Elizabeth Bear - Future Visions - Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

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.