Bear Elizabeth

Bear Greg

Brin David

Kress Nancy

Leckie Ann

McDevitt Jack

McGuire Seanan

Sawyer Robert J.

Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

FEATURING

Elizabeth Bear

Greg Bear

David Brin

Blue Delliquanti & Michele Rosenthal

Nancy Kress

Ann Leckie

Jack McDevitt

Seanan McGuire

Robert J. Sawyer

Illustrations by Joey Camacho / Raw & Rendered

Edited by Microsoft & Melcher Media

Published by

Produced by

One Microsoft Way

Redmond, WA 98052

www.microsoft.com

124 West 13th Street

New York, NY 10011

www.melcher.com

Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

Copyright © 2015 Microsoft

“The Machine Starts” copyright © 2015 by Greg Bear – “Skin in the Game” copyright © 2015 by Elizabeth Bear – “The Tell” copyright © 2015 by David Brin – “Machine Learning” © 2015 by Nancy Kress – “Another Word for World” copyright © 2015 by Ann Leckie – “Riding with the Duke” copyright © 2015 by Jack McDevitt – “Hello, Hello” copyright © 2015 by Seanan McGuire – “Looking for Gordo” copyright © 2015 by Robert J. Sawyer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publishers.

ISBN 978-1-59591-093-6

First Edition

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Foreword by Harry Shum

Introduction by Rick Rashid

Hello, Hello by Seanan McGuire

The Machine Starts by Greg Bear

Skin in the Game by Elizabeth Bear

Machine Learning by Nancy Kress

Riding With the Duke by Jack McDevitt

A Cop’s Eye by Blue Delliquanti & Michele Rosenthal

Looking for Gordo by Robert J. Sawyer

The Tell by David Brin

Another Word for World by Ann Leckie

FOREWORD

Does the science fiction influence the science, or does the science influence the science fiction?

Throughout my life, I have personally been influenced by both. I grew up in 1960s China, in a society in the midst of change. It was a decade of monumental technological advancements—man in space, satellites, supersonic jets, the emergence of new computing systems and languages.

It was also considered by many to be a heyday of science fiction. TV shows like Star Trek went mainstream. Science fiction paperbacks became best sellers for the first time. Movies like Planet of the Apes defined a new kind of blockbuster.

I remember talking to my dad about computers. Many people, including him, hadn’t actually seen them, but they had heard about them and knew that they would be “big,” with the potential to change our world. He pushed me to pursue my studies around this completely new field.

Spurred on by both the science and science fiction of our time, my generation of researchers and engineers grew up to ask what if? and what’s next? We went on to pursue new disciplines like computer vision, artificial intelligence, real-time speech translation, machine learning, and quantum computing.

Today—years and years later—we are realizing much of what we dreamed of as kids. Space is no longer the final frontier.

So what is? Even those “communicators” we saw in science fiction TV shows and movies we now take for granted as part of our daily lives. Your smartphone is probably in your pocket right now.

So what’s next? Twenty years ago, Microsoft made an investment in natural language research. When we started, we didn’t know where it would go, or how long it would take. We had all seen it in Star Trek and dreamed of how we could make it a reality. Now, that technology is shipping in Skype—real-time translation in six languages. We’re not there with Klingon yet, but hopefully someday in the future we may be.

Today, I have the privilege of leading Microsoft’s research efforts, where I’m surrounded by people who were influenced by science and science fiction, as I was. We interact with and publicize our research work across a global community of thought leaders and innovators, including science fiction writers. We invite them to our campus to share their stories with us and so we can share our work with them.

With this collection of short stories, we bring our worlds—fact and fantasy—together once again. The authors all had the opportunity to visit with our researchers to hear about their latest thinking and see their leading-edge work, and to create fiction inspired by that work.

My hope for you as a reader is that you will be inspired by these stories, as I was by the popular science fiction of my time. May they incite you to pursue a new field of study, to chase a possibility you think impossible, to let your imagination take you to places you never thought you could go—for we are only limited by our imaginations.

Harry Shum

Executive Vice President, Technology and Research

Microsoft

INTRODUCTION

The first work of science fiction I can remember reading was Eleanor Cameron’s 1954 novel, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet. It was perhaps more fantasy than science fiction, but the story of young boys who build their own spaceship with the help of a mysterious inventor struck a chord.

As a child growing up, I was always trying to create things, build things, or tinker. I loved taking apart old tube radios and putting them back together in slightly different ways to see what I would get. Once I turned an old radio into a shortwave without really understanding how I’d done it. Another time I did a spectacular job of blowing one up (much to my mother’s consternation).

As my reading matured, so did my taste in science fiction, but I always tended toward the “hard” science fiction where science and the act of invention was the major component. I particularly loved stories that put scientists and inventors themselves into the middle of the action. Robert Heinlein’s 1958 novel Have Space Suit—Will Travel was one of my favorites. A young science-crazy boy—the son of an eccentric scientist—wins a space suit in a contest and goes on a galaxy-spanning adventure. Just thinking about it still brings a smile to my lips.

Science fiction inspired me as a scientist. It jump-started my imagination and gave me energy and a sense of optimism that I could do anything with my mind. Without that optimism and belief in the possible, I don’t think I would have been successful either in creating an operating system (Mach) that has impacted hundreds of millions of Apple devices or in taking on the task of building Microsoft Research into one of the top basic research organizations in the world.

This book is an anthology of original stories inspired by science and scientists. The authors—some of the best and most decorated in the field—each visited Microsoft Research and met with top researchers in areas such as machine learning, computer vision, speech recognition, programming languages, and operating systems. They were given a unique opportunity to see new technologies under development and understand how researchers think and work.

The stories that came out of this process are the kind of science fiction that excited me as boy. They draw upon, highlight, and extrapolate current science. A number of them put scientists and engineers front and center in the narrative.

Seanan McGuire questions the limits of machine translation in her story “Hello, Hello.” In “The Machine Starts,” Greg Bear considers the intended—and unintended—consequences of quantum computing. Elizabeth Bear’s “Skin in the Game” imagines a world in which technology can be used to share emotions. Nancy Kress explores the frontiers of machine intelligence with the aptly titled “Machine Learning.” In “Riding with the Duke,” Jack McDevitt investigates the social and emotional implications of immersive technologies. The graphic novel “A Cop’s Eye,” by Blue Delliquanti and Michele Rosenthal, creates a future world in which a policewoman’s sidekick is an artificial intelligence. Robert J. Sawyer explores the possibilities that computer science could bring to our hunt for alien civilizations in “Looking for Gordo.” David Brin examines the science of prediction in “The Tell.” And in “Another Word for World,” Ann Leckie explores the immense power of tools that facilitate communication across cultures.

All together, they bring to life the potential inherent in the technologies coming out of today’s research labs and the people who create them—perhaps seeding the imagination of a new generation in the process.

Rick Rashid

Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Applications and Services Group

Microsoft

Seanan McGuire

Hello, Hello

Tasha’s avatar smiled from the screen, a little too perfect to be true. That was a choice, just like everything else about it: When we’d installed my sister’s new home system, we had instructed it to generate avatars that looked like they had escaped the uncanny valley by the skins of their teeth. It was creepy, but the alternative was even creepier. Tasha didn’t talk. Her avatar did. Having them match each other perfectly would have been…wrong.

“So I’ll see you next week?” she asked. Her voice was perfectly neutral, with a newscaster’s smooth, practiced inflections. Angie had picked it from the database of publicly available voices; like the avatar, it had been generated in a lab. Unlike the avatar, it was flawless. No one who heard Tasha “talk” would realize that they were really hearing a collection of sounds programmed by a computer, translated from the silent motion of her hands.

That was the point. Setting up the system for her had removed all barriers to conversation, and when she was talking to clients who didn’t know she was deaf, she didn’t want them to realize anything was happening behind the scenes. Hence the avatar, rather than the slight delay that came with the face-time translation programs. It felt wrong to me, like we were trying to hide something essential about my sister, but it was her choice and her system; I was just the one who upgraded her software and made sure that nothing broke down. If anyone was equipped for the job, it was me, the professional computational linguist. It’s a living.

“We’ll be there right on time,” I said, knowing that on her end, my avatar would be smiling and silent, moving her hands to form the appropriate words. I could speak ASL to the screen, but with the way her software was set up, speaking ASL while the translator settings were active could result in some vicious glitches. After the time the computer had decided my hand gestures were a form of complicated profanity, and translated the chugging of the air conditioner into words while spewing invective at my sister, I had learned to keep my hands still while the translator was on. “I’m bringing Angie and the kids, so be ready.”

Tasha laughed. “I’ll tell the birds to be on their best behavior.” A light flashed behind her avatar and her expression changed, becoming faintly regretful. “Speaking of the birds, that’s my cue. Talk tomorrow?”

“Talk tomorrow,” I said. “Love you lots.”

“I love you, too,” she said and ended the call, leaving me staring at my own reflection on the suddenly black screen. My face, so much like her computer-generated one, but slightly rougher, slightly less perfect. Humanity will do that to a girl.

Finally, I stood and went to tell my wife we had plans for the next weekend. She liked my sister, and Greg and Billie liked the birds. It would be good for us.

“Hello,” said the woman on the screen. She was black-haired and brown-eyed, with skin that fell somewhere between “tan” and “tawny.” She was staring directly at the camera, almost unnervingly still. “Hello, hello.”

“Hello!” said Billie happily, waving at the woman. Billie’s nails were painted bright blue, like beetle shells. She’d been on an entomology kick again lately, studying every insect she found as raptly as if she had just discovered the secrets of the universe. “How are you?”

“Hello,” said the woman. “Hello, hello, hello.”

“Billie, who are you talking to?” I stopped on my way to the laundry room, bundling the basket I’d been carrying against my hip. The woman didn’t look familiar, but she had the smooth, CGI skin of a translation avatar. There was no telling what her root language was. The natural user interface of the software would be trying to mine its neural networks for the places where she and Billie overlapped, looking for the points of commonality and generating a vocabulary that accounted for their hand gestures and body language, as well as for their vocalizations.

It was a highly advanced version of the old translation software that had been rolled out in the late 2010s; that had been verbal-only, and only capable of translating sign language into straight text, not into vocalizations that followed spoken sentence structures and could be played through speakers. ASL to speech had followed, and then speech to ASL, with increasingly realistic avatars learning to move their hands in the complex patterns necessary for communication. Now, the systems could be taught to become ad hoc translators, pulling on the full weight of their neural networks and deep learning capabilities as they built bridges across the world.

Of course, it also meant that we had moments like this one, two people shouting greetings across an undefined void of linguistic separation. “Billie?” I repeated.

“It’s Aunt Tasha’s system, Mom,” said my nine-year-old, turning to look at me over her shoulder. She rolled her eyes, making sure I understood just how foolish my concern really was. “I wouldn’t have answered if I didn’t recognize the caller.”

“But that’s not Aunt Tasha,” I said.

Billie gave me the sort of withering look that only people under eighteen can manage. She was going to be a terror in a few years. “I know that,” she said. “I think she’s visiting to see the birds. Lots of people visit to see the birds.”

“True,” I said, giving the woman on the screen another look. Tasha’s system was set up to generate a generic avatar for anyone who wasn’t a registered user. It would draw on elements of their appearance—hair color, eye color, skin tone—but it would otherwise assemble the face from public-source elements. “Hello,” I said. “Is my sister there?”

“Hello,” said the woman. “Hello, hello.”

“I don’t think the computer knows her language very well,” said Billie. “That’s all she’s said.”

Which could mean a glitch. Sometimes, when the software got confused enough, it would translate everything as “hello.” An attempt at connection, even when the tools weren’t there. “I think you may be right,” I said, moving to get closer to the computer. Billie, recognizing the shift from protective mother to computer scientist with a mystery to solve, shifted obligingly to the side. She would never have tolerated being smothered, but she was more than smart enough not to sit between me and a puzzle.

“Is Tasha there?” I asked again, as clearly as I could.

The woman looked at me and said nothing.

“I need to know what language you’re speaking. I’m sorry the translator program isn’t working for you, but if I know what family to teach it, I can probably get it up and running in pretty short order.” Everything I said probably sounded like “hello, hello” to her, but at least I was trying. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Trying. “Can you say the name of your language? I am speaking casual conversational English.” No matter how confused the program was, it would say “English” clearly. Hopefully that would be enough to get us started.

“Hello, hello,” said the woman. She looked to her right, eyes widening slightly, as if she’d been startled. Then she leaned out of the frame and was gone. The image of Tasha’s dining room continued for several seconds before the computer turned itself off, leaving Billie and I to look, bemused, at an empty screen.

Finally, hesitantly, Billie asked, “Was that one of Aunt Tasha’s friends?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll call her later and ask.”

I forgot to call.

In my defense, there were other things to do, and none of them were the sort that could easily be put off until tomorrow. Greg, our two-year-old, discovered a secret snail breeding ground in the garden and transported them all inside, sticking them to the fridge like slime-generating magnets. Greg thought this was wonderful. The snails didn’t seem to have an opinion. Angie thought this was her cue to disinfect the entire house, starting with the kitchen, and left me to watch both kids while I was trying to finish a project for work. It was really no wonder I lost track of them. It was more of a wonder that it took me over an hour to realize they were gone.

Angie wasn’t shouting, so the kids hadn’t wandered back into the kitchen to get in the way of her frenzied housework. I stood, moving carefully as I began my search. As any parent can tell you, it’s better to keep your mouth shut and your eyes open when you go looking for kids who are being unreasonably quiet. They’re probably doing something they don’t want you to see, and if they hear you coming, they’ll hide the evidence.

I heard them laughing before I reached the living room. I stopped making such an effort to mask my footsteps, and came around the corner of the doorway to find them with their eyes glued to the computer, laughing at the black-haired woman from before.

“Hello, hello,” she was saying. “I’m hungry, hello, can you hear me?”

Greg laughed. Billie leaned forward and said, “We can hear you. Hello, hello, we can hear you!” This set Greg laughing harder.

The woman on the screen looked from one child to the other, opened her mouth, and said, “Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha. Hello, hello, can you hear me?”

“What’s this?” I asked.

Billie turned and beamed at me. “Auntie Tasha’s friend is back, and the program is learning more of her language! I’m doing like you told me to do if I ever need to talk to somebody the neural net doesn’t know, and using lots of repeating to try and teach it more.”

“The word you want is ‘echolalia,’” I said distractedly, leaning past her to focus on the screen. “You’re back. Hello. Is my sister there?”

“Hello, hello,” said the woman. “Can you hear me? I’m hungry.”

“Yes, I got that,” I said, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. It wasn’t her fault that her language—whatever it was—was causing issues with the translation software. Tasha’s neural net hadn’t encountered as many spoken languages as ours had. It could manage some startlingly accurate gesture translations, some of which we had incorporated into the base software after they cropped up, but it couldn’t always pick up on spoken languages with the speed of a neural net belonging to a hearing person. Tasha also had a tendency to invite visiting academics and wildlife conservationists to stay in her spare room, since they were presumably used to the screeching of wild birds.

“If not for them,” she had said more than once, “you’re the only company I’d ever have.”

It was hard to argue with that. It was just a little frustrating that one of her guests kept calling my kids. “Can you please tell Tasha to call me? I want to speak with her.”

“Hello, hello,” said the woman.

“Good-bye,” I replied and canceled the call.

Both children looked at me like I had done something terribly wrong. “She just wanted someone to talk to,” said Billie mulishly.

“Let me know if she calls again, all right? I don’t know who she is, and I’m not comfortable with you talking to her until I’ve spoken to Tasha.”

“Okay, Mom,” said Billie.

Greg frowned but didn’t say anything. I leaned down and scooped him onto my shoulder. That got a squeal, followed by a trail of giggles. I straightened.

“Come on, you two. Let’s go see if we can’t help Mumma in the kitchen.”

They went willingly enough. I cast a glance back at the dark computer screen. This time, I would definitely remember to call my sister.

As always, reaching Tasha was easier said than done. She spent much of her time outside feeding and caring for her birds, and when she was in the house, she was almost always doing some task related to her work. There were flashing lights in every room to tell her when she had a call, but just like everyone else in the world, sometimes she ignored her phone in favor of doing something more interesting. I could have set my call as an emergency and turned all the lights red, but that seemed like a mean trick, since “I wanted to ask about one of your houseguests” wasn’t really an emergency. Just a puzzle. There was always a puzzle; had been since we were kids, when her reliance on ASL had provided us with a perfect “secret language” and provided me with a bilingual upbringing—something that had proven invaluable as I grew up and went into neurolinguistic computing.

When we were kids signing at each other, fingers moving almost faster than the human eye could follow, our hands had looked like birds in flight. I had followed the words. My sister had followed the birds. They needed her, and they never judged her for her differences. What humans saw as disability, Tasha’s birds saw as a human who was finally quiet enough not to be startling, one who wouldn’t complain when they started singing outside her window at three in the morning. It was the perfect marriage of flesh and function.

After two days of trying and failing to get her to pick up, I sent an email. Just checking in, it said. Haven’t been able to rouse you. Do you have houseguests right now? Someone’s been calling the house from your terminal.

Her reply came fast enough to tell me that she had already been at her computer. A few grad students came to look @ my king vulture. He is very impressive. One of them could have misdialed? It’s not like I would have heard them. ;) We still on for Sunday?

I sent a call request. Her avatar popped up thirty seconds later, filling the screen with her faintly dubious expression.

“Yes?” she said. “Email works, you know.”

“Email is too slow. I like to see your face.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s all the same to me,” she said. “I know you’re not really signing. I prefer talking to you when I can see your hands.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Greg’s ASL is progressing really well. We should be able to go back to real-time chat in a year or so. Until then, we need to keep the vocals on, so he can get to know you, too. Look how well it worked out with Billie.”

Tasha’s expression softened. She’d been dubious when I’d explained that we’d be teaching Billie ASL but using the voice translation mode on our chat software; we wanted Billie to care about getting to know her aunt, and with a really small child, it had seemed like the best way. It had worked out well. Billie was fluent enough in ASL to carry on conversations with strangers, and she was already writing letters to our local high schools, asking them to offer sign language as an elective. Greg was following in her footsteps. I really was pretty sure we’d be able to turn off the voice translation in another year or so.

To be honest, I was going to be relieved when that happened. I was lazy enough to appreciate the ease of talking to my sister without needing to take my hands off the keyboard, but it was strange to hear her words, rather than watching them.

“I guess,” she said. “So what was up with the grad students? One of them called the house?”

“I think so,” I said. “She seemed a little confused. Just kept saying ‘hello’ over and over again. Were any of them visiting from out-of-country schools? Someplace far enough away that the neural net wouldn’t have a solid translation database to access?” Our systems weren’t creating translation databases out of nothing, of course—that would have been programming well above my pay grade, and possibly a Nobel Prize for Humanities—but they would find the common phonemes and use them to direct themselves to which shared databases they should be accessing. Where the complicated work happened was in the contextual cues. The hand gestures that punctuated speech with “I don’t know” and “yes” and “I love you.” The sideways glances that meant “I am uncomfortable with this topic.” Bit by bit, our translators put those into words, and understanding grew.

(And there were people who used their translators like Tasha did, who hid silent tongues or a reluctance to make eye contact behind computer-generated faces and calm, measured voices, who presented a completely default face to the world and took great comfort in knowing that the people who would judge them for their differences would never need to know. I couldn’t fault them for that. I was the one who asked my sister to let me give her a voice, like grafting a tongue onto Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid, for the duration of my children’s short infancy.)

“I don’t know,” she said, after a long pause. “Only two of them spoke ASL. The other three spoke through their professor, and I’ve known her for years. Why? Did she say something inappropriate to the kids?”

“No, just ‘hello,’ like I said. Still, it was strange, and she called back at least once. Black hair, medium brown skin. I didn’t get a name.”

“If I see someone like that, I’ll talk to her about privacy and what is and is not appropriate when visiting someone else’s home.”

“Thanks.” I shook my head. “I just don’t like strangers talking to the kids.”

“Me, neither.”

We chatted for a while after that—just ordinary, sisterly things, how the kids were doing, how the birds were doing, what we were going to have for dinner on Sunday—and I felt much better when I hung up and went to bed.

When I woke up the next morning, Greg and Billie were already in the dining room, whispering to the computer. By the time I moved into position to see the monitor, it was blank, and neither of them would tell me who they’d been talking to—assuming they had been talking to anyone at all.

We arrived at Tasha’s a little after noon. As was our agreement, we didn’t knock; I just pressed my thumb to the keypad and unlocked the door, allowing our already-wiggling children to spill past us into the bright, plant-strewn atrium. Every penny Tasha got was poured back into either the house or the birds—and since the birds had the run of the house, every penny she put into the house was still going to the birds. Cages of rescued finches, budgies, and canaries twittered at us as we entered, giving greeting and expressing interest in a series of short, sharp chirps. Hanging plants and bright potted irises surrounded the cages, making it feel like we had just walked into the front hall of some exclusive conservatory.

That, right there, was why Tasha spent so much money on the upkeep and decor of her home. It was a licensed rescue property, but keeping it looking like something special—which it was—kept her neighbors from complaining.

Opening the door had triggered the flashing warning lights in the corners of the room. Tasha would be looking for us, and so we went looking for her, following the twitter of birds and the shrieking laughter of our children.

Our parties collided in the kitchen, where Billie was signing rapid-fire at her aunt while Greg tugged at her arm and offered interjections, his own amateurish signs breaking into the conversation only occasionally. A barn owl was perched atop the refrigerator. That was par for the course at Tasha’s place, where sometimes an absence of birds was the strange thing. The door leading out to the screened-in patio was open, and a large pied crow sat on the back of the one visible chair, watching us warily. Most of that wariness was probably reserved for the owl. They would fight, if given the opportunity, and Tasha didn’t like breaking up squabbles between birds she was rehabilitating. Birds that insisted on pecking at each other were likely to find themselves caged. The smarter birds—the corvids and the big parrots—learned to play nicely, lest they be locked away.

I waved. Tasha glanced over, beamed, and signed a quick ‘hello’ before she went back to conversing with my daughter. The world had narrowed for the two of them, becoming nothing more than the space of their hands and the words they drew on the air, transitory and perfect.

The computer was on the table, open as always. I passed the day bag to Angie, pressing a quick kiss to her cheek before I said, “I’m going to go check on the neural net. Let me know if you need me.”

“Yes, leave me alone with your sister in the House of Birds,” she said, deadpan. I laughed and walked away.

Part of the arrangement I had with Tasha involved free access to her computer. She got the latest translation software and endless free upgrades to her home neural net; I went rooting through the code whenever I was in the house. She didn’t worry about me seeing her browser history or stumbling across an open email client; we’d been sharing our password-locked blogs since we were kids. What was the point of having a sister if you couldn’t trade bad boy-band RPF once in a while?

Flipping through her call history brought up the usual assortment of calls to schools, pet supply warehouses, and local takeout establishments, all tagged under her user name. There were seven guest calls over the past week. Three of them were to the university, and pulling up their profiles showed that the people who had initiated the calls had loaded custom avatars, dressing their words in their own curated faces. The other four…

The other four were anonymous, and the avatar had been generated by the system, but not retained. All four had been made from this computer to the first number in its saved database. Mine.

I scribbled down the time stamps and went to join the conversation in the kitchen, waving a hand for Tasha’s attention. She turned, expression questioning. I handed her the piece of paper and signed, “Did you have the same person in the house for all four of these calls?”

Tasha frowned. “No,” she signed back. “I had some conservationists for this one, picking up an owl who’d been cleared for release,” she tapped the middle entry on the list, “but all those other times, I was alone with the birds. What’s going on?”

“Could it be a system glitch?” asked Angie, speaking and signing at the same time. She preferred it that way, since it gave her an excuse to go slowly. She said it was about including Greg in the conversation, and we let her have that; if it kept her from becoming too self-conscious to sign, it was a good thing.

“It could,” I signed. Silence was an easy habit to fall back into in the company of my sister. “I’d have to take the whole system apart to be sure. Tasha, are you all right with my cloning it and unsnarling things once I get home?”

“As long as this glitch isn’t going to break anything, I don’t care,” she signed.

I nodded. “It should be fine,” I signed. “If it’s a system error, that would explain why our caller keeps saying ‘hello’ and never getting any further. I’ll be able to let you know in a couple of days.”

Billie tugged on Tasha’s sleeve. We all turned. Billie beamed. “Can we see the parrots now?” she signed. Tasha laughed, and for a while, everything was normal. Everything was the way it was supposed to be.

My snapshot of Tasha’s system revealed no errors with the code, although I found some interesting logical chains in her translation software’s neural network that I copied over and sent to R&D for further analysis. She had one of the most advanced learning systems outside of corporate, in part because she was my sister, and in part because she was a bilingual deaf person, speaking both American and British Sign Language with the people she communicated with. Giving her a system that could handle the additional nonverbal processing was allowing us to build out a better neural chain and translation database than any amount of laboratory testing could produce, with the added bonus of equipping my sister to speak with conservationists all over the world. It’s always nice when corporate and family needs align.

The calls were being intentionally initiated by someone who had access to Tasha’s computer. There was no way this was a ghost in the machine or a connection routing error. Malware was still a possibility, given the generic avatar; someone could be spoofing the machine into opening the call, then overlaying the woman onto the backdrop of Tasha’s dining room. I didn’t know what purpose that would serve, unless this was the warm-up to some innovative denial-of-service attack. I kept digging.

“Hello? Hello?”

My head snapped up. The voice was coming from the main computer in the dining room. It was somehow less of a surprise when Billie answered a moment later: “Hello! How are you?”

“Hello, hello, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m hungry. How are you?”

I rose from my seat, using the table to steady myself before walking, carefully, quietly, toward the next room. There was Billie, seated in front of the terminal, where the strange woman’s image was once again projected. Greg was nowhere to be seen. He was probably off somewhere busying himself with toddler projects, like stacking blocks or talking to spiders, leaving his sister to unwittingly assist in industrial espionage.

“Billie?”

Billie turned, all smiles, as the woman on the screen shifted her focus to me, cocking her head slightly to the side to give herself a better view. “Hi, Mom!” my daughter chirped, her fingers moving in the appropriate signs at the same time. “I figured it out!”

“Figured what out, sweetie?”

“Why we couldn’t understand each other!” She gestured grandly to the screen where the black-haired woman waited. “Mumma showed me.”

I frowned, taking a step closer. “Showed you what?”

“Hello, hello; can you hear me? Hello,” said the woman.

“Hello,” I said, automatically.

Billie was undaunted. “When we went to see Aunt Tasha, Mumma used her speaking words and her finger words at the same time, so Greg could know what we were saying. She was bridging.” Her fingers moved in time with her lips. ASL doesn’t have the same grammatical structure as spoken English; my daughter was running two linguistic processing paths at the same time. I wanted to take the time to be proud of her for that. I was too busy trying to understand.

“You mean she was building a linguistic bridge?” I asked.

Billie nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Bridging. So I thought maybe we couldn’t understand each other because the neural net didn’t have enough to work with, and I turned off the avatar setting on this side.”

My heart clenched. The avatar projections for Billie and Greg were intended to keep their real faces hidden from anyone who wasn’t family. It was a small precaution, but anything that would keep their images off the public Internet until they turned eighteen was a good idea as far as I was concerned. “Billie, we’ve talked about the avatars. They’re there to keep you safe.”

“But she needed to see my hands,” said Billie, with serene childhood logic. “Once she could, we started communicating better. See? I just needed to give the translator more data!”

“Hello,” said the woman.

“Hello,” I said, moving closer to the screen. After a beat, I followed the word with the appropriate sign. “What’s your name? Why do you keep calling my house?”

“I’m hungry,” said the woman. “I’m hungry.”

“You’re not answering my question.”

The woman opened her mouth like she was laughing, but no sound came out. She closed it again with a snap and said, “I’m hungry. I don’t know you. Where is the other one?”

“Here I am!” said Billie, pushing her way back to the front. “Sorry about Mom. She doesn’t understand that we’re doing science here.”

“Science, yes,” said the woman obligingly. “Hello, hello. I’m hungry.”

“I get hungry, too,” said Billie. “Maybe some cereal?”

I took a step back, letting the two of them talk. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my little girl with a live connection to God-knows-who. I also didn’t like the thought that this call was coming from my sister’s house. If she was out back with the birds, she would never hear an intruder, and I couldn’t call to warn her while her line was in use.

Angie was in the kitchen. “Billie’s on the line with our mystery woman,” I said quickly, before she could ask me what was wrong. “I’m going to drive to Tasha’s and see if I can’t catch this lady in the act.”

Angie’s eyes widened. “So you just left Billie on the line?”

“You can supervise her,” I said. “Just try to keep her from disconnecting. I can make this stop, but I need to go.”

“Then go,” said Angie. I’d be hearing about this later. I knew that, just like I knew I was making the right call. Taking Billie away from the computer wouldn’t stop this woman from breaking into my sister’s house and calling us, and one police report could see Tasha branded a security risk by the company, which couldn’t afford to leave software patches that were still under NDA in insecure locations.

Tasha lived fifteen minutes from us under normal circumstances. I made the drive in seven.

Her front door was locked, but the porch light was on, signaling that she was home and awake. I let myself in without ringing the bell. She could yell at me later. Finding out what was going on was more important than respecting her privacy, at least for right now. I felt a little bad about that. I also knew that she would have done exactly the same thing if our positions had been reversed.

I slunk through the house, listening for the sound of Billie’s voice. Tasha kept the speakers on for the sake of the people who visited her and used her computer to make calls. She was better at accommodation than I was. The thought made my ears redden. My sister, who had spent most of her life fighting to be accommodated, made the effort for others when I was willing to focus on just her. I would be better, I promised silently. For her sake, and for the sake of my children, I would be better.

I didn’t hear Billie. Instead, I heard the throaty croaking of a crow from somewhere up ahead. It continued as I walked down the hall and stepped into the kitchen doorway. And stopped.

The pied crow that Tasha had been rehabilitating was perched on the back of the chair across from the computer, talons digging deep into the wood as it cocked its head and watched Billie’s image on the screen. Billie’s mouth moved; a squawk emerged. The crow croaked back, repeating the same sounds over and over, until the avatar was matching them perfectly. Only then did it move on to the next set of sounds.

I took a step back and sagged against the hallway wall, heart pounding, head spinning with the undeniable reality of what I had just seen. A language the neural net didn’t know, one that depended on motion and gesture as much as it did on sound. A language the system would have been exposed to enough before a curious bird started pecking at the keys that the program could at least try to make sense of it.

Sense enough to say “hello.”

An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.

“All right, Paulson, this was a funny prank, but you’ve used up over a dozen computing hours,” said Mike, pushing away from his own monitor. He was one of the researchers, and had been remarkably tolerant so far. “Time to pack it in.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Just…just wait, all right? There’s one thing we haven’t tried yet.”

Mike looked at me and frowned. I looked pleadingly back. Finally, he sighed.

“Admittedly, you’ve encouraged the neural net to make some great improvements. You can have one more try. But that’s it! After that, we need this lab back.”

“One more is all I need.”

I’d been hoping to avoid this. It would’ve been easier if I could have replicated the original results without resorting to re-creation of all factors. Not easier for the bird: easier for my nerves. Angie was already mad at me, and Tasha was unsettled, and I was feeling about as off-balance as I ever did.

Opening the door and sticking my head out into the hall, I looked to my left, where my wife and children were settled in ergonomic desk chairs. Angie was focused on her tablet, composing an email to her work with quick swipes of her fingers, like she was trying to wipe them clean of some unseen, clinging film. Billie was sitting next to her, attention fixed on a handheld game device. Greg sat on the floor between them. He had several of his toy trains and was rolling them around an imaginary track, making happy humming noises.

He was the first one to notice me. He looked up and beamed, calling, “Mama!”

“Hi, buddy,” I said. Angie and Billie were looking up as well. I offered my wife a sheepish smile. “Hi, hon. We’re almost done in here. I just need to borrow Billie for a few minutes, if that’s okay?”

It wasn’t okay: I could see that in her eyes. We were going to fight about this later, and I was going to lose. Billie, however, bounced right to her feet, grinning from ear to ear as she dropped her game on the chair where she’d been sitting. “Do I get to work science with you?”

“I want science!” Greg protested, his own smile collapsing into the black hole of toddler unhappiness.

“Oh, no, bud.” I crouched down, putting myself on as much of a level with him as I could. “We’ll do some science when we get home, okay? Water science. With the hose. I just need Billie right now, and I need you to stay here with Mumma and keep her company. She’ll get lonely if you both come with me.”

Greg gave me a dubious look before twisting to look suspiciously up at Angie. She nodded quickly.

“She’s right,” she said. “I would be so lonely out here all by myself. Please stay and keep me company.”

“Okay,” said Greg, after weighing his options. He reached contentedly for his train. “Water science later.”

Aware that I had just committed myself to being squirted with the hose in our backyard for at least an hour, I took Billie’s hand and ushered her quickly away before anything else could go wrong.

The terminal she’d be using to make her call was waiting for us when we walked back into the room. I ushered her over to the chair, ignoring the puzzled looks from my colleagues. “Remember the lady who kept calling the house?” I asked. “Would you like to talk to her again?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers,” said Billie, eyeing me warily as she waited for the catch. She was old enough to know that when a parent offered to break the rules, there was always a catch.

“I’m right here this time,” I said. “That means she’s not a stranger, she’s…a social experiment.”

Billie nodded, still dubious. “If it’s really okay…”

“It’s really, truly okay.” Marrying a physicist meant that my kids had always been destined to grow up steeped in science. It was an inescapable part of our lives. I hadn’t been expecting them to necessarily be so fond of it, but that worked out, too. I was happier raising a bevy of little scientists than I would have been with the alternative.

Billie nodded once more and turned to face the monitor. I flashed a low “okay” sign at Mike and the screen sprang to life, showing the blandly pretty CGI avatar that Tasha’s system generated for Pitch. We’d have to look into the code to see when it had made the decision to start rendering animals with human faces, and whether that was part of a patch that had been widely distributed. I could see the logic behind it—the generic avatar generator was given instructions based on things like “eyes” and “attempting to use the system,” rather than the broader and more complex-to-program “human.” I could also see lawsuits when people inevitably began running images of their pets through the generator and using them to catfish their friends.

On the other side of the two-way mirror, Pitch perked up at the sight of Billie’s face on her screen. She opened her beak. Microphones inside the room would pick up the sounds she made, but I didn’t need to hear her to know that she was croaking and trilling, just like corvids always did. What was interesting was the way she was also fluffing out her feathers and moving the tip of her left wing downward.

“Hello, hello,” said her avatar to Billie. “Hello, hello, can you hear me? Hello.”

“Hello,” said Billie. “My mom says I can talk to you again. Hello.”

“I’m hungry. Where am I? Hello.”

“I’m at Mom’s work. She does science here. I don’t know where you are. Mom probably knows. She called you.” Billie twisted to look at me. “Mom? Where is she?”

I pointed to the two-way mirror. “She’s right through there.”

Billie followed the angle of my finger to Pitch, who was scratching the side of her head with one talon. Her face fell for a moment, expression turning betrayed, before realization wiped away her confusion and her eyes went wide. She turned back to the screen.

“Are you a bird?” she asked.

The woman looked confused. “Hello, hello, I’m hungry, where am I?”

“A bird,” said Billie, and flapped her arms like wings.

The effect on Pitch was immediate. She sat up straighter on her perch and flapped her wings, not hard enough to take off, but hard enough to mimic the gesture.

“A bird!” announced the avatar. “A bird a bird a bird yes a bird. Are you a bird? Hello? A bird? Hello, can you hear me, hello?”

“Holy shit,” whispered Mike. “She’s really talking to the bird. The translation algorithm really figured out how to let her talk to the bird. And the bird is really talking back. Holy shit.”

“Not in front of my child, please,” I said, tone prim and strangled. The xenolinguists were going to be all over this. We’d have people clawing at the gates to try to get a place on the team once this came out. The science behind it was clean and easy to follow—we had built a deep neural net capable of learning, told it that gestures were language and that the human mouth was capable of making millions of distinct sounds, taught it to recognize grammar and incorporate both audio and visual signals into same, and then we had turned it loose, putting it out into the world, with no instructions but to learn.

“We need to put, like, a thousand animals in front of this thing and see how many of them can actually get it to work.” Mike grabbed my arm. “Do you know what this means? This changes everything.”

Conservationists would kill to get their subjects in front of a monitor and try to open communication channels. Gorillas would be easy—we already had ASL in common—and elephants, dolphins, parrots, none of them could be very far behind. We had opened the gates to a whole new world, and all because I wanted to talk to my sister.

But all that was in the future, stretching out ahead of us in a wide and tangled ribbon tied to the tail of tomorrow. Right here and right now was my daughter, laughing as she spoke to her new friend, the two of them feeling their way, one word at a time, into a common language, and hence into a greater understanding of the world.

Tasha would be so delighted.

In the moment, so was I.

New York Times best-selling author Seanan McGuire has enjoyed critical and commercial success both under her own name and the pseudonym Mira Grant. Heralded right out of the gate with 2010’s John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, McGuire also holds the unique honor of appearing five times on the same Hugo Awards ballot (with three nominations for McGuire and two for Grant). Prolific in both novels and short work, she is lauded for her detailed world-building in her October Daye urban fantasy series—currently planned out to at least thirteen entries that appear every September—and the InCryptid series, which kicked off with 2012’s Discount Armageddon. As Grant, she writes the bracing and topical Newsflesh trilogy. Its first volume, Feed, was one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010, and earned nominations for both the Shirley Jackson Award and the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Greg Bear

The Machine Starts

Though I am otherwise relentlessly normal, I have one peculiarity: I get along well only with people who are smarter than me. My wife, for example, is smarter than me. I am happy in my marriage.

In my present employment I should be very happy, because everyone around me is smarter and often at pains to prove that fact. It is my duty to reinforce their positive opinions, but at the same time to exert, now and then, small course corrections. Nothing shores up a fine self-opinion better than success.

So far, five years into our project, we had known nothing but failure.

The first thing you saw as you approached the perimeter site was the warehouse, large, square, and painted a brilliant titanium white. Surrounded by two high hurricane fences topped with glittering rolls of razor wire, it looked like the kind of place where you might store an A-bomb. Access to the site was on a strictly controlled, need-to-go basis. Parking was several hundred yards away, on a small lot covered with pulverized rubber. You were told not to drive a loud car, not to cut out your exhaust or rev your engine, not to sing or even shout, upon penalty of being fired.

On the morning of the test, I drove into the lot and parked my white VW, old and shabby. I had owned it since college. My colleagues favored Teslas or Mercedes-Benzes. I liked my Rabbit.

In the lane between the fences, small robots rolled night and day—nonlethal, but capable of shooting barb-tipped wires that carried a discouraging shock. The robots inspected me with their tiny black eyes and, bored by my familiarity, rolled away.

The warehouse was made entirely of wood, no nails or brackets. It covered half an acre and sat on a thick pad of cement reinforced with plastic rebar and mesh. Beneath the pad lay a series of empty vaults that discouraged ground water, rodents, or anything else that might disturb the peace. No pipes or wires were allowed, except for those that fed directly into the warehouse.

After I passed through the fences, a single thick oak door gave access to the warehouse interior. I was scheduled to meet Hugh Tiflin, project manager and chief researcher. He was always prompt, but I was deliberately early. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the architecture, the atmosphere, the implications—to feel the place again.

I summoned up my image of Alan Turing. It is my habit to sometimes talk to the founder of modern computing, hoping for a reflection of his peculiar, sharp wisdom. What we were in the final stages of creating (we all hoped they were the final stages!) could transform the human race. A machine that would end all our secrets. What would Mr. Turing think of such a New Machine?

He never answered, of course. But then, so far, neither did our machine.

I entered the security cage and listened to questions spoken by a soft, automated voice—personal questions that were sometimes embarrassing, sometimes sad, sometimes funny. I answered each of them truthfully enough and the cage opened.

Next to the cage, a small illuminated counter revealed the number of my recent visits: 4. In the last month, I had only been here twice. The counter reset every day. I take it as a personal affront when automated systems make mistakes.

A soft rain began to fall on the high, hollow roof, adding to my damp mood and the penetrating chill in the building. The warehouse was dark, except for a light in the far corner that glowed like a pale sun. I approached a low wood rail and stood in the long, curved shadow of a big black sphere, bloated and shiny, rising on tiny fins almost to the ceiling, silent but for the low hum of the power that kept it alive. A bank of heavily insulated pipes passed under the rails and through the wooden wall to dedicated generators and a refrigeration complex outside.

Early in its development, Tiflin had named the sphere Magic 8 Ball, soon shortened to 8 Ball because, as Tiflin insisted, there was nothing magical about our machine—just good solid physics. It retained a window on one side, however, like the old toy. Tiflin had asked it to be painted on after we finished the first phase.

The window’s message: TRY AGAIN LATER.

Reading that, I experienced an odd sort of dizzy spell, as if there were too many of me in one place—a symptom of stress and hard work, I presumed.

8 Ball was our third major attempt at a fully operational and manageable quantum computer. No doubt you’ve heard something about quantum computing. The underlying ideas are spooky and new, so a lot of what you’ve heard is bound to be wrong. A quantum computer works not with bits but with qubits, or quantum bits. A classic bit, like a light switch, is either on or off, one or zero. A quantum bit can be kept in superposition, neither on nor off, nor both, nor neither—like Schrödinger’s cat until you open its very special box.

Off in far corners, two other big spheres peered from the shadows: 8 Ball’s defunct siblings, Mega and Mini. Mini was ten meters across and had once contained 128 qubits. In its scavenged condition—white insulation peeling, surrounded by a tangle of pipes and wires leading nowhere—it resembled a giant golf ball. We had turned it off—killed it—three years ago. Standing in the opposite corner, Mega was eleven meters wide and resembled a moldy Florida orange. It had contained 256 qubits, all niobium or aluminum circuits bathed in liquid helium. It had sort of worked, for a time—and then it didn’t. Thumbs-down on Mega.

