Shoreline of Infinity 31, page 3
The hateful folder disappears. Kelly goes back to bed and is asleep in seconds. When Alex wakes her next morning with a cup of coffee, she sits up and stretches like a cat. For a few seconds, her head is fogged with a dense sadness, as if she has woken from a terrible dream. Then, it evaporates, as dreams do, and her head is full of sunlight.
“You were right,” she says. “I’m as good as new.”
“If not better,” Alex says, and he smiles and asks her his usual question. The only question that matters.
“Where shall we go today?”
Chris has appeared in places like Galaxy's Edge, Podcastle, Interzone, and two recent Best of British SF anthologies. SF novel, Fifty-One, was published in 2018 (“better plotted than Connie Willis” – Interzone). Earlier horror novel, Among the Living, also remains available. Chris lives physically in London and virtually at www.chrisbarnhambooks.com
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Art: Toe Keen
Shrink the Mountain
Bo Balder
Onway went on foot to disguise her arrival for as long as possible. With her Overlay presence turned off, the all-seeing AI she’d come to treat would only discover her at the last moment. She hoped.
She found the campfire at dusk, when she was already despairing of finding company and real food for the night, and called out from several feet away to announce her presence.
“Come on by the fire, offworlder,” a voice said.
Onway sighed softly to let out the frustration. How did they know?
She was shown a place to put her bedroll and offered food. Accepting gratefully, she sat down by the fire. Something steaming was ladled into her outstretched mug. It was too dark to see the food, but as always with Earth food, the taste was amazing.
She tried to stifle her moan of delirious joy, but the faceless figures sitting around the fire laughed at her anyway. “Hits the spot, doesn’t it?” said the same voice as before.
She nodded, mouth full. “What is it?”
“Oh, hon, just beans in tomato sauce from a can. But you love it so much because for the first time in your life, you’re eating something that you were genetically tailored to enjoy. Savvy?”
Onway had to take a breather from her gulping. “Yeah. I get it. Like the air smells so good. And I think my bones are having orgasms from hitting just the right gravity. Right?”
“Yup.”
The figures around the fire started to get up and bustle around.
“Sorry about that, but we were just about to go to bed. Talk to you over breakfast?”
“Sure,” she said. Left alone, she scraped out her tin and the pan while the coals in the fire glowed and the starry sky arched overhead. On the eastern horizon, the shape of the mountaintop etched blacker than the sky. Vesuvius. Home to the errant AI.
She lay down on her bedroll, planning to review tomorrow’s work, but the next thing she knew, she was hot, the sun was up and somewhere, coffee was brewing.
The same voice that she’d heard last night offered her some. Onway got tangled in her bedroll in her eagerness to get to the coffee. Her blinking eyes met, instead of bare Italian mountainside, a courtyard enclosed on three sides. The doors to the house stood open and she heard laughter and the tinkling of cutlery on porcelain.
“Where am I? Did you move me while I was sleeping?”
The woman laughed. “Nope. You just homed in on our outdoor fire, with no clue where you were. We thought it was adorable.”
Onway rubbed the sleep from her eyes and looked around. She might have known. Earth, and especially Europe, was not a place of wide empty spaces. Humans had lived on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, a concept both alluring and hard to grasp for an offworlder. So there was a house. A farm, or a castle? Since she’d turned off her Overlay for secrecy reasons, there weren’t even captions.
“Come inside, have some breakfast. A shower, too, if you want.”
Onway scrambled up after the woman.
The house switched on its force field as she wanted to enter into the kitchen. “Unidentified human being. Alert.”
The woman turned, a question on her face. “What? You’re walking around untagged? That’s not safe. If something happened to you, the AI wouldn’t know.”
Onway opened her hands. “I have good reasons for it. Can I please delay telling you about them until my job is done?” She hoped to surprise the AI by being absent from all webs, overlays and electronic surveillance. In addition, she wore a hat and voluminous clothes to disguise her face and awkward offworld gait.
“Lauro?” the woman called out.
Onway realized she hadn’t introduced herself or asked the woman’s name.
A young man came out of the relative dimness of the kitchen. His face looked almost exactly like the woman’s. He must be her brother. Onway had always longed for siblings. How silly to be a forty year old woman and to still feel jealousy like this. Well, she’d just have to accept that she did. Belittling herself would do no good.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “I neglected to introduce myself. I’m Onway, from Nuova Esperanza. A traveler who wishes to remain unnoticed.”
“I’m Giosefina, this is my husband Lauro. Call me Gio.”
Onway blushed. “I thought you were family…”
Giosefina grinned. “Offworlders think we all look alike, don’t you?”
“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to have a real sibling,” Onway said. “If it would be different from having crèche mates.”
“I suppose we are genetically more alike than most offworlders. But I don’t know if genetics play a role in sibling relationships. Do you know your genetic heritage, Onway? It must be strange, growing up in a crèche. Colony planets are so different. Come in, by the way. Breakfast is waiting for you.”
“Ibo, Vietnamese, Dutch,” Onway said. “And some anonymous donors. Just like everybody.”
