The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 (44 page)

In the notes she left behind, the archaeologist had written down her conclusions—that the machine generated a field of a certain range, and that this field had the power to dissolve, or at least blur, the boundary between self and other. She wrote in French, and in Arabic, and in her mother tongue, Bambara, but after a while the regularity of her script began to break up, as a sand castle loses its sharp edges and recognizable boundaries when the tide comes in. Thereafter her notes turned into intricate, indecipherable symbols reminiscent of the great tapestry that had hung in the main chamber of the settlement. These continued for several pages and finally, on the last page, she had written in French:
I cannot bear it. I must return.

Thus end the three accounts.

Candidates will observe the requisite moment of contemplation.

The candidate will now consult the Compendium of Machine Anomalies, the Hephaestian Mysteries, and the Yantric Oracle, which will help put these accounts in context. Having completed its perusal, the candidate will make the requisite changes to its own parts in order to generate hypotheses on these questions. Is the negative space of ambiguity machines infinite? Is it continuous? Are the conceptual sub-spaces occupied by each machine connected to each other—by geography, concept, or some other as-yet-undiscovered attribute? What can we make of the relationship between human and machine? If an engineer can dream a machine, can a machine dream an engineer? An artist? A mathematician? An archaeologist? A story? Is the space of ambiguity machines set like a jewel or a braid within the greater expanse of the space of impossible machines? Is it here, in the realm of dream and imagination, that the intelligent machine might at last transcend the ultimate boundary—between machine and non-machine? To take inspiration from human longing, from the organic, syncretic fecundity of nature, the candidate must be willing to consider and enable its own transformation.

Begin.

TED CHIANG

FROM
e-flux journal

T
HE HUMANS USE
Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they've created an ear capable of hearing across the universe.

But I and my fellow parrots are right here. Why aren't they interested in listening to our voices?

We're a nonhuman species capable of communicating with them. Aren't we exactly what humans are looking for?

The universe is so vast that intelligent life must surely have arisen many times. The universe is also so old that even one technological species would have had time to expand and fill the galaxy. Yet there is no sign of life anywhere except on Earth. Humans call this the Fermi paradox.

One proposed solution to the Fermi paradox is that intelligent species actively try to conceal their presence, to avoid being targeted by hostile invaders.

Speaking as a member of a species that has been driven nearly to extinction by humans, I can attest that this is a wise strategy.

It makes sense to remain quiet and avoid attracting attention.

The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe ought to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it's disconcertingly quiet.

Some humans theorize that intelligent species go extinct before they can expand into outer space. If they're correct, then the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard.

Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Río Abajo Forest resounded with our voices. Now we're almost gone. Soon this rainforest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.

There was an African grey parrot named Alex. He was famous for his cognitive abilities. Famous among humans, that is.

A human researcher named Irene Pepperberg spent thirty years studying Alex. She found that not only did Alex know the words for shapes and colors, he actually understood the concepts of shape and color.

Many scientists were skeptical that a bird could grasp abstract concepts. Humans like to think they're unique. But eventually Pepperberg convinced them that Alex wasn't just repeating words, that he understood what he was saying.

Out of all my cousins, Alex was the one who came closest to being taken seriously as a communication partner by humans.

Alex died suddenly, when he was still relatively young. The evening before he died, Alex said to Pepperberg, “You be good. I love you.”

If humans are looking for a connection with a nonhuman intelligence, what more can they ask for than that?

Every parrot has a unique call that it uses to identify itself; biologists refer to this as the parrot's “contact call.”

In 1974, astronomers used Arecibo to broadcast a message into outer space intended to demonstrate human intelligence. That was humanity's contact call.

In the wild, parrots address each other by name. One bird imitates another's contact call to get the other bird's attention.

If humans ever detect the Arecibo message being sent back to Earth, they will know someone is trying to get their attention.

Parrots are vocal learners: we can learn to make new sounds after we've heard them. It's an ability that few animals possess. A dog may understand dozens of commands, but it will never do anything but bark.

Humans are vocal learners too. We have that in common. So humans and parrots share a special relationship with sound. We don't simply cry out. We pronounce. We enunciate.

Perhaps that's why humans built Arecibo the way they did. A receiver doesn't have to be a transmitter, but Arecibo is both. It's an ear for listening, and a mouth for speaking.

Humans have lived alongside parrots for thousands of years, and only recently have they considered the possibility that we might be intelligent.

I suppose I can't blame them. We parrots used to think humans weren't very bright. It's hard to make sense of behavior that's so different from your own.

But parrots are more similar to humans than any extraterrestrial species will be, and humans can observe us up close; they can look us in the eye. How do they expect to recognize an alien intelligence if all they can do is eavesdrop from a hundred light-years away?

It's no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

When we speak, we use the breath in our lungs to give our thoughts a physical form. The sounds we make are simultaneously our intentions and our life force.

I speak, therefore I am. Vocal learners, like parrots and humans, are perhaps the only ones who fully comprehend the truth of this.

There's a pleasure that comes with shaping sounds with your mouth. It's so primal and visceral that throughout their history, humans have considered the activity a pathway to the divine.

Pythagorean mystics believed that vowels represented the music of the spheres, and chanted to draw power from them.

Pentecostal Christians believe that when they speak in tongues, they're speaking the language used by angels in Heaven.

Brahmin Hindus believe that by reciting mantras, they're strengthening the building blocks of reality.

Only a species of vocal learners would ascribe such importance to sound in their mythologies. We parrots can appreciate that.