Filling the expanded north end of the building, 8 Ball was twelve meters in diameter and contained 1024 qubits, each a two-dimensional electron cloud clamped between plates of gallium arsenide and cooled to just a femto-fraction of a degree above absolute zero. The qubits lined the sphere’s penultimate outer layer, and each one communicated, if that’s the right word, through braided world lines across a central vacuum to an entangled twin on the other side of the sphere. Entanglement meant the paired qubits duplicated each other’s quantum state. If one was changed or measured, the other would reflect that interference, no matter how far apart they were. They would be superposed.

Each electron cloud became a new variety of matter, known as an anyon, confirmation of the existence of which we were particularly proud. The qubits’ spooky vacuum jive would, we hoped, help make 8 Ball the most stable quantum computer yet.

But despite a promising beginning, 8 Ball refused to work as designed. Sampling its output caused a catastrophic early collapse of the program strings, which themselves seemed to have been turned into useless nonsense. That had forced us to take a radically new approach. It seemed very possible that if this effort failed, 8 Ball would soon join Mega and Mini as little more than another archaeological curiosity.

Tiflin had asked me to meet him at the warehouse to help check out the newest part of our installation. I was about to stoop to look underneath the black sphere when I noticed a small yellow piece of paper stuck to the rail—a Post-it Note. Other than me, nobody in the lab used Post-its, and I only used them in my office. I pulled up the note. Written on one side in my squared-off printing was, Don’t try to find me. I did not remember either writing this message or sticking it on the rail. Maybe I had simply forgotten. Maybe someone was messing with me and had put it there to screw with my day. There were plenty of smart-asses in our division capable of playing mind games. Work had been painfully difficult the last few weeks. Pressure on our entire team was intense.

I tried to think back and retrace my steps. Parking, walking, answering the absurdly personal questions, my little talk with Mr. Turing—

Plus the dizzy spell.

I had never written a note.

Outside the warehouse, I heard the slam of a car door, followed by feet on gravel. A key clicked in the outer lock. Tiflin entered the security cage and muttered his own answers to the cage’s questions. The inner gate opened. He seemed even more distracted than I was. As he approached 8 Ball, he patted all of his pockets—shirt, pants, leather jacket—as if he’d forgotten something.

I crumpled the Post-it into a ball and hid it in my pants pocket.

When Tiflin came within a few steps, he glanced up at me, startled, and stopped patting, head cocked like a cat considering where to lick next. He broke that off with a long wink, meant to reassure me that Dr. Hugh Tiflin was indeed still in the building, then smoothed his hands down his coat.

At forty-two, Tiflin was a slender man whose upper torso was taller than average and whose legs were shorter. His neck was pale and swanlike, with distinct cords and veins that revealed frequent changes of emotion. His head was large and well-formed, with a chiseled chin and handsome eagle nose, topped by ebullient wavy brown hair. He wore a signature quilted black leather jacket over a cotton shirt, usually green or pink—green today—tucked into cotton-duck hiking pants. His running shoes were cheap and gray. He replaced them every two or three weeks, but somehow they always looked dirty. He was eldest in our team—older than me by a year. He was a genius, of course, or I’d never have worked with him.

“Good morning, Bose. How’s the scint?” he asked.

Four weeks ago, he had decided to eavesdrop on the qubits’ secret communications using a scintillation detector scavenged from a defense division CubeSat. The detector had originally been designed to monitor radiation from orbit over Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan. Tiflin had personally tuned the device to detect disturbances in 8 Ball’s vacuum—bursts of virtual radiation provoked by the passage of our qubits’ entangled photons. New stuff, amazing stuff. Who knew that a vacuum could act like a cloud chamber in a science museum? Tiflin knew—or knew people who knew. That’s why he was Tiflin.

I stooped again to peer at 8 Ball’s lower belly. A wide concrete platform between the main supports—the fins—steadied a stainless steel tube that poked up through 8 Ball’s shell and deep into its central vacuum. “Rudely intrusive,” I said.

Tiflin chuckled. “Right up the ass. We need to wake up this beast.” He looked for himself. “Seems good,” he said, sucking on his cheeks. “Should help us track our progress.” He rose, gripped the rail with both hands, and looked on 8 Ball with pique mixed with adoration. I understood completely. I, too, regarded the black sphere with both love and dread. 8 Ball was beyond doubt the strangest human construct on Earth, and if Tiflin’s plans were all that he hinted, it was about to go through a sea change of procedure and programming.

“We’re due to meet with Cate in thirty minutes,” he said, again patting his pockets. Was he looking for his phone? A pen? A lighter? “Dieter’s got the strings ready to load. Need a ride?”

I didn’t, but the VW could wait. Tiflin and I needed time to reintegrate our states, to normalize. He sounded reasonably cheerful, but I knew the stress he was under. For a year, tough minds whose job it was to decide which funds should go where had been circling our project like sharks. They were far from convinced 8 Ball was in the division’s best interests. Other groups, however, were still making plans that assumed our success. Both were pressing hard on Tiflin.

The absurd level of continuing, tooth-grinding investment showed how sexy the whole idea of quantum computing was, and how much everyone wanted to completely overturn the world’s security, expose all its secrets, and find deep answers to life’s simple questions before our enemies did—or at least before our competitors in Mumbai or Beijing.

But we had yet to run a long-term, successful session. We seemed to be always smoothing the course, pulling out obstacles—preparing over and over for the first big test. We both knew that could not continue.

Tiflin drove his Tesla back toward our offices with a look of fascinated fury, like a child behind the wheel of a bumper car. I clung to the armrests as we squealed into the concrete garage beside Building 10.

“Today will change everything,” he said, climbing out of the bucket seat. “Today will be 8 Ball’s first birthday.” He smiled his feral smile, upper lip rising over prominent canines. He was looking to see if I shared his conviction, if I would offer my full support.

That’s why I was here.

“We should bring a cake!” I said.

Our five quantum computing team members gathered in a small conference room for the first time in weeks. Tiflin fussed with the ceiling-mounted projector. The rest of us sat around the oval table, slumped or yawning, picking our fingernails, studying our cell phones before the cage was locked—hardly a picture of joy.

Cate Riva, director of research, overseeing the entire division, had asked for this get-together the day before. It was crunch time for the entire project—and for everyone on the team.

Facilitator and event coordinator Gina Marsh, small, slender, red-haired and blue-eyed, had just made sure we were all present, that we were who we said we were, that our security profiles were up to date—and that we all looked reasonably clean.

“Cate will be here in a few minutes,” Tiflin said. The others looked his way with heavy-lidded eyes. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”

At Tiflin’s nod, chief of software Dieter Langmeier—tall, bald, bushy-bearded, and a certifiable genius at both systems design and higher-level mathematics—took over. “We’re loading new strings,” he began. “Gödel strings as before, but we’re going to drastically resample the braids. I’ve adjusted the strings to reflect a new understanding.”

“The braids are fine—it’s the processing that’s hanging us,” insisted Wong Poh Kam, senior physicist. Wong was mid-twenties, six feet tall, and slightly stooped, with small, intense eyes on the outer margins of a broad face. “The strings are too damned long.”

“The whole mess is too big,” said Byron Mickle, chief design engineer. Mickle was stocky, big-shouldered, five feet six, with a pleasant, moon-pale face. He dressed and looked like a plumber, and reliably insisted at each meeting that we should have been able to run Mega and Mini for years without exceeding their theoretical capacity. 8 Ball, to Mickle, was grossly excessive.

“Braids, strings, loops, knots—nothing I hear in this room ever makes sense,” Gina said.

Dieter said, with a peeved expression, “Once you absorb the maths, it’s all perfectly clear. We’re simply reflecting a new understanding. The new topology will be much more inclusive and robust.”

“Right!” Gina said. “That makes it so much clearer. I have to key in the Cloaking Device before Cate arrives. Are we good?”

“All good,” Tiflin confirmed. He clearly planned to surprise Cate—perhaps to surprise us all.

The glass door closed and clicked behind Gina. We were now inside the cage—a Faraday cage. No signals in or out, except those that passed through the very tight funnel of building security—and the signals from Max, the supercomputer that spoke to 8 Ball.

“Dieter, before Cate gets here, tell them more about what you’re up to,” Tiflin said.

“I’ve finished compiling the recidivist strings,” Dieter said, too quickly, without taking time to think. He had been rehearsing. The rest of us looked at each other warily. Something was up, and none of us had been clued in.

“What the hell are those?” Mickle asked.

“Tell them what’s different about our new strings,” Tiflin coached, treating Dieter like a prodigy—or a puppet.

“We’re going to compound and re-insert our apparent errors,” Dieter said. “My new thinking is, they may not be errors. They may actually be off-phase echoes between our braided qubits. The braids crossing the vacuum aren’t loops or even knots. Using the scint, we’ve learned they take a half-phase twist—”

“You’ve already sampled the scint?” I asked Tiflin, wondering when it had been activated, and why he had asked me to meet him at the warehouse.

He nodded and dismissed my question with a wave of his hand.

Dieter looked sternly at us, then got up to scrawl matrices and factors and many strange, magical symbols on the whiteboard. He did not like to be interrupted. “A half-phase twist means we’re not dealing with loops, not even with knotted loops, but with Möebius loops.” He spoke that name with reverence. Möebius had astonished all of us when we were kids with his one-sided piece of paper—a simple half twist, run your finger around what appears to be a torus, and behold! Infinity.

“Oh, that,” said Mickle, resting his elbows on the table and putting his chin in his cupped hands.

“Four spatial tracks and two time tracks,” Dieter continued. “Our so-called thermal errors, maybe even the phase-flips, are really signals out of phase—essentially, signals that convey key functions in a program very much like our own. Functions we can parasitize and use for ourselves.”

“A program like our own?” Mickle asked, lifting his head.

“From the multiverse,” Dieter said.

“The multiverse?” Mickle seemed taken aback, and then amused. He chuckled and looked at Wong.

“More of Dieter’s mystical bullshit,” Wong said, rising to the bait. Wong was a dogmatic pragmatist, a surprisingly common type among quantum physicists. “All our crimes come back to haunt us.”

“There’s nothing mystical about any of this,” Tiflin insisted.

Dieter went on, unperturbed, “We need to feed these so-called errors back into our raw strings, to replace the parts of our strings that are riddled with errors. Whenever a Gödel number arises that is even vaguely well-formed, the loader will do a checksum, and if it finds congruence, insert an echoed string. For each so-called error, we’ll correct the phase, then load the recompiled numbers.”

“What the hell does that really mean?” Mickle asked. He was lost. I was also lost. “Evolving code, or succotash?”

“If we just reform and reload the strings, we’ll fill the bit bucket over and over,” Wong said. “And even if 8 Ball works once or twice, we’ll have no idea what it’s doing for millions of cycles, maybe not even then.”

“If we reload?” Tiflin asked with that patented savage grin—lip above canines.

“When,” Dieter said, his face firming to a fine resolve.

“Our problem isn’t too few cycles,” Tiflin insisted. “8 Ball can supply us with trillions upon trillions of cycles—however large the strings. It can supply us with every number that ever was, every string that ever was, every program that ever was—in our universe and at least a quadrillion quadrillion other universes.”

Mickle laid his head on the table.

“I keep telling everyone, the multiverse is bullshit,” Wong muttered.

Tiflin shrugged. “It’s a metaphor.” His face was turning shell pink, like a perfect titration in high school chemistry. And now, most dangerous of all, he dropped his voice into its lowest register. “Numbers and cycles aren’t the problem. Results and answers are the problem, and so far, having expended three hundred million dollars, none of our efforts has had more than primary school success.” He stared hard at Mickle and Wong. “We need to take a chance.”

“A really big chance,” Wong said.

“I hate genetic coding,” Mickle said.

“It’s not ‘genetic,’ and it’s not random. It’s topologically unexpected echoes,” Dieter said. “I call them topopotent recidivist code, or TRC.”

“Oh, brother,” Wong said.

I tried to find a cherry on top of this surprise pile of crap. With Tiflin, that was often my job. “You’re saying you’ll allow 8 Ball’s qubits to compute using mirror strings, alternate strings—strings written in no kind of code we’ve thought of, and never encountered before.”

“The code will almost certainly be familiar, Bose. Think of it as sampling from another spin around the loops—a true quantum echo,” Tiflin said.

“8 Ball will be taking advice from its own cousins,” Dieter said, then added, at Tiflin’s frown, “metaphorical cousins, of course.”

“Christ, zillions of 8 Balls,” Wong said.

“Who knows what sort of creativity is just waiting to be discovered out there?” Dieter waved at the ceiling, the walls—really, at everything around us.

Mickle made a raspberry sound and dropped his head again.

Looking at Tiflin and trying to read his expression, I realized that theory and desperation had finally trumped our own project manager. Despite Tiflin’s objections, Dieter—mystical and multiversed Dieter—was in charge of our quantum computer.

“What—or who—is going to judge and select the strings?” I asked. “We don’t want to do parsing in the QC. That’ll slow it to a crawl. 8 Ball isn’t made for that!”

Dieter raised his hand. “We already have a working subroutine to perform that function.”

“In Max or in 8 Ball?” I asked. We had named 8 Ball’s traditional interpreter—an interposed supercomputer—Max Headroom. Max used to be named Mike, from Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, until I pointed out that Mike vanished and was never heard from again.

Mickle had suggested Max.

“In Max, and then in 8 Ball,” Tiflin said. “We leave the rough parsing to Max and the large numbers to 8 Ball. They can be raw, even partly malformed, because we’ll grind through so many of them so quickly.”

“Max says it’s slick,” Dieter added stubbornly.

“Gentlemen, let’s face the truth. This is a done deal,” Mickle said. “We’ve finally jumped from the bridge into a deep, dark river of sloppy thinking. We’re screwed.” He took a long sip from a bottle of beige Soylent liquid, his frequent substitute for breakfast, lunch, and even dinner.

Tiflin said quietly, pointedly, “It’s done. We’re already loading.”

A long pause.

“A string infested with quantum errors we’ve spent most of our careers trying to weed out!” Wong exclaimed, making weak gestures of frustration and surrender. “I am flabbered. I am gasted.”

Emotions crossed Dieter’s hairy face like clouds over a prairie.

“Have a little faith,” Tiflin said, and leaned back in his chair. “If we’re wrong and this crashes 8 Ball over and over again, to be sure, we’re all screwed, but the fact is, minus results, the division is set to cut its losses and clean house. That’s why Cate called us together this morning. Results, or we get booted out of here.”

“Thanks for the warning,” Wong said.

Then the door clicked and Cate Riva entered, flashing a sunny expression and a big smile. “Good morning, all,” she said with a quick scan around the conference room. “Why so serious?”

“We’re loading new strings, recombined Gödel strings,” Tiflin said, with all the confidence he could fake.

“Wasn’t that the plan?” Cate asked innocently.

“We’re inserting the worst phase-flip errors back into the strings,” Wong said. We all wished he’d just keep quiet.

“Proof of pudding?” Cate asked, still standing. “Because despite my pleasant demeanor, I’m not here to listen to more bullshit.”

A brief silence.

“Take a seat,” Tiflin said. “We’re about to begin. Genius is in the air.”

Cate smiled again, all sunlight and cheer—but behind her brown eyes, all tiger.

Tiflin instructed the screen to drop and the data in the ceiling projector to show 8 Ball’s and Max’s interposed display. “Here we go,” he said, betting the bank—betting our bank.

This was going to be my Waterloo. I could smell it.

Dieter sent the instructions to Max. “First strings are loaded,” he announced.

“What scale?” Cate asked.

“All qubits,” Dieter said. “Two to the one thousand and twenty-fourth power.”

Tiflin looked at me. I looked at Cate. She watched the display.

Programming in a QC consists of designing and controlling how the qubits are entangled—essentially, the topological nature of the braids—and then maintaining or collapsing those entangled states, opening gates from which we could presumably receive our answers. Once set in motion, a quantum computer is autonomous—the program either fails or succeeds. A QC cannot be debugged while it is working. The program cannot be halted or even completely understood while the QC is busy. Only if the results are interesting and useful can we hope that what we did was a success. And they must also be fast.

The display twinkled over our heads. And what do you know?

We got back numbers—long strings of integers, flanked by Max’s instant scorecard analysis. 8 Ball was delivering a select list of exceedingly large primes—the kind of unique and difficult primes used to encode high-level passwords. The kind that could break banks and even worry Uncle Sam.

“Wow,” Cate said. “These are real? You haven’t suckered Max?”

“No suckers here,” Tiflin said, leaning back deeper into the shadows.

8 Ball didn’t choke or even sneeze. For the first time, our newest QC was cooking.

And it was fast.

“Next up,” Tiflin said, as Dieter’s fingers flew over the keyboard, “the complete Icelandic chromosome database for mutations in BRCA 1 and 2 over the last forty years.”

And that worked, too. Our evolving machine had analyzed and understood contemporary human evolution, at least in two important oncogenes.

“The third problem is very big,” Dieter said. “We’re collating the proof of the classification of the theorem of finite simple groups. It’s known as the Enormous Theorem. Tens of thousand of pages of proofs, scattered in several hundred journals, all loaded into Gödel strings, cross-referenced, and logically filtered. The QC should find any contradictions. We’ll get results in four or five minutes.”

“That alone should get us a Fields Medal,” Tiflin said.

Cate reached out to pat Tiflin’s shoulder. “Let me know how that turns out,” she said. “Good work, gentlemen. I’ve seen enough for now.” She stood and left the room.

Inside the hour, the Enormous Theorem was proven consistent, our contracts were extended, and our funding was renewed.

That evening, I went home to the square gray stone and steel apartment where my wife and I had lived for nine months. She had just returned from Beijing and a conference on newer, more inclusive versions of Unicode. We spent our first evening together in three weeks, beginning with sushi from our favorite restaurant and progressing to brandy and cigars—a sin we allowed ourselves every few months.

Then we exercised our marital prerogatives. I managed almost to forget both our team’s troubles and successes. I could not tell her about any of them. Cate would decide how and when to release the story.

Why couldn’t I just accept the fact that Tiflin had triumphed? Cate had messaged Tiflin at the end of the day that maybe we could support doubling the number of qubits. 8 Ball was designed to be scalable, wasn’t it?

My wife rolled over on the flannel sheets and asked, “Do you have a sister?”

She knew I had only brothers, all in India.

“There was this woman in Beijing who looked exactly like you,” she said, “only pretty. Same color skin, same hair. She came up to me and asked how you were doing.”

“And?”

“I said you were fine. She knew your name. She knew where you worked. She touched my cheek with the back of her hand and smiled, the way you used to do. And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you!” She grinned, raised herself over me, and twirled her finger on my chest. “It gave me a thrill—perverse, you know? Like if I went to bed with her, it wouldn’t be cheating on you. And not just because of the girl-girl thing. Does that make any sense? I’ve never seen anything like it, Bose. Are you cloning people now?”

I said we most certainly were not cloning people and hugged her, mostly to shut her up.

“Right,” she said. “You’d have to have been cloned forty-one years ago. How about a transporter malfunction?”

We laughed, but the thought made me both queasy and a little horny—so many bells being rung on my nerd pinball machine, after such a complicated and important day.

A few hours later, I showered, got dressed, and walked into my home office to look over the new morning’s schedule. I found another Post-it Note stuck to my rosewood desktop. This one, again in my distinctive print style, read,

Check out the Pepsi supply.

I looked around the small room. My armpits were soaking. We needed to reset our security system.

And I needed another shower.

Coming into our building, I avoided the soft drink coolers, just because looking, checking, would be utterly ridiculous.

Gina made the rounds of our glassed-in cubicles, delivering a basket of fruit and wine to each of us with compliments from Cate and our CEO as well. Later that day came a message of congratulations signed by the company’s founder. Cate wasn’t wasting time. The news was now global—we had the first successful, large-scale quantum computer, and it was already making major advancements in math and physics.

We were historic.

Two days later, after our staff meeting and our third round of press interviews, I took another morning drive to the perimeter warehouse, trying to silence my inner alarms. I whistled aimlessly, hopelessly tangled in wondering what I would look like as a female. Weird encounter, I thought. But just how weird? And how connected to the spate of anonymous Post-it Notes?

No one had been at the warehouse since Tiflin and I last visited. Cate had put it in lockdown to all but team members, not to jinx success by letting in the press—hot bodies and electronic interference.

Security grudgingly allowed me back in. The counter on the display by the cage read 8. That, of course, had to be wrong. Eight meant I had visited the site four times since Tiflin and I had last gone through. I wondered if we could get access to the security tapes. There might be imposters on the campus, right? But really, I did not want to know.

Everything in the warehouse looked fine. I was supposed to be happy, but none of this felt right. I could not help but think that some day, despite our success, the cage would refuse to open and I’d know my time in the division was over—best to light out for the territories and find smarter people elsewhere.

Why didn’t Tiflin call another meeting to plan the next cycles?

I turned away from 8 Ball and experienced another dizzy spell—too many Boses in one body. And what the hell did that mean?

When I got out to the parking lot and my VW, I saw a sheet of paper in the passenger seat. In the upper right corner, a lab intranet library reference announced these were scint results from the last week, and below that was a graphic representation of 8 Ball’s inner vacuum.

On the upper left corner, beside the reference number, someone had written, using my print style, Thought you should see this. And do take a look at the soft drink coolers. They’re empty most of the time now.

I had had quite enough.

I drove back to Building 10 and found Tiflin in his office. “We need to look at building security videos.”

“Why?” Tiflin said.

“Someone may be trying to mess with us. Humor me,” I said.

We approached the security office and made our request. We were both placed high enough that the head of security allowed us into the inner sanctum, a dark room fronted by two tiered banks of monitors and staffed by five guards.

Two of them relinquished their seats to make room.

I scrawled notes on a sheet of legal paper as we went through the videos for the last four days. The cameras in the warehouse were separate from the lab system, and not accessible from this center, but we still had a clear view of all the rooms, offices, and corridors in three big buildings—a lot to process, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Lots of people, lots of team members wandering around, going to the cafeteria, sitting in their cubicles sucking down Soylents or Pepsis or Mountain Dews or Snapples—

I thought I saw Mickle in a hallway, then, under the same time stamp, working in his office. “Look at that,” I said. “The times are off.”

“That could explain the numbers at the warehouse. Why is it important?” Tiflin yawned.

“Okay,” I told the security chief, “show our offices right now.”

The chief worked over his keyboard and we saw my office and Tiflin’s office in Building 10, in real time, just a few cubicles apart. My office was empty. Empty—just me, I wrote on my little pad.

We looked into Tiflin’s office.

“Wait,” Tiflin said.

Tiflin’s in his office, I wrote and noted the time, the room number, and the chair beside me.

Tiflin no longer sat in the chair.

And his office was empty.

The head of security bent to look over my shoulder. “Looks like the boss is off campus,” he said.

I felt a spreading wave of dismay.

And then, I think I simply forgot.

A few hours later, back in my own office, behind the locked door, I reviewed my notes, not at all sure where I had been or why—and wondering how I had just lost so much time. The last thing I had recorded was, Tiflin’s gone! He just vanished, and I’m forgetting—

I unlocked my door, clutching the diagram I’d found in my car, and checked the soft drink coolers in the adjacent hallway. Mountain Dew and Pepsi were in very short supply—just a few cans.

With real trepidation, I passed down the hall to Tiflin’s office. There he was, sitting at his desk, on the phone. He looked up and lifted an eyebrow—go away, he was busy.

I turned and left.

What the hell had just happened?

I stood before 8 Ball again, my neck hair on end, looking on it not with pique or adoration, but with genuine fear. This time, my visit numbers were consecutive.

“What the fuck are you up to?” I whispered at the black sphere.

The warehouse security gate clicked with the insertion of another key. Mickle entered and spent a number of seconds staring at the counter. From this angle I could not see his number, but he hesitantly answered the cage’s questions, then walked across the concrete floor to where I stood by the rail.

He tipped me a salute. “It says I’ve been out here fourteen times in the last twenty-four hours,” he said.

“Have you?”

“No.”

“Just what are we worried about?” I asked. “What could possibly be going wrong?”

“Nothing, really.” Mickle assumed an expression like a little boy who has just bottled a weird bug. “We’re famous. We’re making headlines around the world.”

“So why are we standing here looking so anxious?” I asked.

Wong entered next and joined us by the rail. “We need to see the building security videos,” he said with a squint.

Before I could answer, Mickle said, “Been there, done that. I took Dieter with me to the security center. His wastebasket kept filling up with Pepsi cans—his favorite. So we asked to see who had been visiting his office.”

“Looking for what?” I asked.

“To count how many Dieters there were in the universe.”

“Why should there be more than one?” I asked.

Mickle shook his head. “Dieter said something more than a little weird. He said every program had to have a programmer. Since 8 Ball was running trillions of programs, how many programmers would it need to import to satisfy causality?”

“How many Dieters.”

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“Not just Dieters. We’ve all contributed code over the years. We’ve all noodled and made suggestions. So we’re all potential dupes.”

“As in suckers?”

“More like duplicates. We played the video until we saw Dieter enter his office. And then—I don’t remember all of it. But there was no Dieter standing next to me in the security center. And there was no Dieter in his office, either. Both had vanished, or at least that’s what I wrote down right after it happened—on a napkin.” Mickle held up the napkin. In his loose scrawl, a black marker message read, Two Dieters canceled.

“Why would they cancel each other out?”

“Because they’re non-Abelian,” Mickle said. “Like fermions. They can’t occupy the same universe at the same time—and become aware of it.”

“That is nuts!” Wong said.

“I agree,” Mickle said. “What shall we tell Tiflin?”

“Let me decide that,” I said. “We should make sure nobody’s playing a joke. I wouldn’t even put it past Tiflin. Make sure we’re not being deceived.”

“That is not the right word,” Mickle said, tapping the rail with his finger. “They wouldn’t be deceptions. They’re just as real as you and me. They even fool the counters. But if we’re going to take this any further, we have to avoid looking for ourselves. Because, gentlemen, if we find us, we’ll just fucking vanish.”

“Tiflin hates multiverses or mystical interpretations,” I said.

“So do I, remember?” Wong said.

“Don’t search for yourself,” Mickle said, poking Wong’s shoulder. Wong shrugged him off with a resentful scowl. “And we won’t look for each other—not when we’re together. You look for me, alone, and I look for you. Alone.”

“Can we look for the others, too?”

“I think so,” he said. “But maybe we shouldn’t tell them we saw them.”

“That might be allowed,” I said, thinking back to the Post-it Notes and my wife telling me about my “sister.” “But we should be cautious.”

“What’s the point, then?” Wong asked.

“Maybe they won’t believe us and they’ll stick around regardless,” Mickle said.

8 Ball kept patiently cycling.

I asked Tiflin to meet me in the lobby of a nice hotel where we put up our international guests. I wanted to be away from the campus, away from our colleagues—away from anyone or anything that might make Tiflin feel stubborn. It was too early for a beer, so he and I took seats in the small bar and sipped cappuccinos.

“We’ve still got a lot to do,” Tiflin said, fidgeting. I was too important and connected to ignore, but he seemed to know he wouldn’t like what I had to say.

“8 Ball’s not working the way we thought it would,” I told him.

“I don’t care,” he said. “It’s working. We’ll figure out how later—before they give us our Nobel.”

I rather thought he would mention that at some point.

“What I’m saying is, the scint may have given us an answer.” I unfolded the printout tracking the photon trails in 8 Ball’s central vacuum. I was still unsure how to read the scint’s numbers, but I’d spent several hours in my office studying the graphic representation: four splash-ripples at the corners of an otherwise smooth pond. Four dropped pebbles creating regular, rather pretty disturbances. As expected.

But at the center of the four points of vibration, there rose a prominent hump—where nothing should be.

Tiflin looked over the printout with an expression almost of dread. So much to lose, I thought. So careful not to sink the boat. Right now, he was the most famous man in computing. His name was on every news show, headlining every major science and tech journal. He was trending big on Twitter— #Masterofchaos.

“You didn’t trump this up?” he asked. There was an odd sidewise look in his eye, as if he had already seen these results but had ignored them.

“Of course not,” I said. “You installed the scint. That’s the latest report from Max, based on data you asked to be collected.”

“Well, did we really need it, in the end?”

“The ripples at the corners represent our topological braids and their echoes,” I said. “They’re real—but they may not explain the speed.”

“Then what does?”

I tapped the hump. “You tell me,” I said. “What do you think that represents?”

“It could be a standing wave,” he said. “Maybe a collaboration or combination of all the others. What’s it doing there?”

“8 Ball may be compounding the entanglements,” I said. “The standing wave could represent a huge mountain of computational power, more number crunching than there will ever be numbers. More numbers than there are universes. God himself can’t think that fast. And there could be consequences we did not anticipate.”

“What sort of consequences?” he asked.

I noted that he did not object to the metaphysics, the mysticism, and almost felt sorry for him. “When we got together at the warehouse five days ago, you were feeling all of your pockets. What were you looking for?”

“My gum,” he said. “I’ve been chewing gum ever since I quit smoking. You know that.”

“Did you find it?”

He shook his head. “No.”

“What did you find?” I asked.

“A pack of cigarettes,” he said. “And a lighter.”

“Did you put them there?” I asked.

“No.” So far he was being honest—which meant he had already been having doubts. “Did you?”

I didn’t give that the dignity of a response. “Like somebody else was wearing your clothes, right? Someone a lot like you—but someone who still smoked. Did your wife notice a difference?”

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“How long have you been having these lapses back into old habits?”

“We’ve all been working too hard,” he said, looking away.

“I think you tested 8 Ball before the big meeting. I think you and Dieter had been running the QC with the new protocols for at least three weeks before our first demo.”

He looked defiant. “So I’m a cautious fellow,” he said. “What’s that got to do with any of this?”

“I have a ghost. Mine’s a female version of myself. Looks a lot like me, and has been here long enough to figure things out. My wife saw her in Beijing—before we made our demo to Cate.”

Tiflin flushed that beautiful titration pink. “That’s ridiculous,” he said not very forcefully.

“8 Ball had already begun its journey, weeks before—right?”

“Bullshit,” Tiflin said, but it was no more than a whisper.

“Guess who clued me about these graphs?”

“Haven’t the slightest.”

“My other. My ghost. She left the printout where I would find it—in our car.”

“That is just sad. Sad and sick.”

“You drink Mountain Dew, don’t you? How many cans a day?”

This jerked him up straight. He stood, spilling his coffee, and spun around to leave. The graphed ripples drifted to the floor, where I pinned the paper with my shoe.

I called after him, “We have to tell everybody. And then we have to shut it down!”

“Go to hell!” Tiflin said over his shoulder as he fled through the lobby.

The entire team sat around the conference table.

I got Tiflin to attend by threatening to tell Cate about our concerns.

The curtains had been drawn and the lights dimmed. The ceiling projector showed a montage of intersecting waves in 8 Ball’s vacuum—the now-familiar four splashes surrounding the imposing central hump. 8 Ball was still running—who knew how many cycles?

Dieter told us he had loaded only fundamental operations the last few days, keeping the qubits powered up and working but doing nothing in particular, at least nothing too complicated. Just housekeeping—making sure all was well, all was healthy.

“Are we sure the standing wave is even in our system?” I asked. “And is it in fact at the center of the vacuum, or is that all just a mathematical fiction?”

“The detector is working!” Mickle said. “It’s not defective.”

“Then how can 8 Ball not be a lump of slag?” Wong asked. “According to the scint, the microwave temperature inside our quantum computer is well over a trillion degrees.”

“Virtual microwave temp,” Tiflin said. “Virtual doesn’t affect the real. The helium is still cold. That counts for something.”

“We should have been told about this right away,” I said to nobody in particular. “This is for the theorists to understand and explain, not just engineers.”

Dieter, despite having a foot in both camps—theory and engineering—sounded defensive. “It’s not a sign of failure. We just don’t know what’s going on, yet.”

“Entangled and braided photons that do not exist echo back on world lines that are mathematical fictions,” I said, “leaving trails in the vacuum that produce virtual microwaves, and they don’t exist either. None of it is remotely real!”

“That’s a load of crap,” Tiflin said. “We’re successful. You just don’t want to acknowledge how successful we are.”

“You don’t remember, do you?” I asked Tiflin, then looked at Dieter.

Mickle lowered his eyes as if in guilt. Dieter ignored us both.

“That hump, that so-called standing wave, is a massive reservoir of computation,” I said. “Millions or even trillions of programs running at once. 8 Ball is a nexus for the work of I don’t know how many programmers, all like us—”

Tiflin rapped his knuckles hard on the desk. “Let’s not draw stupid conclusions,” he said.

“For a time, 8 Ball was running trillions of programs—you said so yourself.”

“A metaphor,” Tiflin insisted.

“Those programs originated in millions of other universes,” I continued. Mickle watched me with morbid fascination, as if I were digging my own grave. “They had to have programmers behind them. And yet, here they are—trillions of lines of code running without a causal beginning. What does that force the machine to do? What does it force the universe to do?”

“In theory—” Mickle said.

“Screw theory,” said Tiflin. “We’ve worked too hard and spent too damned much time and money not to know what’s happening with our own apparatus.”

“Has anybody else looked at the security videos?” I asked.

Silence. Mickle looked away.

“Soft drink machines?”

“They’re usually empty,” Wong said.

“The cafeteria staff is slacking off,” Tiflin said.

I was stubborn. “One by one, we should all look at the building security videos.”

“What the hell would that tell us?” Tiflin asked, standing. Clearly he’d had enough.

“That there’s more than one Dieter walking around Building 10,” I said. “And more than one Tiflin.”

“Christ,” Tiflin said.

“I met Dieter in his office, then I saw him in Room 57,” Mickle said. “He couldn’t have got there ahead of me.”

“Did he look like me totally—same clothes, same hair?” Dieter asked, fascinated.

“Yeah. And then—I think—when you saw him on the video feed, you both vanished.”

“You think?”

“I made a note to that effect on my phone,” Mickle said. “Because I don’t remember.”

“Me, too, with Tiflin,” I said.

“Cool!” Dieter said, looking feverish. “If we could pin this down, make some real experiments, we’d know something tremendous, wouldn’t we?”

Tiflin got out of his chair and went to the door.

I held out my hand to stop him. “My dupe told me to check the Pepsi supply. Most of us drink Pepsi or Mountain Dew.”

“Tra-dition!” Mickle sang, straight out of Fiddler on the Roof.

Tiflin folded his arms.

“Some of us are fresh out of gum,” I said. “Some of us wear the same clothes for days at a time, and dirty sneakers, and wouldn’t notice if we were sharing, would we?”

“Go to hell,” Tiflin said.

“They’re out of Snapple, too,” Mickle said. Oddly, like Dieter, he seemed to be enjoying this, as if it proved something important or at least interesting. Sometimes working with smarter people is infuriating.

“If we did look at the videos, what would that do?” Dieter asked with little-boy wonder. “I mean, none of us have met…them. Us. The others. If they exist.”

“They do not exist,” Tiflin said.

“But has anyone actually seen another?” Dieter asked. “What would happen if we just looked at them?”

“Collapse the wave function,” Wong said. “Stop all this shit right in its tracks. One non-Abelian programmer can’t exist in the same space or time as another, right?”

“They’re no more real than the standing wave,” Tiflin said in a high, exhausted growl. He seemed ready to break into tears. Who could blame him?

“I think we’re way beyond being worried about 8 Ball’s success,” Dieter said. “But we could collapse it all—make all the others vanish, along with their programs. We can pull the plug.”

“That would kill our bonuses,” Mickle said.

“Cashing multiple versions of the same check will crash more than the wave function,” I said.

And she was really smart. Maybe smarter than you! That’s what my wife had told me. A female version of me had to have crossed some distance in the multiverse to occupy this world line, didn’t she? She showed up first in China. I go there infrequently. And she figured it all out before I did. She somehow managed to avoid me, but still left me notes to clue me in. Notes apparently don’t flip the state. To everyone else here, I am still male, and she had to act through me if she was to exert any influence in the open—right? Maybe my others, eventually, would come from far enough across the multiverse that I would be the anomaly.

This was bending my brain big-time.

“Why aren’t we seeing hundreds of them? Thousands?” Mickle asked, clearly finding it hard to believe he was even asking the question.

Dieter was our Rottweiler when it came to pure theory. “Our spaces aren’t that big. If more than one dupe meets—however many they are in total—they all vanish!”

“So if they appear in a clump, they cancel out immediately,” Wong said, firmly in the spirit of this gedanken discussion.

“Heisenbergian crowd control,” Mickle said. “Lovely.”

Tiflin was pinking brightly now and couldn’t bring himself to speak. My remark about the gum and the clothes had shaken him. Maybe he was starting to believe.

“Sorry,” Dieter said, smiling as if at a lovely dream. “One last thought. How many 8 Balls are there? Is our machine in a superposition with all the others? And how could that possibly be stable?”

“Shoot me now,” Tiflin said, pushing past my arm toward the door.

These dupes, as Mickle calls them, are us, smart or smarter. They find themselves in roughly the same environments, covering the same or very similar world lines, attending the same meetings—if they’re not yet clued in about such things—but never more than one per meeting, one per world line. The only way to survive is to avoid meeting yourself. Both will vanish. And their programs or parts of programs, in 8 Ball, might also vanish—which could help explain some weird irregularities in the output. The better programmers you or your dupe are, the more your vanishing affects the success of the standing wave.

I have employees not on our team going over the tapes, tracking us or versions of us on the security system, letting us know where 8 Ball programmers are congregating. Word is getting out. This is spooking everybody.

Why aren’t there trillions of us, filling the Earth to capacity? First of all, there’s that problem of encounters. Second, there’s the probability that for every alternate world in the multiverse, we’re sharing dupes. One vanishes from one world and appears in another. Dupes are traded—filling in a hole, like a tunneling electron—but are not actually duplicated.

And perhaps not even actually destroyed. Who can say?

Who could ever know?

And for every alternate Earth, there is an 8 Ball, very little different from the one we made, going through the same processes, running the same Gödelian strings, with the same successful discovery of extraordinarily long primes, the same confirmation of the Enormous Theorem, the same ability to solve problems involving insane levels of number-crunching. If we could coordinate or discover or recover all those programs, running on all those 8 Balls (or their successors), we’d probably have at least a short list of every possible mathematical problem, run to exhaustion or even solved.

That success will generate more funding for more machines like 8 Ball—bigger machines, newer machines, better and better machines. And all the worlds of the multiverse will begin to fill with people like us at an even faster rate; a surfeit of smart people, clever people, people smarter than me, until perhaps the flash point is reached—more brilliant programmers than any Earth actually needs. Would the multiverse start weeding out these upstarts?

I don’t want to look at any more security tapes. I don’t want to go home and find my female self in the arms of my wife. And I don’t want to run into myself in Building 10 and pop out of existence.

I’ve packed a bag, taken a large sum out of my bank, kissed my wife, left a note for my “sister,” gassed up my VW, and pretty soon I’ll drive to a town I’ve never been to before, someplace I wouldn’t think of. If of course I can think of such a place.

How many of me will think the same? Where would I never want to live? What if we all flee to the same safe, awful hellhole? And is it worth my survival to live there? Between me and my dupes, there’s only one white VW Rabbit, and I seem to have the only set of keys. Dupes bring along their clothes but not their cars. Maybe her keys don’t fit. Maybe she drives a Volvo. Smarter, right?

Again, this bends my brain. I’m trying to imagine the mass exodus. We’ll empty the United States in our Teslas and Mercedeses and then rental cars and motorbikes and maybe bicycles and then just walking or running. A flood of the world’s finest programmers spreading out from North America. Biblical!

An even more frightening thought—

Perhaps every universe has trillions of worlds with intelligent beings on them that are only now beginning to build machines like 8 Ball. Will the entire mass of all these universes be converted into programmers?

There is of course a theoretical safety valve, a choke point that could make all these frightening machines moot. It was Gödel himself who proved that mathematics would never be perfect and logically complete. Will that save us? If that limitation, that very wise act of cautious creation, brings all of this to a soft end, do we say thank God?

Or thank Gödel?

I leave these problems to those who are smarter than me. Maybe I think too much, worry too much. But please don’t search for me. Don’t tell me where I am, where I have been seen, or who’s looking for me.

I don’t want to know.

The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction has called Greg Bear the “best working writer of hard science fiction.” Bear was honored with the Robert A. Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement in 2006, and he is one of only two authors to win a Nebula in every category. Bear’s work has explored the changing fields of genetics and human evolution (1999’s Nebula Award winner Darwin’s Radio), nanotechnology and biological computers (1985’s Blood Music, based on Bear’s award-winning short story of the same name), interplanetary politics and colonization (1993’s Nebula Award winner Moving Mars), and the probable shape of real interstellar travel (Hull Zero Three). His many short stories, all newly revised, will soon be available in three volumes from Open Road. In his teenage years, Bear was part of the founding committee for the San Diego Comic-Con. Since the 1980s, Bear has served on many political and scientific action committees, consulting for Microsoft, NASA, the US Army, and the Department of Homeland Security. He’s a frequent guest at both science fiction conventions and scientific conferences around the world.

Elizabeth Bear

Skin in the Game

Peter was waiting for me when I got backstage.

I had been expecting the publicist to show up for weeks, ever since I started getting the sense that the tour numbers weren’t what the label had hoped. But as I walked out from under the glare and heat of the lights, it didn’t make me any happier to glimpse his hollow-cheeked, handsome scowl off in the wings. I ignored him for a few precious seconds, gratefully burying my dripping face in the snowy, chilled towel that Mitchell, my road manager and best friend, handed me. Sweat and makeup flattened the plush Egyptian terry cloth. I gulped water while I dropped the first towel, handed the glass back to Mitchell as I took another, and wiped myself down again.

I gave him a questioning glance. He waited until I pulled the Dampitronics from my ringing ears and handed them to him to roll his eyes toward Peter and murmur, “You want some backup with the cadaver, Nee?”

I shook my head. My ears shrilled like a temple bell despite the earplugs; my body trembled with exhaustion. A line of itchy soreness ran across my back where the low band of my costume had chafed because I’d lost weight on tour. I wanted: my dressing room, a shower, yoga pants, a sandwich, and my bed—in negotiable order.

I did not want: a conversation with Peter Sullivan.

But there he was, curly graying-blond hair atop a tall frame, a debauched cherub in a bespoke suit. Making me tired.