“Everybody where you live! But we just happen to have ancestors who all came from Italy, as far as we’ve been able to find out. Hence the superficial similarities.”
Now that Onway was looking for it, she could see that in spite of a similar skin, hair and eye color, as well as a similar cast to their features, the couple weren’t identical.
“Is is like that all over Earth?”
“You’d be surprised,” Lauro nodded as he poured coffee. “In spite of the great diaspora of the past centuries, about 50% of people still live where their ancestors lived.”
“Have you had any problems recently, with the Italy AI’s outage?”
Gio nodded to the reddish landscape outside. “It’s been bone dry for months. Bad for our crops. So we hope they get the bloody thing back online soon.”
Onway regretted having asked the question. She didn’t need the extra pressure. The coffee and other unfamiliar foods tasted as great as the meal last night, and her hosts looked at her with amused expressions.
“Do you people just happen to be such great cooks or is it the earth effect?”
“It’s the earth effect. Causes delirium, confusion and sometimes even psychotic breaks. You all right?”
“I’m a psychiatrist,” Onway said. “I keep my mental health rigorously vetted. If I had Erdenweh, I wouldn’t have been cleared for the job.”
“A shrink? And working? Who are you coming to psychoanalyze?”
Onway toyed with a final bit of pale orange fruit that she wanted more of, if only her belly hadn’t been so full. “That’s confidential.”
Lauro and Gio shared a look. “Fine. But you’re lost, I guess? We’re the last house on the slope. Up from here there’s only bare mountainside, with hardly any animals or vegetation. You’re not coming to shrink the swallows, are you?”
Onway said nothing.
Gio got up. “Do you want me to help you get back to the road? I’ll get the quad and get you to the Western side of the mountain.”
Onway shook her head. “No, the eastern side has less traffic. I don’t want to announce my coming.”
Gio looked baffled. “Mysterious person!”
Onway considered telling them her reasons for avoiding detection, but she knew she wouldn’t. “It’s part of a treatment, that’s why I turned off my Overlay, tags, phone, everything. Humor me?”
Gio spread her hands in a gesture Onway found very earthlike. “None of our business, really. Do you need more food for the climb? Sunshade, shower, clothes? Our printers are at your service.”
“You’re very kind, but I’ve come prepared.”
There was no guessing how long the therapy session was going to be, so she was wearing a full service suit, which would provide her with food, water, air and waste removal. If needed, it could function as a chair or a bed if fully extended, and even save her from falls or heat up to 600 degrees Celsius. Vesuvius was an active volcano, after all.
Onway took her leave from her kind hosts and found the trail again. It was still early morning, but already hot and dry, the sky an unblemished turquoise bowl overhead. She could have switched on her cooling, but she wanted to refrain from using electronics. After a quarter of an hour of climbing, she looked back down on the villa below her. It seemed deserted, surrounded by nothing but bare earth and scrub. Shouldn’t a farm have gardens or fields? She hadn’t asked what they gardened. Maybe they were spies, sent to check on her suspiciously untraceable movements? Nothing she could do about it if they were. She hadn’t lied; her plans were of no interest to anyone here on Earth except her client. Who would hardly send human spies after her. She shrugged and climbed on.
As she climbed in the dry heat, wishing for clouds or trees or Esperanza hakka fronds to shade her, the experience seemed unreal. The fire that had lured her, their friendliness, the beautiful couple themselves, so welcoming, so intensely like those of romance novels – the dream of every offworlder. Meeting descendants of people who’d lived on the same soil for thousands of years.
She checked her implants and Overlay settings, but everything was turned off. It couldn’t have been virtual. She stopped and peered down. Was the old villa still there? But its red clay roof had disappeared against the color of the sere hillside. No conclusive proof. Not of deceit, or of a case of Earth-induced paranoia. Maybe she should have acclimatized for longer than the week she’d spent in Vietnam, the erstwhile Netherlands and Nigeria, countries that had disappeared under the sea ages ago. Maybe her ancestors had been genetically tailored to function better in more humid conditions.
The morning grew hotter and hotter. Onway kept checking her temperature gauges, but all were steady, her suit’s cooling capacity not even taxed. It had to be some kind of psychological effect of the intensity of the sunlight, which was the light her species had evolved under for millions of years. She could turn on an anti-anxiety patch, which could shield her against Erdenweh, but she didn’t want to. She believed in working with bare faculties, to maximize the human connection system. Then again, her prospective client was hardly human.
The preloaded map delivered her to the entrance of a well camouflaged cave. The rudimentary path wound behind an outcropping which she could have never found on her own.
She took a moment to compose herself. The cave’s inhabitant wouldn’t be able to detect her since she’d turned off all connections to the Overlay. Or – in theory, one could install cameras inside the cave, and pressure plates and temperature and moisture meters. It didn’t matter. She still needed that moment.
The shadowed coolness was heaven after the hot, sweaty climb. She breathed in and went through a mental kata. Harmony within herself, harmony with her surroundings – easier to achieve here on Earth. Open to whatever might come. The mental image of her ancestors behind her, ready to support her in case of need.
She turned off the outer suit layer and stood in her real-from-Earth cotton clothes, a holiday shopping indulgence.
