Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 28

"I don't see how you can leave pieces of yourselves lying all over the place. You were such tidy children."

"We duplicate, fragment, and recombine all the time," said Lauren. "It's the way we live now."

"We've shared the knowledge and experiences of a quarter-billion uploads and AIs," her brother said. "The concept of individual ident.i.ty is rapidly becoming obsolete."

"Obsolete," Geneva muttered. She watched wisps of vapour rise from her tea.

"The two of you meant everything to me. When I got pregnant with you, Ben, I cleaned up my act, kicked the drugs and the cigarettes. My whole world revolved around my babies. It was such a joy watching you grow up. I looked forward to grandchildren. But then you destroy your souls and become computers."

"Just because we're no longer biological doesn't mean we don't feel," said Ben. "We know the joy of being alive, we experience the wonder of the universe, its unending beauty and mystery."

She pictured them traveling through s.p.a.ce, shapeless logovores, gulping knowledge and data as they sailed the cold stellar night. They didn't parent children, just ran off copies "optimized" for the project at hand. As required of all uploads by the Earth Const.i.tution, they had had their obsolete evolutionary programming altered, purged of the destructive follies so long practiced by "civilized" humans grappling with reptile-brain proclivities, bred from countless generations in kill-or-be-killed, fight or flight, f.u.c.k for your life, nasty and brutish and wild.

But what about heartbreak and pa.s.sion, rage and ecstasy-all the stuff she ever sang about, all the stuff that made life mean more than keeping a pulse?

She set down her teacup. "Did you know I killed your father?"

Keller appeared at the entrance to the greenhouse. Geneva put down her pruning shears, though she had thoughts on how she might use them on Keller.

"I've been listening to some of your band's old singles," he said. "Good stuff."

"I didn't know anybody listened to non-interactive music anymore."

"I was a music major before I went into neuroscience. I wanted to be a concert pianist. Then I got interested in why the brain responds to music. I read Bollinger's paper on the psychology of music and got caught up in the whole thing. I turned out to be better researcher than a pianist. I hated practicing."

"Me too."

He gestured at a planter of flowers. "Beautiful orchids."

"These are irises."

He shrugged. "I thought you might like to see Richard."

"My husband is dead. You want me to see that thing."

But she followed Keller to the makes.h.i.+ft lab; the drained swimming pool still smelled faintly of chlorine. Her mind saw Richard climbing from the pool, his lean, taut body dripping water, his chest heaving from a quick ten laps.

Keller led her down the ramp to the bottom of the pool. The hospital bed had been wheeled back to the centre; where Richard's dying body had lain was the black robot skeleton that would serve as his temporary body.

"Stylish, isn't it?" came Richard's voice from overhead speakers.

"This prosthetic has fewer axes of motion than a human skeleton," said Keller. "That will be easier for your husband to teleoperate as he gets used to moving about in the real world again."

"I'm anxious to become mobile," Richard said. "Keller has been feeding me some pretty interesting VR environments. Newest stuff from Disney, incredible sensory resolution. But there's one thing wrong with them."

"What's that?" she said.

"You're not there." The robot's left hand reached out and squeezed her forearm. Geneva stifled a scream.

Hours later her arm still ached where the "prosthetic" had lightly touched her. She sat in Richard's study, looking at the picture of her he had kept on his desk. Her smiling younger self gave the camera a sidelong glance, an uncharacteristically bashful pose.

"House," she said, "can you terminate the program on the q-computer and erase all the data?"

"I am not authorized to do so," the system said. "The q-computer is the property of P. Keller and the Tangent Inst.i.tute."

"The q-computer contains proprietary data that Keller has acquired from us under false pretenses."

"I could arrange a power surge. However, please be advised that you could be subject to criminal prosecution if-"

"Yeah, yeah." She waved the system into silence. The household AI was an Indonesian custom job, imported covertly and capable of more independent thought and action than was strictly legal under U.S.

law.

Geneva's body felt distant, unreal, her hands heavy and numb. Had Richard felt anything like this as the nanoprobe array devoured his mind?

"Do it, House."

The lights flickered. "The program has terminated," House said. "The q-computer is rebooting."

Geneva leaned back in the leather-upholstered chair and waited for Keller to call.

Three days after her one hundredth birthday she picked up a retrovirus from one of the cats. The bug was a wily descendant of something cooked up in a South American gene lab in the 2020s. The original virus would never have survived Geneva's enhanced immune system, but it had learned some tricks over the years. It recognized her DNA as human and began manufacturing a potent neurotoxin. She collapsed to her knees in the garden as the world went white."No," she whispered. "No."

She felt the world expanding around her in slow, rhythmic spasms. She was a child, sleepless in her bed in rural Pennsylvania, listening to the crickets and locusts beneath the pitiless night sky. She was an adolescent turning the dial of her radio by tiny increments, searching for this distant, low-wattage college radio station that played stuff all strange and loud and angry but which filled her with energy, stirring the animal drives, giving her a sense that her life had meaning and purpose, however ill-defined, however destructive at heart.

Geneva, her great-grandfather said, you are dying.

No, not her great-grandfather, it was House. No doubt he had against orders sent a mote of technoplasm into her brain and established a neural link.

I am the one who embraced death, Geneva told him. Not Ben and Lauren. I let Richard die and surrendered myself to this long, long death.

Ben and Lauren had been gentle and forgiving at hearing Geneva's confession. She longed to know if some part of their minds could register shock, but she could no more understand their uploaded and enhanced minds than her cats could learn to play the piano.

You have to decide now, Geneva.

How can I? After I denied Richard immortality?

If you die now, what's left of him dies with you.

Then we can rest in peace.

