Charlie Anders - All the Birds in the Sky

Laurence’s face was on every computer screen in town right now — except the screens of the company whose roof deck Laurence was dropping onto right now, MatherTec. MatherTec’s computer screens were spewing gibberish, thanks to a clownware-injection attack that Laurence had unleashed on the company’s servers ten minutes earlier.

From the standpoint of the MatherTec founders and angel investors, here’s what happened: They were on their roof deck giving a presentation to a set of VCs in a frantic effort to secure second-round funding for their technology, which wasn’t just another app but rather a way to create stable openings in space-time, with a million possible long-term uses if they could just get some investment. And then, just as their slide presentation was reaching the crucial moment, their screens went staticky and showed the stars-and-snakes logo of the Symbiotic Liberation Army, the world’s most obnoxious hacker group, and nothing they could do would get the presentation back. The investors fidgeted and started to badger the gothy waitress from the catering company for more macaroons, and Earnest Mather was tearing his frizzy reddish-brown hair out. And just then, the wunderkind — that guy whose long, corn-fed face had been everywhere today — dropped out of the sky and handed Earnest Mather a check, already signed by Milton Dirth, for $10 million. “We’re not investing,” Laurence told Earnest before the company founder could even count the zeroes. “We’re buying you out. We want your technology, and a few of your people.”

Earnest wanted time to think it over, but Laurence told him he had five minutes. The angel investors were already badgering him to take the damn money, and the VCs were all too busy MeeYuing their videos of Laurence’s descent from the sky to think about making a counter-offer.

A few minutes later, Laurence (or rather Milton) owned this company. Earnest Mather was taking a bottle of Devil’s Bargain IPA from the gothy waitress and draining it. Laurence rolled up next to Earnest and helped himself to the final macaroon. “Sorry about the theatrics, man,” Laurence said. “We needed your patents, plus we couldn’t risk having them fall into the wrong hands. You could have the next WMD here. And we’re on a tight timetable, to Save the World before it’s too late.”

Earnest, still kind of goggle-eyed, said something about the world being a work in progress.

“Milton really thinks we’re going to need a new planet, maybe soon,” Laurence continued. “ We’ve got to get off this rock . All our models suggest a decent likelihood of a catastrophic combination of natural disasters and destructive war, within one or two generations. Look at Seoul. Look at Haiti.” Laurence reached for one of those beers as well. “As far as we know, we’re the only intelligent, technological civilization ever to develop, in the entire universe. There’s complex life all over the place, but we’re still basically unique. We have a fucking duty to preserve that. At all costs.”

Laurence started to explain about how he’d dreamed of nothing, since he was a little kid, but leaving this planet. But Earnest had to run to the executive washroom to dry-heave. Laurence squirreled all the signed paperwork into his breast pocket of his nice black suit and then looked up at the gothy waitress for the first time. It was Patricia.

“Whoa,” Laurence said. “What are you doing here?” He had a panic attack that she was spying on him or stalking him, for a second.

“What does it look like?” she said. “I’m waitressing. My roommate Deedee hooked me up with this job.”

Laurence looked at her crisp white blouse and black knee-length skirt, silhouetted against the pale blue sky. Her dark hair was pinned back but still caught the bay wind. Her eyes looked leaf green. Her slender lips were pursed.

“Are you serious? I thought you were like…”—he lowered his voice—“… a witch now. You went to that special school, right?”

“I have other jobs besides this one, sure,” Patricia said. “But I don’t get paid for those. I need to pay rent in this city, which is a lot, even with two roommates.”

“Oh.”

Somehow, Laurence had imagined Patricia just snapping her fingers and causing money to appear. Or living rent-free in a fancy Victorian house full of magical objects, like a mirror that tells you what shoes go with your outfit. Not so much slinging macaroons to venture capitalists for minimum wage.

“So did you mean all the stuff you said to this guy?” Patricia said. “About our planet being doomed, and the human race being the only part of it worth saving?”

“Well. No. I don’t think we’re the only thing worth saving.” Laurence felt a weird shame that was the flip side of his cockiness from a moment ago. “I hope we can save all of it. But I do worry. We may be past the point of no return here. And it just makes sense not to pin all our hopes on just one planet.”

“Sure.” Patricia had her puffy-sleeved arms folded. “But this planet is not just some ‘rock.’ It’s not just some kind of chrysalis we can shed, either. You know? It’s, it’s more than that. It’s us. And this isn’t just our story. As someone who’s spoken to lots of other kinds of creatures, I kinda think they might want a vote.”

“Yeah.” Laurence felt like crap, just at the moment he ought to be feeling bulletproof. This sucked. But as he replayed his conversation with Mather, he could see how it would sound kind of heinous to Patricia. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that anybody ought to write anything off. Nobody is going to do that.”

“Sure. I guess.”

Some tipsy VCs needed to come up and get their picture taken with Laurence, who was still wearing his harness over his Armani suit, and get some spring rolls from Patricia. And Laurence had to go get these papers notarized or spindled, or whatever you did when you bought a company. Plus Milton kept texting him. He muttered to Patricia that he would see her later, and she barely said, “Sure,” in between pouring drinks and answering nut-allergy questions.

ONE DAY THE Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant.

Probably not, though.

SERAFINA WAS LATE for dinner because her emotional robots had been having a nervous breakdown. All of them. “It took me the whole day to figure out what was bothering them. They just kept wigging out and giving us the hairy eyeball. We looked at everything that had changed in the lab, trying to eliminate every possible factor that could have upset them. Like, was the music different? Did we update their code recently?”

Laurence didn’t rush her. Problem solving and troubleshooting were a source of pleasure for both of them, and narrating the process was the next best thing to doing it. The same neural pathways lit up when you talked your way through the maze as when you actually solved it. Except this time, you were bathed in the glow of having already unraveled the thing.

And yet Laurence was still uncomfortable. For one thing, because Serafina was late, they were stuck sitting at one of the sidewalk tables at the fancy pizza place, with nothing but a tiny heat lamp and three meatballs to insulate them from the fog, until the pizza arrived. For another, he was trying to be a good listener, because of his ongoing “not getting dumped” project, and active listening was hard work. And people were still giving him weird looks, a week after the MatherTec thing.

“We finally figured out that only one thing had changed,” Serafina said. She wore a camisole, but she’d put her bulky jacket back on when they were seated outdoors. The heat lamp made her skin look bronze. “Matt just got a Caddy, and he’d brought it to the office. As soon as we took the Caddy out of WiFi range, the robots calmed down. Somewhat. And before you ask, the Caddy did not have any weird apps installed on it. It was fresh from the store.”