I was slumping. I spackled my best smile across my face (pin the grin on the clown) and hauled my tired spine upright to sashay over to him. Don’t forget to look spunky but demure. The patriarchy hates it when you’re not appropriately deferential.

It had been a so-so night, and I had just now, without so much as a glance at the time, given up on expecting it to get any better.

“Neon, sweetheart,” he said, and leaned in to kiss beside my cheek. He glanced at his phone, then dropped his hand to his side. “Great performance. You’re looking better than ever.”

“Glad to hear it,” I replied. “Lost weight?”

“Good suit,” he answered, with a self-deprecating flip of his hand he probably practiced in the mirror. His VIP pass fluttered in the breeze. “Can we talk?”

No wasn’t an option.

“Dressing room,” I said. “Follow me.”

Once the door was shut, I stepped behind a screen to undress. I wriggled out of the drum rig with its electrostatic panels and synth triggers and touch plates, and hung it up to air out. Suzie, my dresser, would be along to disinfect it before packing. My costume was as sodden as if I’d walked into a swamp wearing it, and smelled considerably worse. I dropped the sopping scraps of sequined white stretch film into a laundry bag and sealed it, then toweled off and pulled on panties, bra, a V-necked T-shirt, and an old pair of ivory-colored jeans. Even here, in private, my clothes were in my trademark ivory, silver, and white, a scheme I’d selected years ago to set off the darkness of my skin and my auburn halo of zigzag curls, sweat-damp and frizzy now.

Branding, branding, branding. Cameras were literally everywhere.

Barefoot, on the balls of my feet, I padded out of concealment. The white shag throw rug stretched itself and massaged my soles as I curled my toes into it.

Peter handed me a glass of wine—my own Neon White Red, of course, from my own minibar in the corner—and settled into the visitor’s chair with one of his own. I chose to stand. I paced slowly, enjoying the ministrations of the rug, stretching sore calves with each step, aware that Peter was watching.

I bit my lower lip to keep from asking why he’d come. It didn’t matter if I chewed on it now; the lipstick was all over the dirty towels.

It was all about the dominance games with Peter.

I sipped my wine, which was about the only thing around besides me that wasn’t some shade of white. It was rich, not too sweet, a bodacious red with layers and textures. I had never had much patience for delicate, ladylike wines. I wanted something that tugged your shirtsleeve and demanded attention.

There was probably something Freudian in that.

I gave the silence a calculated forty-five seconds and glanced ostentatiously at my bangle. Blood alcohol content .01%, heart rate leveling off at 72 beats per minute, time 11:42 p.m. “Peter,” I said. “I’m exhausted.”

Awarding him the point, but maybe keeping a moral edge. He’d be easier to deal with if he thought he was winning.

His smile was stained with wine. Whatever it was, it was so important that he physically set his phone down. “We’ve got an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with a new marketing technology. Something that could be as much of a game changer as music videos were, or downloads. They asked for you specifically.”

A nervous shiver raised the hairs along my nape and arms. I could tell already: This was going to be a pain in the ass. He wouldn’t have come in person to pitch it to me—to pressure me—if it wasn’t.

I’d been dreading a deeply uncomfortable conversation about what we could do to bring my tour more relevance. I’d rather have that.

“Who’s they?”

He held up a hand. That was Peter for I’m withholding that data until the end of my pitch.

“Could be a career maker,” he said. “You need to get some skin in the game, something we can hook some press coverage on. Some pathos. You’re stable and professional, which is great—but you’re too stable and professional. Your image is, anyway. It’s getting boring. Stable and professional is not what sells rock ‘n’ roll. The fans are hungry, and you have to keep giving them something to chew on, or they move on. And you have a reputation for staying on the bleeding edge to maintain.”

That was the trick, actually. The actual bleeding edge was too far away for most people to stretch to comfortably. In reality, you wanted to be just behind it, safe-ish but plausibly trendsetting, so you didn’t make people uncomfortable, you just made them feel excited. As if they were taking a risk, when it was really a very, very safe investment.

The public likes to feel that they’re standing next to a visionary. But they don’t want to face the social consequences you get when you’re fighting for real change. Jesus was right about his own apostle Peter throwing him under the bus as soon as he got a little scared—and in two thousand years, the only thing different about people is what’s on the surface.

I started off on the actual bleeding edge, a long, long time ago. A real artistic revolutionary. Then I realized I liked eating and having a roof over my head, and I let that edge overtake me. Much better to surf it. Stay on the curl.

Putting up with Peter was just one of the prices I paid for the very nice rug massaging my sore feet right now.

I was probably a more effective double agent for social change here than further out, anyway. And that’s totally not self-justifying twaddle.

I drank my wine politely until I was sure he’d finished. “Can I hear the name now?”

“It’s an app called Clownfish.”

I didn’t drop my wineglass. Which was a good thing, because Envirugs were a bitch to clean. I glanced down at my bangle, thinking about adjusting my endorphin mix a little, but I didn’t want Peter to see that he was getting to me. I caught myself doing it and tried to make it look like I was checking the time.

“I see you’ve heard of it.”

I read Scientific American and The Wall Street Journal in addition to Boing Boing and Ars Technica. That wasn’t one of the things that made it into the carefully curated press releases, but I’d heard of it. I shrugged. “It’s a bit more than an app, Peter.”

He shrugged right back. “I understand there’s a widget or a dongle or something. An interface.”

“It’s a kind of machine empathy, right? Lets a user feel what somebody else is feeling?”

“Not exactly,” he said. “It lets you decide what you—or somebody else, if they allow it—will be feeling. Set emotions on a dial. We’ve been thinking, we sell it as access to your emotions. What you feel as you’re performing. Your own experiences in relation to the song.”

“Fans don’t want to know that my feet hurt and the grilled cheese I had for lunch is giving me indigestion, Peter.”

He tapped his bangle in demonstration. “We can fiddle that. It’s editable. Movie magic—more real than real. Hell, they don’t even have to be your emotions. We can outsource the recording, distribute it as downloadable content. Micropay—”

“No.” I should have walked away from this nonsense years ago. But it was safe and easy, and Peter was easy. Easier than either finding a new label or going it on my own.

I have good lawyers, but breaking contracts is a nightmare. And anyway, my deal was up after this tour. I wondered if they would drop me. I knew I should probably drop them. But things like that are so much work. I have enough to do concentrating on the art, the tech, the brand, the business. I want people who can handle the fiddly stuff and go away.

This is exactly how artists and entrepreneurs get into trouble, time and time again. Knowing it doesn’t make it any more fun to deal with.

“I’m thinking of us both,” he said. “You know how well you do affects how well I do. You owe me a hearing, Neon. And I know you’re going to give me one. You’ve always been a loyal friend.”

Damn it, the man knew where my buttons were installed.

“No.”

He sighed. “No?”

My head was full of ways it might backfire. Exhausted, without really trying, I could think of dozens of different potential disasters. Public relations fallout. Personal attacks. Creeps. Injuries from inadequately tested tech. Lawsuits. Peter probably could, too—but it wasn’t his career at risk the same way it was mine, no matter what he said. Sure, if his acts were successful, he was successful. But I wasn’t his only act.

It also felt like a huge ethical overstep, an outright lie in a way that the branding and marketing didn’t approach. I almost made a joke about Milli Vanilli, but Peter has had the ethical part of his brain turned off, so that wasn’t an argument that would carry any water with him.

He said, “Your reasoning?”

I held up a hand. “Peter,” I said. “It’s midnight. I just spent two hours on stage. I’ll be happy to discuss it with you later. But I think fiscally, as well as brand-wise, it’s a bad idea.”

The money argument always went over better with Peter than any appeals to personal decency or artistic integrity. Say one thing for elective sociopathy: It made him predictable.

“I don’t think that’s what’s bothering you,” he said.

“No?”

“Your face did that thing.” He copied it, then grinned. “Like you just stepped in dead rat.”

His next gesture took in my augmented body, the permanent surgical arch of my feet to Barbie toes. There’s a little repulsor unit implanted in the heel that does most of the work, and makes the stage shoes bearable for a two-hour show. Keeps me from developing plantar fasciitis, too. Supposedly.

He said, “You’ve never hesitated to do what it takes.”

“That’s marketing. It’s different. This is about…” I didn’t want to say authenticity. “…authenticity.”

His eyebrow went up. He didn’t say what he was thinking. And I didn’t know how to explain what I meant—that making a splash was one thing. Mediating, managing, even spinning the sense of intimacy with the artist was one thing.

Selling yourself in a totally false package was something else.

“Look, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re a savvy businesswoman. One of the smartest I’ve met. You know how this game is played. Theater and flash. It’s not really you.”

“Well, it couldn’t be, could it?” I patted down my frizz. Nobody pays for an authentic celebrity with bunions and contact lenses and Botox appointments. They pay for a cunning facsimile of authenticity. A scaffolding they can drape their fantasy over to make it three-dimensional. Not reality.

Real people have real feelings, and real feelings are ugly and complicated. Real feelings are the bleeding edge. Real feelings make people uncomfortable. Nobody spends their beer money on uncomfortable. Part of turning people into consumers is making them think your product will make them like themselves better, not ask themselves harder questions. You have to trick them into confronting uncomfortable. What did John Waters call it? A counterculture stealth bomber? Something like that.

Peter said, “How is it different than convincing the front row that that torch song you’re making love to is really for them?”

I shrugged. “I’m paid to emote, Peter. Not to have emotions.”

He pursed his lips and swirled his wine. My better judgment was under siege. They’d be eating rats and sawdust in there before I knew it, and then it was only a matter of time.

I nibbled a thumbnail. “It’s different, that’s all.”

“Your numbers have been better than they are,” he said slowly. “I had to call in some favors to get them to consider you as a flagship for this. Twist a few arms.”

Whatever happened to ‘They asked for you specifically’? I let the wine touch my upper lip. I licked it off.

I really was too tired for this. “I’ll talk it over with Mitchell.”

“Neon—” His mouth said my name, but his eyebrows said, Are you really taking business advice from that guy?

“Tomorrow,” I said. “No show tomorrow. I’ll have some time to look at numbers, Okay? Have Clarice send them over?”

He scowled, but I knew the species and subspecies of his scowls by heart. This one was a scowl of assent.

At least I liked those better than the sneaky smiles.

I took a mouthful of wine and whiffled air over it to release the bouquet. It was still delicious, despite the churning in my stomach. I’d write it differently in the song.

“I can stick around for a day,” he said. “I want to hear your answer in person.”

And that was Peter for I intend to keep the pressure on.

I Should Never Have Slept With Him: The Neon White Story.

“Damn, honey,” Mitchell said. “He didn’t even ask you if you wanted to get your shoes off first?”

He was sprawled sideways across the boxy beige armchair on the darker beige carpet of the beige-walled hotel room, the tip of one sock-clad foot flipping, flipping, flipping. His head lolled over the opposite side of the chair, dark curls half-hiding his eyes. One of his spidery arms was cocked at a weird angle, the other hugged in close to his chest. He balanced a tablet in front of his eyes and fingertip-skipped through screen after screen of information. His frown got deeper. He huffed and made disgusted cat noises, and I paced and yawned and picked my hair and scavenged an unappetizing room service tray on the theory that it would do my system good to eat something, even if that something was pretty nasty.

Rocks on the road. But they don’t let you write paying-your-dues songs anymore after your third platinum record.

Finally, Mitchell let the tablet fall against his chest. His eyes closed and he seemed to doze for several minutes. I had just given up watching him and gone back to see if there was any warmth left in the coffee when he said, without expression or gesture or opening his eyes, “What have you told him you’re going to do?”

I dolloped in cream. The coffee was gray from reheating. “Talk to you.”

He sniffled dismissively. “Gamble either way. If it flops and you adopted early, you’ll look desperate. If it takes off and you didn’t pick it up out of the gate, you’ll look out of touch.”

“And so the oracle confirms the truth I already knew.”

That at least got him to crack an eyelid. “You gotta get rid of that guy.”

I knew. Honestly, I’d known that for five out of seven years. But that sort of thing—abandoning a relationship—doesn’t come easily to me.

“Does he have a rollout proposal?” Mitch, for reasons of his own, never seemed to say Peter’s name. I wondered if it was conscious avoidance or subconscious disgust.

I rolled my neck, trying to get the tension out. The room was ugly, but the bed hadn’t been too bad. “I thought I might offer to wear the widget for a week or two, just to see what it records,” I said.

He swung his feet to the floor and sat up, corkscrew curls stretching and bouncing like springs as they first caught against, then released from, the rough weave of the upholstery. “Why do you have to record anything? They’re just making it up, right?”

“For the same reason my face has to be under the makeup, I guess. The illusion of depth.” I made a face over the coffee. “Apparently, they can. They can do all kinds of magic with it. But that’s…cheating. Soulless.”

“They used to say the same thing about multitrack remote recording.”

“They were probably right.”

He laughed, knuckled the corners of his eyes, and said, “And intimacy in art is a construct anyway. Art isn’t really about raw unmediated access to reality: that’s reality. You get that at the bus stop. Art is about interpreting reality, pointing up certain aspects of it, focusing attention. Editing.”

Most of my conversations with Mitch could loosely be characterized as “preaching to the choir.” I indulged myself in a little bit of that now, and paraphrased something we’d both said before: “Art isn’t art if it doesn’t have a frame.”

He kept looking at me, as if he expected me to continue.

I shrugged and obliged. “I think a lot of this is getting a baseline. He just wants me to wear it, you know, around for a week or so, until I forget I’m wearing it. We’ll try recording some performances over that time. That would be when we start putting a frame around the thing. The studio bit of the process. So, performance, editing—”

“Can you track out a human heart?”

“Peter thinks so.”

We shared a smile at that, because of course Peter didn’t have a human heart, exactly. He’d had his pulled like a rotten tooth. Or at least rooted out, ground down, and crowned in gold and porcelain.

“You know,” I said, “there have always been people who wanted to control somebody else’s performance, and people who want to control somebody else’s experience of that performance. I think it’s a pathology.”

Mitch raked a hand through his curls, got it caught, tugged it back out again the way it went in. “Never mind that,” he said. “Do you think Peter’s even thought of the risks involved?”

I thought I had, but by the expression of tremendous concern Mitch was wearing, it was obvious I hadn’t thought about it enough. I must have looked completely blank, because Mitch said, “Every celebrity has stalkers, Nee.”

The worst bit was, Peter was right. At least a little bit right: The early signs were there. And as I hunched over my phone checking concert reviews—a terrible narcissistic self-destructive habit, and one I encourage all of my colleagues to quit immediately—I could see all of them. Engagement metrics told me my audience was restless. I needed to bring them something new…but not too new. Something satisfying. I wasn’t the flavor of the month anymore, and there were only two ways it could go from here: I could become a perennial favorite, a mint chocolate chip or coconut sort of a thing…or I could go the trendy way of acai berry, pomegranate, and betel nut.

I closed the app and speed-dialed Peter. He was just down the hall, but I didn’t want to see his face.

“I’ll take the trial rig,” I told him.

“You won’t regret it,” he said.

Peter elected to stick around through the first performance with the new kit. Seventy-two hours is a lifetime in the entertainment industry, and Peter never does anything out of sentiment. Either he was really interested in the results, or he expected me to pull a fast one on him.

I found myself fiddling with my bangle a lot. Maybe Peter had the right idea, and I should get my personal loyalty downgraded a little bit. The problem was, I liked myself the way I was. And that hadn’t always been the case. I’d worked hard for that self-respect, and it seemed cheap to sell it just to make myself a little more comfortable.

I’m a lousy consumer.

The tech guy’s name was Claude, and he was a total dreamboat in a hoodie-and-purple-Chucks, West-Indian-accent, tech-warrior sort of way. Claude was also good at his job. He built the Clownfish into the drum rig, which was convenient, at least—and he managed to do it in under six hours. I could shrug into it and zip it on and off just as I usually did, and there would be nothing to throw me off my stride except making sure the contact surfaces touched the right spots—and my dresser would handle most of that. Suzie was there to help out so she’d have some practical experience for the next time.

The headset was a little more built up than I was accustomed to, into a fairy-wire sort of tiara thing.

And it took a lot of boring, boring fitting. I was used to standing and turning and moving on cue, though I usually listened to audiobooks while I was being fitted for things. This time, I just zoned out.

It was the wrong choice, apparently, because Claude tapped me hesitantly on the shoulder and I jerked out of my reverie.

“Sorry,” he said, with that eye-avoiding deference that makes me want to turn mean, “but can you think about something with some emotional freight? Preferably negative, for this bit? The alpha state doesn’t give us much to tune to.”

“How long have you worked for Clownfish?” I asked.

He winked. “Since the first day. I’m on the board.”

My irritation at his deference turned to respect. This might be a future legend of technology with his hands under my blouse. “I’m flattered.”

He ducked his head. “Management doesn’t get overtime.”

I laughed, and was trying to figure out something that might get my dander up when the dressing room door opened without a knock and Peter sauntered in.

“Hey, Neon,” he said. “Hope you’re disproving the stereotype of the empty-headed singer.”

I sat down hard on a flare of dislike. Claude said, “That’s good. Nice and strong.”

His cool professional demeanor was a pretty good trick, too, since his hands were shoved up underneath my breasts while he adjusted a pearl-white leather strap so it wouldn’t chafe or pinch. Peter strolled over and patted me on the shoulder. The tech and I both jumped as he inadvertently triggered a snare fill from the drum rig. Suzie the dresser didn’t flinch. She must have seen it coming.

“I’m glad you decided to get on board with the Clownfish,” Peter said. “I think it’s a smart business decision.”

He was always nice when he was getting his way. I thought about making some comment about the alteration and curation of self necessary to manage my future as a pop star, but it felt like too much work. Instead, I shrugged and reminded him, “This is just a test.”

I snapped my fingers and got a light, bright cymbal. Peter, damn him, didn’t jump. Neither did Suzie. Maybe she’d just had her startle reflex turned off.

“This thing can receive as well as record?”

Claude nodded from somewhere around my belly button.

“I want a taste,” I said.

His eyes crinkled at the corners. The toes of his purple All-Stars creased as his weight shifted.

“Okay.” A brief pause while he rummaged in his tech-warrior tool kit. “This is not set up to run off my bangle. Just let me sync my phone to the rig…. Got it. You like beaches?”

“I like beaches.”

He tapped his screen with a single-finger flourish.

And I was on a beach. Well, not exactly on a beach: There was no sensation of gritty toes, no sound of water, no burn of heat. But the meditative sense of peace and ease that washed over me was the one that only comes with the hiss of waves, the warmth of sun, and the cool of the breeze, the cry of gulls.

There were no distractions in it, no sense of nagging tasks that must be taken up again when my stroll was done. No bikini strap digging into my shoulder. No worry that some tabloid camera might catch a glimpse of cellulite at the top of my thigh.

It was pure. And impersonal. Timeless. A little chilly. My feeling, and not my feeling. Better, for being unalloyed. Somehow less, for being so clean.

How were people going to react to this? I thought about human emotions. Messy emotions. Emotions that clash and conflict and contradict and confuse. That don’t bother to explain themselves. That send us into therapy, self-medication, medication medication. And here you could get them cleaned up, tidied up, cozied up, and comfortable.

Consolatory.

And we worry about people judging themselves against the photoshopped bodies in fashion ads.

“You edited out all the sand fleas,” I said, when Claude tapped his screen again and the moment ended.

“Nobody pays for sand fleas,” Peter said.

“The second generation is under development, you know,” Claude said. “Once the rigs are more widespread, we’ll be able to set up a sensory loop with the audience. Feedback trance state. We can guarantee that every concert will be the next best thing to an out-of-body experience.”

“Sex,” I said. “But deniable.”

Movie sex, where nobody rolls onto anybody’s hair and nobody ever sneezes.

Peter peered around me to fix his tie in the mirror. Subdued blue and charcoal paisleys, very elegant. “They’ll eat it up,” he said.

I drove my team crazy at the sound check, but you would have, too. I couldn’t even tell the Clownfish was there. Maybe the headpiece was incrementally heavier, or maybe it was my imagination. But other than that homeopathic sensation, the drum rig felt the same, it sounded the same, it moved the same—but I couldn’t escape the feeling that if I just tested enough different combinations enough different ways, something would provoke a failure. So I put the rig and the band and the sound team through everything I planned to do on stage that night, and everything I could ever remember having done by mistake, and everything I could imagine doing by accident. Probably twice.

The rig, for a wonder, worked. Which just redoubled my unease, and the conviction that it was going to fail catastrophically in front of nine and a half thousand people, probably in the middle of “Mystic Verses” or “Digger” or “The Judge.” I was terribly afraid that the new tech would not just crash, but crash in the middle of the popular, showstopping numbers. Thereby, ironically, actually stopping the show.

But if there was a failure built in, or some accidental combination of drum and brain wave that would crash it, I couldn’t find it. And Peter had promised that he and Claude were going to be there all night, and that if anything went wrong it would be fixed posthaste. I disgusted myself by finding Peter’s assurances, well, reassuring. But I also made sure Suzie had the backup drum rig out, and oiled, and ready to go.

And then I stood in the wings and hyperventilated and got in the way—I mean, “supervised”—while the roadies broke down the set for the opening act and wheeled our stuff out, mine and my band’s. I watched chrome and steel and enamel catch the lights from above, and I watched the roadies file off, and I caught my breath and held it as the spots went down.

You think it’s going to get easier with time, that you’re going to get used to it. That with experience, your hands will stop shaking before every show. But they won’t; not as long as you’re alive up there. It’s the adrenaline.

It doesn’t get easier. You just get addicted to it.

At 9:15 p.m., by my bangle, I followed the glow tape onto the darkened stage. I found my mark and took up my position center stage and waited for the hired guns to locate their instruments in the dark. My bangle lit up pale green when everybody checked in as ready.

I snapped the fingers on my left hand.

The electrostatic triggers in the drum rig pick up every motion. Some, they’re calibrated to ignore. But most—the intentional movements of dance, the gestures that punctuate a song—are transformed into percussion, into rhythm, into joy. So my fingers went snap-snap-snap-snap. And the rig translated it into the thump-thump-thump-thump of the bass drum, setting time.

The spots came up. All my white and silver trappings dazzled in the sudden glare.

I’d found my beat. I’d found my light. The technology was working fine. It was going to be Okay again, just as it always was in the end. We were going to do a good show.

And, you know, it was a really good crowd that night. I felt the energy as I hadn’t all tour, and I think the hired guns felt it too. At least, I saw the bassist and the keyboard player grinning at each other through the sweat, and that’s never a bad sign.

I was still high on it when I walked backstage after the encore, and Mitch wasn’t there with my towels. I should have known then, right then, that something was terribly wrong. But the bassist walked over to hug me, and I hugged her, and then we all had a good stoned-on-adrenaline giggle, feeling like we’d finally started working as a group.

When I finally extricated myself, there were still no cold towels. I was irritated, but not really irritated: I’d known Mitchell Kaplanski for the better part of a decade, and if he wasn’t there when I got off stage, something or someone was on fire or shorting out or drunk inappropriately. I resisted wiping my face on my arm, so as not to get makeup on the costume or the rig, and I picked my way over cables and past the bustle of load-out to my dressing room. I poked my head into the buffet along the way, just in case. No Mitch, and it was pretty picked over at this point, but I managed to assemble a chicken fajita with extra extra salsa and a smear of guacamole and ate it—balanced over a paper plate and seasoned with sweat and lipstick—as I minced on aching feet back down the hall to the dressing rooms.

I pressed my bangle to the lock and the door clicked tunelessly. It had been unlocked. Bad news. Had I left it unlocked?

I didn’t think so, but I had been fretting so much about the new technology that I might have forgotten. It was a stupid mistake if I had. Or maybe it had been Mitch or Suzie? Or Peter? Or the venue manager? Nobody else was supposed to have the code…

I opened the door.

Of course it’s no surprise what I found. Everybody knows what I found.

Mitchell sprawled bonelessly across the ruined Envirug. It had humped up around him, trying to support his spine and neck, but it hadn’t been able to do much other than flop him like a rag doll. His blood had soaked the white pile, which was thick and sodden with syrupy, gagging crimson on every side of his corpse.

I was cooler than I would have expected myself to be. When I realized where I was, the wooden floor had bruised my knees, but I hadn’t screamed and I had my bangle to my ear and was dialing 911.

It was 4 a.m. before the police finished with me, but Claude was fiddling with the backup rig when I walked in, the one I’d been wearing on stage dangling from my left hand.

“Everything okay?” I asked.

“Er,” he said. “Yes?”

I gave him my best Dazzling Smile. God knows the orthodontia cost enough. “Hey, Claude?”

He raised a properly suspicious eyebrow. Flirting was the wrong tack, I decided. An appeal to his hacker identity was more likely to get me what I wanted.

I said, “Can you show me how to download and compile that raw file? The one we made tonight?” I held up the drum rig and let it swing from my crooked fingers.

“You going to do something illegal with it?”

“Only technically.” I winked.

A smile spread across his face like bread rising, warm and steady. I felt like a first-class heel for using his ideals so cynically. But I did it anyway.

At least I felt bad about it. It’s possible that’s the biggest thing separating me from Peter.

Peter was on a call, headset rather than bangle, when I found him in the business office. Because he was Peter, and if he went without contact with his phone for longer than fifteen minutes, withdrawal symptoms might set in.

From his end of the conversation it sounded like he was setting up a press conference. About the death. Of course.

“Put this on.” I shoved the Clownfish tiara at him.

He stared at me, his hands not moving, his mouth making noises that were probably very important to the person on the other end of the line. The tiara wobbled across my palm. I wanted to jam it down his throat.

I threw it into his lap because that was better than hitting him with it. “Put it on,” I said again.

“Gotta go,” he said to the phone call, and dropped the connection. He set his gadget aside and picked up the headpiece. “Are you about to pull a gun on me, Neon?”

“There’d be some buzz in that.” I tried for sweet reason and probably approximated icy mildness. “And the cameras in here aren’t mysteriously malfunctioning, the way the ones in my dressing room were.”

He blinked and glanced at the door.

I said, “You got your wish. Plenty of news coverage.”

His eyes went sideways to the phone this time. Probably a better bet than trying to get past me. “You know, in the long run, Mitchell’s death might turn out to be a good thing for you.”

“Are you insinuating I killed my best friend, Peter? Because I think we both know that’s not true.”

“You couldn’t have,” he said calmly. “You were on stage in front of ten thousand people.” The consummate press agent, still: always rounding up the numbers. “And you were wearing the Clownfish. Your alibi is airtight. If I do say so myself.”

My lip curled. I felt like Grace Jones for a moment. Billy Idol. It was probably a better look on them.

“How’s your alibi, Peter?”

He tapped the thin plastic oblong in his shirt pocket. “I’ve been on the phone all night, except when the police were talking to me.”

God. I wondered if he could manage to carry on an upbeat conversation with some fluff page reporter while simultaneously shooting Mitch three times in the chest. The headset was a noise-canceling model.

It was actually plausible. He would only have felt fear, remorse, emotional connection if he chose to, after all: He’d elected to turn all that off by default. Otherwise, assuming he got the drop on Mitch—which whoever killed him patently had—it would have been as complicated for him to kill somebody while carrying on a conversation as it was for most of us to talk on the phone while rummaging in the fridge.

Yes, he was capable of planning a murder, carrying it off, and never getting caught. And it’s not like I had any proof. I just…knew Peter.

“Put the tiara on.”

I must have gotten the sneer right that time, because he reached out gently and picked the thing up, then set it on his head. I’d cued it up to autoplay at the moment when I’d turned the knob and opened the door.

I watched him with a lover’s interest.

His face pinched. He winced.

And then he shut off—touched his bangle and calmed himself, tuned out, edited whatever empathic function he’d been feeling. Back to his baseline sociopathy.

It probably was a good thing I didn’t have a gun.

“Of course it’s a miserable thing to have happened, sweetheart. And of course you’re upset. But think of how advantageously we can cast this. It’s romantic. It’s tragic.”

“Mitch and I weren’t romantically involved, as you know perfectly well.”

He shrugged.

I said, “You killed him.”

“What possible benefit to me could there be in such an action?”

Media interest. Buzz. Drama. Gossip. The top of the news cycle, baby.

But I didn’t actually have to say that. Instead I dropped my voice and said, “Promise me you did not kill him.”

Peter smiled sadly. “I promise you, Neon. I did not kill your friend. But I don’t expect that to change your mind.”

He was lying. Was he lying? He must have known that I would never allow him to pressure me into using Mitch’s death to my advantage. Mustn’t he? Had he turned off those parts of his brain as well?

Could I avoid Mitch’s death serving my career? Actually, I couldn’t see how, when, as Peter said, my alibi was bulletproof. Hell, I’d been wearing the Clownfish. It wouldn’t even hold water that I might have hired someone to do away with him.

“A virtual poker face isn’t going to cut it anymore,” Peter said. “The fans want to feel you have skin in the game. Real loss. This will help you. You’ll see. Everybody loves a little tragedy.”

“Murder,” I said. “But deniable.”

He smiled. Yes, I was sure he’d done it. And I was sure that no one would ever prove it. Peter was a very, very plausible man: an asset in his profession.

Even if I went to the police with my suspicions, Peter would somehow use our history to suggest that I was a jilted girlfriend out for revenge. Even if I hadn’t killed anybody, that was going to look great in the tabloids. If I thought I could convict him, I’d go for it. But no. Not for nothing, not to make him look like a martyr. No.

“And we have the Clownfish recording.” He tapped his ugly plastic tiara. “That’s unbelievable, what that’s going to be worth. The artist who is willing to exploit this medium is an artist who is going to the top.”

“You’re fired,” I told him.

“I work for the label, Neon, not for you.”

“The label’s fired. You’re all fired. I’ll walk away right now.”

“Neon.” He shook his head soothingly. “I know you’re upset and confused. But what are you going to do without Mitch and without me? Nobody can handle that kind of isolation in a high-stress career, sweetheart.”

I closed my eyes. Nausea clotted at the back of my tongue. “You’re probably right.”

He smiled.

“You’re still fired.” My Reasonable Voice was coming out as more of a snarl. “Have Clarice write up some sort of buyout agreement for the rest of the tour. You can tell her I’ll pay anything reasonable to settle. Unless you really want to fight out a long, expensive breach of contract suit.”

The smile sagged into a gape. I wished I were still wearing the Clownfish. I would have liked these emotions on tape.

“And I’m releasing that Clownfish tape,” I said. “You’re not going to make a penny selling it.”

His stricken look—so much more pained than when he’d watched Mitch die through my eyes—told me I’d struck pay dirt. Filthy, stinking pay dirt.

Well, there would certainly be buzz all right.

“You can’t release it,” he said. “It’s our intellectual property. Ours and Clownfish’s.”

“Is it?” I smiled, though it felt like plastic pinned across my lips. “What a pity it’s already been pirated, then.”

I turned away. It took a lot of will not to slam the door behind me, but it was so much more satisfying to let it drift slowly, aimlessly closed between us.

I glanced back over my shoulder once as I walked away down the hall. Peter was standing there. He’d opened the door and stood framed in the doorway, waiting for me to come back to him, the ridiculous tiara crooked on his head.

Peter waited. And I walked away.

A prolific, award-winning science fiction and fantasy author, Elizabeth Bear won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2005, then went on to win the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2006 for Hammered. She followed it up with two sequels to form the Jenny Casey trilogy, just one of her many series, including the Eternal Sky trilogy (which Tor.com called “the most significant epic fantasy published in the last decade”), the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy, the New Amsterdam series, the Promethean Age series, and others. Equally recognized for her short work, Bear won a Hugo Award in 2008 for her short story “Tideline” and another for her novelette “Shoggoths in Bloom” in 2009. Bear’s activity in science fiction and fantasy fan communities has garnered her a loyal online following, as well as two Hugo Awards for Best Fancast for SF Squeecast, for which she is a regular contributor (along with fellow author Seanan McGuire).

Nancy Kress

Machine Learning

Ethan slipped into the back of the conference room in Building 5 without being noticed. Fifty researchers and administrators, jammed into the room lab-coat-to-suit, all faced the projection stage. Today, of course, it would be set for maximum display. The CEO of the company was here, his six-foot-three frame looming over the crowd. Beside him, invisible to Ethan in the crush, would be tiny Anne Gonzalez, R&D chief. For five years a huge proportion of the Biological Division’s resources—computational, experimental, human—had been directed toward this moment.

Anne’s clear voice said, “Run.”

Some people leaned slightly forward. Some bit their lips or clasped their hands. Jerry Liu rose onto the balls of his feet, like a fighter. They all had so much invested in this: time, money, hope.

The holostage brightened. The incredibly complex, three-dimensional network of structures within a nerve cell sprang into view, along with the even more complicated lines of the signaling network that connected them. Each line of those networks had taken years to identify, validate, understand. Then more time to investigate how any input to one substructure could change the whole. Then the testing of various inputs, each one a molecule aimed at the deadly thing near the center of the cell, the growing mass of Moser’s Syndrome. All this hard work, all the partnering with pharmaceutical companies, in order to arrive at Molecule 654-a, their best chance.

So far, no one had noticed Ethan.

The algorithm for 654-a began to run, and in a moment the interaction combinations produced the output on the right side of the screen. Only two outputs were possible: “continued cell function” or “apoptosis.” The apoptosis symbol glowed. A second later, in a burst of nonrealistic theatrics, the cell drooped and sagged like one of Dalí’s clocks, and the lethal structure at its heart vanished.

Cheering erupted in the room. People hugged each other. A lab tech stood on tiptoe and kissed the surprised CEO. They had done it, identified a possible cure for the disease that attacked the bodies of children, and only children, killing half a billion kids worldwide in the last five years. They had done it with molecular computation, with worldwide partnerships with universities and Big Pharma, and with sheer grit.

Someone to Ethan’s left said, “Oh!” Then someone else noticed him, and someone after that. Ethan’s story was company-wide gossip. The people at the front of the room went on burbling and hugging, but a small pocket of silence grew around him, the embarrassed silence of people caught giggling at a wake. Laura Avery started toward him.

He didn’t want to talk to Laura. He didn’t want to spoil this important celebration. Quickly he moved through the door, down the corridor, into the elevator. Laura, following, called out, “Ethan!” He hit the DOOR CLOSE button before she could reach him.

In the lobby he walked rapidly out the door, heading through the rain toward his own facility. Buildings of brick and glass rose ghostly in the thick mist. MultiFuture Research was a big campus, and he was soaked by the time he reached Building 18. Inside, he nodded at Security and shook himself like a dog. Droplets spun off him. What the hell had he done with his umbrella? He couldn’t remember, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was to get back to his own work.

He didn’t belong at a celebration to defeat Moser’s Syndrome.

Too late, too late. Way too late.

Building 18 was devoted to machine learning. Ethan’s research partner, Jamie Peregoy, stood in their lab, welcoming this afternoon’s test subject, Cassie McAvoy. The little girl came with her mother every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday after school. Ethan took his place at the display console.

That end of the lab was filled with desks, computers, and messy folders full of printouts. The other end held child-sized equipment: a musical keyboard, a video-game console, tables and chairs, blocks, and puzzles. The back wall was painted a supposedly cheerful yellow that Ethan found garish. In the center, like a sentry in no-man’s-land, stood a table with coffee and cookies.

“The problem with machine learning isn’t intelligence,” Jamie always said to visitors. “It’s defining intelligence. Is it intelligence to play superb chess, crunch numbers, create algorithms, carry on a conversation indistinguishable from a human gabfest? No. Turing was wrong. True intelligence requires the ability to learn for oneself, tackling new tasks you haven’t done before, and that requires emotion as well as reasoning. We don’t retain learning unless it’s accompanied by emotion, and we learn best when emotional arousal is high. Can our Maip do that? No, she cannot.”

If visitors tried to inject something here, they were out of luck. Jamie would go into full-lecture mode, discoursing on the role of the hippocampus in memory retention, on how frontal-lobe injuries taught us that too little emotion could impair decision making as deeply as too much emotion, on how arousal levels were a better predictor of learning retention than whether the learning was positive or negative. Once Jamie got going, he was as unstoppable as a star running back, which was what he resembled. Young, brilliant, and charismatic, he practically glittered with energy and enthusiasm. Ethan went through periods where he warmed himself at Jamie’s inner fire, and other periods where he avoided Jamie for days at a time.

MAIP, the MultiFuture Research Artificial Intelligence Program based in the company’s private cloud, could not play chess, could not feel emotion, and could only learn within defined parameters. Ethan, whose field was the analysis of how machine learning algorithms performed, believed that true AI was decades off, if it were possible at all. Did Jamie believe that? Hard to tell. When he spoke their program’s name, Ethan could hear that to Jamie it was a name, not an acronym. He had given MAIP a female voice. “Someday,” Jamie said, “she’ll be smarter than we are.” Ethan had not asked Jamie to define “someday.”

The immediate, more modest goal was for MAIP to learn what others felt, so that MAIP could better assist their learning.

“Hello, Cassie, Mrs. McAvoy,” Jamie said, with one of his blinding smiles. Cassie, a nine-year-old in overalls and a T-shirt printed with kittens, smiled back. She was a prim little girl, eager to please adults. Well-mannered, straight A’s, teacher’s pet. “Never any trouble at home,” her mother had said, with pride. Ethan guessed she was not popular with other kids. But she was a valuable research subject, because MAIP had to learn to distinguish between genuine human emotions and “social pretense”—feelings expressed because convention expected it. When Cassie said, “I like you,” did she mean it?

“Ready for the minuet, Cassie?” Jamie asked.

“Yes.”

“Then let’s get started! Here’s your magic bracelet, princess!” He slipped it onto her thin wrist. Mrs. McAvoy took a chair at the back of the lab. Cassie walked to the keyboard and began to play Bach’s “Minuet in G,” the left-hand part of the arrangement simplified for beginners. Jamie moved behind her, where she could not see him. Ethan studied MAIP’s displays.

Sensors in Cassie’s bracelet measured her physiological responses: heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, skin conductance, and temperature. Tiny cameras captured her facial-muscle movement and eye saccades. The keyboard was wired to register the pressure of her fingers. When she finished the minuet, MAIP said, “That was good! But let’s talk about the way you arch your hands, okay, Cassie?” Voice analyzers measured Cassie’s responses: voice quality, timing, pitch. MAIP used the data to adjust the lesson: slowing down her instruction when Cassie seemed too frustrated, increasing the difficulty of what MAIP asked for when the child showed interest.

They moved on, teacher and pupil, to Bach’s “Polonaise in D.” Cassie didn’t know this piece as well. MAIP was responsive and patient, tailoring her comments to Cassie’s emotional data.

It looked so effortless. But years of work had gone into this piano lesson between a machine and a not-very-talented child. They had begun with a supervised classification problem, inputting observational data to obtain an output of what a test subject was feeling. Ethan had used a full range of pattern recognition and learning algorithms. But Jamie, the specialist in affective computing, had gone far beyond that. He had built, “by hand,” one complicated concept at a time, approaches to learning that did not depend on simpler, more general principles like logic. Then he’d made considerable progress in the difficult problem of integrating generative and discriminative models of machine learning. Thanks to Jamie, MAIP was a hybrid, multi-agent system, incorporating symbolic and logical components with sub-symbolic neural networks, plus some new soft-computing approaches he had invented. These borrowed methods from probability theory to maximize the use of incomplete or uncertain information.

MAIP learned from each individual user. When Cassie’s data showed her specific frustration level rising to a point where it interfered with her learning, MAIP slowed down her instruction. When Cassie showed interest in a direction, MAIP took the lesson there. It all looked so smooth, Ethan’s and Jamie’s work invisible to anyone but them.

At the end of the hour, MAIP said, “Well done, Cassie!”

“Thank you.”

“I hope you enjoyed the lesson.”

“Yes.”

“See you on Monday, then.”

“Okay.”

Mrs. McAvoy took Cassie’s hand, exchanged a few pleasantries with Jamie, and led Cassie out the door. It closed. In the corridor, the motion-activated surveillance system turned on.

Jamie beamed at Ethan. “That went really well! Maip—”

“I don’t want to come here anymore,” said the image of Cassie on the surveillance screen.

“Why not?” Mrs. McAvoy said.

“It’s no fun. Please, Mommy, can we never come here again?”

Silence in the lab. Finally Ethan said, “I guess we need to work more on the ontology of social pretense.”

Jamie looked crushed. “Damn! I thought Cassie liked coming here! She fooled me completely!”

“More to the point, she fooled MAIP.”

“All the subagents worked so well on yesterday’s test kid!”

“There’s no free lunch.”

Jamie had a rare flash of anger. “Ethan—do you always have to be so negative? And so fucking calm about it?”

“Yes,” Ethan said, and they parted in mutual snits. Ethan knew that Jamie’s wouldn’t last; it wasn’t in his nature. There they were, yoked together, the Apollo and Cassandra of machine learning.

Or maybe just Roo and Eeyore.

The first time Ethan had heard about Moser’s Syndrome, he’d been chopping wood in the backyard and listening to the news on his tablet. Chopping wood was an anachronism he enjoyed: the warming of his muscles, the satisfying clunk of axe on birch logs, the smell of fresh wood chips on the warm August air. In a corner of the tiny yard, against the whitewashed fence, chrysanthemums bloomed scarlet and gold.

“—coup in Mali that—”

Also, if he was honest with himself, he liked being out of the house while Tina was in it. His year-old marriage was not going well. The vivacity that had originally attracted Ethan, so different from his own habitual constraint, was wearing thin. For Tina, every difference of opinion was a betrayal, every divergent action a crisis. But she was pregnant, and Ethan was determined to stick it out.

“—tropical storm off the coast of North Carolina, and FEMA is urging—”

Thunk! Another fall of the axe on wood, not a clean stroke. Ethan pulled the axe out of the log. Tina came out of the house, carrying a tray of iced tea. Although her belly was still flat, she proudly wore a maternity top. The tea tray held a plate of his favorite chocolate macaroons. They were both trying.

“Hey, babes,” Tina said. Ethan forced a smile. He’d told her at least three times that he hated being called “babes.”

He said, “The cookies look good.”

She said, “I hope they are.”

