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

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?”