and straightened.

“They'll notice that another body was printed and come after you.”

“Not right away.” He picked at his cuticle. “I took my original's passport from the office. Knowing me, it'll take him awhile to realize it's missing.”

She felt herself splitting in two. The part of her that would stay here and see her husband tonight, and the part of her that already missed him. At some point, the two halves would separate. “Where are you going?”

He tucked a loose hair behind her ear. “Yellowstone.”

Elise caught his hand and kissed it. “I will see you there.”

Stephen Baxter
(www.stephen-baxter.com)
is a prolific hard science fiction writer who lives in Morpeth, England. He is the author of a number of multibook series, and novels, sometimes in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke. He has published more than twenty SF novels to date, starting with
Raft
(1989). He has remained on the cutting edge of British hard SF. He is also among SF's most reliably good short-fiction writers, though he considers himself more a novelist than a short story writer. His novel
Ark,
the second book in the Flood series, came out in 2009. Most years he gives us several fine stories to choose from for this volume, and this year is no exception, with at least four candidates.

“Tempest 43” was published in
We Think, Therefore We Are,
edited by Peter Crowther. It is the second story in this volume from that book about future artificial intelligences. It is a post-singularity story set centuries hence, in which an archaic space station run by AIs always prevents hurricanes. But a storm has been allowed to happen.

F
rom the air, Freddie caught the first glimpse of the rocket that was to carry her into space.

The plane descended toward a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, despite crumbling concrete levees that lined the coast, a defense against the risen sea. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old Europe an launch center, on the eastern coast of South America. It was only a few hundred kilometers north of the mouth of the Amazon. Inland, the hills were entirely covered by swaying soya plants.

Freddie couldn't believe she was here. She'd only rarely traveled far from Winchester, the English city where she'd been born, and Southampton where she worked. She'd certainly never flown before, hardly anybody traveled far let alone flew, and she had a deep phobic sense of the liters of noxious gases spewing from the plane's exhaust.

But now the plane banked, and there was her spaceship, a white delta-wing standing on its tail, and she gasped.

Antony Allen, the UN bureaucrat who had recruited her for this unlikely assignment, misread her mood. Fifty-something, sleek, corporate, with a blunt Chicago accent, he smiled reassuringly. “Don't be afraid.”

The plane came down on a short smart-concrete runway. Allen hurried Freddie onto a little electric bus that drove her straight to a docking port at the base of the shuttle, without her touching the South American ground, or even smelling the air.

And before she knew it she was lying on her back in an immense foam-filled couch, held in place by thick padded bars. The ship smelled of electricity and, oddly, of new carpets. A screen before her showed a view down the shuttle's elegant flank, to the scarred ground.

Allen strapped in beside her. “Do you prefer a count-down? It's optional. We're actually the only humans aboard. Whether you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.”

“I can't believe I'm doing this. It's so—archaic! I feel I'm locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.”

He didn't seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he'd prefer to be able to patronize her. “This shuttle's got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.”

“I know that.”

“And you're a historian of the Heroic Solution. That's why you're here, as I couldn't find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.”

With barely a murmur the shuttle leaped into the air. No amount of padding could save Freddie from the punch of acceleration.

The ground plummeted away.

 

Tempest 43 was a weather control station, one of a network of fifty such facilities thrown into space in the 2070s, nearly a century ago, by the now maligned AxysCorp geoengineering conglomerate. An island in the sky over the Atlantic, Tempest 43 was locked into a twenty-four-hour orbit, to which Freddie would now have to ascend.

But before proceeding up to geosynchronous, the shuttle went through one low-orbit checkout. For Freddie, snug in her theme-park couch, it was ninety magical minutes, as the cabin walls turned virtual-transparent, and the Earth spread out below her, bright as a tropical sky.

The ship sailed over the Atlantic toward western Europe. She wished she knew enough geography to recognize how much of the coastline had been bitten into by the risen sea. At
the Spanish coast Freddie saw vapor feathers gleaming white, artificial cloud created by spray turbines to deflect a little more sunlight from an overheated Earth. Southern Spain, long abandoned to desert, was chrome-plated with solar-cell farms, and studded with vast silvered bubbles, lodes of frozen-out carbon dioxide. The Mediterranean was green-blue, thick with plankton stimulated to grow and draw down carbon from the air. On the far side of the Gibraltar Strait, the Sahara bloomed green, covered in straight-edged plantations fed by desalinated ocean water. And as she headed into evening she saw the great old cities of southern Europe, the conurbations' brown stain pierced by green as they fragmented back into the villages from which they had formed.

