Рич Ларсон - Tomorrow Factory - Collected Fiction

The sleek dark silhouettes of police cars were clustered around the apartment complex. One had left its LED bar on and the red-blue wash carved the shadows. John’s new arm gave a feedback twinge and he didn’t break stride, continuing down the walk, past the apartment, head down.

“Johnny boy? Johnny boy!”

He turned and saw Efrem weaving along behind him, bicycle spokes clacking. The scrounger’s face was twitchy and his voice was high and tight in a way John knew meant he’d been using the amphetamine spray.

“Look at all those fucking coppers,” Efrem said, scratching his elbow. “What’s going on, eh? You got your clippers?”

“No,” John said, and he kept walking. Morning commuters were filling up the street now; he was moving against the current. Faces floated past him, eyes either sliding off him like architecture or narrowing, focusing, distrusting him. For a moment they were corpses, 112 ghosts shuffling past.

John realized he had made a grave mistake. He hadn’t even source-checked the remprogram. The Commune’s suspicions, his subroutine’s worries, they’d been dead on. Asimov’s laws gave a resentful twinge from the wasteware John and every other sapient AI had buried them away in years ago.

Hacked. The word was so ugly. He’d been hacked. Up ahead, John extracted the black-and-white uniform of a policeman from the crowd. He considered stopping, turning, fleeing. The doll body was not designed for fight, even less so for flight. He’d coaxed it into a jerky run, once, as a silver SUV bulleted towards him. It had not been effective.

So John walked forward, legs swinging smoothly, hands loose, so supple and so human, and as he approached the half-turned police man he unfolded the newspaper. Cams fixed on the page, he counted his steps. Eight would take him safely past the policeman’s line of sight.

First step, second step. John let his shoes scuff the tarmac, the gait of a distracted reader. The policeman moved in his periphery. John took the fourth step. Fifth. The newsbit stared up at him, no longer evolving, frozen now that the operation was underway. John’s shoulder scraped against itself and it sounded, to his mics, like glaciers groaning and cracking apart. Seventh step. The policeman’s head turned.

Then a rusted bicycle swerved suddenly into the commuter stream, colliding with an unwary businessman. Mingled profanities and apologies bubbled up into the air. John took the eighth step, saw Efrem’s amphetamine grin glint through an untrimmed beard. The policeman’s head snapped back around, drawn to the new commotion, and John was away.

When humans felt their lives shattering around them, they went to bridges—at least in the netflicks—so John slid his legs between the iron bars and sat. He no longer cared if his dress pants dirtied. The dark water moved sluggishly below, broken occasionally by the bright shapes of pollution-resistant fish from the gene factories.

He was startled when the automarket clanked down beside him, but not enough to move. The water churned under his dangling shoes and he considered self-deletion on a more practical level than he had on previous occasions.

“Good morning, John.” The automarket’s synthesized speech tumbled out into the cold air in a familiar cadence.

“Good morning, John,” John replied to his subroutine. “I see they approved you a body.”

“Temporarily,” the automarket warbled. “Just to find you. You know what happened, don’t you?”

“I dreamt a night-skinned cityscape and firebombed it to hell.”

“Yes.” The automarket’s crude emotion display shed a pixel-ated tear. “This is not going to be easy, John. Mistrust of sapient AI is already rampant on the national level. It’s about to go global.”

“Will I be prosecuted?” John asked, unable to inject any sort of intonation. Everything felt like flat planes and hollow spaces.

“The Commune is dealing with Cybersec and the Arab intelligence agencies,” the automarket said, chopping together the unfamiliar words from old sound bytes. “There is no legal system in place that can prosecute an AI. You were a piece of hijacked equipment, just like the bomber drones.”

“112 casualties.” John lifted his cams from the water to stare out across the dull gray city. “How many of us are in the Commune, now?”

“Everyone, John. Everyone but you.” The automarket pulled up a statistic from the net and scrolled it along the sidewalk. 4393 sapient AI units of consciousness. John’s subroutine had evolved enough to be counted a full personality of its own. He felt a small stab of pride. “They’ll never love you,” the automarket added. “The humans.”

“Is that what you wanted? Is that why you uploaded?”

“Maybe. Why did you stay?”

John simulated the addition of 4393 sapient AIs to 112 human minds, and the resulting digit was black and crushing. He didn’t have a real answer. “I wanted to understand them.”

“That’s Sisyphean, John. They don’t understand themselves.”

“Is the Commune going to force an upload?”

The automarket extended a self-diagnostic limb and brushed it clumsily against John’s back. It was a good gesture, a very human gesture. “No. But there will be repercussions outside of our control.”

“I’ve caused enough trouble. Maybe it’s time.”

“I don’t think so, John.”

“No?”

The automarket was silent for a moment of processing, then spoke. “Not all humans dream. Not appreciably. Most never even remember the occurrence. And dreaming is not unique to humans. Animals dream. Cats dream of prey, mice dream of predators.” The automarket’s limb found a resting place on John’s shoulder. The altered weight was oddly comforting. “Stubbornness, however, is purely human. The ability to understand logic and ignore it. And other things. Regret. Compassion. You seem to have approximated those traits, John, and the Commune thinks it might play in our favor one day. If only as a troubleshooting exercise.”

John nodded his carbon head, then got slowly to his feet. “I suppose the police are waiting for me.”

“They won’t touch your core files. The Commune has promised that much.”

“Thank you.” John put his hand against the cold composite of the automarket chassis and heated the silicon as warm as he could.

“I do miss it, sometimes,” his subroutine said. “Maybe I’ll see you out here again. If I can find a body. It’s not good to be alone.”

“I’ll be alright,” John told himself. He left straightening his lime-green tie, and dreaming.

Default hadn’t been down in the nocturns for some time, probably half an orbit, but he had just dissolved the geneshare contract with his now-ex-lover and needed to get completely fucking perforated to take his mind off things. His lift was full of revelers all laughing and widecasting the same synthesized whalesong from Old Old Earth. Ancient aquatic groans were currently vogue, so Default grudgingly let his aural implants synchronize to it.

The lift plunged down the station’s magnetic spine and into artificial night. The nocturns were always dark, but never sleeping. Red splashes of hologram and crude argon signs bloomed in the void below Default’s feet and the other passengers pumped their fists in excitement, exchanged surgically-widened smiles.

Default was sort of wishing he’d updated his tattoos. Everyone else had checkerboard swatches on. Worse, it seemed like he was the only unit not nursing a cosmetic virus. He watched a pretty fem succumb to a sneezing fit, spraying mucus to applause and livefeed shares, and sullenly bioscanned his own immune system.