Clarkesworld Anthology 2012 (13 page)

Neil Clarke is the publisher of
Clarkesworld Magazine
and owner of Wyrm Publishing. He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

Clarkesworld Magazine

Issue 65

Table of Contents

And the Hollow Space Inside

by Mari Ness

A Hundred Ghosts Parade Tonight

by Xia Jia

All the Young Kirks and Their Good Intentions

by Helena Bell

From Farm to Fable: Food, Fantasy, and Science Fiction

by Matthew Johnson

Everything's Surprising: A Conversation with Lev AC Rosen

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

Wendigo Waistcoat Spyglass and Other Words with Lisa L. Hannett

by Jeremy L. C. Jones

2011 Reader's Poll Results

by Neil Clarke

Pilot

Art by Alexander Trufanov

© Clarkesworld Magazine, 2012
www.clarkesworldmagazine.com

And the Hollow Space Inside

Mari Ness

Doug reaches for my hand as the ship approaches. He continues to hold it as the great doors open, as we watch them leave the ship. They pause; they have been in space and ultra-low gravity for five years now. Five years, one month, and three days, to be precise; I cannot believe my mind has memorized this.

We are too far away to see this, but I know their eyelids are blinking as they adjust, process, calculate, move, adjust again, the change in gravity no more than a problem to be solved.

As always, I am struck by how human and inhuman they look. Even their pauses have a precise, calculated feel. No one has ever seen them show uncertainty. No one ever will.

Gravity adjustments made, they walk with precision to the terminal, directly in front of us. It takes me a moment to recognize her, out of the eight faces. That is not surprising; it has been twelve years since I last saw her. What is surprising is how, even now, I am still desperately looking for any trace of my daughter’s smile in my daughter’s face.

The Mars missions, we were assured, would be the eventual saving grace of humanity. Oh, certainly, we hadn’t managed to use up all of the world’s resources yet, but that was only a matter of time. Population growth had slowed, but not stalled out completely, and wars over resources kept getting bloodier — while not reducing the population much. Mars was the only planet we could reach in an acceptable period of time, terraform, and begin colonizing. Other worlds would come, but by the time we reached the next nearest acceptable planet — a 40 year journey each way, under optimum conditions that few scientists thought we would meet — it would be too late for Earth. The Mars missions offered us that saving grace.

Only one problem: ordinary humans couldn’t survive the trip.

Beside me, Doug takes a deep breath. “She looks good.”

“Yes,” I agree.

The four years in low gravity, not to mention the years of dehydrated food before that, should have taken their toll, but she still looks fit and considerably younger than her actual age. Then again, she always did. They all did, a side effect of programming and lack of temptation, and (but this is only my opinion) emotions and stress.

The eight of them reach the terminal, turn in unison, and wave in precision. I have to remind myself once again that I have been assured that they all have individual implants and computers, individual programming. They were all expected to perform different tasks, after all; it would make no sense to have them

They vanish into the facility.

“They didn’t say hello,” says Doug.

I do not tell him that I am relieved.

The facility explained: humans needed interaction. A mere eight people, stuck together in the tight confines of a ship, and then on the almost equally tight confines of the first Mars base, could not be trusted to stay sane. The astronauts on the space stations had remained sane only because they were regularly rotated in and out, and could also continue to converse via radio and satellite to people back on earth. By the time the mission reached Mars, these transmissions would be delayed — not by much, but just enough to leave a long silence after a statement.

Just enough to drive people over the edge — only this edge was out in space, or on a hostile planet with no real edge to go to.

Unless they had no edge to fall off from.

Amy is blind, navigating with touch, sound and precision memory. Her taste and pleasure centers are nonfunctional. She eats carefully balanced meals at carefully programmed times, although she is never hungry.

“I don’t understand why they’re using the… children.” I shouldn’t have hesitated before that word, but I’d never been comfortable using it. They weren’t children. I didn’t know what they were, but they weren’t children, not by any definition of the word. But Doug hated the other, better word: implants. And adults just sounded wrong. The hesitation made Doug flinch. Which might have been why I’d hesitated. “If they think regular people can’t handle it, then why not just send out regular robots?”

Doug flinched again. Any reminder that his — our — daughter was any sort of robot did that to him. “As I understand it, they want to understand and see the long term effects of Mars gravity and terraforming on human bodies, since eventually they do plan to send the rest of us out there.”

“But — ” I swallowed, tried to get my thoughts in order. “They’re
programmed
. They’ll be eating and exercising absolutely regularly in a way regular adults wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Even Olympic athletes aren’t that careful.”

“But it will give them a general idea. Plus, they need to ensure that human bodies — ” it was my turn to flinch — “are capable of spending sustained time in a Martian environment.” He sounded like someone quoting a speech from a marketing consultant; it took me a second to realize that was probably exactly what he was doing.

I gave up attempting to eat. “Ok. What I don’t understand is this. Why are you telling me this?”