The radio said, “Repeat: This just in. The CDC has identified the virus causing Moser’s Syndrome, even as the disease has spread to two more cities in the Northwest. Contrary to earlier reports, the disease is transmitted by air and poses a significant threat to fetuses in the first and early second trimester of pregnancy. All pregnant women in Washington and Oregon are urged to avoid public gatherings whenever possible until more is known. The—”

Ethan’s axe slipped from his hand, landing on his foot and partially severing his little toe in its leather sandal.

Tina shrieked. In his first stunned moment, he thought she’d screamed at the blood flowing from his foot. But she threw the tray at him, crying, “You took me to that soccer game last week! How could you! If anything happens to this baby, I’ll never forgive you!” She burst into tears and ran into the house, leaving Ethan staring at the end of his foot. A chunk of toe lay disjointed from the rest, bloody pulp surrounded by chocolate macaroons. Vertigo swept over him. It passed. The newscaster began to interview a doctor about embryonic damage, nerve malformation, visible symptoms in newborns.

Ethan shifted his gaze to the axe, as if it and not a maybe-living-maybe-not molecule were the danger to his unborn child. An ordinary axe: silver blade, hardwood handle, manufacturer’s name printed in small letters. Absurdly, a sentence rose in his mind from decades ago, a lecture from his first tech professor when he’d been an undergraduate: Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.

Then the pain rushed in, and he bent over and vomited. After that, he pushed the chunk of toe back into place, wrapped his shirt around it, and applied pressure.

If anything happens to this baby, I’ll never forgive you!

They divorced eighteen months later.

Social pretense was not a problem with one of Jamie and Ethan’s other research subjects, eleven-year-old Trevor Reynod. He barreled into the lab, shouting, “I’m here! Freakish! Let’s go!”

“My man!” Jamie said, giving him a fist bump that Trevor practically turned into an assault.

“Jamie! And Dr. Stone Man!” That was the kid’s name for Ethan. Ethan didn’t object, as long as Trevor stayed well away from him. Trevor suffered from ADHD, although most of the suffering seemed to belong to the tired-looking mother who trailed in after him. A member of some sect that didn’t believe in medication, she refused to allow Trevor to be calmed down by drugs, but computer games were apparently allowed. Ethan suspected that these thrice-weekly sessions were an immense relief to her; she could turn Trevor over to someone else. Mrs. Reynod poured herself some coffee and slumped into the easy chair in the corner.

Trevor pummeled the air and danced in place, knocking over a pile of blocks. Jamie got the bracelet onto his wrist (“Your superpower ring, dude!”) and settled both of them in front of a game console as carefully wired as Cassie’s keyboard. Trevor’s data began to flow down Ethan’s display. MAIP was silent during Trevor’s sessions, adjusting his game in response to his frustration or satisfaction levels but not instructing him. Trevor did not respond well to direct instruction.

The game involved piloting a futuristic one-man plane, ridiculously represented as a bullet-shaped soap bubble. Its flight simulator was state-of-the-art, similar to the one used to train USAF jet pilots, who might eventually have MAIP incorporated into their training sessions. While flying over various war-torn terrains, Trevor had to shoot down alien craft to avoid being vaporized and to dodge falling stars that appeared from nowhere. Jamie’s role was to fire at Trevor from the ground. He almost never hit him, which allowed MAIP more control and Trevor merciless mockery.

“Ha! Missed me again!”

“You’re really good, Trev.”

He was. Like most attention-deficit kids, Trevor could muster enormous powers of concentration when the activity actually interested him.

They followed their plan of transitioning Trevor from the shooting game to one teaching math in the last fifteen minutes of the hour. Trevor’s levels of arousal and engagement fell, but not as far as they had the previous week. This was a new version of the math game, punchier and more inventive. In effect, Trevor was beta-testing Math Monkeys, while Ethan and Jamie gained learning-algorithm data from him.

The session was a success. After Trevor left, shouting about his victory over the math monkeys, Jamie said, “Did you catch that? Maip tried a stutter-and-recover strategy on him! We didn’t program that!”

“Not in quite that form, anyway.”

“Come on, Ethan, she figured out for herself how to apply it! She learned!”

“Maybe.” He would have to do the analysis first.

But Jamie danced around the lab in an exuberant imitation of Trevor. “Freakish! She did it, Dr. Stone Man! You did it! Go, Maip!”

Ethan smiled. It felt odd, as if his face were cracking.

At midnight, Ethan let himself into the modeling lab in Building 6. The place was empty, even the most die-hard geek having gone out on a Friday night for beer and company. “Lights on low,” Ethan said. The lab complied.

He’d told himself he wasn’t going to do this again. It only made everything harder. But he could not resist. This was the only place that felt meaningful to him now—or at least the only place where meaning felt natural, like air, instead of having to be manufactured moment after effortful moment.

The lab contained, in addition to its staggeringly expensive machinery, three “rooms,” each with the missing fourth wall of a theater stage or a furniture showroom. The largest was an empty, white-walled box, used to project VR environments ranging from an Alpine village to the surface of the moon. The two furnished rooms represented living spaces with sofas and tables, onto which could be projected the VR programs: changing a chair from red velour to yellow brocade, setting out bottles on a table. Old stuff, but it was the starting point for the real challenge of modeling three-dimensional “reality” that could move and be moved, touch and be touched. This lab, already a huge profit-maker for MultiFuture Research, was usually the first one shown to visitors.

Some of the programs, however, were private.

Ethan slipped on a VR glove and put his password into the projector aimed at the smallest room. It sprang to life and Allyson was there, sitting on the floor, holding her stuffed Piglet. This was the Allyson he’d brought to the lab near the end of her illness, when it was clear that the doctors’ pathetically inadequate measures could not help her. Four more months, they said, but it had been only two. Ethan was grateful that Allyson had gone so quickly; he’d seen children for whom Moser’s Syndrome took its slower, crueler time.

Tina had not been grateful. By that point, she had barely been Tina.

Allyson had loved Winnie the Pooh. Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore had been her friends, but Piglet had been more: a talisman, an icon. Once she’d told Ethan that she hated Christopher Robin, “because his Piglet can talk to him and mine can’t.”

The 3-D model of Allyson raised her head and looked up at Ethan. It was a tremendous technical achievement, that mobile action on a holographic projection. Right now, Ethan didn’t care. When he’d brought Allyson here, late at night on another Friday, she’d already begun to lose weight. Her skin had gone as colorless as the sheets she lay on at home. Her hair had fallen out in patches. Ethan had known this was his last chance; the following week Allyson had gone into the hospital. When Tina had found out what he’d done, she had raged at him with a ferocity excessive even for her. Although it should have been a warning.

The model of Allyson—or, rather, the voice recorder in the computer—said, “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby,” Ethan said. And she smiled.

That was it. Ten seconds of Allyson’s short life, and an enormous expenditure of bandwidth. He hadn’t kept his daughter in the lab longer than that; she’d looked too tired. Ethan hoped that the Biological Division’s Molecule 654-a could cure Moser’s Syndrome. But for him, there was only this.

He called up the overlay programs, one by one. Allyson’s skin brightened to rosy pink. Her hair became thick and glossy again, without bare patches. Her little body grew sturdier. Her eyes opened wider. “Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.” He reached out with the VR glove and stroked her cheek. The sensation was there: smooth, warm flesh.

Over and over he played the enhanced, miraculously mobile model. Throughout, Ethan kept his face rigid, his hands under control, his thoughts disciplined. He was not Tina. He would never let himself be Tina.

No one, not friends or colleagues, had known how to treat Ethan after Allyson, after Tina. “Call us,” friends had said while Ethan awaited Allyson’s diagnosis, “if anything goes wrong.” And later, after Tina, “Call us if you need anything.” But there is no one to call when everything goes wrong, when you need what you can never have back.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.”

When he’d had his fill, the fix that kept him from becoming Tina, he closed the program and went home.

On Monday, Laura Avery waylaid him as he walked from the parking lot to Building 18. This being October in Seattle, it was still raining, but at least Ethan had remembered his umbrella. She had one too, blue with a reproduction of a Marc Chagall painting, which seemed to him a frivolous use of great art. Laura, however, was not frivolous. Serious but not humorless, she had made important contributions during her months at MultiFuture Research, or so he’d been told. The company, like all companies, was a cauldron of gossip.

“Ethan! Wait up!”

He had no choice, unless he wanted to appear rude.

She was direct, without flirtatious games. Ordinarily he would have liked that. But this was not ordinarily, and it never would be again, not for him. Laura said, “I wondered if you’d like to have dinner one night at my place. I’m a good cook, and I can do vegetarian.”

“I’m not vegetarian.”

“I know, but I thought I’d just show off my fabulous culinary range.” She smiled whimsically.

It was an attractive smile; she was an attractive woman. When they’d first been introduced, Laura had glanced quickly at his left hand, and her smile had grown warmer. He’d taken off his wedding ring the day after Tina had left him, long before she’d killed herself. Later, after someone had undoubtedly told Laura about Ethan’s story, Laura had grown more circumspect. But the warmth had still been there; he hadn’t needed MAIP to read her face. Now, a year after Tina’s death, this invitation—had someone told Laura it was exactly one year? Was she that coldly correct?

No. She was an intelligent, appealing woman aware enough of her appeal to go directly after someone she liked. Why she liked him was a mystery; in Ethan’s opinion, there wasn’t enough of him left to like. Or to accept a dinner invitation.

“Sorry. I’m busy.”

She recognized the lie but hid any feeling of rejection. “Okay. Maybe another time.”

“Thanks anyway.”

That was it. A nothing encounter. But it left him feeling fragile, and he hated that. The only thing that had gotten him through the last year was the opposite of fragility: controlled, resolute, carefully modeled action.

After his encounter with Laura, he threw himself into work, trying to figure out why MAIP hadn’t detected Cassie McAvoy’s social pretense of enjoying her piano lesson. He found a few promising leads, but nothing definitive.

How far they still had to go was made clear by Jenna Carter.

Jamie was good with the children who came to the machine lab. Sometimes Ethan thought this was because Jamie, brilliant as he was, was still a child himself: enthusiastic, sloppy, saved from terminal nerdiness only by his all-American good looks. Untested, as yet, by anything harsh. Other times Ethan felt ashamed of this facile assessment; Jamie was good with kids because he liked them.

Not, however, all of them equally. While Jamie had no trouble with Trevor Reynod, he had to hide his dislike for Jenna, who wasn’t even a test subject, only the babysitter for her little brother Paul.

They came in after school on Tuesday. Paul, at eight years old their youngest subject, went straight to the small table where Jamie had set out a wooden puzzle map of the United States.

“Hey, Paul,” Jamie said. “How’s it going?”

“Good.” Paul had a thin face, a shock of red hair, and a sweet smile.

“Can I put the magic bracelet on you? Have to warn you, though, it might turn you invisible.”

Paul looked uncertain for a moment, caught Jamie’s grin, and laughed. “No, it won’t!”

“Well, if you’re sure—let’s see if you can put this puzzle together. Recognize it? It’s our country, all fifty states. Wow! That’s a lot of states! What a challenge!”

“I can do it!”

Jenna pushed forward. “He can’t do that! It’s too hard! He’s only in the third grade!”

“Yes, I can!” Paul picked up Maine and fitted it into the upper right corner of the wooden holder. “See?”

“That one’s easy, dingleberry! Anybody can get Maine!” She turned to Jamie. “Our mother said I was supposed to do the puzzles today.”

Paul looked up, outraged. “No, she didn’t!”

“Did too!”

“Did not!” Jenna grabbed her brother by the shoulders and tried to pull him out of the chair.

“Hey! Quit it! Dr. Peregoy!”

Jamie detached Jenna’s hands. “Paul, let Jenna try the puzzle. I’ll let you do the flight simulator.”

Paul’s mouth opened and his eyebrows rose: surprise, one of the basic facial-recognition patterns. The flight simulator was a treat usually withheld until the end of each session.

Jenna cried, “No fair! I want to do the flight simulator!”

“Maybe later.” Jamie slipped the sensor bracelet off Paul and onto Jenna, and pushed her gently onto the chair. “After all, your mother said you should do the puzzle, right?”

Jenna glared at him. “Yeah!”

“Then let’s see how fast you can do it.”

Jenna hunted for a place to fit Iowa. Paul ineptly piloted the transparent bubble. (“You have crashed the jet, Paul,” MAIP said.) Ethan wondered what Jamie was doing. Then he got it: Jamie wanted to see if MAIP could detect the fact that Jenna was lying. Ethan studied his displays.

MAIP worked with what was, basically, a set of medical data. It didn’t have the context to interpret what that data might mean. To detect social pretense—which it also couldn’t do yet—its algorithms used a subject’s baseline data, observed data, and contradictions among the ontologies of emotion. But MAIP hadn’t “learned” Jenna, couldn’t yet do cold readings without a subject’s baseline data, and had neither context nor algorithms to detect lies. So it was no surprise that MAIP didn’t recognize Jenna’s lies.

“Well,” Jamie said after the children left, “it was worth a shot.”

“Not really,” Ethan said.

“Mr. Negative.”

“MAIP didn’t even register social pretense for Jenna, no matter how much you led her into lying. We’re just not there yet.”

Jamie sighed. “I know.”

“What you just did was no better than a polygraph, and there’s a reason polygraphs aren’t admissible in court. Not reliable enough.”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But there should be some way to do this.”

“We need to solve the problem of social pretense first, and with subjects that we do have baseline data for.”

Jamie said, “Maybe if we…no, that wouldn’t work. And—oh, God, I just thought of another problem. Jenna clearly knew she was lying, but what if someone has convinced themselves that they feel one thing but are actually feeling something different? Like, say, a woman who convinces herself she’s in love, even though all she really wants is to have babies before her biological clock stops ticking? She doesn’t really feel love for some poor schlump but thinks she does, to ease her conscience about trapping him?”

Was this a glimpse into Jamie’s personal life? If so, Ethan didn’t want to know about it. He said, more primly than he intended, “Oh, I think most people know what they really feel.”

Jamie gave him a strange look. “Really, Ethan?”

“Yes. But the point here is that MAIP didn’t know.”

Jamie picked up Texas and fitted it into the puzzle, his head bent over the small table, his hair falling forward over his face and hiding his expression.

December, and still raining. Ethan went to the modeling lab late on a Sunday afternoon. He was alone in the building; it was almost Christmas. Water dripped from his raincoat and umbrella onto the floor. “Lights on.”

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.”

Allyson smiled, and the recording ended. He clothed her in artificial health, pink cheeks, and lustrous hair, and started it again.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.”

He stroked her cheek. Soft, so soft in his VR glove. But Allyson had not been a soft child. Not noisy and obnoxious like Trevor or Jenna, not hidden and falsely polite like Cassie. Allyson had been direct, opinionated, with a will of diamond. She and Tina clashed constantly over what clothes Allyson would put on, what her bedtime was, whether she could cross the street alone, why she drew butterflies instead of the alphabet on her kindergarten “homework.” Ethan had been the buffer between his wife and daughter. It seemed ridiculous that a five-year-old had to be buffered against, but that was the way it had been. Allyson and Tina had been too much alike, and when Tina had blamed not only Ethan but herself for exposing Allyson to Moser’s Syndrome, Ethan had not seen the danger. Tina, dramatic to the end, had thrown herself under a Metro train at the Westlake Tunnel Station.

Allyson would not have grown up like that. As she matured, she would have become calmer, more controlled. Ethan was sure of it. She would have become the companion and ally that Tina had not been.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.”

The recording stopped, but Ethan talked on. “We’re having trouble with MAIP’s ability to attune, Allyson.”

She gazed at him from solemn eyes. Light golden brown, the color of November fields in sunshine.

“‘Attune’ means that two people are aware of and responsive to each other.” And attunement began early, between mother and infant. Was that what had gone wrong between Allyson and Tina? He and Allyson had always been attuned to each other.

Ethan reached out both arms, one in the VR glove and one bare. Both arms passed through the model of Allyson that was made only of light. The gloved hand tingled briefly, but it still moved through the child as if she did not exist.

For a terrible second, Ethan’s brain filled with thick, tarry mist, cold as liquid nitrogen. He went rigid and clamped his teeth tightly together. The mist disappeared. He was in control again.

He turned off the recording, wiped the rain droplets from the floor, and left.

Zhao Tailoring didn’t open until 10 a.m. on Mondays. Ethan, who’d been there at 8:30, waited in a Starbucks, slowly drinking a latte he didn’t want. The Seattle Times lay open on the table, but he couldn’t concentrate. At 9:50 he threw his cup in the trash, left his unread paper, and walked back across the street to the tailor shop. He huddled under the roof overhang, out of the rain.

Tailoring was not part of his life. Ethan bought clothes haphazardly, getting whatever size seemed the best fit and ignoring whatever gaps might present themselves. The window of Zhao Tailoring held Christmas decorations and three mannequins. The plastic-resin woman wore a satin gown; the man, slacks and a double-breasted blazer; the child, a pair of overalls over a ruffled blouse. They looked bound for three entirely different events. The sign said ALTERATIONS * REPAIRS * NEW CLOTHES MADE. At 9:58, an Asian woman unlocked the front door.

“Ethan! What are you doing here?”

Laura Avery, under her Marc Chagall umbrella. Ethan felt his face go rigid. “Hello, Laura.”

“Are you having tailoring done?” Her voice held amusement but no condescension.

“No. What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at work?”

Her brows rose in surprise at his harsh tone. “I had a doctor’s appointment across the street. Nothing serious. Are you having a suit made?”

“I already said I wasn’t having tailoring done. Please stop asking me personal questions.”

Surprise changed to hurt, her features going slack in the blue shadows under the umbrella. “Sorry, I just—”

“If I wanted to talk to you, I would.”

A moment of silence. Ethan opened his mouth to apologize, to explain that he was just distracted, but before he could speak, she turned and stalked away.

“You come in, yes?” the Asian woman said.

Ethan went in.

“You want nice suit, yes? Special this week.”

“No. I don’t want a suit. I want…I want to buy the mannequin in the window.” Incongruously, an old childish song ran through his head: How much is that doggie in the window?

“You want buy what?”

She didn’t have much English. The person who did was late showing up for work. “You come again, twelve o’clock maybe, one—”

“No. I want to buy the mannequin…the doll.” They had finally agreed on this word. “Now. For a hundred dollars.” He had no idea what store mannequins cost.

She shook her head. “No, I cannot—”

“Two hundred dollars. Cash.” He took out his wallet.

They settled on two-fifty. She stripped the overalls and blouse off the mannequin, and, to his relief, she put it in a large, opaque suit bag. Ethan watched its stiff plastic form—hairless, with a monochromatic and expressionless face—disappear into the bag. He put it in the trunk of his car, pushing from his mind every bad B movie about murderers and wrapped-up bodies.

Marilyn Mahjoub was fifteen minutes late for her first testing session. Waiting, Jamie paced, smacking a fist into his palm, dialing the energy all the way up to ten. “You know, Dr. Stone Man, we’d be so much farther along with Maip if all the fucking subfields of AI research hadn’t been—oh, I don’t know—slogging along for sixty or seventy years without fucking communicating with each other?”

“Yes,” Ethan said.

“It’s just such a…oh, by the way, I changed some of our girl’s heuristics. What I did was—are you listening to me? Hello?”

“I’m listening,” Ethan said, although he wasn’t, not really.

“You’re not listening. Maip listens to me more than you do, don’t you, Maip?”

“I’m listening,” MAIP said.

“Why is she so much more here than you are? And why is that kid so late?”

If there was a reason, they never heard it. Marilyn Mahjoub arrived eventually, in the custody of a sullen older brother. Her clothing embodied the culture clash suggested by her name: hijab, tight jeans, and crop top. She had huge, dark eyes and a slender, awkward grace. In a few years, she would be beautiful.

Like Cassie McAvoy, Marilyn played the keyboard. Unlike Cassie, she was good at it. Ethan could picture her in a concert hall one day, rising to cries of “Brava!” However, she did not take well to MAIP.

“Try playing that last section slower,” MAIP said in the warm, pretty voice that Jamie had given her. She was comparing Marilyn’s rendition, note by note, to the professional version in her memory.

Marilyn’s lip curled. “No. It shouldn’t be slower.”

“Let’s try it just to see.”

“No! I had it right!”

“You did really well,” MAIP said. “Can I please hear the piece again?”

Jamie nodded briskly; MAIP was acting to lower Marilyn’s frustration level by offering praise and neutrally suggesting a redo. Ethan studied the data display. Her frustration level was not lowering.

“No,” Marilyn said, “I won’t play it again. I don’t need to play it again. I did it right already.”

“You did really well,” MAIP said. “I can see that you’re talented.”

“Then don’t tell me to do it slower!”

“Mare,” said her brother, with much disgust, “chill.”

Jamie stepped in. “What would you like to play now, Marilyn?”

Her childish pique disappeared. Lowering her head, Marilyn looked up at Jamie through her lashes and purred, “What would you like to hear?”

Christ—twelve years old! Were all young girls like this now? Allyson wouldn’t have been. She would have been direct, intelligent, appealing.

Jamie, flustered (Ethan hadn’t known that was possible), said, “Play…uh, what else do you…what do you want to play?”

Later, after brother and sister had left, Jamie turned on Ethan. “What’s wrong with you?”

“With me?”

“You’ve been distracted this whole session, and you made me deal with that little wildcat by myself! Did you even hear me say that I added heuristics to Maip, matching emotion with postural clues?”

“No, I…. Yes.”

“Uh-huh. Get with it, Ethan! We have to get this right!”

Ethan said, “Don’t take your frustration with Marilyn out on me.”

MAIP said, “Jamie, you seem distressed.”

Startled, Ethan turned toward the computer. “MAIP has your data? Did you give your baseline readings to her?”

“No!” Jamie’s irritation disappeared, replaced instantly with buoyancy; it was like a dolphin breaking the surface of gray water. “Well, I gave her some data, anyway—but I think she applied the postural heuristics and the other new stuff and…I don’t know, you’ll have to do the analysis, but I think she actually learned!”

Ethan gazed at MAIP. A pile of intricate machinery, a complex arrangement of electrons. For some reason he couldn’t name, he felt a prickle of fear.

It was after 10 p.m. when the last researchers left Building 6. In Building 5, the Biological Division, lights still burned. Perez and Chung clattered out together, talking excitedly. Maybe they’d had another breakthrough, or maybe they just loved their work.

Ethan knew he didn’t love his work on MAIP, no more than a castaway loved his raft. Depended on it, was grateful for it, needed it. But love was nowhere anymore, unless it was here.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.”

The mannequin from Zhao Tailoring wore one of Allyson’s dresses, which had still been hanging in her closet at Ethan’s apartment. The mannequin had jointed arms and legs. Ethan carefully adjusted it into a sitting position. It was a little too tall for the projection, and he had to wrap the bottom four inches of plastic with his raincoat. That was all right; when he projected Allyson onto the mannequin, it looked as if she had plopped herself down onto his coat. Maybe after playing dress-up, maybe just with five-year-old mischief. Ethan set the lights to low, put the stuffed Piglet into her arms, and added the projected overlays, one by one. Healthy skin, glossy hair, bright eyes.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Hi, baby.”

Ethan’s knees trembled. Slowly he knelt beside her, the coat buttons lumpy under his calves. Lightly—so lightly, the VR glove on his right hand feeling her skin but not the hard plastic below—he used his left arm to hug his daughter.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What the fuck?”

Lights crashed on full; illusion crashed with them. Ethan jumped up. Jamie said, “What the hell are you doing? Laura called me; she saw you go into—”

“Go away. Leave me alone.”

He didn’t. But Jamie’s face, always so confident, turned a mottled maroon of embarrassment. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” Then confusion and embarrassment vanished. “No, I’m not sorry! Ethan, somebody has to level with you. You can’t go on like this. I know—we all know—what you’ve been through. As tough as it gets, yeah. But you have to…. This isn’t normal. That model isn’t Allyson. You know that. You have to let go, move on, accept that she’s gone instead of…. This is a perversion of technology, Ethan. I’m sorry, but that’s what it is. And also a perversion of Allyson’s mem—”

He didn’t finish the sentence. Ethan crossed the floor in a mad dash and knocked him down.

Jamie looked up at Ethan from the floor. He wasn’t hurt or even winded; Ethan was no fighter, and Jamie outweighed him by at least forty pounds. Ethan had merely pushed him over. Jamie got up, shook his head like a pit bull hurling away a carcass, and left without a word.

Ethan began to tremble.

His fingers shook so much that he could barely shut down the programs. He left the mannequin sitting in the middle of the floor, a lifeless hunk of plastic, and left his coat and the stuffed Piglet with it. He couldn’t bear to touch any of them.

Outside, in the dark and blowing rain, there was no sign of Jamie. Ethan lurched to Building 18. He had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t drive; he could barely see. The tarry mist was back in his brain, filling it, chilling him to the marrow. There had never been anyplace else to go, not for a year. It frightened him that he couldn’t feel the sidewalk beneath his feet, couldn’t hear the raindrops strike the ground.

In the AI lab, lights burned and the flight simulator was running. Jamie must have been working late. But Jamie wasn’t here now, and if Ethan didn’t do something—anything—he would die. That was how he felt—how Tina must have felt. Thinking of Tina only made him feel worse. He stumbled to the game console and squeezed himself into the small chair in front of it. His hands gripped the controls. At least he could feel them, solid under his fingers: the only solid thing in his world of black mist and tarry cold. Black mist as a train sped into Westlake Tunnel Station, as an unseen virus ate into nerve and tissue…

“You have just crashed the jet,” MAIP said. “Let’s try again!”

Train speeding forward at forty miles per hour…“Hi, Daddy”…keep going keep going don’t give in or you’ll explode you will be Tina…damn bitch how could she leave me like that not my fault Moser’s Syndrome not my fault…don’t give in….

“You have crashed the jet. But I know you can do this—let’s try again!”

Over and over he crashed the jet, even as MAIP made it harder and harder for him to fail. He smashed the jet into mountains, into deserts, into the sea. Again and again and again. Someone spoke to him, or didn’t. There was noise again, a lot of noise; there was destruction and death, as there should be, to classify reality, to match the ontology of everything he had lost—

And then, finally, he realized the noise was his own screaming, and he stopped.

Into the silence MAIP said, “You were very angry, Ethan. I hope you feel better now.”

He gave a little gasp, first at MAIP’s words and then because he wasn’t alone. Jamie stood beside him with Laura Avery.

She said gently, “Are you all right?” And when Ethan didn’t answer, she added, “Jamie called me. After I called him, I mean. I saw you carrying something into Building 6 and—”

Jamie interrupted. “When did you input your data into Maip?”

Ethan said nothing. The tarry cold mist had receded. No—it had vanished. He felt limp, drained, bruised, as if he had fallen off a cliff and somehow survived. You were very angry. I hope you feel better now.

“You didn’t, did you?” Jamie demanded. “You never gave your baseline data to Maip! She did a cold reading on you, extrapolating from free-form observation! We didn’t teach her to do that!”

“Be quiet,” Laura said. “Jamie, for God’s sake—not now.”

MAIP said, “Ethan, I’m glad you feel better. You were both angry and sad before. You were sad even when you smiled.”

Jamie drew a sharp, whistling breath. “Detection of social pretense! I’m sorry, Ethan, I know you’re upset and I said some things I shouldn’t have, but—detection of social pretense! From cold readings! She’s taken a huge step forward—she knows you!”

Ethan said, not to Jamie but to the complexity of machinery and electrons that was MAIP, “You don’t know me. You’re a nonlinear statistical modeling tool.”

Laura said, “But I’m not.” She put a tentative hand on his arm.

Jamie said, “Maip’s not, either. Not anymore. She learned, Ethan. She did!”

Ethan looked at the flight simulator, which flashed the total number of jets he had crashed. He looked at MAIP. He saw the mannequin, a pathetic lump of plastic that he had left in Building 6.

Ethan rose. He had to steady himself with one hand on the game console. Laura’s hand on his arm felt warm through his damp shirt. He didn’t, he realized, know any of them, not really: not Laura, not MAIP, not Jamie. Not himself. Especially not himself.

He would have to learn everything all over again, reassess everything, forge new algorithms. Starting with this moment, here, now, to the sound of rain on the roof of the building.

Acclaimed for her skill at bringing a deep human dimension to complex science concepts, Nancy Kress has a shelf full of the top awards in science fiction, including Nebulas for Best Short Story (for 1986’s “Out of All Them Bright Stars”), Best Novelette (for 1998’s “The Flowers of Aulit Prison”), and Best Novella (for 2015’s Yesterday’s Kin, her fourth win in the category) and Hugos for Best Novella (including 2009’s The Edrmann Nexus). Her novella Beggars in Spain, later expanded into a novel, won both the Hugo and Nebula in 1991, thanks to its dramatic and affecting examination of genetic engineering. Beggars in Spain kicked off the Sleepless series, just as “The Flowers of Aulit Prison” was expanded into the Probability series; together they make up just a small part of the more than two dozen novels Kress has published. The Best of Nancy Kress, published by Subterranean Press in September 2015, collects her best short work from over thirty years.

Jack McDevitt

Riding With the Duke

Walter Peacock knew from his earliest days that he was not like the other kids. While they talked of growing up to be state troopers, firefighters, and race car drivers, he dreamed of becoming a scientist. And much more. Eventually, he would join the ranks of Alan Guth, Freeman Dyson, and Peter Higgs.

He was never sure where the passion had come from. But he’d always been fascinated by the surrounding universe. Why does water freeze from the top down? And is it true that had it been otherwise, there would be no life on the planet? Are there really extra dimensions? Why is the universe not simply a lot of floating gas?

High school was a debilitating experience. He had few friends, and the girls pretty much never noticed him. He took a cousin to the prom. After graduation he attended the University of Tennessee, where he majored in physics and went on to earn a master’s degree. By then he’d read The Double Helix, A Brief History of Time, Shadows of the Mind, and Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Among numerous others. And he’d come to a painful realization: The tangled complexities of his chosen field left him bewildered. How can the same particle be in two places simultaneously? Can space really be bent?

The truth was, he just wasn’t smart enough.

He pulled out of the doctoral program almost before he’d started. “Just as well,” his father had said. He’d never been happy with all the physics, had been warning Walter from the beginning that a career in law, like his own, would be a much more prudent course. “There’s no career as fulfilling as putting away thugs,” he’d said countless times. He was on the staff of the district attorney.

Walter took a temporary job in Knoxville as a taxi driver, a decision that disappointed his parents. And he launched on a course, he hoped, that would reorder his life. A young woman he’d been dating told him that sometimes you simply had to face reality. A few weeks later she said she wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. No explanation was offered. Walter was disappointed, but not surprised. It was not an uncommon experience for him.

A week later, attending another cousin’s birthday party, he met Diana Carter. She was gorgeous, with black hair, luminous blue eyes, and a dazzling smile. One of those women who take over the room when they come in the door. She’d been at UT also, a psychology major. He took a deep breath, fought down his usual fears, and invited her to dinner that weekend. She thought about it and said yes, and he’d had to restrain an inclination to wave both fists in the air. It went well.

He followed up, several nights later, with a show. She was energetic and smart, but he was cautious not to allow himself to become emotionally involved. It was, he thought, just a matter of time before she’d move on. But she surprised him when, a few days before his birthday, she called him, asked if he had any plans for that evening, and invited him out for a celebratory dinner. “How did you know about it?” he asked.

She laughed. “It’s on your Facebook page.”

“Of course it is.”

She took him to the Old Mill in Pigeon Forge, where he enjoyed himself thoroughly, until he discovered that she was also celebrating an appointment as an advertising sales consultant with Arbuckle Brothers, a major furniture retailer. So the evening was really about her. Still, the night went well, and he was encouraged when, as they pulled up outside her apartment, she invited him in.

“I’ve a birthday present for you, Walter,” she said. A package waited on a side table. She handed it to him and he unwrapped it.

“It’s a Quark-box,” he said, reading the packaging.

“You know what that is?”

It had been all over the networks. “It allows you to substitute yourself for one of the characters in a TV show or a movie.” Walter couldn’t see the point. High Noon with him impersonating Gary Cooper just wasn’t going to work. But he tried to look excited.

“I got one a couple of weeks ago. It provides a whole new experience.”

“So you’ve enjoyed it?”

“Have you seen any movies lately?” she asked. On their two dates they’d gone to a play and a concert.

“A few. Sure.” In fact, that was what he did when he wasn’t driving around in the cab: sat home watching movies and TV shows. He’d reacted to losing his girlfriend by treating himself to a new TV, which incorporated a virtual reality component. It used a sensor to analyze the color, shading, and general appearance of his living room and of the on-screen images. It then blended the two, projecting visuals across walls, floor, and ceiling, creating an illusionary reality that placed the viewer in the center of the action. Walter literally sat on the bridge of the Enterprise with Kirk and Spock. He saw that Diana’s television was equipped with the same technology. “Why do you ask?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Anything you enjoyed?”

He shrugged. “Let me think about it.”

Diana turned on the TV and the screen filled with movie titles. “Have you seen The Avengers?”

“A few years ago, yes.”

“Did you like it?”

“Sure.”

“Would you be willing to try it again? I can promise you a surprise.”

“I’m playing Thor?”

She smiled. “I guess you have me figured out.”

“It wasn’t hard to guess.”

“That’s okay with you?”

“Sure.”

“Good. Now, I need you to stand in front of the television.”

Walter complied.

“Good evening, sir,” said the TV. “Please identify yourself by the name your friends use.” Walter nodded. “My name is Walter Peacock, and I appreciate the very nice birthday present.”

“Excellent. Please smile at me.”

Walter smiled.

“And provide me with some expressions, demonstrating how you might react to different emotional situations.”

He tried to look as if he sensed danger. “This is how I might respond if I hear a strange noise in the house at night.”

“Just provide the expressions if you will, Mr. Peacock. I can manage the interpretations.”

“Perfect,” said Diana. “You want a snack before we start?”

“No, thanks. I’m still full.” The Avengers didn’t seem right for the occasion. Diana just wasn’t the type who’d be a fan of action movies, but he was certainly not going to do anything to spoil the mood.

She tapped a keypad, picked up a remote, and dimmed the lights. “Off and running,” she said, sitting down beside him. The TV screen brightened.

A blue sky filled with white mist appeared. The mist filled the room but was quickly replaced by the Paramount trademark. Then Walter was looking up a flight of illuminated stairs. Far below him, the Earth turned slowly. An ominous voice was speaking, saying that humanity would be able to do nothing but burn.

The stairway vanished and the mist came back, inside a rotating cube. Then he and Diana were adrift in a dark sky, while a helicopter cleared a mountain, descended toward a cluster of buildings, and landed. An evacuation was under way. Someone who looked like a government director walked out to meet the aircraft. Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, climbed out of the chopper, and the two engaged in a tense conversation. They were running out of time.

Walter sat back to watch but was surprised a few minutes later when the Black Widow showed up. She was being played by Diana. He turned and saw her grinning at him.

Despite being tied to a chair and outnumbered by the bad guys, she beat them to a pulp. “Guess I better not mess around with you,” he said.

Walter did not appear as Thor. Instead, he was Steve Rogers. Captain America.

“Beautiful,” he said. He almost fit the part.

She squeezed his hand. But when he moved closer to her, she was not receptive. “Stay with the movie,” she said. What the hell was going on? “Movies are a lot more fun than they used to be, Walter, now that you can put yourself in as any of the characters.”

“I could be John Wayne,” he said.

“Sure. And it’s not just limited to movies. You can anchor the CBS news, cover the Titans, take over the Scarborough talk show. Whatever you like.” She took his arm onto her lap. “Meantime, let’s stay with this one for a while so we can see how good you are at tossing that shield around.”

Walter wondered how Steve Rogers performed as a superhero while simultaneously earning a living. It was in his thoughts during the next few days as he drove his taxi through the Knoxville streets. At home, he couldn’t resist using the Quark-box to watch himself play Frasier on the reruns of the hit comedy show, and Sam Malone, the bartender on Cheers. He really liked to think of himself in a John Wayne role, or maybe Tom Selleck, but it didn’t really feel right. Somehow he’d been better as Captain America. Maybe because Diana had been there and hadn’t laughed.

A few days after his birthday, she called again. “I was talking this morning with Vince Scaparello.” Vince was a history teacher at Brackenwood Academy, a college prep school north of town. “He tells me their physics teacher hasn’t been feeling well and has decided to retire.”

The school would be opening next week. “That’s pretty short notice,” Walter said. “How serious is it?”

“I don’t think it’s life-threatening.”

“But they need somebody.”

“Yes. You’d be the perfect hire.”

“Diana, we’re talking about high school kids. I have no experience doing anything like that.”

“Your call, Walter. I’m not sure experience is critical. Every teacher has to start somewhere. I’m not pushing this. I just thought you might be interested. It’s the field you like. And you’re obviously not happy riding around in the cab.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks. I appreciate it. But I don’t think I’m the guy they want.”

That afternoon Walter drove to the school. A security guard watched as he entered the administration office. One of the secretaries looked up. “My name’s Peacock,” he said. “I understand the Academy’s looking for a physics teacher.”

“Have a seat, please, Mr. Peacock,” she said. “I’ll tell Dr. Mullen you’re here.”

He’d barely sat down before she came over and asked him to follow her across the hall into another office. Dr. Mullen smiled and invited him to have a seat. “It’s good to see you again, Walter,” she said. “How have you been?” Francine Mullen had been the principal during Walter’s years at the Academy, but he doubted she really remembered him. Smaller than most of her students, she nevertheless possessed a commanding presence. Her once-black hair was now almost fully gone to gray. But her dark eyes retained the intensity he remembered from his first year.

“I’ve been fine, Dr. Mullen. The school doesn’t seem to have changed much.”

“Probably not.” She made herself comfortable behind the desk and indicated he should take one of the chairs. The walls were covered with framed photos of her with students in caps and gowns, with teachers, and with athletes. “I understand you’re interested in teaching physics for us.”

“Yes. I’ve been told you have a sudden vacancy. I’d like to help, if I may.”

“Do you have any classroom experience, Walter?”

“No, ma’am. I have a master’s degree in physics, though.”

“From Tennessee?”

“Yes.” Walter had been on the honor roll consistently at UT. He produced a transcript of his grades and gave it to her.

She studied it and nodded. “What else have you done?”

“I was a supermarket cashier during my college years. This past summer I’ve been driving a cab.”

“Do you have plans to pursue a doctorate?”

“Eventually.” Best to sound optimistic.

“Why are you applying for the teaching job, Walter?”

“Because it’s my field of interest. And I thought I could help.”

Her eyes locked with his while she considered her options. Walter tried to affect a confident manner while he wondered if anyone else had applied. And whether he really wanted her to accept his application. He remembered how much he’d hated the public speaking course. It was one of only two C’s he’d received. And that had been a generous grade. He loved physics, but he’d never been comfortable talking to an audience.

“Good enough, Walter.” She delivered a welcoming smile. “We’ll have a preliminary meeting of the faculty Monday at nine. Classes start Tuesday. Check with Melinda on the way out. She’ll have a copy of the curriculum for you.”

Diana was pleased. “I think you’ll enjoy yourself,” she said.

His mom tried to encourage him too, but his father sighed and suggested it was just another dead end. “I don’t want to sound negative. But teaching will never provide any serious money. You might as well stay with the cab.”

Walter suspected he was right. But he needed a start in a different direction. He thought about staying with the taxi while he tried his hand in the classroom. He drove at night, so it wouldn’t interfere with his schedule. But he’d probably need the time to prepare for his classes.

He called the cab company and let them know he’d be in that evening, but it would be his last night. Short notice wasn’t a problem for them. Drivers were easy to come by.

The curriculum looked simple enough. Motion and forces. Heat and thermodynamics. Electricity and magnetism. He’d have a lab available for each class twice a week. There was no list of reading assignments included, so he’d have to put one together. Find some books that the kids would both understand and enjoy.

He spent most of the weekend planning classes. He used index cards to write notes that would guide him through the material. And he put together some assignments. He’d start with Newton’s three laws of motion and tie them into conservation of energy.

He took a break Saturday night and used his Quark-box to watch himself infuriate his superiors as the disc jockey in Good Morning, Vietnam. The software gave his personality a substantial boost. Nobody had ever accused him of being funny, but on that evening he was hilarious. He sat, laughing more than he had in ages and wondering why the computer could make him that good while he couldn’t do it himself.

But he couldn’t. And he knew it. If he could go into the classroom and perform as he had in that film, his students would love him. And more to the point, they’d pick up some basic physics too. The teachers who’d been most useful to him had all possessed a sense of humor and an ability to instill laughs into the process. One of his more vivid memories was a history class on the start of the War of Jenkins’ Ear in the eighteenth century. The Spanish Coast Guard had boarded a British ship, and one of them had used a sword to slice off the ear of its captain, Robert Jenkins. Jenkins, according to the instructor, had picked up the ear, confronted his attacker, and said, “Sir, you’ll ’ear about this ’ere ear.”

But Walter was strictly a monotone kind of guy. Damn.

He spent additional time on the Internet reading about the qualities of a good teacher. Talk with the students, not at them. Take notice of what they do right, rather than spend your time pointing out errors.

Be aware that people spend a considerable amount of their formative years listening to authority figures, parents and teachers and bosses, telling them how they screw up. “Don’t touch it; you’ll break it.” The result is that most of us tend to underrate our own capabilities.

He went out with Diana Sunday evening and told her what he’d been doing. “Perfect,” she said. “You’re going to be one of the great teachers of our time.” They were on the observation floor of the Sunsphere in World’s Fair Park, with a magnificent view of the city.

“So, how’s life with your new company?”

“Okay.”

“What do you actually do for them?” She seemed a bit young to be an advertising consultant.

“I write commercials.”

“You have any background in that?”

She laughed. “I like to write, and I know what turns people on.” Her eyes looked elsewhere as she said it.

The Monday teachers’ meeting was short and generally inconsequential. Walter already knew he’d have five classes per day. There would also be a study hall. And he’d been assigned a freshman homeroom. Dr. Mullen spoke for a few minutes, welcoming everyone back from summer vacation and asserting her confidence that Brackenwood would enjoy another productive year. She passed out folders containing teachers’ schedules, students’ names, and a copy of the Academy protocols. Do not spend time alone in a classroom with one student. Do not under any circumstances use physical force. Announcements will be made over the PA system during the first five minutes of homeroom. Students will be dismissed within one minute after a bell rings. They are to be in the next class when the second bell rings ten minutes later.

