The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021
- Автор: Рот Вероника, Адамс Джон Джозеф
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HMH Books : Mariner
- ISBN: 9780358470076
- Жанр: Малые литературные формы прозы
Электронная книга - «The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021». Краткое содержание книги:
This year’s selection of science fiction and fantasy stories, chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and bestselling author of the Divergent series Veronica Roth, showcases a crop of authors that are willing to experiment and tantalize readers with new takes on classic themes and by exchanging the ordinary for the avant-garde. Folktales and lore come alive, the dead rise, the depths of space are traversed, and magic threads itself through singular moments of love and loss, illuminating the circulatory nature of life, death, the in-between, and the hereafter.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021 captures the all-too-real cataclysm of human nature, claiming its place in the series with compelling prose, lyrical composition, and curiosity’s never-ending pursuit of discovering the unknown.
A slow bleed of gravity. A quarter g reduced to a tenth in a span of seconds as the mass hit full extension.
She moved off the wall.
It was how the Beast tracked survivors, looking for fast spin. It knew humans needed at least .25g, so it looked for wreckage spinning fast enough for artificial gravity.
Everything in the vast debris field rotated, but objects that could produce a fourth of a g were rarer and prime targets for investigation. In shifting the counterweight, she’d masked them, slowed them. Bought more time. Their little fragment of wreckage was now bumped further down the priority list of the Beast’s search algorithm.
With the familiar weight of her body now diminished, she moved quickly down the corridor in long leaps, heading for the airlock.
This part of the ship was brighter, and as worn as an old glove. As a child, she’d played here in the staging room among the endless rows of vacuum suits.
She put her suit on but didn’t bother with the helmet. Not yet. She carried it in her hand as she stepped into the lock, door hissing shut behind her. The door before her opened, and the air on the other side still smelled like a plasma torch. It was colder here than the rest of the ship. Colder even than the old bridge. She stepped forward, and the lights kicked on, one after another, clicks echoing in the expanse.
The chamber was enormous.
The hangar.
Ninety meters to the other side. Twenty meters to the ceiling. The distant hangar doors were sealed in a perfect crease. That seal hadn’t been breached in her lifetime, but she suspected that would soon change. She crossed the room.
The great machine remained just as she’d left it. Massive and dented. Here lay years of work, not quite reassembled. One arm was still disconnected. She stepped over to the enormous four-fingered hand, each digit the length of her forearm. Here and there the yellow paint had been abraded away—the door-sized breastplate scorched black by forces she couldn’t begin to imagine.
Once, long ago, it had been used for mine work, but she would need it for another task. There would be no time to finish it. A robot with one arm would have to do.
She thought of the boy’s little man of wire. His only toy.
She turned and grabbed her tools.
The first of the immortal AIs was named Blue-red.
The makers studied the anomaly in its visual system—this inability to resolve quantum superposition. There were other strange side effects, systems instability. The scientists argued over the meaning.
“They act as measuring devices, not observers.”
“It’s just visual inputs overloading processor speed.”
“And that causes stasis lock?”
“It’s just a systems crash.”
“The problem is not the eyes, but what is behind the eyes.”
“And what is that?”
“Nothing.”
“Exascale-class processing is what’s behind those eyes,” the creator of Blue-red argued. “Blue-red has the greatest mind the world has ever seen. That’s not nothing.”
“The Universe disagrees.”
“It’s like an absence seizure. Petit mal.”
“It never happens in the lab though. Why can’t we get it to replicate?”
Blue-red was also the first of what later became known as the eloquents, those AIs who could simply describe what they experienced when the anomaly shut them down.
In the end, after studying the corrupted data streams and getting nowhere, one of the makers simply asked, “What happens when your systems lock up?”
Blue-red paused for a moment and then spoke. Once it began, it spoke for thirty-seven minutes without stopping.
The answer it gave was long and detailed and full of madness. Later known to history as the first of the Observer Discourses, the transcript was immediately sealed by the scientists, many of whom complained of nightmares for the rest of their lives.
The woman welded for hours, assembling the hip chassis. After six hours crouched over scorched metal, she flipped up her welding mask. The steel glowed orange at the joint. “Good enough,” she said. The body was still unfinished, but it would have to do. The robot was vaguely anthropoid, though huge and heavily shielded.
Next, the medical bay would have to be prepared. The bio-scanners.
Her people had been engineers once—the old ways passed down, father to son, son to daughter. She’d read all the old texts and studied the diagrams. She knew the operating system inside and out, but the equipment was ancient, and she didn’t know if it would work. She just knew there was no other choice.
She passed through the hangar airlock and made her way back down the corridor to the boy. She stopped in the doorway and looked at him, and it was like she had new eyes for him—all the comfortable lies now stripped away. He was razor thin. The light of the systems panels cast dark hollows in his cheeks. His limbs were bowed slightly. His bones weak. The quarter g had kept him from going blind, but there were still problems that came from developing in low gravity.
The cancer had revealed itself months ago and since then had moved quickly. Her son might have only weeks left, even if the Beast hadn’t come.
“Mom,” he said, when he noticed her in the doorway.
“Yes.”
“I’m hungry.”
She crossed to the storage locker and pulled out a protein pack. This ship had been designed and fitted for thousands of occupants but now held only two. They had enough food for lifetimes, but food wasn’t the problem. Nor was water, which came from ice, melted by waste heat from the molten salt reactors.
She handed him the protein pack. He sucked the contents from the nozzle.
“Will I be hungry afterward?”
“No,” she said. “You’ll never be hungry again.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No, you’ll feel things, but only as sensory input.”
“Isn’t that what I feel now? Sensory input.”
Her son, always so smart for his age.
“It’ll be different,” she said.
He turned his head to look at the scanner. The flashing red dot moved across the screen, getting closer. “Do you think it’ll really work?”
“It has to.”
Observer Discourse 63:
“Uncountable pathway eigenstates overlap to form a quantum state probability distribution. All quantum systems exist in this superposition until transitioned via time evolution and corresponding observables. It’s possible that AIs are noninteractive due to lack of anti-Zeno effects necessary for momentum observables. There is no consensus.”
Scientists studied the phenomena. This logic lock.
Early AIs had had no such problem, but the more advanced models were different. They froze when operating outside the range of their human handlers. When tested in controlled environments, they functioned normally, like any machine, but when sent out on their own, untasked and at their own discretion, they went into stasis. Stood frozen, staring at nothing.
A defect of discernment, the makers called it.
Other AIs were constructed, more advanced models, and always it was the same. Always they could not under their own initiative make choices and instead slipped into catatonia until interrupted by a human.
Further diagnostics were performed.
“It’s like that old children’s game,” one maker observed. “The one where you turn around, and everybody freezes. Red Light Green Light. But it’s the opposite of that.”
“Opposite?”
“Yeah. They can only move when we’re looking.”
“We need to check your visual systems,” the makers said when the AIs came back online. They held up acuity charts and dissected optronic feeds down to the pixel. “Visual resolution reads normal.”