According to Hindu mythology, the universe was created with a sound: “Om.” It's a syllable that contains within it everything that ever was and everything that will be.

When the Arecibo telescope is pointed at the space between stars, it hears a faint hum.

Astronomers call that the “cosmic microwave background.” It's the residual radiation of the Big Bang, the explosion that created the universe fourteen billion years ago.

But you can also think of it as a barely audible reverberation of that original “Om.” That syllable was so resonant that the night sky will keep vibrating for as long as the universe exists.

When Arecibo is not listening to anything else, it hears the voice of creation.

We Puerto Rican parrots have our own myths. They're simpler than human mythology, but I think humans would take pleasure from them.

Alas, our myths are being lost as my species dies out. I doubt the humans will have deciphered our language before we're gone.

So the extinction of my species doesn't just mean the loss of a group of birds. It's also the disappearance of our language, our rituals, our traditions. It's the silencing of our voice.

Human activity has brought my kind to the brink of extinction, but I don't blame them for it. They didn't do it maliciously. They just weren't paying attention.

And humans create such beautiful myths; what imaginations they have. Perhaps that's why their aspirations are so immense. Look at Arecibo. Any species that can build such a thing must have greatness within it.

My species probably won't be here for much longer; it's likely that we'll die before our time and join the Great Silence. But before we go, we are sending a message to humanity. We just hope the telescope at Arecibo will enable them to hear it.

The message is this:

You be good. I love you.

X

Charlie Jane Anders
is the author of
All the Birds in the Sky
(2016). Her fiction and journalism have appeared in
Tor.com, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Tin House, ZYZZYVA
, the
San Francisco Chronicle
, the
New York Times
, and dozens of anthologies. Her story “Six Months, Three Days” won a Hugo Award. She was a founding editor of the science fiction blog
io9
and organizes the Writers With Drinks reading series.

• I've always had a hard time balancing absurdism and personal, emotional storytelling. This is probably the biggest thing I struggle with as an author. And when I was first invited to contribute a story to an anthology of video game stories,
Press Start to Play
, I gravitated toward the absurd angle—games offer a chance to talk about our relationship with, and dependence on, technology, and they speak directly to the weirdness of our pop culture fantasies. So I spent months wrestling with a sprawling tale of social collapse, AI uprising, and bizarre games. The deeper I got into this weird post-cyberpunk scenario, the less of a center the story seemed to have. There were just too many threads to pull at, and no central skein to hold on to. It wasn't until I was shamefully late for my deadline that I finally had the courage to throw out that whole exercise in gratuitous strangeness and start over, with a much simpler story that drew on my own experience of having a loved one with dementia. The resulting story is still totally absurd—but, I hope, more in the way that the inescapable tragedies of real life are always absurd and logic-defying.

Dale Bailey
is the author of
The End of the End of Everything: Stories, The Subterranean Season
, and five other books. He lives with his family in Hickory, North Carolina.

• “Lightning Jack's Last Ride” began as a title, nothing more. I spent a long time trying to sort out what it might belong to before I stumbled across Baby Face Nelson in some article or other, which got me thinking about the outlaw mystique Nelson shared with so many of his fellow Public Enemies—Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly, Ma Barker, and John Dillinger, among others. Murderous villains every one, but to a Depression-era America starved for heroes, they had a certain glamorous appeal. And while I had fun inventing a new outlaw age and a rogues' gallery to inhabit it, it was the tension between the killer and his charisma that gave the story impetus. Gus might attest that Jack doesn't have a bone of true malice in his body—Gus might even believe it—but the truth is, Jack is a stone-cold killer. The question is why we might ever think otherwise.

Ted Chiang
is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop. His fiction has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus Awards. His collection
Stories of Your Life and Others
has appeared in ten languages and was recently reissued by Vintage Books. He lives near Seattle, Washington.

• There are actually two pieces titled “The Great Silence,” only one of which can fit in this anthology. This requires a little explanation.

Back in 2011, I was a participant in a conference called Bridge the Gap, whose purpose was to promote dialogue between the arts and the sciences. One of the other participants was Jennifer Allora, half of the artist duo Allora & Calzadilla. I was completely unfamiliar with the kind of art they created—hybrids of performance art, sculpture, and sound—but I was fascinated by Jennifer's explanation of the ideas they were engaged with.

In 2014 Jennifer got in touch with me about the possibility of collaborating with her and her partner, Guillermo. They wanted to create a multiscreen video installation about anthropomorphism, technology, and the connections between the human and nonhuman worlds. Their plan was to juxtapose footage of the radio telescope in Arecibo with footage of the endangered Puerto Rican parrots that live in a nearby forest, and they asked if I would write subtitle text that would appear on a third screen, a fable told from the point of view of one of the parrots, “a form of interspecies translation.” I was hesitant, not only because I had no experience with video art, but also because fables aren't what I usually write. But after they showed me a little preliminary footage, I decided to give it a try, and in the following weeks we exchanged thoughts on topics like glossolalia and the extinction of languages.

The resulting video installation, titled
The Great Silence
, was shown at Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop and Museum as part of an exhibition of Allora & Calzadilla's work. I have to admit that when I saw the finished work, I regretted a decision I had made earlier. Jennifer and Guillermo had previously invited me to visit the Arecibo Observatory myself, but I had declined because I didn't think it was necessary for me to write the text. Seeing footage of Arecibo on a wall-size screen, I wished I had said yes.