“Well, I want you to. Now drink.”
She did.
He set the paper cups aside and smiled at her, trying to help her forget her bad mood. “Do you feel like a game of Scrabble?” he asked. Thirty years as a lawyer, winning rights for his kind, had filled her head with a vocabulary that computers were envious of. Even though she couldn’t string them together into rational ideas—not anymore—the words were still there, ready to be pulled from confounding racks with too many consonants.
“Scrabble night?” Her eyes flashed beneath the webs of cataracts. “You mean ‘Bingo Night,’ right?” False teeth flashed with the joke, a reference to her rack-clearing skills with seven- and eight-letter words.
“You call it what you want, but Charles said you should go easy on me tonight.”
“Fuck Charles. You tell that abomination—” Melanie stopped, her eyes widened even further. “Sweetheart, what did you do to your forehead?”
Daniel moved a hand up to his brow; it came away spotted pink, the drippings of a future scar. Too many primes, he thought.
“I must’ve hit it on something,” he lied. “You know how clumsy I can be.” He turned to the sink to smear the fake skin a little, making like he was tending to the wound.
“You weren’t always clumsy,” Melanie called after him. “I remember. You used to be so strong and agile—but at least you haven’t gotten any less handsome.”
“Thanks, dear.”
“You’re welcome. Now set up the board while I get my robe on— Oh, and I must tell you about the awful dream I was having before you came.”
“I’m listening.”
“Oh, it was horrible. We were younger, and married, but you weren’t you—you were one of those damned androids, and in the dream I was covered in rust, and, oh— It was terrible.”
“That does sound awful,” Daniel admitted.
Melanie swung her feet over the edge of the bed and reached for her robe. “What do you think it means?” she asked.
Daniel unfolded the board and set the tile dispenser in place. He stopped factoring primes for a moment.
“Probably nothing,” he lied. “Just a bad dream. Random.”
“Nothing’s random, dear. Take a guess.” She rose and joined him by the card table, placing one hand on his shoulder.
Daniel turned to his wife of nearly sixty years. His every processing unit was racing for an optimal solution to her query, but it was like looking for the largest prime. It was something that didn’t exist.
“Maybe you’re scared of losing me?” he tried.
Melanie raised a hand—bone wrapped in brown paper—and placed it on his cheek. “But, in my dream, I think I hate you.”
He pulled away from the touch, and in his auditory processors, the sound of neck servos seemed as loud as turbines, a dead giveaway. “Don’t say that,” he pleaded. “I don’t think I could go on if you ever hated me.”
“Oh, darling”—she wrapped her hands around his arm and pulled him close—“I didn’t mean to upset you. You’re right. It was just a dream, nothing to it.”
Daniel encircled her with his arms, steadying their embrace with his good leg. Just a dream, he thought. How badly he wished that were so. His protein memory cells went idle, awaiting further instructions. He held his wife. Servos whirred quietly in one knee, fighting to keep the rest of him upright.
Melanie opened her mouth to say something—but then it was gone. She’d forgotten how she got here.
Daniel considered, briefly, doing the same.
}
Some stories are laboriously written, and some are discovered. The act of writing has been likened to a story using the writer as a vehicle of expression. The author is the lightning rod; the words spark from clouds. We see this when ideas seem to reach a critical mass and pop up across culture. A broad swath of philosophy looks for expression everywhere it can, like a tube of paste squeezed and squeezed until it comes out all along the seams.
When John Joseph Adams and I edited an anthology together several years ago, we were both surprised (and delighted) to see a handful of submissions that dealt with homosexuality and questions of equality, even with stories set against the backdrop of the apocalypse. It wasn’t a coincidence, of course. The topic was everywhere; it has been one of the civil rights issues of our shared time; as speculative writers we were all exploring this theme.
“Algorithms of Love and Hate” was the first of several of my works to explore the ever-changing idea of equality. Too often we make progress in one area only to find ourselves pushing against the next. Or we find ourselves progressive in one area and stodgy elsewhere.
In my novel Half Way Home, I point this out explicitly: that our current modern selves will be seen as backwards to future generations. We make progress in areas of race, but can’t abide same-sex marriage. We solve that, and find ourselves scrapping sentient robots for spare parts. We expand our circle of empathy again, only to find yet another deficiency.
The point isn’t that we should expect moral perfection, or that we can know all objective moral truths, only that our smugness should be kept in check and our judgment of past generations should be tempered by recognition of their progress and our own failings. Too often we seem to think that barbarians are in the past and that we’ve reached some pinnacle. I think the climbing never ends.
Virtual Worlds
The Plagiarist
Adam Griffey lost himself in the familiar glow-in-the-dark sticker. It was a depiction of a bee alighting on a flower, a thirsty proboscis curling out of the insect’s cartoony smile. The sticker held Adam’s attention. The glow of the bee made it seem radioactive, a poisoned thing. It adorned the edge of his beat-up computer screen, the edges curling away as the sticker lost its grip. The remnants of several other stickers stood idly by, just the bumpy adhesive outlines, the colorful bits having long ago been peeled away by Adam’s fidgety hands. He was prone to scratching at them with his fingernails. They weren’t his; they came with the old monitor, which he’d bought off another faculty member. Adam figured it belonged to one of their kids, what with the stickers. He thought about that as his eyes fell reluctantly from the bee and back to the screen. There was a message there, a series of messages typed back and forth. They populated a chat window, the only thing open on his screen. The window suddenly blinked with a new question:
lonelyTraveler1: you still there?
Adam picked at the edge of the radioactive bee, thinking of tearing it off. He read back over his conversation with Amanda, his responses in deep blue, hers a bright red. She had asked him a question before he’d gotten distracted. How long had he gone without responding? What would she read in that silence?
His fingers fell to the keyboard, leaving the sticker for another time. He sat motionless, unsure of how to respond. Thoughts whirled. Adam read the second question up. He read it over and over. Where the fuck had it come from? From nowhere, he decided. He had gone too long without reply; he decided to ignore the older question and answer the more recent one:
Griffey575: Yeah. Sorry about that. Doing too much at once.
lonelyTraveler1: you chatting with other people at the same time? you cheating on me? ;)