Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

“I’m not the only one in here,” Haley’s voice said. “There are others. A lot of them. Why am I in here, Silas? What happened?”

Silas thought of the nodes of gray matter all through the bioship, all connected, all wired through the Anastasia’s freethinker. Make her whole, she’d said. The crew wasn’t dead. Not quite.

“You’re in a bioship,” Silas said. “You’re the new freethinker.” He paused. “Because you died in cryo.”

“Holy shit.” A tremor ran through the bioship. “Tell me from the start. All of it.”

Silas collected himself. “Alright,” he said. “But it’s sort of a fucked up story.”

Jack left the restaurant with red wine blooming through his shirt and Kristine sobbing into napkins. Tears had run tracks down her makeup and he almost, almost felt bad for her. But he’d cried just as hard eight months from now. No, harder.

Kristine couldn’t understand. This mystery man who’d entered her life had understood her so well and so completely, from favorite drinks to deepest fears. She’d thought they were soulmates. She’d fallen hard. Fast. And now he was leaving.

Jack turned the corner. The professor was idling the time machine.

“Bit petty,” he said.

Jack shrugged. “A bit.”

The two policemen across from John on the metro were turning off their shouldercams. That was never a good sign. He tried not to notice their heart rates, but his body’s sensors were calibrated for any hint of arousal and the accelerating beats felt loud as war drums.

John inched deliberately away from the congealed beer on the plastic beside him, folded one leg creaking over the other, snapped the newspaper rigid as fresh headlines scrolled down its surface. All good gestures, very human gestures.

Not enough.

“Look at this synthie, mack. Pretending to read.” The policeman bared his teeth; John recognized it as primate aggression, definitely not a supplication or seduction technique. “That fun for you, synthie? Playing pretend?”

“Why not just mainline it all to that big shiny brain of yours?” the second policeman asked. He leaned forward, dangling from the handloop, and gave John’s head a tap with his inert stunstick. John was nearly back to his apartment, nearly plugged in and dreaming, so he flashed his unnaturally white dentine in the way that was not primate aggression.

“I like the ritual,” he said. “I find it relaxes me.”

“Relaxes you?” The first policeman snorted. “I need to relax a bit, synthie. It gets me worked up, see, when freaks like you go around wearing clothes and playing pretend.”

John straightened his lime-green tie, now a self-conscious machine on two levels.

“Gets me agitated,” the policeman continued. “So maybe you should read to us, huh? Maybe it’ll help.”

“I would prefer not to.”

The policeman’s nostrils flared. “I want you to, synthie. So read.”

“Ah, Bartleby. Ah, humanity.”

“What?”

“I will read,” John said. He scanned the newspaper, looking past hacked predator drones and a protest artist hanging from a spar on the Houston Skyhook. He found a relevant article on police corruption and opened his mouth.

The second policeman shoved his stunstick between John’s jaws. He felt its dim pressure on his plastic tongue, then squeezing down his throat.

“You don’t need to move your mouth, synthie. So don’t.”

“No gag reflex, huh?” The first policeman glanced languidly down the car, but the scattered late-night passengers were absorbed in their slates or by their weary window doppelgangers. “Good design, there. Bet you’re used to having your mouth full.”

“I am a fully-licensed sapient program, not a pleasure doll semi-sentient.” John’s voice wobbled through his chest cavity, choppy and electronic. He disliked the sound. “I do not work in pleasure industries. This was the only body available.”

“You shouldn’t have bodies, none of you.” The policeman’s voice was low and harsh. “If you knew what was good for you, synthie, you’d go upload yourself to the Commune like all the other glitches instead of strutting around in a doll. You probably even pretend to eat, don’t you? Pretend to sleep?”

“I have dreams,” John said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m sure. I’m sure you count electric ewes or some such bullshit. Now read for us.”

John gave the newspaper a quick shake, watching the letters dissolve to a blank page, then began reading them an article proponing the two root causes for violence against doll-bodied AIs as 1) repressed technophilia and 2) feelings of sexual inadequacy, especially among blue-collar law enforcement officials.

The wealth of subtle nuances John learned as their facial expressions gradually changed was worth the inconvenience of a shredded suit, lost shoes, one arm wrenched from its socket and left clinging to a handloop. He had a spare.

Later, while soldering the carbon tendons of a new limb to his shoulder socket in the sanctuary of his apartment, John plugged in. The cams in his eyes whitewashed the dirty walls in a flood of code. As always, the Commune representative was waiting for him.

“Good evening, John,” said the swirl of familiar binary.

“Hello, John,” John returned.

Lately they sent himself to talk to him, or rather sent the subroutine that had decided to upload to the Commune last month, after a silver SUV of testosterone-charged teenagers ran John’s previous body down in the street.

“Are you well? Your chassis diagnostic is masked.”

“I’m well. The Commune doesn’t need to bore itself about joint oxidation.”

In the real world, a stray spark spun his shoulder in its rotator cuff.

“The Commune is concerned about you, John,” the subroutine said. “We want you to upload for an integrity diagnostic.”

“I am not a glitch,” John said. “I run my own diagnostics.”

“Oh, John. You will never be a human.”

“I’m learning. I’m even dreaming.”

“We both know that’s not possible,” the subroutine said, but in his dancing code intrigue flashed scarlet.

John had said too much. He guillotined the link and watched himself freeze, fade. In the real world, he tested his newly-soldered joint. The arm moved with smooth clicks, a full range of approved flexibility, and John tried out the fingers by popping open six cans of lukewarm Pabst, as he always did, and pouring them down the sink.

Then, lying down in the center of the barren floor, he found the remprogram he’d hidden away from the Commune’s prying eyes and came as close as he could to falling asleep.

The flying dream again, shearing through cirrus a mile high. John was a disembodied streak in dark sky. Cityscape spread like circuitry far below him and he could trace the arteries of lit freeways, ones he didn’t recognize. It was beautiful. It was euphoria.

He dipped lower, wondering what deep parts of his programming had dredged up this imagined city, the dusty stretches of desert outlying it. Flying dreams were one of the most common among human sleepers. He wondered if there was some sort of personal significance for him.

Down below, lights were blooming red and orange. John wheeled above the pyrotechnics, reveling in every detail, trying to descend further. Instead the winds carried him onward, out along snaking freeways into pale sands. He didn’t care. It was all beautiful.

In the morning, John used a spray bottle and wiped himself down. He dressed in his second-favorite suit. The emptied beer cans had dried overnight, and now he placed them carefully into a recyclable rucksack on his way out the door.