Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

Silence.

“You know, for years I thought it was my fault. I believed that I was the one who destroyed our family. Uncle went to prison, Mama got sick, and you… you couldn’t even look at me. Even after we left, if I didn’t call you, I didn’t hear from you.”

I still remembered those video calls, stilted conversations on birthdays and holidays. In them, he always seemed too tired or too busy to talk properly.

“I spent years waiting for you… I waited, and I waited, and I waited.”

The tears rose unbidden and I wiped at my face, angry at my own weakness. I’d sworn long ago that I would never cry in front of him. The dead man stood and walked to the window, his back to me. He stared out for a long moment before speaking.

I didn’t know what to say to you. His voice was so soft I could barely hear it over the noise outside. As if he was talking to himself. When I looked at you all I could see was my own failure: I was your father and I couldn’t protect you. I hated myself for it and I took that out on you—and for that, I’ll never forgive myself.

“Good. Because I won’t ever forgive you either.”

He turned back to me and I watched the slow realization work itself across his face.

You are still angry at me, he said, finally. Sadly.

“You let me down so many times.” Tears sprang to my eyes again, lending a quaver to my voice. “I don’t know how to stop being angry at you.”

I wish I could make it up to you.

“Well, it’s too late for that.” For the first time in thirty years, I looked my father in the eyes as I spoke. “Did you honestly think that by coming here and chanting your empty platitudes, you could undo all those years of pain? You said you came back to warn me, but this isn’t about me. This is about you getting your last moment of absolution.”

I am so sorry. For everything.

“It doesn’t matter anymore.” I was suddenly tired. “Go. Find your salvation somewhere else.”

Thunder boomed from somewhere in the distance, sending a ripple of unease through the crowd outside. The wind picked up, skittering debris across the yard. As the fat, heavy rain clouds rolled in, the party outside began to pack up. Families in the building fled to their flats, while those who had too far to go clustered under the canvas canopies to wait out the storm.

I picked up my backpack and looked around, but the dead man was gone.

A flood of mourners streamed out from the compound, breaking up into little rivulets of people eager to get home before the rain started. I joined them and headed for the bus shelter. Just as I reached it, the sky opened up and wept.

Inside the shelter, I wedged myself into a small space in the back and tugged the hood of my hi-dri up to hide my face. I didn’t want to explain my sudden departure to any mourners who might recognize me. I was staring into the haze of the rain, my mind blank with grief, when I felt a familiar hand on my shoulder.

“So you would have just left us like that, eh?” Auntie Chio’s voice was sad. I tensed involuntarily as I turned to her, but her expression bore an unexpected understanding.

Before I could speak, she wrapped me in a warm embrace. For a moment, I wanted to fight off her kindness. My rage was an invisible load I’d been carrying for so long that I didn’t know how to put it down. Instead, I returned her hug with a fierceness I didn’t realize I had, and finally, I let my tears flow. This time I didn’t bother to wipe them away. There was no one left to see me cry.

The storm passed quickly, and I decided to forego the bus and walk back to the Harbourfront. On foot, I was able to look more closely at the city around me. Though the main roadways were well-maintained, I noted buckled panels and weedy gardens in the side streets. I passed rows of empty homes kept ready for returnees, but underneath their neat government-issued paint jobs the brickwork was crumbling. Eventually, they too would have to be razed and converted into parkland.

I arrived at the Harbourfront just as the sun was setting behind the Niger Bridge, highlighting its rusted pylons. My city, like the rest of the world, was disintegrating. The realization relieved me, in an odd way. I wondered if too many of us were trying to return to who we imagined we were before the Catastrophe broke us. Maybe what we needed was to learn to live with the world, and ourselves, as it was now. Perhaps our salvation lay in the broken spaces inside us all.

Fonda Lee (fondalee.com) is the World Fantasy Award–winning author of the Green Bone Saga, beginning with Jade City and continuing in Jade War and Jade Legacy . She is also the author of the acclaimed young adult science fiction novels Zeroboxer, Exo , and Cross Fire and has written comics for Marvel. Fonda is a three-time winner of the Aurora Award and a multiple finalist for the Nebula and Locus Awards. Born and raised in Canada, she now resides in Portland, Oregon.

I didn’t want a girlfriend. Don’t get me wrong, I like girls—I just don’t have time for the hassle of dating right now. But I was at a family reunion last year and my parents kept making comments about me still being single: “Oh, he works too hard” and “He’s shy; he just needs to give himself some credit.” My mom was asking my aunts if they could set me up with girls they knew. It was getting to be too much.

So when I got home from the reunion, I signed up for a Worthy account. It was pretty simple: I filled out some information about myself, put in my preferences for gender and age, and in seconds I had an AI-generated virtual girlfriend named “Ivy.” She sent me a text: “Hi, I’m looking forward to getting to know you.” I texted back right away, “Me too, how’s it going?” and my Worthy score in the corner of the screen went up from zero to five.

You start by texting your virtual significant other, but as the relationship progresses, you can send and receive voice messages, go on virtual dates, and talk over video calls. You get points based on the quantity and quality of your interactions. Once I reached a high enough Worthy score to be at Level 3 (“Spark” level) in the program, I could upload photos and short clips of myself and Worthy would insert my virtual girlfriend into them. That would give me ammunition to tell my parents I was dating someone. They live in Seattle and I’m in Boston, so we mostly stay in touch via texts and photos anyway.

It’s not like I was being completely dishonest, either, because I would be getting dating experience. Just a lot more efficiently. Worthy gets you through the awkward, shallow online dating phase using an AI that teaches you to be a more emotionally intelligent romantic partner—which is what girls want, right? You don’t have to disappoint or be disappointed by a real person. And if you get too busy, you can just put your account on hold.

You have to treat the relationship seriously to get a high Worthy score, though. If you ask your AI partner how their day is going, listen to them, and send them virtual flowers on your “anniversary,” your score goes up. If you ignore them, talk over them, or say insensitive things, it goes down. Worthy’s algorithms learn your behavior and react realistically. So you can’t hack the system by sending virtual flower bouquets nonstop. The program will flag that as being insincere and your rating will take a nose dive.

Once you have a high enough score, you can transfer your account over to Worthwhile, which is the company’s actual dating site. Over there, you can see everyone else’s Worthy scores and they can see yours before you decide whether or not to contact each other. But I wasn’t thinking that far down the line when I started. I just wanted the photos and videos from Worthy to keep my parents off my back.