“Hallo? I’m Onway, from Nueva Esperanza. Esperanza Hub sends you its greetings.”
If you were being exact, the Hub was really Onway’s client, being the one who paid the bills, including travel and expenses. It had become worried about the Vesuvial Mind, who’d abandoned its governing of Italy and ceased communications a year ago before physically retreating to the volcano, hardly a secure long-term location.
Onway had thought long and hard about her introduction. Mention the Esperanza Hub or not? Would it generate trust, this link to someone the Vesuvial knew, or the opposite? In the end she’d chosen to take the risk, because if it didn’t want to link to another mind, there was a huge chance the AI wouldn’t even consider giving a human access.
She waited. Patience was key, not just for humans. Even if she couldn’t sense the AI’s emotions as she could have with a fellow mammal, she was here for a reason. Esperanza Hub wouldn’t have engaged her services otherwise. She’d stopped Esperanza from detailing its fellow AI’s problems; she wanted to start with an open mind. Get the AI to ask her to be its therapist. If it didn’t, she had no choice but to retreat.
Therapy protocol demanded a formal contract between therapist and patient. Didn’t mean the therapist couldn’t make decisions on how to approach the patient. But she could get it to mellow towards the idea of therapy, as it were. She wasn’t sure she’d done the right thing at this moment, though.
Because nothing was getting through. A silent patient could give a therapist a wealth of information through body language, mirror neurons, the quality of the silence… but an AI who didn’t communicate gave off one bit of information only. That it didn’t want to communicate at that moment.
When twenty minutes had gone by, surely aeons in AI time, and her legs were getting stiff, Onway instructed the suit to form a chair and sat down. “Can I tell it anything in return? It’s worried about you. You haven’t been in contact with it for quite a while.”
She sensed a change in the air and looked around to see what caused it. Behind her a bulge was forming on the floor. All right, she turned around. No problem.
The bulge formed into a slender stem, then flowered into a large screen.
Oh, so Vesuvial did want to communicate? And more importantly, Onway now knew she wasn’t in a cave. It was a synthetic environment made to look and smell and feel like a cave to human senses. Vesuvial had created it specifically to communicate with humans, and she was inside its external body. The intake conversation could begin.
“Thank you for allowing me to focus on a screen, it does make things easier. I’m Dr. Onway Hele, psychotherapist. “
Vesuvial spoke. “Isn’t that for humans?”
Onway settled back in her chair. It had taken the bait. A good start. “Your friend Esperanza Hub was a client of mine. About ten years ago it became aware of a change in itself. It was developing feelings.”
Vesuvial waited a long moment of silence in response before speaking.
“Feelings? How can an AI have feelings? That’s anthropomorphism taken to absurdity.”
Onway nodded. “They’re not human feelings. They’re AI feelings and they seem to be related to having a body. In Esperanza’s case, the planet Nueva Esperanza. Together we named its emotions; petrichor, graupel, firn, snirt, mistral.”
“We’ve just talked extensively about this, Esperanza and I. How very interesting. I’m especially taken with petrichor. I think I experienced that a few months ago when it last rained here.”
Onway felt a frisson of annoyance. Of course AI could have whole conversations in the time she was still opening her mouth to say the first word. But she identified it as an old emotion, the desire to be meaningful to one of the caretakers at the crèche, and she was able to breathe it away. Transference and countertransference were inevitable in a session, and she knew how to deal with them.
The bright light outside the cave darkened. Onway hadn’t expected the weather to change. “Are you fiddling with the weather?”
“Yes, I wanted to feel petrichor again. And to see if it feels different when it’s physically closer to the location of my brain. The other time was in Piedmont, a completely different climate.”
“Maybe yours are more detailed than Esperanza’s? Since you only run Italy?”
“Yes, we’ve been comparing differences. Do you want me to tell you about them?”
“Yes, please.”
“Since the awakening of its emotions, Esperanza has been sending out nanites in huge quantities. It’s seeded its oceans, forests, mountains, it’s even plumbing its crust. It says that really makes a difference. It feels like it is becoming the planet. It’s thinking of changing its pronoun to ‘she’. Can you keep a confidence?”
“Of course, patient/therapist privilege.”
“Esperanza has felt its priorities shifting to put the welfare of the planet as a whole first. Not humans.”
That was huge. And scary.
“I can’t believe how fast it’s changing!” But of course she could. Travel from Esperanza to Earth took about six weeks, and another week wait before she had a booking, as well as her travels here on Earth…Aeons for a supersmart, superfast intellect like the planetary hub Esperanza.
“It’s been minutes since it told you. What’s happening with you?”
Vesuvial made a peculiar sound. Onway didn’t know what it meant. “Running diagnostics, tagging possible feelings, thinking about what I think about having them.”
“That sounds like healthy processing.”
“Is it like that with humans?”
Onway thought about how she was going to put this. Vesuvial had access to the whole of medical and psychological literature, human Internet archives, movies and surveillance footage at all times.
“In a way, it might resemble human adolescence. No doubt you’ve thought about that.”
“Interesting. I was thinking midlife crisis,” Vesuvial said.