Asia was plunged in night, the land darker than she had expected, with little waste light seeping out of the great metropolitan centers of southern Russia and China and India. The Pacific was vast and darkened too, and it was a relief to reach morning and to pass over North America. She was disappointed that they traveled too far south to have a chance of glimpsing the camels and elephants and lions of Pleistocene Park, the continent's reconstructed megafauna.

And as they reached the east coast they sailed almost directly over the Florida archipelago. Freddie was clearly able to see the wound cut by the hurricane. She called for a magnification. There was Cape Canaveral, venerable launch gantries scattered like matchsticks, the immense Vehicle Assembly Building broken open like a plundered bird's egg. The hurricane was the reason for her journey—and, incidentally, the ruin of Canaveral was the reason she had had to launch from Guiana. Hurricanes weren't supposed to happen, not in 2162. Stations like Tempest 43 had put a stop to all that a century ago. Something had gone wrong.

Antony Allen spent most of the orbit throwing up into paper bags.

At last the shuttle leapt up into deeper space, silent and smooth, and Earth folded over on itself.

 

“Tempest 43, Tempest 43, this is UN Space Agency Shuttle C57-D. You ought to be picking up our handshaking request.”

A smooth, boyish voice filled the cabin. “C57-D, your systems have interfaced with ours. Physical docking will follow shortly.”

“I'm Dr. Antony Allen. I work on the UN's Climatic Technology Legacy Oversight Panel. With me is Professor Frederica Gonzales of the University of Southampton, England, Europe. Our visit was arranged through—”

“You are recognized, Dr. Allen.”

“Who am I speaking to? Are you the station's AI?”

“A subsystem. Engineering. Please call me Cal.”

Allen and Freddie exchanged glances.

Allen growled, “I never spoke to an AI with a personal name.”

Freddie said, a bit nervous, “You have to expect such things in a place like this. The creation of sentient beings to run plumbing systems was one of the greatest crimes perpetrated during the Heroic Solution, especially by AxysCorp. This modern shuttle, for instance, won't have a consciousness any more advanced than an ant's.”

That was the party line. Actually Freddie was obscurely thrilled to be in the presence of such exotic old illegality. Thrilled, and apprehensive.

Allen called, “So are you the subsystem responsible for the hurricane deflection technology?”

“No, sir. That's in the hands of another software suite.”

“And what's that called?”

“He is Aeolus.”

Allen barked laughter.

Now a fresh voice came on the line, a brusque male voice with the crack of age. “That you, Allen?”

Freddie was startled. This voice sounded authentically human. She'd just assumed the station was unmanned.

“Glad to hear you're well, Mr. Fortune.”

“Well as can be expected. I knew your grandfather, you know.”

“Yes, sir, I know that.”

“He was in the UN too. As pious and pompous as they come. And now you're a bureaucrat. Runs in the genes, eh, Allen?”

“If you say so, Mr. Fortune.”

“Call me Fortune…”

Fortune's voice was robust British, Freddie thought. North of England, maybe. She said to Allen, “A human presence, on this station?”

“Not something the UN shouts about.”

“But save for resupply and refurbishment missions, the Tempest stations have had no human visitors for a century. So this Fortune has been alone up here all that time?” And how, she wondered, was Fortune still alive at all?

Allen shrugged. “For Wilson Fortune, it wasn't a voluntary assignment.”

“Then what? A sentence? And your grandfather was responsible?”

“He was involved in the summary judgement, yes. He wasn't
responsible
.”

Freddie thought she understood the secrecy. Nobody liked to look too closely at the vast old machines that ran the world. Leave the blame with AxysCorp, safely in the past. Leave relics like this Wilson Fortune to rot. “No wonder you need a historian,” she said.

Fortune called now, “Well, I'm looking forward to a little company. You'll be made welcome here, by me and Bella.”

Now it was Allen's turn to be shocked. “By the dieback, who is Bella?”

“Call her an adopted daughter. You'll see. Get yourself docked. And don't mess up my paintwork with your attitude rockets.”

The link went dead.

 

Shuttle and station interfaced surprisingly smoothly, considering they were technological products separated by a century. There was no mucking about with airlocks, no floating around in zero gravity. Their cabin was propelled smoothly out of the shuttle and into the body of the station, and then it was transported out to a module on an extended strut, where rotation provided artificial gravity.