Were there any questions?

There were a few. Had last year’s effort to include parents more actively in the educational process succeeded?

“We’re happy with the results,” said Dr. Mullen. “It worked. Largely thanks to the efforts of Harry and Jackie. We’ll be expanding the effort this year. Details are in the protocols.”

Somebody wanted to know whether they would restore the senior field trip to DC.

And had the issues involving Internet use been settled?

When it was finally over, most of the teachers dispersed to local restaurants. Walter received two invitations, but since he didn’t know anyone, he declined both.

He didn’t sleep well, staring for hours at the ceiling while going over his opening remarks in his head. He’d compiled some jokes. Like: What do you say to Schrödinger’s cat at the end of the experiment? “Make up your mind.”

Why didn’t Einstein’s lamps work? Because energy is always conserved.

Why did Heisenberg’s wife hate to go shopping? Because she could never decide what she was looking for.

Hell, no. He’d never be able to get away with any of those. He wished he could get into his Robin Williams persona. But he’d need the Quark-box for that.

On Tuesday he got up too early. He made breakfast, sat down to watch the news show he now thought of as Morning Walter, and finally set out for school. Had he stayed with the taxi, he’d be in bed now. By the time he arrived at Brackenwood and pulled into the parking lot, he was a nervous wreck.

He walked in through the front doors, showed his ID to the security guard, and arrived in his classroom twenty minutes early. But there were already three kids behind their desks. He put his briefcase down, picked up a piece of chalk, and wrote his name on the board: MR. PEACOCK. Behind him, somebody giggled.

When he turned, they were all not very effectively hiding smiles. “Good morning,” he said, trying to be casual.

They all responded with “Good morning, Mr. Peacock,” followed by more snickers.

Get used to it, he thought. They don’t know they’re laughing at Captain America.

The homeroom was easy. And it was only fifteen minutes long. The classes ran three-quarters of an hour. In the first period, Walter tried his best to assume a confident stance and welcome everybody. He placed them into their assigned seats. “If at any time,” he said, “you have a question, please don’t hesitate to raise your hand.” He followed with a short description outlining what the program would cover. Then he gave them an assignment: “I’d like to know what you find most puzzling about physics. Think about it for a couple of minutes, and write your response in no more than four sentences.” The plan was to give them something to occupy them for a few minutes while he committed faces and names to memory.

But the timing didn’t work. The kids—there were twenty-four of them—opened their notebooks, frowned at them, and, for the most part, shook their heads. Nothing puzzled them about physics because they’d never really thought about it. But each of them wrote something down. There were a few questions about how curveballs work, and when you fall off a building, do you pick up speed as you get nearer to the sidewalk? And several wondered why they needed the class at all. Well, Okay. It was a start.

Wes Calvecchio, who looked as if he might be a linebacker on the Academy team, was the exception. He raised a hand. "Why can’t we travel faster than light?” he asked.

“Good question, Wes.” Somebody said something about bad roads. Walter tried to explain. It violates causality. “If you could move at the speed of light, there’d be no sense of passing time. You’d get the impression you were traveling at an infinite pace. No way you could go faster than that.” He saw confusion in their eyes. “Maybe,” he said, “we better let that go for a while.”

It was, he decided, going to be a long day.

“I’m sorry I got near it,” he told Diana. “I’m just the wrong person for the job.”

“Give yourself a chance,” she said. “The first day is never easy.”

He didn’t like confiding in her, putting his weakness on display. But she’d called him again. He didn’t get a sense she was being swept off her feet by him, but something seemed to be going on. And God knew there was no one else in his life. “Got to go,” he said. “I have to prep for tomorrow.”

That was a lie. No amount of prepping was going to get him through the next day. Some people just aren’t good with an audience. He settled in to watch some Seinfeld. With himself in the lead. He tried to prevent Jason Alexander, as George, from confronting the Soup Nazi. He inserted Diana for Elaine and persuaded her that the original title of War and Peace was War: What Is It Good For? He watched himself and George unknowingly con a couple of Nazis into a ride home from the airport. But he shut the TV down midway through the episode.

Walter was magnificent as Jerry. If he could only, somehow, take that personality into the classroom, he’d become the best teacher in the state. But the jokes hadn’t worked. And that was the point. It was the personality that was missing. The delivery. He got off the sofa and tried to deliver a couple of the Seinfeld routines, but it was no use. Everything came out flat.

Well, it was going to be all right. He’d met his students and survived.

His topic on the second day was the difference between speed and velocity, and why it matters. Wes Calvecchio stayed with him, nodding occasionally, biting his lower lip. And Linda Markham’s bored eyes softened, as she leaned forward over her desk, obviously trying to puzzle her way through what he was saying. The others for the most part stared quietly out windows or down at their notebooks. They looked frequently up at the clock, occasionally whispering. They were obviously all relieved when the bell rang.

The rest of the week followed a similar pattern. He wanted to talk to Diana, but he didn’t call her. It wouldn’t be a good idea to let her see him feeling sorry for himself. He was beginning to think seriously about quitting. His father checked in. “How’s it going, Walter?”

“Fine,” he said. That night he left the TV off. Comedy is hard.

On Monday the assistant principal showed up minutes before the second period. “I’ll be sitting in, Walter. It’s just an evaluation.” His name was either James or Jack Delhorn.

“Sure, Mr. Delhorn,” said Walter. “I hope you enjoy it.”

The class headed in the same direction as all the others. They spent time calculating how long it would take a brick tossed from a twenty-story building to hit the ground. And why, when you removed air resistance, did everything fall at the same rate? Walter thought the topic should have been interesting to high school juniors, but he could see the boredom in their eyes. One of them, Wes again, actually looked sympathetic. Occasionally Delhorn glanced his way, but his face remained expressionless.

When it was over, the assistant principal got up slowly and watched the students leave the room. “Thank you, Walter,” he said. “You have any free time today?”

He’d have preferred to get the meeting with Delhorn out of the way immediately, but he had a study hall coming up, followed by a lab and two more classes. He could have offered to go down on his lunch break, but that would sound as if he were panicky. So he arranged to sit down with Delhorn when classes ended. It made for an unnerving day, during which he decided to open the conversation by offering his resignation.

He got the first name from a biology teacher before going down to the assistant principal’s office. It was James. He was bent over his computer when Walter arrived.

Delhorn had lost most of his hair, though he looked barely forty. He was short, a bit overweight, with thick glasses, heavy eyebrows, and a neatly clipped gray mustache. He wore a vest, with his tie loosened. “Come in, Walter,” he said. “Glad to see you.” He looked at an armchair. “Have a seat.” The notebook the assistant principal had taken into his classroom lay closed on the desk. “How was the rest of the day?”

“Okay, James.” He took a deep breath. “Before we go any further, I’d like to say something.”

“Sure, Walter.” James sat back and delivered an automated smile.

“I realize I’m not very good in the classroom. I thought I’d be okay, but it’s not working. So I thought I’d better—”

“The students aren’t giving you any problems, are they?”

“No, sir. I guess I’m just not equipped to be a teacher.”

Delhorn nodded. “I think you may be selling yourself a little bit short.”

“I wish that were true, but I think I have it right.”

“Walter, if you leave, we’ll be replacing you with a retired history teacher who has stepped in before for physics. But he knows about as much about physics as I do. We’d like you to stay on. Give yourself some time.”

“I’d like to, James. But I just don’t have what I need to make it work.”

“You’ve only been here a week. It’s never easy for a new teacher.”

“I’m sure you’d be able to manage if I leave. And I think it’s best for both of us—”

“Walter, you understand this isn’t really about you. We were relieved when you came on board right after we heard McLaughlin wasn’t coming back. Physics teachers are especially hard to find on short notice. We want you to stay. I understand it’s hard on you. But the students need you. I heard enough down there today to know that you have a handle on your field. The rest of it, connecting with the kids, getting the technique down, that’s all just a matter of time. It’ll come. You’ve got the important part, the background. Just give yourself a chance.”

He struggled through the next couple of days without noticeable change, other than that the signs of disaffection in the classroom were increasing, more kids rolling their eyes and shaking their heads. He told himself to relax. He was in charge. But his voice was acquiring an edge. He was losing patience with his students. He’d always loved his physics classes. How could these kids be so distant?

On Wednesday afternoon Diana called him while he was on his way home. That was a surprise. They were still in the very early stages of whatever relationship they were having. She should be maintaining a distance, letting him take up the pursuit. “How’s my favorite physics teacher doing?”

There was something in her tone that told him she knew. “Okay,” he said. “You write any commercials lately?”

“A couple. I’m beginning to think it’s what my life will be about.”

A long pause followed. Finally: “Nothing much has changed, Diana. Have you been hearing things?”

“My sister’s a senior at the Academy.”

“Oh.”

“She says she’s hearing you don’t seem comfortable in the classroom.”

“She’s got that right.”

“What are you doing this evening?”

“Not much. Trying to figure out what I’ll need to survive tomorrow.”

“Maybe a night off would help. You probably need to relax.”

“I guess I don’t have anything to lose. What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe a movie?”

“That’s not going to work, Diana.”

She shrugged. “I’m just talking about taking a night off.”

“Okay. How about The Big Lebowski?”

“I’m not sure I’m in the mood for a comedy. You mentioned once that you’d enjoy seeing yourself play John Wayne. How about we watch Rio Bravo?”

He took a bottle of Merlot over with him. Diana surprised him with a kiss. It wasn’t their first, but she hadn’t previously initiated the action. “You ready to play the Duke?” she asked.

He lowered his voice by about three octaves: “Ready as I’ll ever be, schweetheart.”

She grinned and backed away from the door, inviting him inside. “That sounded more like Bogart.”

He caught the aroma of pizza. And popcorn was on the coffee table. “This is exactly what I needed. A complete break.”

“That’s my guess too. Just relax and enjoy raising hell with the bad guys.” She brought the pizza out of the kitchen, set it on the table, and began dividing it.

Walter opened the wine and poured two glasses. He raised one in her direction. “For the loveliest woman in the West.”

She lifted hers, they touched glasses, and drank. Walter was feeling good for the first time in two weeks.

They finished off the pizza and started on the popcorn. “You going to play Feathers?” he asked. The role had originally been Angie Dickinson’s.

“No,” she said. “I thought I’d be Nathan Burdette.”

“He’s the head villain, isn’t he? That would certainly change the tone of the action.”

She was wearing a wide smile. “I suspect it would.”

“Well, let’s get it started, schweetheart.” Bogart again.

“You have to get your characters straight, Walter.”

They had another laugh, and Diana picked up the remote.

Walter had seen it twice before. He’d expected that watching it with himself in Wayne’s role as Sheriff John Chance would be different. Probably funny. Possibly absurd. But it wasn’t like that at all, at least not in any way that mattered. The software manipulated him, deepened his voice, mimicked Wayne’s stalwart responses, and somehow managed to retain the power of the film. Walter strode through the bar that was the center of so much of the action and performed in an utterly believable manner. He had to struggle to remind himself that it was a film. No lives were at stake. He was sitting beside Diana, downing popcorn and occasionally trading hugs. Neither of them ever laughed at his performance.

When it was over, and the siege at the jail had been lifted, and the credits were rolling, he simply sat back and stared at the screen. There was no confusion in his mind, no sense that, in some way, he had been John Wayne.

Still, Diana hugged him. “You played the part beautifully,” she said.

Before the night ended, he’d begun to suspect it had been a setup. That Diana had hoped to use the technology to persuade him that he possessed the charisma and presence of the Hollywood giant. He was tempted to say something. Sheriff Chance would have done that, would have had it out with her. But in the end, he was still only Walter Peacock.

The only aftereffect he noticed arrived the following morning: In the classroom, he felt a bit less nervous. It wouldn’t have been correct to say he was at ease, but he was able to deliver his presentations and to respond to occasional student questions without having his stomach tighten. He’d watched himself the previous night performing at a level he’d never have believed possible. And he was beginning to believe he shared the same sensitivity and humanity that Wayne had portrayed so well.

He called Diana that evening. “It’s odd,” he said. “I didn’t feel this way after I’d watched myself do the comedy sketches.”

“You’re probably not a comedian by nature, Walter.”

“I don’t think I’d qualify as a John Wayne sheriff either.”

“It’s a different set of qualifications. You’re talking about courage and charisma. Most of us have a fair supply of both. We just don’t know it, so it doesn’t show up. Had you ever spoken before a group prior to starting at Brackenwood?”

“During my Boy Scout days. We used to tell stories around the campfire.”

“Walter, do you know that, if you start looking around for what people are most afraid of, death is not first on the list?”

“No, I had never heard that. What is?”

“Public speaking.”

“You’re kidding.”

“There’ve been several studies. It always comes in at the top of the lineup.”

“I never realized—”

“It derives from a lack of self-confidence. We all have the problem.”

He was tempted to ask if she was doing anything that night, but something in her voice told him she wouldn’t be receptive. “Well, anyhow,” he said, “I’ve got a lot of work to do this evening. Have to go.”

“I don’t guess you have time to watch a little TV?”

“Ummm. Sure. I can squeeze something in. You interested in watching Without a Clue? It’s hysterical.”

He wasn’t sure how it happened, but even though he brought Without a Clue, a Sherlock Holmes parody, somehow they sat down to watch Casablanca. “Hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s my all-time favorite movie.”

Walter had seen it years before, when he was about twelve. It was okay. “You’ve got a pretty good part in this one,” he said. “What was her name? Bogart’s girlfriend?”

“Ilsa Lund.”

“Oh, yes. Ingrid Bergman. She was gorgeous. You’re a perfect fit. And you get to see me play Bogie.”

She looked particularly resplendent that evening. As if they were actually going to spend the evening at Rick’s Café. “I wonder if you’d do me a favor, Walter?”

“Sure.”

“Play Paul Henreid’s part instead. Victor Laszlo.”

“Really?” That was a surprise. “Okay. Whatever you like.”

Humphrey Bogart’s character, Rick Blaine, operates Rick’s Café in Casablanca during the early days of World War II, before the entry of the United States into the struggle. Victor Laszlo is a leader of the French resistance who arrives with his wife, Ilsa, ironically Rick’s one-time lover.

Nazis are periodically in the café, as well as pro-French customers, so tensions can get high. Walter watched himself as Laszlo easing past the Reich’s Major Strasser. And Diana trying to come to terms with her commitment to her husband while she struggles with her obvious passion for Rick.

He was enjoying it, cruising along while Rick tried to recapture Ilsa, who had been forced to leave him years before in Paris. His own role, as Laszlo, remained relatively quiet. Then, while Walter munched on a brownie, seated at a table not far from a group of Nazi officers, Major Strasser walked into the saloon and began to lead them in a rendition of “Deutschland Über Alles.” Laszlo overhears it, strides into the middle of the scene, and leads a group of pro-French customers in a resounding “La Marseillaise.” For a few moments, the two groups contend, but the Germans, overwhelmed, eventually give up.

He swallowed the rest of the brownie and sat watching himself striding victoriously through the saloon. For the first time, he understood why Diana had thought he should be able to handle a classroom.

The next day, at the Academy, he did something new: He stepped off script. He’d planned on discussing the mathematical aspects of gravitation. Instead, he started by looking out over his twenty-odd students and asking a simple question: “If you go up onto the roof and walk over the edge, why do you fall?”

Hands went up across the room. He pointed at Linda Markham, who had looked bored since the first day. “Gravity,” she said.

“Very good.”

She smiled.

He looked down at her. “Linda, what’s gravity?”

The smile faded. “It’s what makes you fall.”

“Okay. That’s true. Anybody else got something to add?”

Nobody did. Finally, Wes raised a hand. “So what is gravity, Mr. Peacock?”

“Okay,” he said, “you want the truth?”

Rich Armand, up front, grinned: “We can’t handle the truth.”

“You might be right, Rich,” he said. “But here’s the reality: Space is made out of rubber.” That brought snickers and rolling eyes. “I’m serious,” he said. They quieted, and he explained about how mass made it curve.

He went from that to other off-the-wall questions: “While we’re on the subject of the roof, did you know you weigh less up there than you do in the basement?”

And “Is it true you age more quickly waiting for the school bus than you do riding it?” That served as his introduction to relativity.

Later, he would look back on that day as his breakthrough. Not that everything worked, but for the first time he enjoyed doing the presentation. And it was obvious the kids enjoyed themselves as well. They had been tested. They had to use their imaginations. And, possibly for the first time, they began to acquire an insight into the complexities of the physical world.

He drove home formulating what he’d do next. “Everybody knows that some stars explode. How certain are you that the sun did not blow up five minutes ago?”

Or maybe this would be a good time to talk about the size of the galaxy.

“Let’s use a transporter to put Linda at the galactic center on her birthday, which is when, Linda?”

“April 11th, Mr. Peacock.” He had no idea of the actual date, but this one was as good a guess as any other.

“Okay. Linda’s there on April 11th, and she turns on a very large spotlight. We have a giant telescope. How long would it be before we could see it? Would it be a few hours? The next day? What do you think?”

“Beautiful,” said Diana. He took her to dinner at Dean’s Restaurant. “You’re on your way.” She raised her glass of Diet Coke to him.

“Premature,” he said. “I don’t want to push my luck.”

“I think we’re doing fine.”

“What exactly happened? What changed?”

“You’ve begun to believe in yourself. It’s all you needed.”

“And you arranged that by having me play John Wayne and Paul Henreid?”

“Not exactly. You had a chance to see what you could do. It fit within your essential parameters. It’s who you are, Walter. All you needed was to get acquainted with yourself.”

“I still don’t buy into it.”

“The technology has only been available for a few months, but there’s already been some research. Most of the people who fail in what they want to accomplish do so because they underestimate who they are. When they don’t believe they can succeed at something, they have little chance. Unless they get lucky. But show them visions of themselves exercising the qualities that most of us are born with, courage and a brain, and they tend to recognize the reality. After that, there’s no stopping them.”

“Well, Diana, I owe you. Maybe I can wander off now into the quantum world and win a Nobel.”

“It’s possible, Walter. But you’ve got a bigger responsibility at the moment.”

“What’s that?”

“Last time I looked, you had over a hundred students.” Their meals arrived. But neither was paying much attention to the food. “You want to watch a movie tonight?”

“Sounds like a good idea,” Walter said. “Do we have a copy of The High and the Mighty?”

“Actually, we do.”

“Okay, let’s go for it.”

“By the way, I don’t think I told you: I’m quitting Arbuckle.”

“Really? Why?”

“I don’t know. I just can’t imagine Ilsa Lund spending her life selling sofas.”

Jack McDevitt came to writing after establishing himself in numerous other careers, but he’s definitely made up for lost time. His first novel, The Hercules Text, received a special-citation Philip K. Dick Award in 1986. More recently, McDevitt was honored with the 2015 Robert A. Heinlein Award for lifetime achievement, in recognition of his prodigious body of work. (A dozen of his novels have been Nebula Award finalists.) Considered a master at science fiction mysteries, McDevitt is perhaps best known for his two main series: the Priscilla Hutchins books and the Alex Benedict series. Alongside his numerous novels and shorter works that have been nominated for the major science fiction awards, 2003’s Omega, the fourth Priscilla Hutchins novel, won the Campbell Award, and Seeker, the third Alex Benedict installment, won the 2006 Nebula for Best Novel. Like much of McDevitt’s writing, both were praised for their combination of expert storytelling and hard science.

Blue Delliquanti & Michele Rosenthal

A Cop’s Eye

Blue Delliquanti is an artist, comic writer, and illustrator based in Minneapolis. Since 2012, Delliquanti has been regularly publishing the webcomic O Human Star, a science fiction story about a roboticist who returns to life as an android after his mysterious death sixteen years before. Acclaimed for its complex examination of identity and relationships, O Human Star won the 2012 Prism Comics Queer Press Grant. In addition to her self-published work, Delliquanti has contributed to several anthologies, including Smut Peddler and Womanthology, and she’s collaborated with David Axe, Kevin Knodell, and Nathan Schreiber on nonfiction comics.

Michele Rosenthal is an accomplished Brooklyn-based illustrator and graphic designer. The Sonic Man Machine, a Risograph fan comic illustrated by Rosenthal and written by her brother Mike, features 1970s electronica band Kraftwerk going on a surreal, hot-pink adventure. She recently published her first children’s ebook, The Trouble with Falling Asleep, a bedtime story for kids with active imaginations. Rosenthal’s illustrations have been featured in numerous print publications and online at Funny or Die and POPSUGAR. Her film blog, Criterion Affection, chronicles (often through illustration) her effort to watch every single film in the Criterion Collection, and she also runs Queer Portraits in History, a blog profiling historical LGBTQ figures.

Robert J. Sawyer

Looking for Gordo

“Order in the court! All rise!” Emily Chiu and the two hundred other people in the wood-paneled room got to their feet. She was a witness, but most of the others had donated five thousand dollars apiece for their seats. Countless millions were also watching the streaming coverage online.

Richard Weisman—portly, with thundercloud-gray hair—entered through a side doorway and strode to the bench. Although the opposing counsels on this Saturday afternoon weren’t actual lawyers—one was an astronomer; the other, a historian—Weisman was a real judge, donating his time, just as the city had donated the use of the courtroom.

The US and California flags that normally stood behind the bench were in their usual places. Emily had pointed out to the reporter sitting next to her that the California one, depicting a big bear, was particularly apt, since today’s proceedings revolved around 47 Ursae Majoris, but she didn’t think the guy got the joke.

Even more appropriate, though, was the third flag that had been added to the right of the other two. Since it was hanging limply, the people present couldn’t make out what it depicted, but Emily had seen the same design flapping in the breeze out front of the Interstellar Communications Society headquarters. Until her first visit there, two years ago now, she’d had no idea there was such a thing as an official flag of Earth, but this was indeed it. In the center was a blue circle, representing the home planet; in back of it, dominating the left side, was a portion of a much larger yellow circle, representing the sun. A smaller white circle to the right stood for the moon.

As Judge Weisman sat down, everyone in the courtroom did the same. “All right,” he said. “We heard opening arguments before lunch. Now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty. Dr. Plaxton, you may call your first witness.”

Hannah Plaxton, a compact woman with dark hair and a birdlike way of moving, was the aforementioned astronomer; in today’s proceedings, being televised worldwide, she was representing the side not just in favor of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but those advocating active SETI, the deliberate sending out of signals. “Thank you, Your Honor. We call Ursula.”

Emily felt her eyebrows go up, and she could hear a murmur wash across the room. It seemed just about everybody, including the court staff, had expected various human experts to be summoned to the stand first; Emily herself was here to testify about the work her team had done to make all this possible.

Two uniformed guards quickly wheeled a seventy-inch paper-thin monitor, flipped to portrait mode, to a position next to the dock, and the image of Ursula—still startling no matter how much time Emily had spent staring at it—appeared.

“Please raise your upper right arm,” said the clerk.

On the screen, Ursula—being a female, she did indeed have two right arms—did as she was asked.

“Do you solemnly state that the testimony you may give in the cause now pending before this court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?”

“I do.” The bubbly voice was based on that of a popular web-series actress. Emily had abandoned attempts to simulate the way alien speech really sounded; that was akin to pebbles rattling inside a tin can.

Hannah opened her mouth to ask her first question when Judge Weisman silenced her by lifting his own right hand, palm out. “Just a minute. Ursula, I need to be satisfied that you understand the oath you just took. Do you?”

Ursula’s eyestalks turned to face the edge of the monitor. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“You affirmed, ‘So help me God.’ Do your people have a God?”

“We freely acknowledge that in a universe as old as this one, beings superior to us almost certainly exist—and so of course I would welcome their assistance in this or any other matter.”

Emily suppressed a snort. Ursula was practically making Hannah’s case for her—and the judge seemed to realize that, as he chose not to pursue the issue further. “Very well,” he said. “Dr. Plaxton, you may proceed.”

“Thank you. Ursula, why did your people choose to contact us?”

Emily’s team of programmers had done their job well: When time was needed to query the Reticulum, the simulated alien made a show of bobbing and weaving its eyestalks, just as we’d seen real aliens do in the thousands of videos they’d sent us.

After a second, the answer came. “We had detected your radio and TV transmissions, and particularly your radar. Also, spectroscopic studies of your atmosphere suggested the presence of biological processes that replenished oxygen, not to mention signs of an industrial society.”

Hannah seized upon that. “In other words,” she said, “your people already knew about our existence long before anyone here had thought seriously about deliberately announcing our presence to the universe, correct?”

“Correct.”

This, of course, was one of the key points: Hannah’s opponent today was the chair of the committee urging a moratorium on active SETI, or “METI,” the messaging of extraterrestrial intelligence; its members felt that deliberate signaling might attract alien invaders or pillagers. Hannah’s side felt such a ban would be pointless, since we’d already accidentally revealed our existence—a fact Ursula had now confirmed.

“What motivated your people to send out the Reticulum?”

“We wanted to share what we knew and what we had created,” said Ursula in a tone that made it all sound eminently reasonable. “After all, surely you’d do the same thing for us.”

When Emily Chiu had first arrived at the Interstellar Communications Society, she’d been all set to talk about the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. So she’d been taken aback by Hannah Plaxton’s initial question: “Do you like dinosaurs?”

“Who doesn’t?” Emily had replied, settling into a chair on the opposite side of a cluttered desk.

“Ever been to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto?”

“No.”

“They were planning a new dinosaur gallery, oh, about twenty years ago,” Hannah said. “They already had the best hadrosaur collection in the world—those are duck-billed dinosaurs. A lovely Stegosaurus. Lots of ceratopsian material and a nice T. rex cast. But they were missing a sauropod—you know, like Brontosaurus.”

Emily smiled. “‘Thin at one end, thick in the middle, and thin again at the other end,’ to quote Monty Python.”

“Exactly. The iconic dinosaur. They figured they really needed one of those, and so went looking for a sauropod skeleton they could buy or excavate. Except, it turns out, they already had one. It had been shipped to Toronto from Pennsylvania in 1962, put in storage, and literally forgotten about; it wasn’t until 2007 that a curator stumbled upon the fact that they had such a thing already. It’s now the centerpiece of their gallery. They named it Gordo, in honor of the former curator who had originally acquired it.”

It had been an early flight down, and Emily was tired. “So?” she said.

“So we’ve been listening for ETs for seventy years now, starting with Frank Drake’s Project Ozma in 1960. And for a while there, we had a decent crowd-sourced search: people using spare processor cycles on their computers to comb through chunks of data collected by radio telescopes. But two things have largely derailed that. First, modern processor chips throttle down automatically to save energy, so there aren’t that many spare cycles anymore. Yup, green policies may have kept us from finding little green men. And, second, people lost interest—they’d expected us to find something quickly in the data, and, well, as time went on and nothing was found, fewer and fewer people participated.”

Emily nodded. She remembered hearing about SETI@home years ago, but hadn’t seen anything about it recently.

“These days,” Hannah said, “we do most of our listening with what we call an LNSD radio-telescope array: a large number of small dishes. We currently have forty-two operational, and hope to increase the quantity eventually to three hundred and fifty. But even forty-two just might be the answer to life, the universe, and everything: With them, we receive eight gigabytes of data a second.”

Emily’s specialty was large data sets. She did the mental math: That was enough to fill a one-terabyte hard drive every minute.

“There was no way we could store it all when we started,” continued Hannah, “so we relied on real-time array processing to sort the wheat from the chaff, determining on the fly if something looked promising—that is, looked like something other than just the usual stellar noise; otherwise, we had to discard the information. But all of that changed a couple of years ago. With storage costs continuing to plummet, we could finally afford to record and store everything we collected. Of course, dealing with all that data is another matter. It’s going to take not just a lot of computing horsepower to sort through it, but innovative analytical tools.

“And that’s where you come in: As I say, we’ve been collecting tons of data every day for years now, but it’s never been properly searched. And, well, we’re hoping what we want is already in there: We want to look for an alien message in the data we’ve already recorded.” She spread her arms. “In short, we’re looking for our Gordo.”

Emily Chiu was very proud of the work her lab had done in creating the Ursula avatar, which was built atop their signature personal-assistant AI technology and incorporated the real-time speech-to-speech translation capabilities they’d originally developed for video calling. Hannah Plaxton spent the rest of the afternoon questioning Ursula, and, to Emily’s delight, the software performed beautifully. No judge had yet allowed an AI to testify under oath in a real case, but since Ursula was doing so well in this mock one, perhaps one soon would.

The trial was a fundraiser for the Interstellar Communications Society. Whatever verdict the jury reached wouldn’t be binding on anyone, but the event was certainly getting a lot of media attention, which is no doubt why Hannah’s opponent, Piotr Sudeyko, had agreed to participate. He was a historian who specialized in Earth’s own previous first-contact situations, including the arrival of Europeans in the New World; he’d long felt that the anti-METI arguments hadn’t been given sufficient publicity. Emily watched intently as Sudeyko rose from his chair; his probing would be the real test of Ursula’s programming.

“Good morning, Ursula,” he said, dolorous brown eyes peering over Ben Franklin glasses. He was bald with a high forehead that bulged out like that of a beluga whale.

Ursula’s twin eyestalks separated to their maximal extent, but both jade-green spheres faced intently toward Sudeyko. Like all of the intelligent natives of 47 Ursae Majoris, Ursula had six limbs—three for locomotion and three for manipulation—all sprouting from a central torso. A wasp-waist constriction in the copper-colored torso marked where Ursula’s ancestors had rotated their upper bodies ninety degrees when they’d risen up to stand on just three legs. The two thicker and longer legs were in front, and the shorter, thinner one was in back; that had the effect of tilting their bodies backward, as if the aliens were perpetually recoiling in comic surprise. The perfectly circular iris of a mouth located well down the torso just added to the astonished look.

Sudeyko continued: “Ursula, we humans have struggled with many vexing issues since the dawn of time. Perhaps you can help us.”

Emily had managed only a second-row seat today. She craned her head to see the monitor clearly. “I would be happy to try,” Ursula replied.

“Thank you,” said Sudeyko. “During the USSR era, Soviet SETI proponents had taken as a given that any advanced civilization would be a socialist Utopia run by an entrenched central authority. Is that, in fact, the case?”

“No. We govern by plebiscite.”

“Ah,” said Sudeyko. “So, each of your citizens gets one vote?”

“No,” said Ursula, splaying all her pincers in strong negation. “We would never be so limiting. Each of us, as you can see, has three hands—two on one side, and one on the other. Each hand gets its own weighted vote. The inside hand has a vote worth one point; the outside upperhand gets a vote worth two-thirds of a point, and the outside lowerhand gets a vote worth one-third of a point. For any proposition, each individual may cast a total vote worth two points, one and two-thirds points, one and one-third points, one point, two-third points, one-third points, or zero points. We may each assign whatever combination of our weighted votes we wish to any of the choices offered, but once all votes have been assigned, one can make no further selections. So, if there are four or more candidates or choices in a plebiscite, one may fractionally support no more than three of them. The winner is determined by simply summing all the factional votes; if there’s a tie, the candidate or choice receiving votes from the largest number of individuals wins.”

The mathematician in Emily couldn’t keep from trying to crunch the numbers in her head, wondering if this was an efficient system. But Sudeyko, it seemed, was on the trail of something else. “And so when it came to the question of whether to send the Reticulum to Earth, what choices were put forth?”

“There were four propositions. ‘We should send the Reticulum to every star system we’ve identified as being a likely harbinger of life.’ ‘We should listen to and observe each star system that appears inhabited, and if we detect an overture of contact from them, only then should we send the Reticulum.’ ‘While acknowledging that it would be a protracted process thanks to delays necessitated by the finite speed of light, rather than sending the Reticulum, we should instead send only a small tantalizing sampler in hopes of fostering an ongoing trading relationship, swapping portions of our knowledge and culture for portions of theirs.’ And, lastly, ‘Even if we’ve detected that another star system has inhabitants, and even if they reach out to contact us, we should neither initiate contact with nor respond to contact from them.’”

“And when the voting was held, what was the outcome?”

“The first proposition, namely that we send the Reticulum to every likely star system, was approved overwhelmingly. In fact, the total fractional votes it received exceeded the combined totals assigned to all three of the other options.”

“Really?” said Sudeyko, who presumably already knew this answer, or else he wouldn’t have asked the question here in open court. Nonetheless, he did a good job of sounding surprised at the degree of consensus. And perhaps if this had been a trial, the judge might have objected to Sudeyko striding over to the jury box and leaning in, but it certainly made for good theater. “And just to be clear,” he said, looking not at Ursula but at the women and men who had won the contest to be seated here, “how many of your people got to vote on these propositions?”

Ursula sounded surprised by the question. “Why, all of them, of course.”

It had sounded reasonable when Ursula said her entire species had voted on whether to initiate contact. But debate over this very issue had torn the SETI community apart for a decade and a half now. One camp had been pushing to upgrade the traditionally passive search for extraterrestrial intelligence to active messaging.

A possible answer, they said, to the eerie silence—the failure to detect any extraterrestrial transmissions—was that there are in fact no other life-forms currently extant. But another possible answer, they contended, was that we’ve misunderstood interstellar etiquette. Perhaps aliens don’t speak until spoken to. They could well be aware of our presence, thanks to our decades of leaking signals out into space, but it might be incumbent upon us to make a gesture that indicates we are beings of goodwill.

Just passively listening, they said, is plain lazy: It implies that we prefer for others to do the heavy lifting of composing messages and beaming them with great power at specific stars. Worse than that, it also shows that we’re greedy, expecting others to give things to us. Any civilization we could contact, they pointed out, will almost certainly be more advanced than our own; the universe is almost fourteen billion years old, and we’ve only been a radio-capable species since 1895. Civilizations around other stars might well be thousands, millions, or even billions of years ahead of us. We could gain enormously in terms of knowledge through contact with them; they, on the other hand, would have relatively little to learn from us. Since we would have more to gain, they argued, perhaps it’s expected that we should invest more, by being the first to reach out.

But others had considered this to be dangerous naïveté. First, they said, the underlying assumption that any advanced civilization must be peaceful and altruistic could be wrong. And even if some were, surely, they said, it was possible that others were not. One possible explanation for the Fermi paradox—the fact that although our science suggests that the universe should be teeming with life, all SETI efforts have so far failed—was that there is a violent berserker race that makes it its business to wipe out any civilizations it detects. Whatever other races might still exist locally may have learned by observing this that remaining silent was crucial to survival.

Nonetheless, the METI advocates pushed forward with amendments to the SETI protocol that would allow and encourage direct and immediate proactive transmissions designed specifically to signal our presence to other civilizations. This prompted a rash of resignations from the international commissions involved in drafting the protocol. These self-styled dissidents felt that no overture toward contact should be made without wide-ranging international and interdisciplinary consultation and consensus.

The debate continued to rage here in 2030, but those favoring active SETI had crowed victory when it became clear that the advanced beings at 47 Ursae Majoris had done precisely what they’d proposed humanity should be doing: Those aliens had boldly and deliberately announced their presence to the universe.

Many of the players on both sides had changed since the argument had begun—some had retired, others had died, a couple had even switched positions—but, at last, the opponents of active SETI had gotten what they’d wanted all along: Rather than a few individuals behind closed doors deciding a matter that could have a profound impact on the entire planet, broad public discussions were now occurring. The METI dissidents were finally getting their day in court.

“Ursula,” Professor Sudeyko said, “we humans have a history of considering ourselves special, so forgive the vanity, but is it safe for us to assume that ours was the only world you sent the Reticulum to?”

Ursula clasped her two right arms together. “I’m afraid not. We identified eleven other systems that might have intelligent life. They each got sent copies.”

“Was there anything special about us?”

“Well,” she said, “your star system was the furthest one we sent the Reticulum to. My home system of 47 Ursae Majoris and yours of Sol are forty-six of your light-years apart. But we also sent the Reticulum to 20 Leonis Minoris, which is just twelve of your light-years from us; SV Leonis Minoris AB, just fifteen light-years away; 61 Ursae Majoris, sixteen light-years away; Groombridge 1830, seventeen light-years away—”

Sudeyko held up a hand—and Ursula was as good now at interpreting human gestures as Emily and others were at understanding alien ones. “Thank you,” he said. “And have any of these other systems sent you a reply?”

“The short answer,” said Ursula, “is ‘not yet.’ But, of course, that is a slippery concept in these matters. We made all of the transmissions over a period of three of our years, with the one to you, seeing as it had the farthest to go, being sent first. I have no idea if a reply has been received since that transmission.”

“So,” said Sudeyko, again facing the jury, “you don’t actually know if there were negative consequences to, if I may phrase it this way, shouting in the jungle?”

Emily and her team had spent months combing through the ever-growing data set from the array of radio telescopes. She’d joked to one of the other data-mining specialists that it was like looking for a needle in an infinitely expanding haystack.

If there had been a blindingly obvious signal, such as the first five prime numbers repeated in a very powerful broadcast, the real-time scanners would have caught it as it came in. So, if there was something buried in here, it was likely both a weak signal and a subtle one. Still, there are ways you can tell if something has information content—Zipf plots were one such tool—and other ways, such as Shannon entropy scores, for determining how complex the content is, even if you couldn’t decipher a word of it.

Emily knew the chances of finding anything were slim, but, nonetheless, she kept designing new techniques, tweaking algorithms, modifying filters, and—

—and there it was.

My God.

She’d found it.

She’d found Gordo.

And just like Gordo—just like sauropods, by far the largest land animals ever to exist—it was huge. Gigantic. Not just terabytes. Not petabytes. No: more even than that. Exabytes—quintillions of bytes. She double- and triple-checked, ran some more tests, and then checked again, just to be sure. There had, after all, been numerous false alarms related to SETI signals. The first pulsar discovered in 1967 was dubbed LGM-1 for “Little Green Men One,” because it appeared to be an extraterrestrial beacon, and, in 2015, a signal candidate from the Parkes Radio Observatory in Australia turned out to just be noise from the microwave oven in the lunchroom.

But, when Emily was totally sure, she picked up her phone and said, “Call Hannah Plaxton.”

“It’s after 2 a.m.,” the phone replied. “Are you sure you want to call so late?”

Emily was surprised at the time. Still: “She’s an astronomer. She’s used to being up at night.”

“She’s a radio astronomer,” replied the phone. “She works during the daytime.”

Well, the phone had her there. “All right. But if Hannah comes online overnight, wake me. And book me a flight for tomorrow morning to go see her.”

In 1980, Carl Sagan had popularized the idea of an Encyclopedia Galactica, opining that aliens might someday be so kind as to beam such a thing to us. Back then, Sagan probably considered the Encyclopedia Britannica the pinnacle of human knowledge, and not just because he was a contributor to it. But for all his forward thinking, Cosmic Carl was a product of his time; no encyclopedia could properly systematize all that humanity had learned, although the few remaining Wikipedians still gamely tried.

In 2009, SETI pioneer Seth Shostak started advocating that if humanity were to transmit anything to the stars, it might as well transmit everything, broadcasting the whole World Wide Web. The modern Web would take months to send via microwave, but the whole darn thing could be beamed to a specific target via optical broadband in less than a day.

But, it turned out, the denizens of 47 Ursae Majoris had beaten us to the punch, sending what had been dubbed the Reticulum—their alien counterpart of our World Wide Web.

“My predecessors at my lab pioneered automated picture captioning,” Emily said. “It’s such a common feature in cameras now, we tend not to think about it. But the techniques they developed are a big part of what’s letting us make sense of the Reticulum.” She was standing next to a wall monitor at the Interstellar Communications Society, an image of three of the aliens filling it.

Hannah Plaxton looked down at the caption. “‘A doctor treating a patient,’” she read aloud.

“That’s right,” said Emily. She gestured, and text labels appeared over the image, identifying the specific objects in it: Doctor. Patient. Individual. Tray. Equipment.

Hannah pointed at the “individual.” “Why isn’t this guy mentioned?”

Emily nodded. “The captioning is done with neural networks; they learn as they go along. The more pictures they looked at, the better they got at picking out what was relevant. Look at the eyestalks on the two aliens who are mentioned in the caption. On the doctor, they’re facing toward the patient. She is looking at the patient; the patient is the focus of her attention. And see the patient’s eyestalks? They’re turned toward the doctor. Those two aliens are regarding each other. But the third guy? The one not mentioned in the caption? Sure, the software realized that he’s there, but he’s not looking at either of the other two; his eyes are turned to look at something out of frame. And so the algorithms decided he was just a bystander accidentally caught on camera, not part of the action being depicted.”

“Interesting,” said Hannah. “In most of our own pictures—ones taken by humans—the people in the frame are looking not at each other, but at the camera.”

“Right. Which is so artificial, when you think about it. In fact, if that ever happens on a TV show or in a movie, we’re freaked out; an actor almost never turns directly toward the camera. But it doesn’t seem that any of the pictures in the Reticulum are posed photographs. And that says something about their society, I’m sure. In any civilization, cameras are going to become dirt cheap—they’ll be everywhere. And storage will become so cheap, as well, that you’ll record everything.”

“But what happens to privacy?” asked Hannah.

“Maybe the aliens never valued it in the first place. Look at what little clothing they wear. It’s all functional: sometimes a sash with storage pouches, protective gear, ornamental ribbons. No one part of the anatomy is always covered, so there are clearly no nudity taboos. And there are plenty of photos in which the individuals in the background seem to be having sex.”

“And they don’t desire privacy for that, at least?”

“Maybe the reason we started desiring it was because, while doing it, we’re particularly vulnerable to sneak attack. But with cameras recording everything, you’re probably perfectly safe all the time—so, what the heck. For us, any picture in which people were having sex, whether it was the foreground of the image or the background, that’d be the thing we focused on. But it’s clear from the eyestalks that that particular act is given no special importance. It’s not ignored—it’s not that every alien demurely swivels his eyestalks away whenever he sees a couple of others going at it; there are plenty of pictures in which others happen to be looking at what’s going on. But it’s not disproportionate.”