“Because they want us to talk to her before she goes.”

By “they” he meant the facility’s attorneys, of course.

Amy is also a skilled engineer and astronaut, programmed with the equivalent of multiple doctorate degrees in engineering, computer science, astronomy, microbiology, geology and geophysics and to speak multiple languages with the same flat intonation, who has to be reminded by a computer program to eat, who has never laughed or cried in her entire life.

“I’ll sign more papers if I have to,” I said. “I don’t want to see her.”

“Crystal.”

“I’m serious.”

“Crystal. If you don’t go, she can’t go. And — ” He swallowed, and I saw that he was about to start crying. “She doesn’t belong here. You’ll see.”

The reason for their quick disappearance is soon explained. The eight of them must be thoroughly checked — their programs are not yet perfectly adjusted for self-maintenance, although they are able to observe and check each other. Then a patch, to ensure that they are properly programmed to adjust to the new gravity, and another patch to ensure that they are able to translate and understand the very latest idioms in multiple languages.

And, of course, they must eat, which none of us will want to see.

This last part is true. The implants do not respond to appetite or taste, and although they are programmed to eat, with the precise, mechanical movements they use for everything else, they have difficulty with this. Eating, it turns out, is somewhat more complicated than mere programming, and it is not something I want to watch again.

None of this is anything I want to watch again.

“Of
course
she’s agreeing to go,” I ranted at Ariela, my best friend, the only one other than Doug who knew the whole story. “She’s
programmed
to go. Why do I have to go to see this for myself?”

Ariela fiddled with her coffee cup. “I don’t think that’s it,” she said, after a moment.

“Then what is it?”

“I think they want you to be able to say good-bye.”

I have a picture of my daughter, in her crib, surrounded by wires and tubes.

It is the only one I have. Most of the time, I leave it buried at the bottom of a drawer in the guest room, face down. But sometimes I take it out, and try to imagine that in it, my daughter is smiling.

When I found out my child would be born without a brain, I didn’t cry. I couldn’t. Everything inside me was swallowed up, gone, empty, and I had nothing to cry with. I just sat quietly, hands folded over my abdomen, listening. I didn’t have much to say.

I had options, they explained, carefully. I could terminate the pregnancy — it was difficult to find anyone who would terminate late term pregnancies here, but a trip to Europe or Asia could be arranged. I could bring the child to term. (Beside me, Doug jerked, but didn’t say anything.) The child would not live, but some parents found that comforting, and I could hold her afterwards. (”Comforting”? The hollow part of me could not ask.)

Or, they said, they could offer a third possibility.

I’ve cried enough about this already.
Enough.

The medical procedure was less simple than they had promised. Eight hours of initial surgery, and then two days in bed, another surgery, and then a third. Doug tried to read books to me, but I was so sick I could barely understand his words. Finally he set me up with an tablet and music and let that play while he slept and slept.

With each procedure, I dreamed, dreamed that metal was moving through my skin and bones, dreamed that wires were replacing my nerves. I saw myself as a computer. I saw myself linking to my daughter.

I threw up, over and over. The pregnancy, said the nurses sympathetically. Or the drugs. But I knew it wasn’t either.

Even now, I sometimes wonder if some of those nanobots entered my blood, my skin, if their presence is why I can now look at my daughter and have no desire to hold her.

I was allowed to hold her, briefly, after the birth. It was psychologically better for the mother, one of the doctors argued; a compassionate thing to do, agreed the attorneys, who probably had other fears in mind. I had no thoughts of a lawsuit, not then.

She was small, so very small. And so limp. For some reason I had thought that the procedures would extend metal all the way through her body, but no. Not that she was lacking in metal; she had wires and tubes seemingly everywhere, controlling her food intake and bladder and monitoring pulse rates and the electronic activity in her brain.

But no tubes in her nose or her mouth, and her tiny chest rose and fell steadily.

“There were some problems,” Doug says.

“Problems,” I repeat.

He swallows. “They could send commands to them while they were on the mission, but apparently, something about the distance and time — anyway, they weren’t able to successfully upload all of the patches and fixes. Some of the programming broke down.”

“And?”

“Some of them — well, they’re saying some of them may be nonfunctional.”

It takes me a moment to sort through the pronouns. “Amy?”

“I don’t know.” He swallows miserably.

“The implant is letting her breathe,” explained one of the doctors. “In time, it might allow her to do more.”

“What more?” asked Doug.

“We don’t entirely know,” said the doctor. “Movement, walking, certainly. Speech, hopefully. And more beyond that.”

I touched her cheek. It was warm to the touch, and I could tell that she was breathing. But that was all. She did not move, did not even flutter an eye at my touch.

She had not cried, not even that first baby cry after birth.

“This is your fault,” I shout at Doug, although it isn’t. “You were the one who insisted on fixing her.”

“You are the one who keeps thinking she’s dead,” he shouts back.