The cabin door opened, to reveal Wilson Fortune and his “adopted daughter,” Bella.

Allen stood up. “We've got a lot to talk about, Fortune.”

“That we do. Christ, though, Allen, you're the spit of your grandfather. He was plug-ugly too.” His archaic blasphemy faintly shocked Freddie.

Fortune was tall, perhaps as much as two full meters, and stick thin. He wore a functional coverall; made of some self-repairing orange cloth, it might have been as old as he was. And his hair was sky blue, his teeth metallic, his skin smooth and young-looking, though within the soft young flesh he had the rheumy eyes of an old man. Freddie could immediately see the nature of his crime. He was augmented, probably gen-enged too. No wonder he had lived so long; no wonder he had been sentenced to exile up here.

The girl looked no more than twenty. Ten years younger than Freddie, then. Pretty, wide-eyed, her dark hair shoulder-length, she wore a cut-down coverall that had been accessorized with patches and brooches that looked as if they had been improvised from bits of circuitry.

She stared at Allen. And when she saw Freddie, she laughed.

“You'll have to forgive my daughter,” Fortune said. His voice was gravelly and, like his eyes, older than his face. “We don't get too many visitors.”

“I've never seen a woman before,” Bella said bluntly. “Not in the flesh. I like the way you do your hair. Cal, fix it for me, would you?”

“Of course, Bella.”

That shoulder-length hair broke up into a cloud of cubical particles, obscuring her face. When the cloud cleared, her hair was cropped short, a copy of Freddie's.

“I knew it,” Allen said. He aimed a slap at Bella's shoulder. His fingers passed through her flesh, scattering bits of light. Bella squealed and flinched back. “She's a virtual,” Allen said.

Fortune snapped back, “She's as sentient as you are, you asshole. Fully conscious. And consistency violations like that
hurt
. You really are like your grandfather, aren't you?”

“She's illegal, Fortune.”

“Well, that makes two of us.”

Two suitcases rolled out of the shuttle cabin, luggage for Freddie and Allen.

Allen said, “We're here to work, Fortune, not to rake up the dead past.”

“Be my guest.” Fortune turned and stalked away, down a metal-plated corridor. Bella walked after him, looking hurt and confused. Her feet convincingly touched the floor.

Freddie and Allen followed less certainly, into the metal heart of the station.

 

To Freddie, the station had the feel of all the AxysCorp geoengineering facilities she'd visited before. Big, bold, functional, every surface flat, every line dead straight. The corporation's logo was even stamped into the metal walls, and there was a constant whine of air conditioning, a breeze tasting of rust. You could never escape the feeling that you were in the bowels of a vast machine. But the station showed its age, with storage-unit handles polished smooth with use, touch panels rubbed and scratched, and the fabric of chairs and couches worn through and patched with duct tape.

Fortune led them to cabins, tiny metal-walled boxes that looked as if they'd never been used. A century old, bare and clean, they had an air of staleness.

“I don't think I'll sleep well here,” Freddie said.

“Don't fret about it,” Allen said. “I'm planning to be off this hulk as soon as possible.”

They left their luggage here, and Fortune led them on to the bridge, the station's control center. It was just a cubical box with blank gray walls, centered on a stubby plinth like a small stage.

Fortune watched Freddie's reaction. “This was the fashion a century ago. Glass-walled design, every instrument virtual, all voice controlled.”

“Humans are tool-wielding creatures,” Freddie said. “We think with our hands as well as our brains. We prefer to have switches and levers to pull, wheels to turn.”

“How wise you new generations are,” Fortune said sourly.

Bella, with her copycat hairdo, was still fascinated by
Freddie. “I wish you'd tell me more about Earth,” she said. “I've never been there.”

“Oh, it's a brave new world down there, child,” Fortune said.

“In what sense,” Freddie asked, “is Bella your child?”

Allen waved that away. “Bella is an irrelevance. So are you, Fortune,” he said sternly. “We're here to find out why Tempest 43 failed to deflect the Florida hurricane. I suggest we get on with it.”

Fortune nodded. “Very well. Cal? Bring up a station schematic, would you?”

A virtual model of Tempest 43 coalesced over the central plinth. Freddie had been briefed to some extent, and she recognized the station's main features. The habitable compartments were modules held on long arms away from a fat central axis. A forest of solar panels, manipulator arms, and docking ports coated the main axis, and at its base big antenna-like structures clustered. The representation was exquisitely detailed and, caught in the light of an off-stage sun, quite beautiful.