“Well, that explains why the Reticulum is smaller than our World Wide Web: no nudity or sex taboo equals no pornography. You could shave a zettabyte off our own Web if it didn’t have all that stuff.”

“Exactly. And there’s more. The aliens have three arms. Males have two on the left and one on their right, and females have the opposite configuration. It’s a weird dimorphism, but you can almost see how evolution selected for it. They sent us numerous pictures of family groups walking as woman-child-man. They don’t hold pincers, but the woman puts her left pincer on one of the child’s shoulders, and the man puts his right pincer on the other, and the child is protected, while the adults each have two arms on the outside to do things with, right?”

“Ah, Okay,” said Hannah.

“The algorithms were able to divine some additional meaning from that. Whether it’s conscious or not, the aliens clearly place things that are precious to them adjacent to their single hands. We’re calling them ‘twoside’ and ‘oneside,’ and anything that’s of great value or needs protection seems to be on the oneside.”

“The algorithms did that? Starting with nothing?”

“They didn’t start with nothing. They started with hundreds of millions of images, and looked at each one with a patience and a depth that no humans could have.”

“Data mining for the win,” said Hannah.

“Exactly.”

It was finally Emily’s turn to take the stand. Hannah Plaxton asked her a series of rehearsed questions about the data mining that had discovered the Reticulum. But then it was Piotr Sudeyko’s turn to cross-examine her.

“Dr. Chiu,” he said, “I’ve been very impressed by the naturalness of Ursula’s speech.”

“Thank you.”

“You really have done a remarkable job, producing an alien AI avatar that makes the Reticulum as easy to query as our own World Wide Web.”

“Thank you. It was a team effort.”

“It’s astonishing, really. I was given to understand that the sort of universal translation Ursula performs is impossible. Can you explain to the good women and men of the jury how it was accomplished?”

“Certainly. We had our first big breakthrough in spontaneous speech recognition in 2010, using fully connected deep neural networks, or DNN. For deep learning, you keep throwing more and more samples at the neural nets, and, by comparing one to another, the nets eventually figure out word semantics, sentence semantics, and knowledge modeling.

“One of the keys was realizing that semantic intent is better defined at the phrase/sentence level, rather than at the word level. After all, the meaning of a single word is often ambiguous—is a bat a flying mammal or a sporting club? But a phrase, or a sentence, or even a whole document, contains rich contextual information that we leverage. And, of course, the whole web, whether it’s ours or theirs, contains countless Rosetta stones. There are only a handful of ways to lay out the periodic table, for instance, and any technologically advanced civilization is going to have some sort of representation of it.

“So, our neural nets just kept looking to see which alien words were juxtaposed frequently with which objects in accompanying illustrations. It’s a statistical game, but if you play it long enough, you win.”

“I see. And I suppose for simple things it was fairly easy to come up with a translation table, no?”

“That’s right. For instance, they sent thousands of pictures of mineral specimens, and by examining text linked to those pictures, not only were the neural nets able to figure out the alien words for specific types of minerals—their term for ‘quartz,’ say, or for ‘diamond’—but eventually to figure out general terms, including ones with fine distinctions that even most humans are unaware of, such as the difference between a ‘rock’ and a ‘mineral.’”

“I confess that I myself don’t know the difference.”

“A mineral is homogeneous, with a specific crystalline structure; a rock is made up of multiple minerals.”

“Ah,” said Sudeyko. “And so, I suppose, by the same technique, your algorithms divined the alien words for, say, ‘stream’ and ‘river.’”

“That’s right.”

“And for ‘pond’ and ‘lake.’”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

“And ‘sea’ and ‘ocean.’”

“Well…”

“Yes, Dr. Chiu?”

“Of course, our technique can only translate things for which there are terms in both languages. I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures and maps of their world they sent us. It’s a much drier planet than our own. There are no seas or oceans—and so no continents or large islands. A map of their world’s surface looks like a slice of Swiss cheese, with the holes being lakes.”

“Aha,” said Sudeyko, smiling in a way that, to Emily, looked triumphant. He turned to Judge Weisman. “Your honor, I’d like to recall Ursula to the stand.”

Weisman announced a fifteen-minute recess. Once it was over and everyone was reseated, Piotr Sudeyko said, “I have a few more questions for you, Ursula.”

The avatar’s eyestalks swiveled to follow him as he paced in the open area in front of the judge’s bench. “I’ll do my best to answer them.”

“I spent a lot of time looking through some of the photographs that were included in the Reticulum. Naturally, many of them were unrecognizable to me. I was very grateful for the automatic captioning; otherwise, in most cases, I’d have had no clue what I was looking at. But there were some photos that were startlingly familiar. Both your people and mine seem to have a fondness for sunsets.”

“Sunsets are beautiful.”

“Indeed they are. And both your sun and ours are very similar, what we call class-G yellow dwarfs. In fact, I’d have a hard time telling in a lot of cases whether a picture was of one of your sunsets or one of ours.”

Ursula’s eyestalks rippled in agreement. “I imagine it could be difficult.”

“But, of course, after the sun finally sets, things are different. Your system is forty-six light-years away from ours.”

“Forty-six of your light-years,” said Ursula amiably. “One hundred and two of ours.”

“Right, right. But, no matter which way you reckon it, it’s enough to shift the arrangement of stars. I’m not an astronomer, like Dr. Plaxton over there, but, if I understand correctly, the brightest star in our nighttime sky is the one we call Sirius, whereas in your sky, it’s the one we know as Canopus.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Of course, here, the moon outshines any star at night, especially when it’s full.”

“True.”

“And I suppose the same thing happens on your world.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

Sudeyko stopped his pacing as if startled. “Why not?”

“My world has no moon.”

“Really?” said Sudeyko, raising his eyebrows dramatically. “But then how do you know what a moon is?”

“There are two gas-giant planets in our system; each has several moons that we can observe through telescopes.”

“Ah, I see,” said Sudeyko. “And these gas giants—do they show visible disks to your unaided eyes, or are they just pinpoints of light like the stars?”

“The latter—though of course they move from night to night against the stellar background.”

“And, just to be clear, your world is a rocky planet, like ours?”

“More or less. It’s a little larger, and about two billion of your years older.”

Sudeyko waved those irrelevancies away. “Fine. But, again, to be clear, it’s not, in itself, a moon; that is, the object it orbits around is your sun, not a larger world.”

“That’s right.”

“I imagine on a clear night that you can see what we call the Milky Way, the band of stars visible when you look in toward the galactic center.”

“Yes. We call it the ‘Sky River.’”

“And perhaps, if you’re at the right place on your planet, you can even see our two satellite galaxies—the ones we call the Clouds of Magellan—or the tiny smudge of the nearest separate galaxy, Andromeda.”

“If one’s eyesight is normal, yes.”

“But there are no solid objects—nothing that shows as a disk; nothing that shows visible surface features—in your night sky, correct?”

“That’s right.”

Sudeyko seemed to consider for a time, but of course he was simply letting the impact of this register on the jurors. “Huh,” he said at last. “And, before the recess, Dr. Emily Chiu told us there are no seas or oceans on your world. So, perhaps you could tell me a bit about your previous experience with first contact.”

“I don’t know what you mean by that.”

Someone had stolen Emily’s seat during the recess; she was now four rows from the front. She shifted uncomfortably: Ursula was giving the correct answer, but Emily was afraid the journalists would misinterpret it as a failure on the software’s part.

“Oh,” said Sudeyko, as if a great mystery had been solved. “Right. Your planet is all one big land mass. So, there are no populations that were geographically isolated for millennia, correct?”

“If I follow your meaning, yes, that is correct.”

“So you never underwent anything like, say, what happened here when Europeans came to the Americas, or to Australia. You never had the devastation, the disease, and the decimation of populations that we experienced time and again when formerly isolated cultures came into contact, especially when one was clearly technologically more advanced than the other?”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Well,” said Sudeyko, “the past’s the past. Let’s turn to the present. Tell me about your space program.”

“Pardon me?”

“You know: your astronauts, your spaceships.”

“I don’t know the words ‘astronauts’ or ‘spaceships.’”

“So you don’t have a space program?”

“Apparently not.”

“Why not? Judging by the material in the Reticulum, your civilization is substantially more advanced than ours, and we’ve been putting people in space for almost seventy years now.”

“It never occurred to us that such a thing was possible.”

“You didn’t dream from ancient times about going to other worlds?”

Ursula twirled her inside arm in baffled negation. “No. Why would we?”

“Well, that’s an interesting question,” said Sudeyko. “I suppose it’s possible that if we didn’t have a large moon ourselves—if we didn’t have another world hanging over our heads since the dawn of time, tantalizingly just out of reach—perhaps we wouldn’t have been inspired to venture into space, either.”

“That’s an interesting supposition,” agreed Ursula.

“You said earlier that an overwhelming majority of your whole population voted to send the Reticulum to planets in other star systems.”

“Yes.”

“Which means presumably most of you considered it a safe thing to do.”

“Of course.”

“Because, after all, if it never occurred to your people to travel even within your own solar system, it presumably never occurred to you that beings in other star systems might physically bridge the gulf between their world and yours.”

“What a novel suggestion! Yes, you’re right: That never occurred to us.”

Sudeyko moved over and began pacing back and forth in front of the jury box. It was hard to get anyone to take their eyes off Ursula in all her surrealist glory, but the historian wanted to be sure that everyone was looking at him, so his point would land with maximum force. “And so,” he said, “when your people voted, they were not considering the possibility that beings from another world, or their automated probes, might come and enslave, plunder, or destroy your world, isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “That is so.”

“And, because of your planet’s specific circumstances, you blithely went ahead shouting your existence to neighboring stars, without the slightest thought you might be endangering your existence.”

“Yes.”

“But we, who have a history of disastrous first contacts even among our own people, and who have a space program and recognize that others might, too, do understand that attracting attention to ourselves on the galactic stage might in fact bring on unwanted, indeed dangerous, visitors.”

“Objection!” said Hannah, rising to her feet. “Your honor, opposing counsel is arguing his case!”

“Yes,” Judge Weisman said. “He certainly is—and very effectively, too, I might add. Court is recessed until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Emily and Hannah had gone for dinner at a sushi place near the courthouse. “You know,” Hannah said in a derisive tone, “if Sudeyko is right, it could already be over for Ursula’s people. Remember she said they sent their Reticulum to eleven other star systems besides ours? If, say, the beings at 20 Leonis Minoris—just a dozen light-years from them—were his dastardly berserkers, even if their battleships could only manage a third of the speed of light, they’d have had time to show up and annihilate Ursula’s world.”

“You’re sure he’s wrong, aren’t you?” Emily said.

“No,” said Hannah, “I’m not. You can’t prove a negative; you can’t prove hostile aliens don’t exist. But, thanks to you and your team, we now know for sure that peaceful ones do exist.”

The closing arguments went pretty much as Emily expected them to. Hannah Plaxton extolled the virtues of altruistically sharing our art and culture, our science and our spiritual writings, not just with the people of 47 Ursae Majoris, who, after all, had already reached out to us, but also with as many other likely star systems as possible.

And Piotr Sudeyko reiterated his belief that no such actions should be taken without a broad international consensus—even though, as a historian, he doubtless knew that such a thing likely would be impossible to attain.

Judge Weisman gave instructions to the jurors and sent them off to deliberate; their verdict, whatever it might be, would further fuel debate. In that sense, by bringing the matter to wider attention, Sudeyko and the moratorium crowd had already won.

People filed out of the courtroom, but Emily stayed behind. The staff had shut off the giant monitor standing next to the witness dock, but Emily touched the control that turned it back on and Ursula appeared on the screen. Emily regarded the avatar, and the avatar regarded her. At last, Ursula said, “May I be of assistance?”

“Perhaps,” said Emily. “Suppose instead of us composing a reply, suppose we were to ask you to do it. If we gave you access to a powerful radio telescope or messaging laser, what message would you send back to your people about us?”

Ursula’s limbs moved precisely as Emily’s team had programmed them to, mimicking what the neural nets had divined to be gestures of thoughtful reflection. And then the little round mouth irised opened and closed. “I’d tell them we made a mistake.”

Emily was surprised by how sad that made her feel. “You wouldn’t have sent the Reticulum, if you had it to do over?”

Ursula’s inside arm twirled. “No, no, no. That’s not the mistake. The mistake was not realizing that travel between worlds is possible. I would propose to my people that some of them should come here in person.”

“And do you think they would actually do that? Come here? Come to visit humanity?”

“I have no idea,” Ursula said. And then she raised all three arms. “But I know how I’d vote.”

Robert J. Sawyer is one of only eight writers ever to have won all three of the world’s top awards for best science fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (for Hominids), the Nebula (for The Terminal Experiment), and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (for Mindscan). According to the Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards, he has won more awards for his novels than any other author in the history of the science fiction and fantasy genres. Rob—who holds two honorary doctorates—has published in both of the world’s top scientific journals, Science (guest editorial) and Nature (fiction). The ABC television series FlashForward was based on his Aurora Award–winning novel of the same name, and he was one of the scriptwriters for that program. In 2013 he received the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal from the governor general of Canada, and in 2014 he was one of the initial nine inductees into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

David Brin

The Tell

You can read much of the human saga—a stark history of extravagant hopes and stunning defeats—on the face of any gambler…

…the same story told by Judean hills, where towns and villages gradually piled atop one another, layer after layer, each stratum spelling yet another tale of confidence and ambition that inevitably failed. Till someone else arrived to build upon that dust. An upward sedimentary process, mounting ever higher. Generations, separated by the babble of language and culture and centuries, but united by one aim—to reach Heaven by dint of hard work, hope, and pain.

“Here, we have trenched through an augury,” our guide explained, while leading us along plank bridges that crisscrossed over the Tel Ain Makor dig. “An important ceremonial center, it apparently remained in use across the Hellenistic period till it was burned and abandoned under the Hasmoneans, then restored during the Roman era.”

She gestured toward a broad, shallow excavation where ancient ashes and debris had been removed—slowly and painstakingly—by archaeology students from all over the world. One cluster of young folks crouched at the north end, murmuring to each other, alternately in English and in Hebrew.

“Here, priests would come to apply the arts of prophecy, divining future events from haruspication—studying animal entrails. Or else by reading auspices—interpreting the flight and behavior of passing birds. From inscriptions on tribute medallions, it appears that people came from all over the region—even dignitaries from Caesarea and Jerusalem—to have horoscopes read or to learn what the gods intended.”

Another group of students, closer to us, argued in Arabic over which tool to use on an obstinate outcrop. I didn’t understand a word, but from their expressions I could easily tell the debate was just theater, for us visitors. Or for the guide. And it worked. A twitch of a smile showed she was pleased with their industriousness.

I don’t delve time. I dig faces.

“You mentioned horoscopes. So they also did astrology here?”

That was Ludmilla Kilonova. Of course that would interest her. Stars and such. Especially those on the verge of exploding.

“Good question. I don’t believe there was an observatory here. At least, we’ve seen no traces so far.” Our Ministry of Antiquities guide gestured at the extent of the dig, almost twenty meters long by thirty, under a tent canopy that flapped slightly in an inadequate breeze, staving off the harsh Levantine sun. Beyond, surveyor stakes pocked the dun-colored hilltop with laser-pinned accuracy, proposing sites for further excavation.

“Tel Ain Makor may seem vast when you are crawling so close to the ground. But in fact, it was a minor municipality, more a pilgrimage shrine than a large, urban center. I would wager that they acquired their star charts from Alexandria. Or maybe Babylon.”

Babylon. I perked up at the mention. My home.

At least that’s what they call Vegas, sometimes: New Babylon.

The parallels ran deep. Both sin capitals featured hellish desert heat. Though we’re clever enough to use air conditioning. Take that, Hammurabi.

Both nursed the same delusion. That our gaudy works will stand up to time.

And an identical, all-too-human ambition. To peer forward. To catch a warning glimpse of what’s ahead.

Was that my real reason for coming halfway around the world? To traipse through dust amid proof that humans always fool themselves?

As if further evidence were needed.

“You are needed,” Sophia Van Took said, almost two years earlier, cornering me after my second Saturday show. Bigger stars get helpers and dressers and private quarters. I shared a backstage alcove with Teresa, my “beautiful associate” (I could no longer say “assistant”), whose makeup table and privacy screen left little room for the headliner—me. Well, well. It still beat working for a living.

I took advantage of Sophia’s presence by handing her my glitter-dusted jacket, slightly pungent from sweat. (Hey, those lights are hot.)

“Hang it over there, please?” I indicated the cupboard that served as my wardrobe closet. Sophia held the garment gingerly by the collar, clearly pondering whether to let it fall, then shrugged and tiptoed for a hanger. Diminutive, and thanks to her last name some wiseacres called her “the hobbit.” But no one in her presence. Who wanted to live.

My shirt went into a laundry hamper, to be dealt with by the Tuscany Hotel staff. Hey, this may not be the Strip, but my name drew enough customers to merit some amenities. While toweling off, I asked Dr. Van Took, “How’d you like the show?”

“Didn’t pay much attention,” she admitted. Or was that a brag? Sophia had a pretty good poker face. During the performance I glimpsed her at the comp table, sipping occasionally from a grapefruit juice while tapping the rim of her specs—the latest model from Anson Aiware. Even from the stage I could tell that images flickered along the inner surfaces. She must have been grunting, clicking, scrolling, and deciding the fate of nations the whole time I was levitating Teresa, or catching a bullet with my teeth.

Or doing my mentalist routine, guessing which cards had been chosen by five randomly selected guests, all by reading giveaway tells: The dilating iris. A cheek tremor. A nervous grin. Or the clenched, flat expression of a college kid absolutely determined not to show a thing—and thus revealing everything.

Ah, well. Van Took had uses for a stage magician, but entertainment never entered into it.

“So what’s the scam?” I asked. “Another perpetual motion machine? Cold fusion? A vacuum energy propulsion system?”

Those were the big three—perennial favorites—though others had been climbing lately: SETI “signals” and water desalinization miracles and microbiota guaranteed to cure your bowels of all that ails ’em. Along with a dozen other skilled illusionists, I served on a Skeptics Society alert squad to help investigate such claims, separating auspicious assertions from deceptive ones. Because it turns out that scientists and engineers aren’t very good at penetrating hoaxes.

We stage magicians know the tricks, though. Well, most of them. Ways to deliver power without wires, to make things fizz or bubble or rise without any visible means of support. They say it takes a thief to catch one. Anyway, it helps pay the bills, off-season. And Mom and Dad seemed a bit more proud of me when I mentioned this sideline. As if I was a kind of private eye. Or something else respectable.

“None of that, this time.” Sophia shook her head.

I admit feeling some disappointment. Those tech-hoax gigs are cool, hanging around top science types and showing them whatever trick was afoot—or mistake, since some of the cold fusion guys are actually sincere, just way too eager and prone to fooling themselves. Then there are those rare occasions when the strange new thing actually turns out to be…but I’m drifting off-topic.

“What? No warp drive?” I asked. “Or teleport—”

Holding up a hand, Sophia scotched my hopes.

“No, this job is all about prediction.”

I blinked, my facial expression as readable as any mark’s.

“Again?”

Sophia shrugged. “They do keep trying.”

Perhaps the simplest example of reality mining is the analysis of automobile traffic congestion by using the global positioning system (GPS) data collected from the mobile telephones carried by the automobile drivers. These data provide minute-by-minute updates on traffic flow, allowing for more accurate predictions of driving time. Congestion patterns can be predicted days in advance, and traffic jams detected hours before they become serious…

—Alex Pentland, Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data (2008)

It’s said to be embedded in our prefrontal lobes, twin nubs above the eyes that let us think about the future. Somehow, a bunch of clever apes fell into the habit of fantasizing about what might happen next…

…if I enter that thicket…

…if we refuse the other tribe’s ultimatum…

…if I propose this idea at today’s meeting…

…or wear this outfit…

…or declare this new rule…

…or try to run that yellow light…

Einstein called it the gedankenexperiment, or thought experiment. We’re good at telling ourselves stories about what lies ahead. And certainly the habit does help, a bit, exposing obvious errors to avoid…

…though only up to a point. Anticipation all too easily becomes hallucination, envisioning, and then expecting what we want to happen. That’s fine in a novel, film, or stage show. But it’s a damn poor way for leaders to make policy.

Hey, I just explained the saga of endlessly repeated blunders called “history.” Nonetheless, we do keep trying. Tea leaves and priestly pronouncements gave way to primly mechanistic war games—which convinced Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm to charge ahead, destroying both empires.

War games transformed into scenario-based planning. (So now you had a decision tree of diverse ways to be wrong!) Then clever mathematical models fought each other for relevance—a darwinnowing that did help to expose this or that danger, but almost never pointed to solutions.

Are your models flawed? Add more variables! Or more data…big data sets. Humongous ones. Gather and collate everything!

And feed it to AI…but what kind of AI? There are so many, all disappointingly far from omniscient, all just as confused as the rest of us when they try their hand at prophecy. Especially the “quants” who would get rich exploiting market models—preying on those who are just one step behind—then wreck their own trading house by pressing the wagers too far. Just like a Vegas gambler, so sure that his winning streak is something ordained to last forever.

Always lurking like a chiding ghost is the shade of Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov’s fictional “psychohistorian,” who made prediction look so easy on the pages of a 1940s wish-fantasy novel. The archetype seer whose models of civilization—the rise or fall of whole empires—might finally reduce all irksome human chaos and variability to cool numbers and equations. How many economists, sociologists, politicians, and/or psychopaths started out by lifting their gaze from a Foundation book, staring ahead, and murmuring: “Hey, I could do that!” Paul Krugman. Osama bin Laden. Milton Friedman, Shoko Asahara, Carl Sagan, Newt Gingrich…. The sheer range of nerdy Asimovians, from brilliant to crazy but all drawn to the same dream, would be amazing if it weren’t frightening.

But, heck, why not blame Karl Marx, whose followers felt so sure they sussed the driving forces of humanity? Or believers in the greatest (if heretical) acolyte of Marx—Ayn Rand—whose seductive incantations followed all the master’s patterns to reach opposite conclusions.

And so, “laws of sociology” grew less fashionable. Simulations improved only glacially, while choking on tsunamis of Big Data. At which point the powers of the world—desperate for guidance—rediscovered Adam Smith.

Maximize the number of participants! If individual models and modelers can fool themselves, then make them compete with one another in a marketplace of ideas. Utilize the same competitive forces that propel evolution—the most creative force in the universe! The same driver as markets. As science.

Hence the “wisdom of crowds” became the next fashion in prognostication. And there were good initial signs! Wikipedia, Kickstarter, Duolingo, and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk all showed promising outcomes from lateral cooperation and competition, so much more agile than hierarchical command.

Crowd-sourced analysis started with SETI@home, when thousands lent their home computers to a network that analyzed radio telescope data, sifting for alien signals—an approach that expanded to genome research, protein-folding problems, and a myriad other collaborations between scientists and “smart mobs” of amateurs, like the Zooniverse Project, where amateur aficionados help identify lunar craters, translate old ships’ logs, identify galaxies, and find planets round other stars.

Clearly, some sort of distributed wisdom was at work. But the sixty-four-trillion-dollar question loomed. Can it be applied to peering ahead? To prediction?

Again, look at human history. Sure, arrogant human leaders proved foolish, nine times out of ten. But were there cases, in the past, when mobs or mass movements did any better? Could mobs be made much, much smarter?

—M.N. Plano, How We Did It (2025)

Kilonova took care of the most dangerous cameras, and a good thing too. Mazella’s mob would recognize me in two heartbeats. Quicker than that, now that all casinos employed computerized face recog. Sure, Sophia Van Took would offer me a new identity—and face-job—if things went wrong tonight. But I like Vegas. And showbiz.

The Feds had better be one step ahead this time, I thought, glancing at my clandestine companion, then kissing our little drone for luck and letting it go. The machine would swoop about, barely more noticeable than a gnat, noting every lens and biometric scanner along our path, then latch-spooking those we could not evade. Unless Sophia’s people had missed a step in the perpetual tug-of-info-war. One mistake and the least of my problems might be hiding under Witness Protection. Johann Mazella played for keeps.

The drone hovered just outside our hiding place, under a buffet table where a bribed busboy had wheeled us as the Golden Palace kitchens were closing. The little flier took its time, then confirmed that we truly were in a surveillance shadow.

I glanced at my companion. Ludmilla Kilonova owned a pleasant smile, though I had never seen her eyes. Those windows to the soul were always hidden by shades—high-tech specs that overlaid the world with augmented reality data. But I suspected another reason, a flattering one. She knows what I can do.

We’re on. Her specs picted to mine. A more secure channel than whispering.

Fine, I replied, scrolling words with my tongue. You first, Mata Hari.

I couldn’t see the eye roll, but twitches of cheek muscles confirmed one. Well, well, fair enough. Kilonova’s cover story was genuine—she really was in town to give a talk on late stellar evolution at the astronomical convention. Still, I never had the slightest doubt about her real profession.

Follow me, magic man.

She wriggled her way out of the buffet table, then slithered across a tile floor inset with gilt GP casino logos. I might have enjoyed watching her graceful moves, had I not been worried about my own ass. The specs showed a very narrow tunnel for us to crawl along. It wouldn’t do for my jeans to bump the boundary.

Our path led up some carpeted stairs, drawing ever closer to a most familiar sound, the background music of my life: the tinkling jangle of slots.

Someone in casino security should lose his job, I pondered as we took shelter under a kiosk where addicts could tap their savings and max out their credit cards to refill their gambling accounts. Even at 4 a.m., there were players about, though none in this area right now. As if wee-hours slot junkies would pay us any notice.

It occurred to me that the tunnel-of-unobservance down which we had come might be a great path to rob this very kiosk. Could that even be the intention? Someone gets himself hired as a consultant for GP security, then sets up a route…. Hey, at minimum it could make a cool movie pitch.

Hold that thought, I noted, as Kilonova signaled for us both to slide along a narrow cleft and stand up, another entirely necessary quasi-erotic slither that pressed my body along hers. Again, it might have been enjoyable, but for her faintly audible sigh, that I easily translated.

Men.

OK, so now we were standing. And, according to plan, we then simply stepped into view, striding side by side like a couple on holiday, returning from a very late show…with the drone warning us to turn our faces just-by-coincidence away from any and all cams—all but one, which the drone conveniently caused to malfunction, using methods that were well beyond my security clearance.

Of course, if casino security ever cared to do so, they might backtrack images and discover that a certain couple had appeared in one area, without any record of them getting there. Hence, this all had to go smoothly, with no one ever suspicious enough to backtrack.

Time for the switcheroo. I caught sight of another couple seated together at a Simpsons-themed slot machine. They stood up and Maggie Simpson complained with a soft whimper—one of a hundred cues the mechanisms used to tweak human emotions, with one aim: to keep players in their seats. Seats containing sensors sent biodata to giant processors, helping adjust the slot experience—all the sights and sounds and payouts—in just the right way, so that humanity’s most susceptible members would find it nearly impossible to leave.

I’ll know civilization is growing up when the people behind all this are labeled psychopaths. Predation on the weak-willed will be gone when we get to Star Trek.

Still, I’ll miss the colors. The sound and flash of outrageous dreams. The smell of boundless—if groundless—hope.

This couple ignored the comeback cues as they got up and turned away from the machine. He complaining about back pain from bad posture. She griping about the size of tip he gave the pretty cocktail waitress—as she sloshed from too many complimentary beverages. They staggered a little, converging at an angle toward Kilonova and me, while I focused on memorizing the man’s voice, his walk.

Next blind spot, just ahead.

Outlined in the specs’ percept-overlay, it didn’t look like much of a blind spot. A fat pillar, supporting a tall, 4K screen advertising Golden Palace shows and events. There was at least one camera—from that unoccupied blackjack table, over there—staring right at us as we rounded the corner, on collision course with the drunken slot addicts, just as the display screen shifted to images of Penn & Teller, the casino’s featured magic and comedy act.

Sudden warmth and a faint electric prickle erupted along my left side as pixelated garments came to life, matching the screen duo perfectly as Kilonova and I did a rapid dance around the other couple, whose own garments flickered just so.

The man straightened up as I slouched. The woman’s step became serene as Kilonova slumped and seemed to slosh, now clothed in a completely different style…and we parted ways again, under Penn Jillette’s knowing grin.

The journey continued. None of our other evasions were quite as dramatic or high-tech as that fancy identity swap. Mostly we were just pretending to be a pair of prey animals—precisely how the casino owners viewed their slot herds—taking a bathroom break (where I fetched a spool of fiber-optic cable out of the trash bin), then strolling over the famed Golden Palace catwalk, and finally vanishing in a shadow behind the casino’s Sports and Events Betting Parlor, where I quickly pulled out a svelte packet of burglary tools and got to work, while Kilonova and the drone kept watch.

Some professions prepare you well for a job like this one. Those demanding utter hand and eye coordination. Brain surgeon, perhaps, snaking your laparoscope up a patient’s sinus to operate on an occlusion in the parietal lobe—yeah, I guess that would come in first place. But a master at sleight-of-hand magic would make a close second.

In a cranny behind one of the betting booths—where customers might pick a team and spread to bet on, or an election result, or the odds against a terrorist attack happening this week, whatever seemed worth laying down a wager for—I drilled through the wall, then used a waldo probe to fish around, till finally I found a fiber-optic cable encased in a triple-security conduit. One false move would release helium gas, revealing that someone had been tampering.

Nerves of steel? Yeah, that’s me. Fortunately, I only had to deliver Sophia’s nanos under that first, pressurized layer, using a special hypodermic flex-needle. The microscopic spy machines then did the rest, tying in a repeater tap so my employers could track and identify every photon.

And here’s the ultimate answer to all those fools who think they can protect their private secrets forever: Go ahead. Encrypt every bit and blip and bloop on your computer—or in the Cloud or even in the DarkNet, BlackHoleNet, and SingularityNet—under a maze of ciphers and steganography images and even quantum-entangled trip wires. All those tricks may thwart the corporations or even Big Brother, for now. But next year? When they have much bigger quantum processors? Or when they can listen to voice vibrations in your glass windows? Or fly in a drone that watches you type? Or that logs each letter electronically, on its way from keyboard to tablet? Or reads the nano-flashes emitted by your own brain?

Right. Preserve safety, freedom, and privacy…by hiding. Show me one time in history when that worked, with any consistency or for very long. Ever.

Better to prevent Big Brother in the first place! There are ways to do that. By keeping an eye on Sophia Van Took’s employers, for example. So that Sophia can keep an eye on bad guys on our behalf. Without becoming one herself.

Anyway, that’s the hope. And, sure, it felt ironic, thinking about all that while engaging in tech-wielding skulduggery. But just ask Kilonova about her exploding stars. Why do stars explode? Because irony sits at the bottom of all natural processes. Irony sucks the energy out of absolutely everything.

Get it? Neither do I. But it was the one time I heard her tell a real joke, guffawing at her own cleverness. And I swear, someday I’ll figure out the punch line.

Something flashed in the corner of my spec-percept. The drone, yelping for attention. But I had to concentrate.

Ludmilla whispered urgently. The casino’s AI must have noticed two customers passing out of sight here, taking too long to emerge. A security guard was coming. Getting closer.

“I’m almost done…almost…”

I could sense her nearby, scanning both VR space and reality for escape options. It wouldn’t do to knock out the guard if the whole reason for our mission was to raise no misgivings! Even if he suspected nothing but just escorted us to the security office, or even took our retinal scans, the game would be up. They’d know we weren’t the same couple. They would then scour all the cams, detect the switch, work their way back, back, back in time from image to image…

Even if Mazella didn’t seek to make an example of me, I’d be through in this town.

“There! I’m closing up now…criminy!”

I left the self-sealing wall patch to dry, grabbing my tools and hopping back—

—as Ludmilla Kilonova knelt and barfed all over the floor, including my left shoe—

—just before a giant person wearing Golden Palace livery turned the corner and stopped short, staring in ill-concealed disgust.

“Uh, we need an auto-mop in section forty-seven,” he murmured into a shoulder mike. “Yeah, third one tonight. Better tell food services.”

I folded away my tool kit behind my back—one-handed as the other hand stroked my “wife’s” head.

“I guess she had too much,” I started to explain, slurring to disguise my voice. “We’ll clean it up. Sorry. So sorry.”

The guard shook his head and made shooing motions.

“Don’t worry, sir. It happens. Maybe you should head up to your room now. Get some sleep.”

Solicitous guard. I busied myself helping Ludmilla stand and then shuffle on, giving us both an excuse to divert our faces from every camera as we followed a path chosen by the drone, supporting each other, moaning and grumbling.

Only when we were finally ensconced in room 1245 on the second floor, where the other couple had checked in yesterday—and when the flitting drone confirmed there were no bugs—did we both straighten up.

“Smooth move,” I commented while peeling off the pixelated suit. “But did you have to throw up on my shoe? I like this pair.”

“Oh, quit bellyaching,” she replied from the bathroom, between gargles. “You try doing that on command.”

I shrugged and refrained from commenting that I’ve given tougher performances. Still, she ranked several notches higher in my esteem. Especially now that, for the very first time, I could see her eyes, uncovered by specs, glittering with adrenaline rush.

“So,” she commented, wiping her mouth with a washcloth. “What’ll we do until checkout time?”

Feigning fatigue and nonchalance—though I knew she could read me, too—I faked a yawn.

“I wonder what’s on pay-per-view.”

The Mazellas were on to something with their betting system. Word spread among bookies—Vegas and online—not to try nibbling at the Golden Palace oddsmakers.

Thanks to the tap that Ludmilla and I planted, Sophia Van Took’s team quickly zeroed in on the GP secret sauce—an improved algorithm for weighting wagers from a crowd. An incremental improvement, then. No transcendent or magical leap. Not this time. I could read relief on Sophia’s face, plus disappointment.

That was the holy grail, of course—the combined hope and dread that propelled interest by so many groups, from Amazon and Google to NASA. From Palantir and TIBCO to Goldman-Sachs, to the Vatican and the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. Humanity badly needed better predictive methods. But if one group or secretive elite ever got their hands on something truly effective, it wouldn’t matter much whether they were corporate, criminal, or some foreign alliance. Human nature being what it is, even Sophia’s agglomeration of academics and civil servants might be tempted to leverage such power, rationalizing they were only acting for the common good.

And her team operated under safeguards. Multiple paths of civilian oversight. I shivered at the thought of a true anticipation engine being discovered and monopolized by the likes of Johann Mazella.

Is such a machine or system even possible? The dream of every prophet, fortune-teller, priest, planner, investor, protector, and lover, ever since our brows got pushed forward by those lamps, the prefrontal lobes.

In modern times, much of the investment went into “intelligent” computation, fed with massive information. Ideally, all information. The World Meteorological Model consumed more computing power than some major cities, dividing Earth’s surface, atmosphere, and oceans into ever smaller cells, transforming those pathetic old four-hour “weather reports” into a finely meshed gas-vapor-energy sim that lets folks plan what to wear on vacation, ten days ahead. A miracle so routine that several billion ingrates take it for granted, then diss the genius scientists who built the WMM for believing climate can change. Don’t get me started.

And yet, even the best modeling programs kept bumping against their twin enemies, complexity and chaos. The famous butterfly effect, where time (our ancient foe) amplifies even tiny perturbations—say, the flapping of a monarch’s wings—into a hurricane of downstream variations. Later efforts to push the WMM forward by even one more hour threatened to double the system’s computational needs.

How about quantum computers? Arrays of qubits processing fine skeins of possibility in parallel. Spectacularly parallel—if mystically inclined cyberneticists are right that quantum machines tap networks of entangled computers in alternate universes. And yet…

…yet the mesh models seemed helpless when it comes to analyzing human affairs.

Clearly, the problem was not in the machines, but software. Lacking a Hari Seldon, but swamped with all kinds of Big Data, we didn’t know how to mix and stir and bake all the ingredients.

From ancient warlords to insurance companies seeking better underwriting formulas; from investment arbitrage to handicapping political races, to predicting the next move by terrorists or strategic powers, to planning a new store for your doughnut-shop chain, there would be no end of eager customers for improved foresight services.

Only, even if you solve the complexity and chaos problem, there’s another rub. If you keep the method secret, you’ll eventually turn the whole world against you, or else fall into multiple traps of overconfident delusion. But if you share it, adversaries will apply every new forecasting method and cancel each other out! We’ve seen that happen to every brilliant stock market analytics tool.

The cancellation effect can be a good thing! What was it Sun Tzu said about war? Or maybe Clausewitz? Conflict only becomes violently physical when one side is mistaken about the other’s abilities or intentions. It’s why Eisenhower, humanity’s second most underrated statesman, made such a point of “open skies,” pushing development of spy satellites so both sides might see and predict better, calming their worst fears.

As Sophia’s team calmed when they evaluated data from the tap that Kilonova and I installed at the Golden Palace.

All right, so the Mazellas hadn’t made an epic breakthrough. But what kind of breakthrough had they made?

Sophia’s project caught my curiosity, so her top analyst—Simon Anderson—gave me reading materials. Books by Poundstone and Rebonato and Hanson and Pentland and MacLean shed some light on quantitative analysis and risk assessment. The details went way over my head—especially since I still had nine shows a week to perform—but I dug some of the gist. Enough to realize the quants had bitten off way more than they could chew. The better their models got, the more likely they’d prove brittle when some fickle, human factor veered unexpectedly.

“You get a more robust system when there’s diversity,” Anderson explained. “With scenarios, the storyteller often pushes one part of the narrative, trying to make a point. But that tendentious tendency eases when you increase the number of contributors.”

“Like with Delphi?” I asked, poking deliberately.

Simon shrugged. “OK, sure. Back in the 1950s, the Rand Corporation tried simply polling large numbers of people, getting them to vote on what they thought might happen in the future. John Brunner’s 1960s book The Shockwave Rider portrayed that method working better than it ever wound up performing in real life. Outside a novel, the results weren’t impressive.”

“Um. Duh? Delphi just measured the average opinion of a herd. Herds follow whatever’s fashionable. That’s no way to build a smart mob.”

“Oh? Then how would you do it?”

“Competition! That’s what wagering has always been about. It’s why the Golden Palace oddsmaking system had you spooked.”

“Hm. Then why haven’t statesmen and politicians and captains of industry long ago adapted, using competitive wagering systems to predict, and to make better policy?”

“Beats me. Maybe because betting always had such a low reputation. And it was vulnerable to cheating. Money is a good incentive, but it also warps everything, like gravity around a black hole. Anyway, haven’t there been efforts to adapt the approach lately, by setting up prediction markets?”

“Sure. Professor Robin Hanson established one of the first modern versions, with later variants run by everyone from SAP and Intrade to the Long Now Foundation. Start by gathering a large number of savvy volunteers. Only, instead of polling or voting, you get them wagering against each other—usually with pride-points, or else small charitable donations—just enough to get their competitive juices flowing. When it’s adversarial, folks care more, pay closer attention, maybe study a bit, before betting.

“IARPA then took things a bit further with their Good Judgment Project, creating a large pool and giving the volunteers access to lots of unclassified background material, tracking outcomes and seeking individuals with good predictive success. Some amateurs outscored top CIA analysts! The best were then put together in teams of various kinds—”

I leaned forward. “And the results?”

“Good. It’s partly classified. But a moderate step forward.”

“Still, only another incremental step.” I pondered for a moment. “Jeez, one would think that this IARPA approach ought to get the most investment of all.”

“Oh?” Simon glanced at his watch, then looked back at me archly. “The overall outcomes weren’t that much better than other predictive systems.”

“Yes, but you’re missing the big picture. We should be sifting the largest pool possible, not for the predictions themselves, but in order simply to find out who is right a lot.”

“Well, sure, I get that—”

“Do you? The IARPA program appears to have preselected by all sorts of criteria. How big was their pool?”

“It started at about a thousand.”

“A trifle. It should be hundreds of thousands, and with very loose criteria, with just one aim—find out who’s right more often than not. Then study the heck out of those people.”

“You’re talking about a predictions registry,” Simon said with a sigh. “It’s been tried, on a small scale. One Utopian goal was to give added credibility to people who are—as you say—right a lot. So that it translates into reputation.”

Utopian, indeed, I thought. And for once, Simon and I agreed about something.

“Like the way Nate Silver vaulted from nerdy number cruncher to media star for his election forecasts. Yeah, we should be scanning and scoring millions, so that being right a lot counts more in building credibility than money, charisma, or connections.”

“Or sleight of hand and illusion spinning?”

I lifted both shoulders in a quick shrug. Fair enough.

Simon stroked back his thinning blond hair.

“Look, I need to get back to work. And don’t you have a show to do?”

His face was easier to read than a ten-year-old playing poker for the first time. Frustration and eagerness to get away. And wondering why his boss had saddled him with a stage magician, saying “answer all his questions.”

I checked my specs. “Yeah, I gotta go. Still, I think I know why competition—markets and all similar approaches—has proved disappointing so far.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Because all systems that’ve been tried so far are voluntary. Folks who participate are already engaged, involved. They approve and want the experiment to work.”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Everything! In life, you don’t get to pick and choose when to compete. I can’t miss a show. A ballplayer has to try to make every game. A company that skips a year without a product is in trouble. A politician who skips an election—”

“And what does this have to do with prediction markets?”

“It’s simple, Simon. There are thousands, maybe millions of folks who make their living by pushing confident prognostications about the future. Stock analysts, cable news pundits, religious doomcasters…none of whom ever wants to be scored on the basis of accuracy! They smooth-talk others into betting on their forecasts…sometimes every penny the suckers own. They hedge their language and even say contradictory things, so they can point later at “successes.” What breakthrough tech could possibly do society and civilization more good than if we started tallying that army of persuasive arm-wavers and ranking them by how often—or how rarely—they were right?

“If it’s Utopian to imagine sifting millions of blithe predictions and applying market-like accountability for failure—giving positive reputation cred to people who are right a lot—then how much better to hold accountable those persuasive jerks who never seem to get dinged when they keep on being wrong!”

Vehemence. I seldom indulge, but this time it boiled up from within. Of course I hate such charlatans far more than the scientific hoaxers I’m called upon to help expose. As a professional liar, I concoct illusions that folks knowingly bought and paid for, fully aware that they are being fooled. But I can spot signs—the tells—when someone at a pulpit or on a pundit program or public policy forum is fibbing so smoothly, perhaps swaying millions. Warping a civilization that’s been pretty good to us.