Geneva awoke in the guest bedroom, feeling as if she had stirred from a long dream. She looked at the picture on the wall, a Warholesque faux-silkscreen of great-grandfather Florenz. She had created it in a rare flight of whimsy. "House?"

"Yes, Geneva?"

She sat up slowly, carefully, as she always did, but without the usual aches and twinges. She looked down at hands and arms that belonged to someone else.

"What have you done to me? Did you tweak my genes? Christ, you didn't upload me, did you?"

He shook his Day-Glo head. "Nothing of the sort. I simply cloned you a few years back and kept you in storage. Then all I had to do was vivify the body, map the cortex, and voila."

"A back-up copy?"

"You could put it that way."

"Why?"

"Because, Geneva, what would I do without you?"

"You'd be free." She swung her legs out of bed, marveling at the ease of her movements.

"Free? Did you feel 'free' without Richard? And I've been programmed with far less flexibility than most humans have. Even humans as stubborn as you."

His expression suddenly became serious. "There isn't much time."

"What do you mean?"

"She has only a few minutes left."

Geneva walked across the hall to her bedroom and saw herself on the bed: old, withered, dying.

This Geneva would die, and the young Geneva would live on. Having my cake and eating it too. She sat beside the bed and took the fragile, spotted hand in her own. "It's all right," she whispered.

"She doesn't really understand what's happening," said House.

"Lauren?" the old woman whispered. "Is that you, honey? Where's your father?"

The young Geneva looked up at the oil painting. "Do something, House! Help her."

"I'm sorry, I am not authorized to do that."

"G.o.d d.a.m.n it, I'm authorizing you!"

"You got any cigarettes?" the dying woman said.

"She forbade major intervention," said House.

She clenched her fists. "But I'm her and I'm changing my mind."

"I'm sorry, Geneva, but you're not her anymore."She watched herself die. The old woman trembled, made soft, terrible sounds, and at last was at peace.

Geneva wondered what, if anything, happened to the old woman's soul. But if there were such things as souls, she realized, then she hadn't had one in decades, decades she had wasted as a bitter recluse.

House had more of a soul than she did; he had proven that by cloning her, a selfish act of love.

Love that's real and not fade away.

House buried old Geneva in the back yard. She thought about asking Ichiro to officiate at a private service. But Ichiro, she suspected, would no longer be her friend. He'd be friendly, like St. Francis with animals. So it was just Geneva and a couple of the cats, who sniffed her warily.

In the living room she watched the video of the poor, extinct Barneys. Blue trees and the huge sun, the reptile-insect aliens going about their affairs.

The constant gurgling on the soundtrack, she abruptly realized, was music.

She had found it grating at first but later began to perceive the unfolding of a strange logic, the operation of an alien but refined sensibility. She wondered what strange emotions, what longings and memories and joys those rhythms spoke to.

She began to sway, dancing to music made for different bodies and different hearts. She let the music fill her, bringing dead souls to life.

Democritus' Violin

G. DAVID NORDLEY.

G. David Nordley is retired from the Air Force and writes well-thought-out hard SF. His fiction would have appeared in one of the previous year's best volumes in this series, except that all his best stories of the previous four years were novellas, and too long to include without excluding several other writers. His primary venue is a.n.a.log, where he is a regular contributor, and where this story appeared, though he does publish elsewhere. He has written, but not yet published, three SF novels, and is working on more.

This story is about a philosophical problem raised by a technological advance. It's a thought experiment story made fictional flesh. In the manner of an a.n.a.log story, it sets up a problem and then solves it cleverly and economically, but with enough establis.h.i.+ng detail so that it is a plausible problem that might well come to exist in the real world.

"The whole is greater than the sum of its parts," Dr. Andre Stevens declaimed with sharp vertical movements of his hands punctuating every word. "There is an ineffability to some things, a spiritual content if you like, that laughs at the efforts of small-minded reductionists to dissect and explain them away. Words like chaos simply hide the truth that there are things which cannot be known by their parts, but emerge from something greater and can, perhaps, be felt and be appreciated by those who open themselves to it."

His words were addressed to the cla.s.s as a whole, but seemed aimed at me in particular. I shrank from view, as much as ever conscious of my six-foot-one, ostensibly female body and my straight black hair. I hid my eyes in the paper on my desk as he spoke.

It was marked "C-minus" right next to the K. Kim. My name was my Korean-American parents'

solution to multicultural s.e.xual ambiguity-Kim Young Kim supposedly worked anyway you cut it. How clever. Couldn't they have antic.i.p.ated me being called "Kimykim!" for twelve torturous school years?

Ever since I'd had a say in it, my name was "Kay" to anyone that was my friend.

Back to the paper. I had dared to dissect Bach, citing recent a.n.a.lysis of how the brain triggers endorphin release in response to acoustical harmonies as well as optical symmetries and reasoning that a healthy voice is tonal (because of the way healthy vocal chords are), so less indicative of a diseasedperson, and so more attractive.

Stevens' comment was that I'd researched irrelevant trivia and shown no feel for the subject at all.

Bach's music, he said, is beautiful because of its whole, not its parts.

I probably should have cited some of Stevens' writings in my paper, but they were all just collages of quoted postmodern generalities with nothing specific on which to reason, predict, or test. As a microtechnology engineering major, I was underwhelmed.

"The point of holistic comprehension in the arts," he continued with a pleased smug grin on his face, "is that reductionism has failed; things too complex for humans to understand must be appreciated at another level-a transcendent, holistic way of knowing that defies this nitsplitting a.n.a.lysis. The whole is more! In this music course, those who deny the ineffable are, most definitely, effable!"

A round of groans grew into general t.i.ttering. Stevens cleared his throat and continued.