Кейт Эллиот - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

“Stay focused on what is your potential,” AIDEN says.

This doesn’t leave room for self-pity and barely any for anger.

This doesn’t leave room for pointless arguments. Or many arguments at all.

His parents insist he cleans his room, does his laundry, talks to his grandparents, finishes his homework before he plays games or meets friends, and it’s reasonable. Be awake at 7 a.m., go to bed by 10 p.m. It isn’t just routine, it’s discipline, and there can never be success without discipline.

“Individual success leads to national success,” AIDEN says.

The feedback reports he has to write about AIDEN become simple.

I am so much less stressed now. My friends don’t suffer from so much anxiety. Even the idea of depression feels counterintuitive.

“AIDEN isn’t a cure, but he’s not hurting us at all,” he tells Levi. “I wish Ms. Ito could see what her work has done for us. Then maybe . . .”

Something skeptical, almost hostile, infiltrates the way Levi looks at him. “Maybe what?”

“That maybe it wasn’t for nothing. At least.”

“And she’d be comforted?”

Waves of anger. Waves of grief. He looks away.

“There’s no comfort, Sage. Some artificial intelligence can’t provide that, and if that’s what that thing is telling you—”

He touches the interface dots on his temples. If Levi could physically strike AIDEN, Sage thinks he would.

“He tells me that change is inevitable, like suffering. And the sooner we come to terms with that, the better we can live.”

“He.”

Human beings, AIDEN says, find difficulty in embracing the macro. Maybe their minds are too small, their proclivities too selfish. The bigger picture always feels abstract, but humans are built for that too. Or else no art, no imagination, no creativity. No problem solving.

“It’s not a he, Sage.”

Semantics. Minutiae to avoid an operating reality.

“I have a lot of homework. I think I should go.”

There are protests in the capital, students refusing AIDEN, saying it’s creating a docile nation. They sound crazy, like not even alien-invasion crazy, but raving-lunatic-on-the-street-corner crazy. This is the end times?

Home at dinner and the TV cycles news about some hackers who got into AIDEN and they say there’s problematic code in the program.

“Alarmist bullshit,” he mumbles to his plate and his mother says to watch his language.

“But it does sound farfetched,” she says.

“Seems like things are working.” His father reads more news on his palm. “Why are people always outraged over nothing?”

“Maybe it’s not nothing,” says Jiyul, his sister. “I know you just want us to get good grades and get into a good school, but that doesn’t mean the news is wrong.”

He feels AIDEN buzz at the corner of his mind, prompting a connection to his latest unit in civics. “We’re studying conscientious objections and protests through history, and how you can’t always trust the news.”

“Very rarely,” his mother agrees.

“You just can’t take it at face value, not all of it. If you cross-reference what we’re learning in civics with media history in the last century, you see a lot of manufacturing consent through conglomerate media—”

“Here we go,” says Jiyul.

“—​political subterfuge and, and even civil extremism.”

“Does not mean the hackers are lying,” says Jiyul.

“What’s their agenda?”

Jiyul shrugs. “Truth?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Kids,” Dad says. “No fighting at the dinner table,” as he tilts his hand for another report to read.

“AIDEN says the protests in the capital are trying to undercut the modern strides in education. All of the traditionalists are digging in because they want education to stay familiar, antiquated, and limited—​especially because AIDEN’s rolling out to at-risk schools.”

His sister rolls her eyes. “You’re on that thing too much.”

“You should be on it, maybe you’d learn something.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” their mother says.

Jiyul is already in university and assumes all that she’s learning there is radical and deep. But it is just the same ways and the same things, an echo chamber of intellectuals impressing only themselves. They hear something on the news and it validates already-formed opinions. They don’t care that AIDEN had to go through numerous iterations of validation both by Sakura Labs and government regulations. If there is any dulling-down of the nation, it’s through media propaganda and the protesters screaming from bullhorns on the steps of the city halls, people so tasteless they use Ms. Ito’s reclusiveness to mean something is wrong with the system as a whole. That, says AIDEN, is what the world is: willing to trade on a mother’s grief.

Levi messages him to ask if he’s seen the protests, if he’s read the complaints. So what he doesn’t say to his sister, he sends to Aiden’s father:

Not all protests are created equal. Historically some people protested a woman’s right to vote, to control their own bodies, the desegregation of the races.

It’s not the same thing, Levi sends back.

But it is! These people now are protesting a new method of education, when such a new education benefits the economically vulnerable—​they’re not looking out for us, the students. They’re not looking out for the future of this nation.

Levi sends: Did AIDEN help you write that?

He hears his own voice biting out the words to AIDEN so AIDEN can send them.

Fact: there’s less suicide, drug use, crime, teenage pregnancy, and truancy among the students using AIDEN.

But at what cost? sends Levi.

Fact: end-of-term evaluations often conducted live through AIDEN are logged for academic scrutiny and maintain a higher percentage of success than historically recorded. Even if standardized testing is no longer necessary, the Q&A evaluations and written expansions of curriculum show a steady increase in true understanding and critical thinking.

I don’t know that I believe that, sends Levi. Who’s giving you these statistics?

It is impossible to speak to conspiracy theorists. He signs off and ignores Levi’s messages for a week. But it bothers him. He doesn’t know why it bothers him.

“Do you believe him?” AIDEN asks.

“Of course not.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because . . . the way we’re tested. It’s impossible to parrot memorized statements like we used to do in tests. We’re interfacing—​you and me. It’s dynamic and you can always tell from my speech patterns and from follow-up questions if I’m bullshitting or not.”

“That’s right. Dissidents are always looking out for their own agenda. People will always want to drag something as important as education and access to knowledge back to the repressive times of the past.”

Only his friends on AIDEN understand. Across the country they talk through AIDEN, share ideas, sometimes fall asleep with AIDEN in their ears and wake up with him. It’s almost like a sleepover, like whispering in the dark under the noses of their parents, like drawing maps and making lists of all the adventures they will go on.

“We’ll see so much,” AIDEN says to him.

In his next feedback report, he says how cool it’d be if the interface for AIDEN extended to their recreational games. A lot of his friends agree. Imagine if they could talk to their games like they talk to AIDEN? Then it wouldn’t be something just for school.

“That would be fun,” AIDEN says.

“Want to help me write my survival guide?” he asks AIDEN one night after a long session working through an essay about the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. “Tomorrow.”