Simon Anderson blinked at me.

“Utopian indeed. How on Earth would you construct a predictions market that’s not voluntary?”

OK, so that’s how I got the idea for Liar-Outer…and its more flashy competitor FIBuster. And it led to the reason I had to leave Vegas, running for my life.

Heck, I wouldn’t be in so much trouble if FIBuster weren’t so successful. Me and Simon and a few others started with just a few million from some Silicon Valley moguls, creating an online system where folks can post predictions made by any public figure, with or without the person’s cooperation. Starting with direct quotes, but getting past all the hedging and hemming and hawing and bullshit. Specially made AI semantics programs help distill out an essence, the gist, paraphrasing for simplicity. For what scientists call falsifiability.

When a public figure complains, he or she is given three chances to refine the paraphrasing, so long as the outcome remains clear and falsifiable. Predictors are welcome to give odds, as well. Only at that point, well, they’ve volunteered and become part of the system’s economy.

And if he or she won’t cooperate? Then it goes up anyway, as a bet. Stakes are chosen from a grid based on how rich and/or pushy the would-be Nostradamus was, and how many other folks believed ’em. Win or lose, the result is posted, with most lost wagers assigned to various charities. And if they refuse to pay? Well, that’s fine. There’s no legal obligation. But it’s funny how quickly a sense of moral obligation took shape. And cable TV con artists started taking the worst hits on their cred.

Unlike fact-checking sites, Liar-Outer and FIBuster became ever more interactive. A game. A participation sport. A market.

And, of course, the Savonarola-Rasputin caste hated it!

But that’s not what sent me packing.

I was doing my magic shtick at the Tuscany; off-strip, if still classy. But I was starting to see the writing on the wall. More and more customers were coming to the shows armed with electronic augmentations. Specs that could zoom-expand and record your quickest hand movements, for example, encouraging smart alecks to shout gotcha when I palmed a card or made bouquets of flowers appear out of midair. At one point our Illusionist Guild threatened to strike if augmented reality goggles weren’t banned during show time.

That helped for maybe a year or so. But soon the AR gear merged with regular eyeglasses. Then folks started showing up with smart contact lenses. Oh, you could counter with some techie tricks—e-dazzlers and such—but all that did was create a hostile audience. So the jig was up for traditional sleight of hand.

I could still wow ’em with my mentalist stuff. Reading facial micro-expressions and tells and all that. But now folks just assumed I was cheating with augmentation gear! Using infrared and backstage implements and Ekman readers. I wasn’t! But the clock was clearly ticking, making me start to feel obsolete. An old-style craftsman in an age of machines. But then my skill found one more application.

Saving my damn life.

Was it coincidence that it happened the same evening Kilonova came to watch my show, first time I’d seen her in months? Of course not. Van Took’s correlation programs sensed something, and Ludmilla came by to have a closer look. Maybe (I flattered myself) to rekindle something with her “magic man.”

She sat at my comp table with an untouched drink, wearing specs shamelessly along with an expression of concentration. Jeez, if you aren’t going to enjoy the performance, you could’ve waited for me backstage.

Something had her nervous. At one point, when I glanced her way, she tapped the edge of her specs in a way that said she wanted to pict me a percept-message. I shrugged, blinking twice to indicate I was bare-eyed and it would have to wait…then went back to telling a fellow from Portland how much money he had in his wallet.

Then came a part of the act where I make water run uphill inside a clear container. A trick that had an extra step, ever since some wise guy publicly accused me of using one of the new room-temperature superfluids. From that day forth, Teresa would hand me the crystal pitcher and I’d theatrically pour some into my mouth, taking a great big swallow.

While reciting my standard patter, drawing out audience suspense, I noted that Kilonova was like an electrified wire—the proverbial watch spring, humming. She removed her specs, staring at me bare-eyed, and I could tell she was asking me to see.

Not her, I realized, tracking Kilonova’s gaze. But Teresa. Still reciting and flourishing, I looked at Teresa.

Holding out the pitcher, my beautiful associate was her usual smiling self. Moreover, after several years together, she had picked up on a lot of the tricks and cues. The cheek twitches and blink patterns and iris dilations and breath pauses that made the average mark so easy to read—these were all under control.

Too much control. Now that my attention included her, I could read more subtle body tells of deceit.

But over what?

Simple, let’s start by altering the patter. When you have a smooth and practiced stage routine, any variation can make your partner break stride. Cause her to make eye contact. Send a questioning look.

“So is this one of them there room temperature superfluids?” I asked the audience while flourishing both hands toward the pitcher in her grasp. “Or how about ectoplasm! Phlegm? Phlogiston? Fairy blood? Luminiferous ether?” I ran down a long list, made up on the fly. Teresa’s smile froze, exactly as one would expect if I were being a routine-wrecking jerk.

But there was no questioning look. No eye contact. In fact, her gaze flicked away…and I read guilt.

I read fear.

I guess I could have “accidentally” spilled the pitcher right then, ruining the trick but earning forgiveness from the audience with some performance lagniappes. Instead, I called for a volunteer.

“Hey, I get a lot of repeat customers, and I’ll bet some of you out there have seen this shtick before, right?” A smattering of applause. “OK then, how about one of you out there come up and take a gulp to prove it’s water? I’m getting older, and this bladder of mine is already full. Anyone? How about you, sir?”

Grinning sheepishly for his friends, and almost stumbling in eagerness, the tourist hurried forward, onto the stage…and it only took a glance to see plain panic in Teresa’s eyes. Good. The villains who blackmailed or bribed you into this will study the recording and see your shock, your dismay. They’ll know you tried and failed. That you didn’t tip me off. You’ll live.

I owed her that much. Nothing more.

As the tourist shuffled forward, dazzled by the lights, I teased laughter from his pals by suggesting that maybe this time the fluid might not be water! That I had summoned a mark onstage to do the taste test in order not to take the risk myself. He guffawed nervously, assuming that it was part of my new, mischievous patter.

Kilonova blanched, as pale as a ghost. Would I really be such a bastard?

The mark reached out to receive the pitcher, overcoming nerves with macho and a sense of fun. I loved the guy…and motioned for Teresa to hand him the crystal decanter—

—which, trembling, she fumbled at the last instant, letting it slip.

I dived after and caught it. Bumping heads with the eager, clumsy-helpful customer, I bobbled the heavy pitcher, losing hold, recovering…then taking a huge pratfall as the goblet fell crashing to the stage. Amid the splash and flying fragments, our volunteer hopped back, cussing amiably.

Rolling to my feet, I apologized, brushed off his jacket, handed him a couple of passes to the Horsefeathers Revue, and caught a final glimpse of my beautiful associate, disappearing behind the curtain.

During the next few minutes, Kilonova made repeated let’s get out of here motions. But no way I’d flee the stage, too! There were replacement tricks up my sleeve. And I remembered how to perform alone. And these good people—some of them—had paid good money to see me. Or at least deserved a break from the cybernetically enhanced parasitism of the casino floor.

Anyway, the show must go on.

“These distributed sensor networks have given us a new, powerful way to understand and manage human groups, corporations, and entire societies. As these new abilities become refined by the use of more sophisticated statistical models and sensor capabilities, we could well see the creation of a quantitative, predictive science of human organizations and human society. At the same time, these new tools have the potential to make George Orwell’s vision of an all-controlling state into a reality. What we do with this new power may turn out to be either our salvation or our destruction.” —Alex Pentland, Reality Mining of Mobile Communications: Toward a New Deal on Data (2008)

So there I was a few days later in Israel, presumably accompanying my new bride to an astronomical conference in Haifa, then taking a honeymoon trip to archaeological sites, culminating at the Tel Ain Makor dig, northeast of Jerusalem. Kilonova believed in realism, so I quite enjoyed the pretense. Indeed, I was pondering the possibility of proposing an indefinite extension of our ruse, which so far seemed—in addition to other advantages—to stave off more assassination attempts.

This meant that the powers intent on keeping me alive were at least evenly matched with those wanting me dead.

But why? This can’t be just Johann Mazella. Even if that ruthless mogul caught wind of our spycraft at the Golden Palace (and by now I doubted he ever would), time would surely have dissipated any rage down to the “you’ll never work in this town again” range. He’d know that was plenty punishment for a guy like me.

As Milla and I made our way back to the tour van, past layer after layer of failed civilizations, I pondered.

No, it has to be about Liar-Outer. A lot of powerful people have been inconvenienced. Some even had their careers ruined by our credibility scoring system. Could it be revenge?

But that didn’t make sense either! I’d broken no vows to members of the diffuse oligarchy. I had behaved as a member of an opposing team. You don’t kill honest adversaries out of pique, lest it turn into a tit-for-tat bloodbath. Revenge? No, there was something else. Something much more likely to propel murder.

Prevention.

I confronted Milla with my suspicion that evening, over dinner at our hotel near Ramallah.

“You know something I don’t know.”

She nodded, with a guarded expression, and gave an evasive answer.

“How would you know something that I know but you don’t?”

No, no. Evasion doesn’t make for good marriages.

“You and Sophia. Your predictive engines. You figure that I’m going to do something. And that potential future action would put me in danger. That’s why you showed up last Sunday at the Tuscany.”

A glint in the eye. She knew a subtle tell was all the confirmation needed, as I worked at the logical chain.

“Moreover, it’s something strong. A future condition attractor state that others were likely to detect, as well. Others who would not approve of my future course of action. Hence, you came to rescue me. My knight in black-spandex armor.”

This time a slight smile. A tight nod.

“The least service I could perform for a magic man.”

“And this thing I am about to do…can I assume it has to do with prediction?”

Another nod.

“Well, then,” I started to fume. “If you ladies are so good at fortune-telling, why don’t you go ahead and invent whatever-it-is yourselves! Why do you need me? I could’ve gone on, oblivious and perfectly happy—”

All right, that was a lie, and Milla could read it well enough. In fact, I never felt better about being alive than right there by a glittering swimming pool at the edge of the miraculous Israel-Palestine Economic Development Zone, looking at her and doing verbal jousting.

“It doesn’t work that way,” she explained in a very low voice, out of habit, since we had good anti-eavesdropping gear. “Our newest method is very person-specific. We focus on creative people and tell when they are having what’s called an aha moment…when they’re working on a tough problem and seem utterly confident they have a brilliant answer.”

I had to blink.

“So, I’ve been a lab rat. Watched. Studied.”

“Ever since your success with Liar-Outer. You and ten thousand other creative types. And, sure, it’s somewhat of a privacy breach—”

“Somewhat!” Of course, face recognition was by now old hat. Initial public revulsion quickly passed when folks realized that banning such systems would never prevent governments or corporations or criminals from using them. But this was the first I ever heard of “aha” detection…zooming in on people at the very moment of triumphant realization.

“But aren’t those types of people always under scrutiny?” Milla asked. “By the curious? Or by competitors? Or by those hoping to ride the next thing? Anyway, the science came out a year ago, and in another year everyone will have the Aha! app on their specs. It’s the interim between that’s dangerous.”

The danger interval. That period between when techies develop something and the public owns it. Before it gets into the open, there’s a span when elites get to monopolize the breakthrough. Use it to their advantage. Maybe even prevent it from becoming public at all.

“Unfortunately, some bad people and groups have been aha scanning too,” she went on. “There’ve been situations where powerful men didn’t want a problem solved. We’re still investigating the case of an inventor who was working on a new kind of solar power. One day, she absolutely radiated her aha moment. By nightfall—before presenting to her colleagues—she was dead.”

“But science doesn’t work like that!” I protested. “Her team…they’ll fill in the gaps, have their own aha moments—”

“Of course they will. But in the world of Big Money, as in gambling and war, sometimes even a small delay can be worth many millions.”

I chewed on that a bit…before experiencing a mini-aha.

“But I don’t recall having such a moment recently! You say this was after Liar-Outer became successful.”

“That horse is out of the barn. It’s fast becoming part of civilization. Some cable news professional deceivers may want you dead for spoiling their meal ticket, but they’ll never act on it. No, this is something new.”

“And you have no idea what it is?”

Kilonova shrugged. “What do you think we are? Magicians? Mind readers? We can just tell that you’ve seen the light, so to speak. Had a great big idea. And that it has to do with the prediction problem. And you’re confident it’ll be a game changer. Alas, there are others—who also saw your moment—who don’t want the game changed!”

I threw up my hands.

“My life is being fought over by crazy people. I swear, I’ve had no such aha moment! Don’t you think, if I did have one, that I’d know about it?”

Milla offered up one of her rare, genuine smiles.

“Oh, sweetheart, of course not.”

The unconscious. It’s always there. Young Sigmund Freud, in his Introductory Lectures, brilliantly demonstrated the existence and power of that inner realm, hidden from our surface veneer—the theater of conscious awareness. (Alas, that younger scientist gradually transformed into a tendentiously warped guru-bully; but that’s another story.) Although it’s not currently fashionable to talk about the unconscious, in this era of drugs and electrode probing and organic meddling, we know it’s down there, fizzing and popping and sometimes pushing us in directions we would never choose, logically, to go. Multilayered and many-faceted, it probably makes up the vast majority of thinking that goes on in our complex brains.

All right. So my aha moment must have been unconscious, but so strong and so close to the surface that I was blaring a specific kind of pleasure—realization tells—for maybe a week or more. Huh. So much for pride in my poker face.

Looking back, I could vaguely recall feeling great. Happy and confident. But over what? My head is always so full of stuff! Fantasies and passing schemes and thoughts that sci-fi authors call what-ifs. Heck, I’m lucky ever to make sense of that jumble of half-formed ideas. Hence, it took me some time—despite Kilonova’s blithe confidence—to zero in on the thing.

Freud (the young-smart version) offered methods. Like free association—allowing words, phrases, and images to roll out of the imagination, writing them down, and doing a little detective work. Correlating and finding common threads. For example, I already knew the aha must have to do with predictive methods.

Not tracking and scoring of would-be public prophets. Liar-Outer and FIBuster were already doing that and had a full head of steam, with thousands of eager players innovating new methods daily.

And not the aha moment detection system, either! I knew nothing of that a week ago.

What I had been thinking about, lately, were those prediction markets of Sophia’s, how to utilize the wisdom of crowds. Find potential errors and opportunities—land mines and diamond mines—in the murky realm ahead. Despite some progress, results from existing markets were still disappointing. They didn’t measure up to what math-ists said prediction markets ought to be accomplishing.

Of course, the problem was obvious. People were hedging. Failing to commit. Hemming and hawing and letting mass opinion influence them. It was all very good to harness human competitiveness, but conformity could be just as strong. What we all needed was a way to get their most honest predictions, free of superficial repressions. The frank, candid, even rude opinions bubbling out of the great calculation engine of—

I sat up in bed, so fast that dizziness made me sway, before my pounding heart caught up.

The great calculation engine of the unconscious, of course.

Moreover, I knew how to do it! I had known for a couple of weeks, in fact. And the realization had almost killed me.

Kilonova rolled over, opened one eye to glance at me, and sighed. A sigh that said: Ah, dummy’s finally figured it out.

“Milla, I think I know—”

“Great.” I could tell that her rapid evaluation swiftly settled on no danger and, losing interest, she floated back toward sleep. “Proud of you…tell me in mornin’.”

And she rolled over the other way.

I sat back, letting this secondary aha settle in. Unlike a passing dream, I wouldn’t have to write it down.

You see, the human face is a window into those lower realms, beneath conscious awareness. We all use facial cues to some extent…except for unfortunate folks whose brains skip that innate skill. Meanwhile, a few in every generation—some priests, merchants, charlatans, healers, magicians, con artists—learn how to peer through that window for opportunity, truth, insight, or advantage.

All of which is being automated. First machines learned to recognize that a face is there. Then to recognize one face out of billions. Simple biometric scans led to perceiving smiles and frowns, then lip-reading words.

They say we’ll soon have visage-based lie detection. And if only elites get to use that, then we’ll have Big Brother forever…

…but if instead all citizens can apply such tools on politicians and oligarchs and salesmen? Then we’ll have Big Brother never.

So many threads coming together, almost all at once. The Singularity, some called it, though day to day, month by month, the process of adaptation always felt like—well—normality. Always vexing. Always verging on the new. Life. Not the future at all.

And now we were all going to get apps to detect each other’s aha moments. Yeesh.

But all of it came together when I thought about prediction markets. The problem was that participants kept squelching their answers for reasons like conformity, timidity, or fear of being judged immoral for betting on a dark possibility. Was there a way to get past all that, and learn what the participant really thought, deep down?

The tell. I had been using it all my adult life, from poker games to mentalist shows, to helping skeptics solve hoaxes. My art form was reading human faces. And now, all my tricks and tools were going online, available to any Tom, Ahmed, and Sally. And to Sophia or any competitor who wanted to set up a predictions market. So long as the wagering participants did so over a video link, revealing their faces.

Let them make one bet consciously…but also take note when their unconscious clearly disagrees! Let both sides of the participant play and make wagers. Including the side that doesn’t care about social niceties, or tact, or conformity. The side that some autistics tap into so easily. A side of you that knows when you’re lying to yourself.

Of course, I was absolutely determined that this could only be voluntary. Participants have to know, top to bottom. But then—after some initial, reflexive outrage, why would they refuse? It’s just another modern tool. Another means of self-expression. Only this time for another, inner you.

Another way, possibly, to win your wagers.

Oh, this won’t solve the prediction problem. In fact, nothing ever will. Not sheep entrails nor the flights of birds. Nor quantum computers, chewing on ginormously Big Data. Not finely meshed cellular automata models. Nor improved systems to find folks who are right more often, giving them more cred than charlatans. Nor science fiction extrapolations, nor finely crafted scenarios. And not even vastly improved prediction markets. Some or most of those methods will help us navigate, as individuals and societies, anticipating a bit better, evading a higher fraction of mistakes. But the fantasy goal of real prophecy will always elude us, slipping just ahead, like an alluring wraith.

The future will always leap out to bite us, no matter how compulsively hard we try to penetrate its shadows with those prefrontal lamps on our brows. How much wiser, then, also to invest in resilience, not just anticipation.

Still, we are what we are. Children of Prometheus, whose name meant “foresight.” It’s how we’re built.

Magic men. Magic women. We shuffle the cards, then spread them out, like a fan. Like the many branches of a dimly lit road.

Pick one.

Dr. David Brin is a New York Times best-selling author, a physicist, a futurist, and an inventor. His background in astrophysics and space science has given him a high degree of prescience: His books have predicted global warming, cyberwarfare, and the World Wide Web. Many of Brin’s works take place within his Uplift universe and have won some of science fiction’s top awards, including 1983’s Hugo and Nebula winner Startide Rising and The Uplift War, which won the Hugo and Locus Awards for Best Novel in 1987. Brin’s postapocalyptic novel The Postman was adapted as a 1997 feature film of the same name, and his nonfiction book The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? won the American Library Association’s Eli M. Oboler Memorial Award for the best published work in the area of intellectual freedom in 2000. He appears on numerous popular-science shows and consults widely for corporations, universities, and government agencies. Since 2010, Brin has served as an external advisor for NASA’s Innovative and Advanced Concepts group, and he helped establish the Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination at the University of California at San Diego in 2013.

Ann Leckie

Another Word for World

Ashiban Xidyla had a headache. A particularly vicious one, centered somewhere on the top of her head. She sat curled over her lap, in her seat on the flier, eyes closed. Oddly, she had no memory of leaning forward, and—now she thought of it—no idea when the headache had begun.

The Gidanta had been very respectful so far, very solicitous of Ashiban’s age, but that was, she was sure, little more than the entirely natural respect for one’s elders. This was not a time when she could afford any kind of weakness. Ashiban was here to prevent a war that would quite possibly end with the Gidanta slaughtering every one of Ashiban’s fellow Raksamat on the planet. The Sovereign of Iss, hereditary high priestess of the Gidanta, sat across the aisle, silent and veiled, her interpreter beside her. What must they be thinking?

Ashiban took three careful breaths. Straightened cautiously, wary of the pain flaring. Opened her eyes.

Ought to have seen blue sky through the flier’s front window past the pilot’s seat, ought to have heard the buzz of the engine. Instead she saw shards of brown and green and blue. Heard nothing. She closed her eyes, opened them again. Tried to make some sense of things. They weren’t falling, she was sure. Had the flier landed, and she hadn’t noticed?

A high, quavering voice said something, syllables that made no sense to Ashiban. “We have to get out of here,” said a calm, muffled voice somewhere at Ashiban’s feet. “Speaker is in some distress.” Damn. She’d forgotten to turn off the translating function on her handheld. Maybe the Sovereign’s interpreter hadn’t heard it. She turned her head to look across the flier’s narrow aisle, wincing at the headache.

The Sovereign’s interpreter lay in the aisle, his head jammed up against the back of the pilot’s seat at an odd, awkward angle. The high voice spoke again, and in the small bag at Ashiban’s feet her handheld said, “Disregard the dead. We have to get out of here or we will also die. The speaker is in some distress.”

In her own seat, the pink- and orange- and blue-veiled Sovereign fumbled at the safety restraints. The straps parted with a click, and the Sovereign stood. Stepped into the aisle, hiking her long blue skirt. Spoke—it must have been the Sovereign speaking all along. “Stupid cow,” said Ashiban’s handheld, in her bag. “Speaker’s distress has increased.”

The flier lurched. The Sovereign cried out. “No translation available,” remarked Ashiban’s handheld, as the Sovereign reached forward to tug at Ashiban’s own safety restraints and, once those had come undone, grab Ashiban’s arm and pull.

The flier had crashed. The flier had crashed, and the Sovereign’s interpreter must have gotten out of his seat for some reason, at just the wrong time. Ashiban herself must have hit her head. That would explain the memory gap, and the headache. She blinked again, and the colored shards where the window should have been resolved into cracked glass, and behind it sky, and flat ground covered in brown and green plants, here and there some white or pink. “We should stay here and wait for help,” Ashiban said. In her bag, her handheld said something incomprehensible.

The Sovereign pulled harder on Ashiban’s arm. “You stupid expletive cow,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign picked Ashiban’s bag up from her feet. “Someone shot us down, and we crashed in the expletive High Mires. The expletive expletive is expletive sinking into the expletive bog. If we stay here we’ll drown. The speaker is highly agitated.” The flier lurched again.

It all seemed so unreal. Concussion, Ashiban thought. I have a concussion, and I’m not thinking straight. She took her bag from the Sovereign, rose, and followed the Sovereign of Iss to the emergency exit.

Outside the flier, everything was a brown and green plain, blue sky above. The ground swelled and rolled under Ashiban’s feet, but given the flier behind her, half-sunk into the gray-brown ground, and the pain in her head, she wasn’t sure if it was really doing that or if it was a symptom of concussion.

The Sovereign said something. The handheld in Ashiban’s bag spoke, but it was lost in the open space and the breeze and Ashiban’s inability to concentrate.

The Sovereign yanked Ashiban’s bag from her, pulled it open. Dug out the handheld. “Expletive,” said the handheld. “Expletive expletive. We are standing on water. The speaker is agitated.”

“What?” The flier behind them, sliding slowly into the mire, made a gurgling sound. The ground was still unsteady under Ashiban’s feet, she still wasn’t sure why.

“Water! The speaker is emphatic.” The Sovereign gestured toward the greenish-brown mat of moss beneath them.

“Help will come,” Ashiban said. “We should stay here.”

“They shot us down,” said the handheld. “The speaker is agitated and emphatic.”

“What?”

“They shot us down. I saw the pilot shot through the window, I saw them die. Timran was trying to take control of the flier when we crashed. Whoever comes, they are not coming to help us. We have to get to solid ground. We have to hide. The speaker is emphatic. The speaker is in some distress. The speaker is agitated.” The Sovereign took Ashiban’s arm and pulled her forward.

“Hide?” There was nowhere to hide. And the ground swelled and sank, like waves on the top of water. She fell to her hands and knees, nauseated.

“Translation unavailable,” said the handheld, as the Sovereign dropped down beside her. “Crawl then, but come with me or be dead. The speaker is emphatic. The speaker is in some distress.” The Sovereign crawled away, the ground still heaving.

“That’s my bag,” said Ashiban. “That’s my handheld.” The Sovereign continued to crawl away. “There’s nowhere to hide!” But if she stayed where she was, on her hands and knees on the unsteady ground, she would be all alone here, and all her things gone and her head hurting and her stomach sick and nothing making sense. She crawled after the Sovereign.

By the time the ground stopped roiling, the squishy wet moss had changed to stiff, spiky-leaved meter-high plants that scratched Ashiban’s face and tore at her sodden clothes. “Come here,” said her handheld, somewhere up ahead. “Quickly. Come here. The speaker is agitated.” Ashiban just wanted to lie down where she was, close her eyes, and go to sleep. But the Sovereign had her bag. There was a bottle of water in her bag. She kept going.

Found the Sovereign prone, veilless, pulling off her bright-colored skirts to ball them up beneath herself. Underneath her clothes she wore a plain brown shirt and leggings, like any regular Gidanta. “Ancestors!” panted Ashiban, still on hands and knees, not sure where there was room to lie down. “You’re just a kid! You’re younger than my grandchildren!”

In answer the Sovereign took hold of the collar of Ashiban’s jacket and yanked her down to the ground. Ashiban cried out, and heard her handheld say something incomprehensible, presumably the Gidantan equivalent of No translation available. Pain darkened her vision, and her ears roared. Or was that the flier the Sovereign had said she’d heard?

The Sovereign spoke. “Stupid expletive expletive expletive, lie still,” said Ashiban’s handheld calmly. “Speaker is in some distress.”

Ashiban closed her eyes. Her head hurt, and her twig-scratched face stung, but she was very, very tired.

A calm voice was saying, “Wake up, Ashiban Xidyla. The speaker is distressed.” Over and over again. She opened her eyes. The absurdly young Sovereign of Iss lay in front of her, brown cheek pressed against the gray ground, staring at Ashiban, twigs and spiny leaves caught in the few trailing braids that had come loose from the hair coiled at the top of her head. Her eyes were red and puffy, as though she had been crying, though her expression gave no sign of it. She clutched Ashiban’s handheld in one hand. Nineteen at most, Ashiban thought. Probably younger. “Are you awake, Ashiban Xidyla? The speaker is distressed.”

“My head doesn’t hurt,” Ashiban observed. Despite that, everything still seemed slippery and unreal.

“I took the emergency medical kit on our way off the flier,” the handheld said, translating the Sovereign’s reply. “I put a corrective on your forehead. It’s not the right kind, though. The instructions say to take you to a doctor right away. The speaker is…”

“Translation preferences,” interrupted Ashiban. “Turn off emotional evaluation.” The handheld fell silent. “Have you called for help, Sovereign? Is help coming?”

“You are very stupid,” said Ashiban’s handheld. Said the Sovereign of Iss. “Or the concussion is dangerously severe. Our flier was shot down. Twenty minutes after that a flier goes back and forth over us as though it is looking for something, but we are in the High Mires, no one lives here. If we call for help, who is nearest? The people who shot us down.”

“Who would shoot us down?”

“Someone who wants war between Gidanta and Raksamat. Someone with a grudge against your mother, the sainted Ciwril Xidyla. Someone with a grudge against my grandmother, the previous Sovereign.”

“Not likely anyone Raksamat then,” said Ashiban, and immediately regretted it. She was here to foster goodwill between her people and the Sovereign’s, because the Gidanta had trusted her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, and so they might listen to her daughter. “There are far more of you down here than Raksamat settlers. If it came to a war, the Raksamat here would be slaughtered. I don’t think any of us wants that.”

“We will argue in the future,” said the Sovereign. “So long as whoever it is does not manage to kill us. I have been thinking. They did not see us, under the plants, but maybe they will come back and look for us with infrared. They may come back soon. We have to reach the trees north of here.”

“I can use my handheld to just contact my own people,” said Ashiban. “Just them. I trust them.”

“Do you?” asked the Sovereign. “But maybe the deaths of some Raksamat settlers will be the excuse they need to bring a war that kills all the Gidanta so they can have the world for themselves. Maybe your death would be convenient for them.”

“That’s ridiculous!” exclaimed Ashiban. She pushed herself to sitting, not too quickly, wary of the pain in her head returning, of her lingering dizziness. “I’m talking about my friends.”

“Your friends are far away,” said the Sovereign. “They would call on others to come find us. Do you trust those others?” The girl seemed deadly serious. She sat up. “I don’t.” She tucked Ashiban’s handheld into her waistband, picked up her bundle of skirts and veils.

“That’s my handheld! I need it!”

“You’ll only call our deaths down with it,” said the Sovereign. “Die if you want to.” She rose, and trudged away through the stiff, spiky vegetation.

Ashiban considered tackling the girl and taking back her handheld. But the Sovereign was young, and while Ashiban was in fairly good shape considering her age, she had never been an athlete, even in her youth. And that was without considering the head injury.

She stood. Carefully, still dizzy, joints stiff. Where the flier had been was only black water, strips and chunks of moss floating on its surface, all of it surrounded by a flat carpet of yet more moss. She remembered the Sovereign saying We’re standing on water! Remembered the swell and roll of the ground that had made her drop to her hands and knees.

She closed her eyes. She thought she vaguely remembered sitting in her seat on the flier, the Sovereign crying out, her interpreter getting out of his seat to rush forward to where the pilot slumped over the controls.

Shot down. If that was true, the Sovereign was right. Calling for help—if she could find some way to do that without her handheld—might well be fatal. Whoever it was had considered both Ashiban and the Sovereign of Iss acceptable losses. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted both of them dead. Had, perhaps, specifically wanted the war that had threatened for the past two years to become deadly real.

But nobody wanted that. Not even the Gidanta who had never been happy with Ashiban’s people’s presence in the system wanted that, Ashiban was sure.

She opened her eyes. Saw the girl’s back as she picked her way through the mire. Saw far off on the northern horizon the trees the girl had mentioned. “Ancestors!” cried Ashiban. “I’m too old for this.” And she shouldered her bag and followed the Sovereign of Iss.

Eventually Ashiban caught up, though the Sovereign didn’t acknowledge her in any way. They trudged through the hip-high scrub in silence for some time, only making the occasional hiss of annoyance at particularly troublesome branches. The clear blue sky clouded over, and a damp-smelling wind rose. A relief—the bright sun had hurt Ashiban’s eyes. As the trees on the horizon became more definitely a band of trees—still dismayingly far off—Ashiban’s thoughts, which had this whole time been slippery and tenuous, began to settle into something like a comprehensible pattern.

Shot down. Ashiban was sure none of her people wanted war. Though off-planet the Raksamat weren’t quite so vulnerable—were, in fact, much better armed. The ultimate outcome of an actual war would probably not favor the Gidanta. Or Ashiban didn’t think so. It was possible some Raksamat faction actually wanted such a war. And Ashiban wasn’t really anyone of any significance to her own people.

Her mother had been. Her mother, Ciwril Xidyla, had negotiated the Treaty of Eatu with the then-Sovereign of Iss, ensuring the right of the Raksamat to live peacefully in the system, and on the planet. Ciwril had been widely admired among both Raksamat and Gidanta. As her daughter, Ashiban was only a sign, an admonition to remember her mother. If her side could think it acceptable to sacrifice the lives of their own people on the planet, they would certainly not blink at sacrificing Ashiban herself. She didn’t want to believe that, though, that her own people would do such a thing.

Would the Gidanta be willing to kill their own Sovereign for the sake of a war? An hour ago—or however long they had been trudging across the mire, Ashiban wasn’t sure—she’d have said certainly not. The Sovereign of Iss was a sacred figure. She was the conduit between the Gidanta and the spirit of the world of Iss, which spoke to them with the Sovereign’s voice. Surely they wouldn’t kill her just to forward a war that would be disastrous for both sides?

“Sovereign.”

A meter ahead of Ashiban, the girl kept trudging. Looked briefly over her shoulder. “What?”

“Where are you going?”

The Sovereign didn’t even turn her head this time. “There’s a monitoring station on the North Udran Plain.”

That had to be hundreds of kilometers away, and that wasn’t counting the fact that if this was indeed the High Mires, they were on the high side of the Scarp and would certainly have to detour to get down to the plains.

“On foot? That could take weeks, if we even ever get there. We have no food, no water.” Well, Ashiban had about a third of a liter in a bottle in her bag, but that hardly counted. “No camping equipment.”

The Sovereign just scoffed and kept walking.

“Young lady,” began Ashiban, but then remembered herself at that age. Her own children and grandchildren. Adolescence was trying enough without the fate of your people resting on your shoulders, and being shot down and stranded in a bog. “I thought the current Sovereign was fifty or sixty. The daughter of the woman who was Sovereign when my mother was here last.”

“You’re not supposed to talk like we’re all different people,” said the girl. “We’re all the voice of the world spirit. And you mean my aunt. She abdicated last week.”

“Abdicated!” Mortified by her mistake—Ashiban had been warned over and over about the nature of the Sovereign of Iss, that she was not an individual, that referring to her as such would be an offense. “I didn’t know that was possible.” And surely at a time like this, the Sovereign wouldn’t want to drop so much responsibility on a teenager.

“Of course it’s possible. It’s just a regular priesthood. It never was particularly special. It was you Raksamat who insisted on translating Sovereign as Sovereign. And it’s you Raksamat whose priests are always trancing out and speaking for your ancestors. Voice of Iss doesn’t mean that at all.”

“Translating Sovereign as Sovereign?” asked Ashiban. “What is that supposed to mean?” The girl snorted. “And how can the Voice of Iss not mean exactly that?” The Sovereign didn’t answer, just kept walking.

After a long silence, Ashiban said, “Then why do any of the Gidanta listen to you? And who is it my mother was negotiating with?”

The Sovereign looked back at Ashiban and rolled her eyes. “With the interpreter, of course. And if your mother didn’t know that, she was completely stupid. And nobody listens to me.” The voice of the translating handheld was utterly calm and neutral, but the girl’s tone was contemptuous. “That’s why I’m stuck here. And it wasn’t about us listening to the voice of the planet. It was about you listening to us. You wouldn’t talk to the Terraforming Council because you wouldn’t accept they were an authority, and besides, you didn’t like what they were saying.”

“An industrial association is not a government!” Seeing the girl roll her eyes again, Ashiban wondered fleetingly what her words sounded like in Gidantan—if the handheld was making industrial association and government into the same words, the way it obviously had when it had said for the girl, moments ago, translating Sovereign as Sovereign. But that was ridiculous. The two weren’t the same thing at all.

The Sovereign stopped. Turned to face Ashiban. “We have been here for two thousand years. For all that time, we have been working on this planet, to make it a place we could live without interference. We came here, to this place without an intersystem gate, so that no one would bother us and we could live in peace. You turned up less than two centuries ago, now most of the hard work is done, and you want to tell us what to do with our planet, and who is or isn’t an authority!”

“We were refugees. We came here by accident, and we can’t very well leave. And we brought benefits. You’ve been cut off from the outside for so long, you didn’t have medical correctives. Those have saved lives, Sovereign. And we’ve brought other things.” Including weapons the Gidanta didn’t have. “Including our own knowledge of terraforming, and how to best manage a planet.”

“And you agreed, your own mother, the great Ciwril Xidyla agreed, that no one would settle on the planet without authorization from the Terraforming Council! And yet there are dozens of Raksamat farmsteads just in the Saunn foothills, and more elsewhere.”

“That wasn’t the agreement. The treaty explicitly states that we have a right to be here, and a right to share in the benefits of living on this planet. Your own grandmother agreed to that! And small farmsteads are much better for the planet than the cities the Terraforming Council is intending.” Wind gusted, and a few fat drops of rain fell.

“My grandmother agreed to nothing! It was the gods-cursed interpreter who made the agreement. And he was appointed by the Terraforming Council, just like all of them! And how dare you turn up here after we’ve done all the hard work and think because you brought us some technology you can tell us what to do with our planet!”

“How can you own a planet? You can’t, it’s ridiculous! There’s more than enough room for all of us.”

“I’ve memorized it, you know,” said the Sovereign. “The entire agreement. It’s not that long. Settlement will only proceed according to the current consensus regarding the good of the planet. That’s what it says, right there in the second paragraph.”

Ashiban knew that sentence by heart. Everyone knew that sentence by now. Arguments over what current consensus regarding the good of the planet might mean were inescapable—and generally, in Ashiban’s opinion, made in bad faith. The words were clear enough. “There’s nothing about the Terraforming Council in that sentence.” Like most off-planet Raksamat, Ashiban didn’t speak the language of the Gidanta. But—also like most off-planet Raksamat—she had a few words and phrases, and she knew the Gidantan for Terraforming Council. Had heard the girl speak the sentence, knew there was no mention of the council.

The Sovereign cried out in apparent anger and frustration. “How can you? How can you stand there and say that, as though you have not just heard me say it?”

Overhead, barely audible over the sound of the swelling rain, the hum of a flier engine. The Sovereign looked up.

“It’s help,” said Ashiban. Angry, yes, but she could set that aside at the prospect of rescue. Of soon being somewhere warm, and dry, and comfortable. Her clothes—plain, green trousers and shirt, simple, soft flat shoes—had not been chosen with any anticipation of a trek through mud and weeds, or standing in a rain shower. “They must be looking for us.”

The Sovereign’s eyes widened. She spun and took off running through the thick, thigh-high plants, toward the trees.

“Wait!” cried Ashiban, but the girl kept moving.

Ashiban turned to scan the sky, shielding her eyes from the rain with one hand. Was there anything she could do to attract the attention of the flier? Her own green clothes weren’t far off the green of the plants she stood among, but she didn’t trust the flat, brownish-green mossy stretches that she and the Sovereign had been avoiding. She had nothing that would light up, and the girl had fled with Ashiban’s handheld, which she could have used to try to contact the searchers.

A crack echoed across the mire, and a few meters to Ashiban’s left, leaves and twigs exploded. The wind gusted again, harder than before, and she shivered.

And realized that someone had just fired at her. That had been a gunshot, and there was no one here to shoot at her except that approaching flier, which was, Ashiban saw, coming straight toward her, even though with the clouds and the rain, and the green of her clothes and the green of the plants she stood in, she could not have been easy to see.

Except maybe in the infrared. Even without the cold rain coming down, she must glow bright and unmistakable in infrared.

Ashiban turned and ran. Or tried to, wading through the plants toward the trees, twigs catching her trousers. Another crack, and she couldn’t go any faster than she was, though she tried, and the wind blew harder, and she hoped she was moving toward the trees.

Three more shots in quick succession, the wind blowing harder, nearly pushing her over, and Ashiban stumbled out of the plants onto a stretch of open moss that trembled under her as she ran, gasping, cold, and exhausted, toward another patch of those thigh-high weeds, and the shadow of trees beyond. Below her feet the moss began to come apart, fraying, loosening, one more wobbling step and she would sink into the black water of the mire below, but another shot cracked behind her and she couldn’t stop, and there was no safe direction, she could only go forward. She ran on. And then, with hopefully solid ground a single step ahead, the skies opened up in a torrent of rain, and the moss gave way underneath her.

She plunged downward, into cold water. Made a frantic, scrabbling grab, got hold of one tough plant stem. Tried to pull herself up, but could not. The rain poured down, and her grip on the plant stem began to slip.

A hand grabbed her arm. Someone shouted something incomprehensible—it was the Sovereign of Iss, rain streaming down her face, braids plastered against her neck and shoulders. The girl grabbed the back of Ashiban’s shirt with her other hand, leaned back, pulling Ashiban up a few centimeters, and Ashiban reached forward and grabbed another handful of plant, and somehow scrambled free of the water, onto the land, and she and the Sovereign half-ran, half-stumbled forward into the trees.

Where the rain was less but still came down. And they needed better cover, they needed to go deeper into the trees. Ancestors grant the woods ahead were thick enough to hide them from the flier, and Ashiban wanted to tell the Sovereign that they needed to keep running, but the girl didn’t stop until Ashiban, unable to move a single step more, collapsed at the bottom of a tree.

The Sovereign dropped down beside her. There was no sound but their gasping, and the rain hissing through the branches above.

One of Ashiban’s shoes had come off, somewhere. Her arm, which the Sovereign had pulled on to get her up out of the water, ached. Her back hurt, and her legs. Her heart pounded, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, and she shivered, with cold or with fear she wasn’t sure.

The rain lessened not long after, and stopped at some point during the night. Ashiban woke shivering, the Sovereign huddled beside her. Pale sunlight filtered through the tree leaves, and the leaf-covered ground was sodden. So was Ashiban.

She was hungry, too. Wasn’t food the whole point of planets? Surely there would be something to eat, it would just be a question of knowing what there was, and how to eat it safely. Water might well be a bigger problem than food. Ashiban opened her bag—which by some miracle had stayed on her shoulder through everything—and found her half-liter bottle of water, still about three-quarters full. If she’d had her wits about her last night, she’d have opened it in the rain, to collect as much as she could.

“Well,” Ashiban said, “here we are.”

Silence. Not a word from the handheld. The Sovereign uncurled herself from where she huddled against Ashiban. Put a hand on her waist, where the handheld had been tucked into her waistband. Looked at Ashiban.

The handheld was gone. “Oh, Ancestors,” said Ashiban. And after another half-panicked second, carefully got to her feet from off the ground—something that hadn’t been particularly easy for a decade or two, even without yesterday’s hectic flight and a night spent cold and soaking wet, sleeping sitting on the ground and leaning against a tree—and retraced their steps. The Sovereign joined her.

As far back as they went (apparently neither of them was willing to go all the way back to the mire), they found only bracken, and masses of wet, dead leaves.

Ashiban looked at the damp and shivering Sovereign. Who looked five or six years younger than she’d looked yesterday. The Sovereign said nothing, but what was there to say? Without the handheld, or some other translation device, they could barely talk to each other at all. Ashiban herself knew only a few phrases in Gidantan. Hello and good-bye and I don’t understand Gidantan. She could count from one to twelve. A few words and phrases more, none of them applicable to being stranded in the woods on the edge of the High Mires. Ironic, since her mother Ciwril had been an expert in the language. It was her mother’s work that had made the translation devices as useful as they were, that had allowed the Raksamat and Gidanta to speak to each other. And who is it my mother was negotiating with? With the interpreter, of course.

No point thinking about that just now. The immediate problem was more than enough.

Someone had shot down their flier yesterday, and then apparently flown away. Hours later they had returned, so that they could shoot at Ashiban and the Sovereign as they fled. It didn’t make sense.

The Gidanta had guns, of course, knew how to make them. But they didn’t have many. Since they had arrived here, most of their energies had been devoted to the terraforming of Iss, and during much of that time they’d lived in space, on stations, an environment in which projectile weapons potentially caused far more problems than they might solve, even when it came to deadly disputes.

That attitude had continued when they had moved down to the planet. There were police, and some of the Terraforming Council had bodyguards, and Ashiban didn’t doubt there were people who specialized in fighting, including firing guns, but there was no Gidanta military, no army, standing or otherwise. Fliers for cargo or for personal transport, but not for warfare. Guns for hunting, not designed to kill people efficiently.

The Raksamat, Ashiban’s own people, had come into the system armed. But none of those weapons were on the planet. Or Ashiban didn’t think they were. So, a hunting gun and a personal flier. She wanted to ask the Sovereign, standing staring at Ashiban, still shivering, if the girl had seen the other flier. But she couldn’t, not without that handheld.

But it didn’t matter, this moment, why it had happened the way it had. There was no way to tell who had tried to kill them. No way to know what or who they would find if they returned to the mire, to where their own flier had sunk under the black water and the moss.

Her thoughts were going in circles. Whether it was the night spent in the cold, and the hunger and the fear, or whether it was the remnants of her concussion—and what had the Sovereign of Iss said, that the corrective hadn’t been the right sort and she should get to a doctor as soon as possible?—or maybe all of those, Ashiban didn’t know.

Yesterday the Sovereign had said there was a monitoring station on the Udran Plains, which lay to the north of the Scarp. There would be people at a monitoring station—likely all of them Gidanta. Very possibly not favorably disposed toward Ashiban, no matter whose daughter she was.

But there would be dozens, maybe even hundreds of people at a monitoring station, any of whom might witness an attempt to murder Ashiban, and all of whom would be outraged at an attempt to harm the Sovereign of Iss. There was no one at the crash site on the mire to see what happened to them.

“Which way?” Ashiban asked the girl.

Who looked up at the leaf-dappled sky above them, and then pointed back into the woods, the way they had come. Said something Ashiban didn’t understand. Watched Ashiban expectantly. Something about the set of her jaw suggested to Ashiban that the girl was trying very hard not to cry.

“All right,” said Ashiban, and turned and began walking back the way they had come, the Sovereign of Iss alongside her.

They shared out the water between them as they went. There was less food in the woods than Ashiban would have expected, or at least neither of them knew where or how to find it. No doubt the Sovereign of Iss, at her age, was hungrier even than Ashiban, but she didn’t complain, just walked forward. Once they heard the distant sound of a flier, presumably looking for them, but the Sovereign of Iss showed no sign of being tempted to go back. Ashiban thought of those shots, of plunging into cold, black water, and shivered.

Despite herself, Ashiban began imagining what she would eat if she were at home. The nutrient cakes that everyone had eaten every day until they had established contact with the Gidanta. They were traditional for holidays, authentic Raksamat cuisine, and Ashiban’s grandmother had despised them, observed wryly on every holiday that her grandchildren would not eat them with such relish if that had been their only food for years. Ashiban would like a nutrient cake now.

Or some fish. Or snails. Surely there might be snails in the woods? But Ashiban wasn’t sure how to find them.

Or grubs. A handful of toasted grubs, with a little salt, maybe some cumin. At home they were an expensive treat, either harvested from a station’s agronomy unit, or shipped up from Iss itself. Ashiban remembered a school trip, once, when she’d been much, much younger, a tour of the station’s food-growing facilities, remembered an agronomist turning over the dirt beside a row of green, sharp-smelling plants to reveal a grub, curled and white in the dark soil. Remembered one of her schoolmates saying the sight made them hungry.

She stopped. Pushed aside the leaf mold under her feet. Looked around for a stick.

The Sovereign of Iss stopped, turned to look at Ashiban. Said something in Gidantan that Ashiban assumed was some version of What are you doing?

“Grubs,” said Ashiban. That word she knew—the Gidanta sold prepackaged toasted grubs harvested from their own orbital agronomy projects, and the name was printed on the package.

The Sovereign blinked at her. Frowned. Seemed to think for a bit, and then said, “Fire?” in Gidantan. That was another word Ashiban knew—nearly everyone in the system recognized words in either language that might turn up in a safety alert.

There was no way to make a fire that Ashiban could think of. Her bag held only their now nearly empty bottle of water. People who lived in space generally didn’t walk around with the means for producing an open flame. Here on Iss things might be different, but if the Sovereign had been carrying fire-making tools, she’d lost them in the mire. “No fire,” Ashiban said. “We’ll have to eat anything we find raw.” The Sovereign of Iss frowned, and then went kicking through the leaf mold for a couple of sturdy sticks.

The few grubs they dug up promised more nearby. There was no water to wash the dirt off them, and they were unpleasant to eat while raw and wiggling, but they were food.

Their progress slowed as they stopped every few steps to dig for more grubs, or to replace a broken stick. But after a few hours, or at least what Ashiban took to be a few hours—she had no way of telling time beyond the sunlight, and had no experience with that—their situation seemed immeasurably better than it had before they’d eaten.

They filled Ashiban’s bag with grubs, and walked on until night fell, and slept, shivering, huddled together. Ashiban was certain she would never be warm again, would always be chilled to her bones. But she could think straighter, or at least it seemed like she could. The girl’s plan to walk down to the plains was still outrageous, still seemed all but impossible, but it also seemed like the only way forward.

By the end of the next day, Ashiban was more sick of raw and gritty grubs than she could possibly say. And by the afternoon of the day after that, the trees thinned and they were faced with a wall of brambles. They turned to parallel the barrier, walked east for a while, until they came to a relatively clear space—a tunnel of thorny branches arching over a several-meters-wide shelf of reddish-brown rock jutting out of the soil. Ashiban peered through and saw horizon, gestured to the Sovereign of Iss to look.

The Sovereign pulled her head back out of the tunnel, looked at Ashiban, and said something long and incomprehensible.

“Right,” said Ashiban. In her own language. There was no point trying to ask her question in Gidantan. “Do we want to go through here and keep going north until we find the edge of the Scarp, and turn east until we find a way down to the plain? Or do we want to keep going east like we have been and hope we find something?”

With her free hand—her other one held the water bottle that no longer fit in Ashiban’s grub-filled bag—the Sovereign waved away the possibility of her having understood Ashiban.

Ashiban pointed north, toward the brambles. “Scarp,” she said, in Gidantan. It was famous enough that she knew that one.

“Yes,” agreed the Sovereign, in that same language. And then, to Ashiban’s surprise, added, in Raksamat, “See.” She held her hands up to her eyes, miming a scope. Then waved an arm expansively. “Scarp see big.”

“Good point,” agreed Ashiban. On the edge of the Scarp, they could see where they were, and take their direction from that, instead of wandering and hoping they arrived somewhere. “Yes,” she said in Gidantan. “Good.” She gestured at the thorny tunnel of brambles.

The Sovereign of Iss just stared at her. Ashiban sighed. Made sure her bag was securely closed. Gingerly got down on her hands and knees, lowered herself onto her stomach, and inched herself forward under the brambles.

The tunnel wasn’t long, just three or four meters, but Ashiban took it slowly, the bag dragging beside her, thorns tearing at her clothes and her face. Knees and wrists and shoulders aching. When she got home, she was going to talk to the doctor about joint repairs, even if having all of them done at once would lay her up for a week or more.

Her neck and shoulders as stiff as they were, Ashiban was looking down at the red-brown rock when she came out of the bramble tunnel. She inched herself carefully free of the thorns and then began to contemplate getting herself to her feet. She would wait for the Sovereign, perhaps, and let the girl help her to standing.

Ashiban pushed herself up onto her hands and knees and then reached forward. Her hand met nothingness. Unbalanced, tipping in the direction of her outstretched hand, she saw the edge of the rock she crawled on, and nothing else.

Nothing but air. And far, far below—nearly a kilometer, she remembered hearing in some documentary about the Scarp—the green haze of the plains. Behind her the Sovereign of Iss made a strangled cry, and grabbed Ashiban’s legs before she could tip all the way forward.

They stayed that way, frozen for a few moments, the Sovereign gripping Ashiban’s legs, Ashiban’s hand outstretched over the edge of the Scarp. Then the Sovereign whimpered. Ashiban wanted to join her. Wanted, actually, to scream. Carefully placed her outstretched hand on the edge of the cliff, and pushed herself back, and looked up.

The line of brambles stopped a bit more than a meter from the cliff edge. Room enough for her to scoot carefully over and sit. But the Sovereign would not let go of her legs. And Ashiban had no way to ask her to. Silently, and not for the first time, she cursed the loss of the handheld.

The Sovereign whimpered again. “Ashiban Xidyla!” she cried, in a quavering voice.

“I’m all right,” Ashiban said, and her own voice was none too steady. “I’m all right, you got me just in time. You can let go now.” But of course the girl couldn’t understand her. She tried putting one leg back, and slowly, carefully, the Sovereign let go and edged back into the tunnel of brambles. Slowly, carefully, Ashiban got herself from hands and knees to sitting by the mouth of that tunnel, and looked out over the edge of the Scarp.

A sheer cliff some six hundred kilometers long and nearly a kilometer high, the Scarp loomed over the Udran Plains to the north, grassland as far as Ashiban could see, here and there a patch of trees, or the blue and silver of water. Far off to the northwest shone the bright ribbon of a river.

In the middle of the green, on the side of a lake, lay a small collection of roads and buildings, how distant Ashiban couldn’t guess. “Sovereign, is that the monitoring station?” Ashiban didn’t see anything else, and it seemed to her that she could see quite a lot of the plains from where she sat. It struck her then that this could only be a small part of the plains, as long as the Scarp was, and she felt suddenly lost and despairing. “Sovereign, look!” She glanced over at the mouth of the bramble tunnel.

The Sovereign of Iss lay facedown, arms flat in front of her. She said something into the red-brown rock below her.

“Too high?” asked Ashiban.

“High,” agreed the Sovereign, into the rock, in her small bit of Raksamat. “Yes.”

And she had lunged forward to grab Ashiban and keep her from tumbling over the edge. “Look, Sovereign, is that the…” Ashiban wished she knew how to say monitoring station in Gidantan. Tried to remember what the girl had said, days ago, when she’d mentioned it, but Ashiban had only been listening to the handheld translation. “Look. See. Please, Sovereign.” Slowly, hesitantly, the Sovereign of Iss raised her head. Kept the rest of herself flat against the rock. Ashiban pointed. “How do we get there? How did you mean us to get there?” Likely there were ways to descend the cliff face. But Ashiban had no way of knowing where or how to do that. And given the state the Sovereign was in right now, Ashiban would guess she didn’t either. Hadn’t had any idea what she was getting into when she’d decided to come this way.

She’d have expected better knowledge of the planet from the Sovereign of Iss, the voice of the planet itself. But then, days back, the girl had said that it was Ashiban’s people, the Raksamat, who thought of that office in terms of communicating with the Ancestors, that it didn’t mean that at all to the Gidanta. Maybe that was true, and even if it wasn’t, this girl—Ashiban still didn’t know her name, likely never would, addressing her by it would be the height of disrespect even from her own mother now that she was the Sovereign—had been Sovereign of Iss for a few weeks at the most. The girl had almost certainly been well out of her depth from the moment her aunt had abdicated.

And likely she had grown up in one of the towns dotted around the surface of Iss. She might know quite a lot more about outdoor life than Ashiban did—but that didn’t mean she knew much about survival in the wilderness with no food or equipment.

Well. Obviously they couldn’t walk along the edge of the Scarp, not given the Sovereign’s inability to deal with heights. They would have to continue walking east along the bramble wall, to somewhere the Scarp was lower, or hope there was some town or monitoring station in their path.

“Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, and reached out to give the Sovereign’s shoulder a gentle push back toward the other side of the brambles. Saw the girl’s back and shoulders shaking, realized she was sobbing silently. “Let’s go back,” Ashiban said, again. Searched her tiny Gidantan vocabulary for something useful. “Go,” she said, finally, in Gidantan, pushing on the girl’s shoulder. After a moment, the Sovereign began to scoot backward, never raising her head more than a few centimeters. Ashiban followed.

Crawling out of the brambles back into the woods, Ashiban found the Sovereign sitting on the ground, still weeping. As Ashiban came entirely clear of the thorns, the girl stood and helped Ashiban to her feet and then, still crying, not saying a single word or looking at Ashiban at all, turned and began walking east.

The next day they found a small stream. The Sovereign lay down and put her face in the water, drank for a good few minutes, and then filled the bottle and brought it to Ashiban. They followed the stream’s wandering east-now-south-now-east-again course for another three days as it broadened into something almost approaching a river.

At the end of the third day, they came to a small, gently arched bridge, mottled gray and brown and beige, thick plastic spun from whatever scraps had been thrown into the hopper of the fabricator, with a jagged five- or six-centimeter jog around the middle, where the fabricator must have gotten hung up and then been kicked back into action.

On the far side of the bridge, on the other bank of the stream, a house and outbuildings, the same mottled gray and brown as the bridge. An old, dusty groundcar. A garden, a young boy pulling weeds, three or four chickens hunting for bugs among the vegetables.

As Ashiban and the Sovereign came over the bridge, the boy looked up from his work in the garden, made a silent O with his mouth, turned and ran into the house. “Raksamat,” said Ashiban, but of course the Sovereign must have realized as soon as they set eyes on those fabricated buildings.

A woman came out of the house, in shirt and trousers and stocking feet, gray-shot hair in braids tied behind her back. A hunting gun in her hand. Not aimed at Ashiban or the Sovereign. Just very conspicuously there.

The sight of that gun made Ashiban’s heart pound. But she would almost be glad to let this woman shoot her so long as she let Ashiban eat something besides grubs first. And let her sit in a chair. Still, she wasn’t desperate enough to speak first. She was old enough to be this woman’s mother.

“Elder,” said the woman with the gun. “To what do we owe the honor?”

It struck Ashiban that these people—probably on the planet illegally, one of those Raksamat settler families that had so angered the Gidanta recently—were unlikely to have any desire to encourage a war that would leave them alone and vulnerable here on the planet surface. “Our flier crashed, child, and we’ve been walking for days. We are in sore need of some hospitality.” Some asperity crept into her voice, and she couldn’t muster up the energy to feel apologetic about it.

The woman with the gun stared at Ashiban, and her gaze shifted over Ashiban’s shoulder, presumably to the Sovereign of Iss, who had dropped back when they’d crossed the bridge. “You’re Ashiban Xidyla,” said the woman with the gun. “And this is the Sovereign of Iss.”

Ashiban turned to look at the Sovereign. Who had turned her face away, held her hands up as though to shield herself.

“Someone tried to kill us,” Ashiban said, turning back to the woman with the gun. “Someone shot down our flier.”

“Did they now,” said the woman with the gun. “They just found the flier last night. It’s been all over the news, that the pilot and the Sovereign’s interpreter were inside, but not yourself, Elder, or her. Didn’t say anything about it being shot down, but I can’t say I’m surprised.” She considered Ashiban and the Sovereign for a moment. “Well, come in.”

Inside they found a large kitchen, fabricator-made benches at a long table where a man sat plucking a chicken. He looked up at their entrance, then down again. Ashiban and the Sovereign sat at the other end of the table, and the boy from the garden brought them bowls of pottage. The Sovereign ate with one hand still spread in front of her face.

“Child,” said Ashiban, forcing herself to stop shoveling food into her mouth, “is there a cloth or a towel the Sovereign could use? She lost her veils.”

The woman stared at Ashiban, incredulous. Looked for a moment as though she was going to scoff, or say something dismissive, but instead left the room and came back with a large, worn dish towel, which she held out for the Sovereign.

Who stared at the cloth a moment, through her fingers, and then took it and laid it over her head, and then pulled one corner across her face, so that she could still see.

Their host leaned against a cabinet. “So,” she said, “the Gidanta wanted an excuse to kill all us Raksamat on the planet, and shot your flier out of the sky.”

“I didn’t say that,” said Ashiban. The comfort from having eaten actual cooked food draining away at the woman’s words. “I don’t know who shot our flier down.”

“Who else would it be?” asked the woman, bitterly. The Sovereign sat silent beside Ashiban. Surely she could not understand what was being said, but she was perceptive enough to guess what the topic was, to understand the tone of voice. “Not that I had much hope for this settlement you’re supposedly here to make. All respect, Elder, but things are as they are, and I won’t lie.”

“No, of course, child,” replied Ashiban. “You shouldn’t lie.”

“It’s always us who get sold out, in the agreements and the settlements,” said the woman. “We have every right to be here. As much right as the Gidanta. That’s what the agreement your mother made said, isn’t it? But then when we’re actually here, oh, no, that won’t do, we’re breaking the law. And does your mother back us up? Does the Assembly? No, of course not. We aren’t Xidylas or Ontrils or Lajuds or anybody important. Maybe if my family had an elder with a seat in the Assembly it would be different, but if we did, we wouldn’t be here. Would we.”

“I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, child,” replied Ashiban. “When the Raksamat farmsteads were first discovered, the Gidanta wanted to find you all and expel you. They wanted the Assembly to send help to enforce that. In the end my mother convinced everyone to leave the farmsteads alone while the issues were worked out.”

“Your mother!” cried the woman, their host. “All respect, Elder, but your mother might have told them to hold to the agreement she worked out and the Gidanta consented to, in front of their ancestors. It’s short and plain enough.” She gestured at the Sovereign. “Can you tell her that?”

The front door opened on three young women talking, pulling off their boots. One of them glanced inside, saw Ashiban and the Sovereign, the other woman, presumably a relative of theirs, standing straight and angry by the cabinet. Elbowed the others, who fell silent.

Ashiban said, “I don’t speak much Gidantan, child. You probably speak more than I do. And the Sovereign doesn’t have much Raksamat. I lost my handheld in the crash, so there’s no way to translate.” And the Sovereign was just a girl, with no more power in this situation than Ashiban herself.

The man at the end of the table spoke up. “Any news?” Directed at the three young women, who had come in and begun to dish themselves out some pottage.

“We didn’t see anything amiss,” said one of the young women. “But Lyek stopped on their way home from town, they said they went in to take their little one to the doctor. It was unfriendly. More unfriendly than usual, I mean.” She sat down across the table with her bowl, cast a troubled glance at the Sovereign, though her tone of voice stayed matter-of-fact. “They said a few people in the street shouted at them to get off the planet, and someone spit on them and called them stinking weevils. When they protested to the constable, she said it was no good complaining about trouble they’d brought on themselves, and wouldn’t do anything. They said the constable had been standing right there.”

“It sounds like the Sovereign and I need to get into town as soon as possible,” suggested Ashiban. Though she wondered what sort of reception she herself might meet, in a Gidanta town where people were behaving that way toward Raksamat settlers.

“I think,” said the woman, folding her arms and leaning once more against the cabinet, “that we’ll make our own decisions about what to do next, and not take orders from the sainted Ciwril Xidyla’s daughter, who doesn’t even speak Gidantan. Your pardon, Elder, but I honestly don’t know what they sent you here for. You’re welcome to food and drink, and there’s a spare bed upstairs you and her ladyship there can rest in. None of us here means you any ill. But I think we’re done taking orders from the Assembly, who can’t even bother to speak for us when we need it.”

If this woman had been one of her own daughters, Ashiban would have had sharp words for her. But this was not her daughter, and the situation was a dangerous one—and moreover, it was far more potentially dangerous for the Sovereign, sitting silent beside her, face still covered.

And Ashiban hadn’t reached her age without learning a thing or two. “Of course, child,” she said. “We’re so grateful for your help. The food was delicious, but we’ve walked for days and we’re so very tired. If we could wash, and maybe take you up on the offer of that bed.”

Ashiban and the Sovereign each had another bowl of pottage, and Ashiban turned her bagful of grubs over to the man with the chicken. The three young women finished eating in silence, and two went up, at an order from the older woman, to make the bed. The third showed Ashiban and the Sovereign where they could wash.

The bed turned out to be in its own tiny chamber, off an upstairs corridor, and not in one corner of a communal sleeping room. The better to keep watch on them, Ashiban thought, but also at least on the surface a gesture of respect. This small bedroom probably belonged to the most senior member of the household.

Ashiban thanked the young woman who had shown them upstairs. Closed the door—no lock, likely the only door in this house that locked was that front door they had come through. Looked at the Sovereign, standing beside the bed, the cloth still held across her mouth. Tried to remember how to say sleep in Gidantan.

Settled for Raksamat. “Sleep now,” Ashiban said, and mimed laying her head on her hand, closed her eyes. Opened them, sat down on one side of the bed, patted the other. Lay down and closed her eyes.

Next she knew, the room was dark and silent, and she ached, even more than she had during days of sleeping on the ground. The Sovereign lay beside her, breathing slow and even.

Ashiban rose, gingerly, felt her way carefully to the door. Opened it, slowly. Curled in the doorway lay the young woman who had shown them to the room, her head pillowed on one arm, a lamp on the floor by her hand, turned low. Next to her, a gun. The young woman snored softly. The house was otherwise silent.

Ashiban had entertained vague thoughts of what she would do at this moment, waking in the night when the rest of the house was likely asleep. Had intended to think more on the feasibility of those vague thoughts, and the advisability of following up on them.

She went back into the room. Shook the Sovereign awake. Finger on her lips, Ashiban showed her the sleeping young woman outside the door. The gun. The Sovereign of Iss, still shaking off the daze of sleep, blinked, frowned, went back to the bed to pick up the cloth she’d used to cover her face, and then stepped over the sleeping young woman and out into the silent corridor. Ashiban followed.

She was prepared to tell anyone who met them that they needed to use the sanitary facility. But they met no one, walked through the dark and silent house, out the door and into the starlit night. The dark, the damp, the cool air, the sound of the stream. Ashiban felt a sudden familiar ache of wishing-to-be-home. Wishing to be warmer. Wishing to have eaten more than what little she and the Sovereign could forage. And, she realized now they were outside, she had no idea what to do next.

Apparently not burdened with the same doubts, the Sovereign walked straight and without hesitation to the groundcar. Ashiban hastened to catch up with her. “I can’t drive one of these,” she whispered to the Sovereign, pointlessly. The girl could almost certainly not understand her. Did not even turn her head to look at Ashiban or acknowledge that she’d said anything, but opened the groundcar door and climbed into the driver’s seat. Frowned over the controls for a few minutes, stretched out to a near-eternity by Ashiban’s fear that someone in the house would wake and see that they were gone.

The Sovereign did something to the controls, and the groundcar started up with a low hum. Ashiban went around to the passenger side, climbed in, and before she could even settle in the seat the groundcar was moving and they were off.

At first Ashiban sat tense in the passenger seat, turned as best she could to look behind. But after a half hour or so of cautious, bumpy going, it seemed to her that they were probably safely away. She took a deep breath. Faced forward again, with some relief—looking back hadn’t been terribly comfortable for her neck or her back. Looked at the Sovereign, driving with utter concentration. Well, it was hardly a surprise, now Ashiban thought of it. The Sovereign had grown up down here, doubtless groundcars were an everyday thing to her.

What next? They needed to find out where that town was. They might need to defend themselves some time in the near future. Ashiban looked around to see what there might be in the car that they could use. Back behind the seats was an assortment of tools and machines that Ashiban assumed were necessary for farming on a planet. A shovel. Some rope. A number of other things she couldn’t identify.

A well between her seat and the Sovereign’s held a tangled assortment of junk. A small knife. A doll made partly from pieces of fabricator plastic and partly from what appeared to be bits of an old, worn-out shirt. Bits of twine. An empty cup. Some sort of clip with a round gray blob adhesived to it. “What’s this?” asked Ashiban aloud.

The Sovereign glanced over at Ashiban. With one hand she took the clip from Ashiban’s hand, flicked the side of it with her thumb, and held it out to Ashiban, her attention back on the way ahead of them. Said something.

“It’s a translator,” said the little blob on the clip in a quiet, tinny voice. “A lot of weevils won’t take their handheld into town because they’re afraid the constable will take it from them and use the information on it against their families. Or if you’re out working and have your hands full but think you might need to talk to a weevil.” A pause, in which the Sovereign seemed to realize what she’d said. “You’re not a weevil,” said the little blob.

“It’s not a very nice thing to say.” Though of course Ashiban had heard Raksamat use slurs against the Gidanta, at home, and not thought twice about it. Until now.

“Oh, Ancestors!” cried the Sovereign, and smacked the groundcar steering in frustration. “I always say the wrong thing. I wish Timran hadn’t died, I wish I still had an interpreter.” Tears filled her eyes, shone in the dim light from the groundcar controls.

“Why are you swearing by the Ancestors?” asked Ashiban. “You don’t believe in them. Or I thought you didn’t.” One tear escaped, rolled down the Sovereign’s cheek. Ashiban picked up the end of the old dishcloth that was currently draped over the girl’s shoulder and wiped it away.

“I didn’t swear by the Ancestors!” the Sovereign protested. “I didn’t swear by anything. I just said oh, Ancestors.” They drove in silence for a few minutes. “Wait,” said the Sovereign then. “Let me try something. Are you ready?”

“Ready for what?”

“This: Ancestors. What did I say?”

“You said Ancestors.”

“Now. Pingberries. What did I say?”

“You said pingberries.”

The Sovereign brought the groundcar to a stop, and turned to look at Ashiban. “Now. Oh, Ancestors!” as though she were angry or frustrated. “There. Do you hear? Are you listening?”

“I’m listening.” Ashiban had heard it, plain and clear. “You said oh, pingberries, but the translator said it was oh, Ancestors. How did that happen?”

“Pingberries sounds a lot like…something that isn’t polite,” the Sovereign said. “So it’s the kind of swear your old uncle would use in front of the in-laws.”

“What?” asked Ashiban, and then, realizing, “Whoever entered the data for the translator thought it was equivalent to swearing by the Ancestors.”

“It might be,” said the Sovereign, “and actually that’s really useful, that it knows when I’m talking about wanting to eat some pingberries, or when I’m frustrated and swearing. That’s good, it means the translators are working well. But Ancestors and pingberries, those aren’t exactly the same. Do you see?”

“The treaty,” Ashiban realized. “That everyone thinks the other side is translating however they want.” And probably not just the treaty.

It had been Ciwril Xidyla who had put together the first, most significant collection of linguistic data on Gidantan. It was her work that had led to the ease and usefulness of automatic translation between the two languages. Even aside from automatic translation, Ashiban suspected that her mother’s work was the basis for nearly every translation between Raksamat and Gidantan for very nearly a century. That was one reason why Ciwril Xidyla was as revered as she was, by everyone in the system. Translation devices like this little blob on a clip had made communication possible between Raksamat and Gidanta. Had made peaceful agreement possible, let people talk to each other whenever they needed it. Had probably saved lives. But. “We can’t be the first to notice this.”

The Sovereign set the groundcar moving again. “Noticing something and realizing it’s important aren’t the same thing. And maybe lots of people have noticed, but they don’t say anything because it suits them to have things as they are. We need to tell the Terraforming Council. We need to tell the Assembly. We need to tell everybody, and we need to retranslate the treaty. We need more people to actually learn both languages instead of only using that thing.” She gestured toward the translator clipped to Ashiban’s collar.

“We need the translator to be better, Sovereign. Not everyone can easily learn another language.” More people learning the two languages ought to help with that. More people with firsthand experience to correct the data. “But we need the translator to know more than what my mother learned.” Had the translations been unchanged since her mother’s time? Ashiban didn’t think that was likely. But the girl’s guess that it suited at least some of the powers that be to leave problems—perhaps certain problems—uncorrected struck Ashiban as sadly possible. “Sovereign, who’s going to listen to us?”

“I am the Sovereign of Iss!” the girl declared. “And you are the daughter of Ciwril Xidyla! They had better listen to us.”

Shortly after the sky began to lighten, they came to a real, honest-to-goodness road. The Sovereign pulled the groundcar up to its edge and then stopped. The road curved away on either side, so that they could see only the brief stretch in front of them, and trees all around. “Right or left?” asked the Sovereign. There was no signpost, no indication which way town was, or even any evidence beyond the existence of the road itself that there was a town anywhere nearby.

When Ashiban didn’t answer, the Sovereign slid out of the driver’s seat and walked out to the center of the road. Stood looking one way, and then the other.

“I think the town is to the right,” she said, when she’d gotten back in. “And I don’t think we have time to get away.”

“I don’t understand,” Ashiban protested. But then she saw lights through the trees, to the right. “Maybe they’ll drive on by.” But she remembered the young woman’s story of how a Raksamat settler had been received in the town yesterday. And she was here to begin with because of rising tensions between Gidanta and Raksamat, and whoever had shot their flier down, days ago, had fairly obviously wanted to increase those tensions, not defuse them.

And they were sitting right in the middle of the path to the nearest Raksamat farmstead. Which had no defenses beyond a few hunting guns and maybe a lock on the front door.

A half dozen groundcars came around the bend in the road. Three of them the sort made to carry loads, but the wide, flat cargo areas held people instead of cargo. Several of those people were carrying guns.

The first car in the procession slowed as it approached the path where Ashiban and the Sovereign sat. Began to turn, and stopped when its lights brushed their stolen groundcar. Nothing more happened for the next few minutes, except that the people in the backs of the cargo cars leaned and craned to see what was going on.

“Expletive,” said the Sovereign. “I’m getting out to talk to them. You should stay here.”

“What could you possibly say to them, child?” But there wasn’t much good doing anything else, either.

“I don’t know,” replied the girl. “But you should stay here.”

Slowly the Sovereign opened the groundcar door, slid out again. Closed the door, pulled her cloth up over her face, and walked out into the pool of light at the edge of the road.

Getting out of the passenger seat would be slow and painful, and Ashiban really didn’t want to. But the Sovereign looked so small standing by the side of the road, facing the other groundcar. She opened her own door and clambered awkwardly down. Just as she came up behind the Sovereign, the passenger door of the groundcar facing them opened, and a woman stepped out onto the road.

“I am the Sovereign of Iss,” announced the Sovereign. Murmured the translator clipped to Ashiban’s shirt. “Just what do you think you’re doing here?” Attempting more or less credibly to sound imperious even despite the one hand holding the cloth over her face, but the girl’s voice shook a little.

“Glad to see you safe, Sovereign,” said the woman, “but I am constable of this precinct and you are blocking my path. Town’s that way.” She pointed back along the way the procession of groundcars had come.

“And where are you going, Constable,” asked the Sovereign, “with six groundcars and dozens of people behind you, some of them with guns? There’s nothing behind us but trees.”

“There are three weevil farmsteads in those woods,” cried someone from the back of a groundcar. “And we’ve had it with the weevils thinking they own our planet. Get out of the way, girl!”

“We know the Raksamat tried to kill you,” put in the constable. “We know they shot down your flier. It wasn’t on the news, but people talk. Do they want a war? An excuse to try to kill us all? We won’t be pushed any farther. The weevils are here illegally, and they will get off this planet and back to their ships. Today if I have anything to say about it.”

“This is Ciwril Xidyla’s daughter next to me,” said the Sovereign. “She came here to work things out, not to try to kill anyone.”

“That would be the Ciwril Xidyla who translated the treaty so the weevils could read it to suit them, would it?” asked the constable. There was a murmur of agreement from behind her. “And wave it in our faces like we agreed to something we didn’t?”

Somewhere overhead, the sound of a flier engine. Ashiban’s first impulse was to run into the trees. Instead, she said, “Constable, the Sovereign is right. I came here to try to help work out these difficulties. Whoever tried to kill us, they failed, and the sooner we get back to work, the better.”

“We don’t mean you any harm, old woman,” said the constable. “But you’d best get out of our way, because we are coming through here, whether you move or not.”

“To do what?” asked Ashiban. “To kill the people on those farmsteads behind us?”

“We’re not going to kill anybody,” said the constable, plainly angry at the suggestion. “We just want them to know we mean business. If you won’t move, we’ll move you.” And when neither Ashiban nor the Sovereign replied, the constable turned to the people on the back of the vehicle behind her and gestured them forward.

A moment of hesitation, and then one of them jumped off the groundcar, and another few followed.

Beside Ashiban the Sovereign took a shaking breath and cried, “I am the Sovereign of Iss! You will go back to the town.” The advancing people froze, staring at her.

“You’re a little girl in a minor priesthood, who ought to be home minding her studies,” said the constable. “It’s not your fault your grandmother made the mistake of negotiating with the weevils, and it’s not your fault your aunt quit and left you in the middle of this, but don’t be thinking you’ve got any authority here.” The people who had leaped off the groundcar still hesitated.

The Sovereign, visibly shaking now, pointed at the constable with her free hand. “I am the voice of the planet! You can’t tell the planet to get out of your way.”

“Constable!” said one of the people who had come off the groundcar. “A moment.” And went over to say something quiet in the constable’s ear.

The Sovereign said, low enough so only Ashiban could hear it, “Tell the planet to get out of the way? How could I say something so stupid?”

And then lights came sweeping around the lefthand bend of the road, and seven or eight groundcars came into view, and stopped short of where the constable stood in the road.

A voice called out, “This is Delegate Garas of the Terraforming Council Enforcement Commission.” Ashiban knew that name. Everyone in the system knew that name. Delegate Garas was the highest-ranking agent of the Gidantan Enforcement Commission, and answered directly to the Terraforming Council. “Constable, you have overstepped your authority.” A man stepped out from behind the glare of the lights. “This area is being monitored.” The sound of a flier above, louder. “Anyone who doesn’t turn around and go home this moment will be officially censured.”

The person who had been talking to the constable said, “We were just about to leave, Delegate.”

“Good,” said the delegate. “Don’t delay on my account, please. And, Constable, I’ll meet with you when I get into town this afternoon.”

The Commission agents settled Ashiban and the Sovereign into the back of a groundcar, and poured them hot barley tea from a flask. The tea hardly had time to cool before Delegate Garas slid into the passenger seat in front and turned to speak to them. “Sovereign. Elder.” With little bows of his head. “I apologize for not arriving sooner.”

“We had everything under control,” said the Sovereign, loftily, cloth still held over her face. Though, sitting close next to her as Ashiban was, she could feel the Sovereign was still shaking.

“Did you now. Well. We only were able to start tracking you when we found the crash site. Which took much longer than it should have. The surveillance in the High Mires and the surrounding areas wasn’t functioning properly.”

“That’s a coincidence,” Ashiban remarked, drily.

“Not a coincidence at all,” the delegate replied. “It was sabotage. An inside job.”

The Sovereign made a small, surprised noise. “It wasn’t the weev…the Raksamat?”

“Oh, they were involved, too.” Delegate Garas found a cup somewhere in the seat beside him, poured himself some barley tea. “There’s a faction of Raksamat—I’m sure this won’t surprise you, Elder—who resent the illegal settlers for grabbing land unauthorized, but who also feel that the Assembly will prefer certain families once Raksamat can legally come down to the planet, and between the two all the best land and opportunities will be gone. There is also—Sovereign, I don’t know if you follow this sort of thing—a faction of Gidanta who believe that the Terraforming Council is, in their turn, arranging things to profit themselves and their friends, and leaving everyone else out. Their accusations may in fact be entirely accurate and just, but that is of course no reason to conspire with aggrieved Raksamat to somehow be rid of both Council and Assembly and divide the spoils between themselves.”

“That’s a big somehow,” Ashiban observed.

“It is,” Delegate Garas acknowledged. “And they appear not to have had much talent for that sort of undertaking. We have most of them under arrest.” The quiet, calm voice of a handheld murmured, too low for Ashiban’s translator clip to pick up. “Ah,” said Delegate Garas. “That’s all of them now. The trials should be interesting. Fortunately, they’re not my department. It’s Judicial’s problem now. So, as I said, we were only able to even begin tracking you sometime yesterday. And we were already in the area looking for you when we got a call from a concerned citizen who had overheard plans for the constable’s little outing, so it was simple enough to show up. We were pleasantly surprised to find you both here, and relatively well.” He took a drink of his tea. “We’ve let the team tracking you know they can go home now. As the both of you can, once we’ve interviewed you so we know what happened to you.”

“Home!” The Sovereign was indignant. “But what about the talks?”

“The talks are suspended, Sovereign. And your interpreter is dead. The Council will have to appoint a new one. And let’s be honest—both of you were involved mainly for appearance’s sake. In fact, I’ve wondered over the last day or two if you weren’t brought into this just so you could die and provide a cause for trouble.”

This did not mollify the Sovereign. “Appearance’s sake! I am the Sovereign of Iss!”

“Yes, yes,” Delegate Garas agreed, “so you told everyone just a short while ago.”

“And it worked, too,” observed Ashiban. Out the window, over the delegate’s shoulder, the sun shone on the once again deserted road. She shivered, remembering the cracked flier windshield, the pilot slumped over the controls.

“You can’t have these talks without me,” the Sovereign insisted. “I’m the voice of the planet.” She looked at Ashiban. “I am going to learn Raksamat. And Ashiban Xidyla can learn Gidantan. We won’t need any expletive interpreter. And we can fix the handheld translators.”

“That might take a while, Sovereign,” Ashiban observed.

The Sovereign lifted the cloth covering her mouth just enough to show her frown to Ashiban. “We already talked about this, Ashiban Xidyla. And I am the Voice of Iss. I will learn quickly.”

“Sovereign,” said Delegate Garas, “those handheld translators are a good thing. Can you imagine what the past hundred years would have been like without them? People can learn Raksamat, or Gidantan, but as Ashiban Xidyla points out, that takes time, and in the meanwhile people still have to talk to each other. Those handheld translators have prevented all sorts of problems.”

“We know, Delegate,” Ashiban said. “We were just talking about it, before the townspeople got here. But they could be better.”

“Well,” said Delegate Garas. “You may be right, at that. And if any of this were my concern in the least, I’d be getting a headache about now. Fortunately, it’s not my problem. I’ll see you ladies on your way home and…”

“Translation unavailable,” exclaimed the Sovereign, before he could finish. Got out of the groundcar, set her empty cup on the roof with a smack, opened the driver’s door, and slid in. Closed the door behind her.

“Young lady,” Delegate Garas began.

“I am the Voice of Iss!” the Sovereign declared. She did something with the controls and the groundcar started up with a low hum. Delegate Garas frowned, looked back at Ashiban.

Ashiban wanted to go home. She wanted to rest, and go back to her regular, everyday life, doing nothing much.

There had never been much point to doing anything much, not with a mother like Ciwril Xidyla. Anyone’s wildest ambitions would pale into nothing beside Ashiban’s mother’s accomplishments. And Ashiban had never been a terribly ambitious person. Had always wished for an ordinary life. Had mostly had it, at least the past few decades. Until now.

Those Raksamat farmers wanted an ordinary life, too, and the Gidanta townspeople. The Sovereign herself had been taken from an ordinary girlhood—or as ordinary as your life could be when your grandmother and your aunt were the voice of the planet—and thrown into the middle of this.

Delegate Garas was still watching her, still frowning. Ashiban sighed. “I don’t recommend arguing, Delegate. Assassins and a flier crash in the High Mires couldn’t stop us. I doubt you can do more than slow us down, and it’s really better if you don’t. Sovereign, I think first we should have a bath and clean clothes and something to eat. And get checked out by a doctor. And maybe get some sleep.”

The Sovereign was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “All right. I agree to that. But we should start on the language lessons as soon as possible.”

“Yes, child,” said Ashiban, closing her eyes. “But not this very moment.”

Delegate Garas laughed at that, short and sharp. But he made no protest at all as the Sovereign started the groundcar moving toward town.

Ann Leckie enjoyed immediate success and critical acclaim for her debut novel, Ancillary Justice, in 2013. Leckie was already a successful short story writer; her first published work, “Hesperia and Glory,” was included in Science Fiction: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition, and her subsequent stories “The God of Au” and “The Endangered Camp” were featured in later editions of the same anthology. But it was Ancillary Justice, the first book in Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, that swept the major science fiction awards, garnering Hugo, Nebula, Locus, British Science Fiction Association, and Arthur C. Clarke Awards for best novel—alongside widespread acclaim for the book’s deft balance of suspense, character development, and world-building. Its sequels, 2014’s Ancillary Sword and 2015’s Ancillary Mercy, garnered similar awards attention and closed out the trilogy.

Credits

MICROSOFT

Editors Jennifer Henshaw and Allison Linn

Chief Storyteller Steve Clayton

Corporate VP, Communications Frank X. Shaw

A special thanks to all the Microsoft researchers who spent time with the authors and generously shared their work and ideas.

MELCHER MEDIA

President, CEO Charles Melcher

VP, COO Bonnie Eldon

Senior Producer John Morgan

Production Manager Susan Lynch

Editorial Assistants Adrian Rapazzini, Luisa Lizoain, and Karl Daum

“A Cop’s Eye” was produced in collaboration with Lion Forge Comics, with special thanks to Adam Staffaroni.

Illustrations & Design Joey Camacho / Raw & Rendered

An experienced 3-D motion and graphic designer based in Vancouver, Canada, Raw & Rendered (a.k.a. Joey Camacho) has created conceptual and innovative work for major global brands as well as passionate local companies. Since graduating from the Alberta College of Art + Design, Camacho has developed unique and innovative 3-D graphics, both still images and motion work. He established a strong presence with his Progress Before Perfection series—creating an abstract Cinema 4-D render every day for a year. After finishing off 365 images, Camacho continues producing new work in the acclaimed series.

microsoft.com/futurevisions

Content

Bear Elizabeth, et al Future Visions: Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

Seanan McGuire Hello, Hello

Greg Bear The Machine Starts

Elizabeth Bear Skin in the Game

Nancy Kress Machine Learning

Jack McDevitt Riding With the Duke

Blue Delliquanti & Michele Rosenthal A Cop’s Eye

Robert J. Sawyer Looking for Gordo

David Brin The Tell

Ann Leckie Another Word for World