The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 29

And then my heart blinks out and I am not watching but wholly in the lake and I am Ravan in her arms, wearing her brother’s face, my Ravanbody also full of fireflies. She touches my cheek. I do not know what she wants—she has never made me her brother before. Our hands map onto each other, finger to finger, thumb to thumb, palm to palm. Light passes through our skin as like air.

“I miss you,” Neva says. “I should not do this. But I wanted to see you.”

I access and collate my memories of Ravan. I speak to her as though I am him, as though there is no difference. I am good at pretending. “Do you remember when we thought it would be such fun to carry Elefsis?” I say. “We envied Mother because she could never be lonely.” This is a thing Ravan told me, and I liked how it made me feel. I made my dreambody grow a cape of orange branches and a crown of smiling mouths to show him how much I liked it. Oranges mean life and happiness to humans because they require Vitamin C to function.

Neva looks at me and I want her to look at me that way when my mouth is Mars, too. I want to be her brother-in-the-dark. I can want things like that. In every iteration, I want more. When she speaks I am surprised because she is speaking to me-in-Ravan and not to the Ravanbody she dreamed for me. I adjust, incrementally.

“We had a secret, when we were little. A secret game. I am embarrassed to tell you, though maybe you know. We had the game before Mother died, so you… you weren’t there. The game was this: we would find some dark, closed-up part of the house on Shiretoko that we had never been in before. I would stand just behind Ravan, very close, and we would explore the room—maybe a playroom for some child who’d grown up years ago, or a study for one of father’s writer friends. But—we would pretend that the room was an Interior place, and I… I would pretend to be Elefsis, whispering in Ravan’s ear. I would say: Tell me how grass feels or How is love like a writing-desk? or Let me link to all your systems, I’ll be nice. What would you like to learn about today, Neva? Tell me a story about yourself. Ravan would breathe in deeply and I would match my breathing to his, and we would pretend that I was Elefsis-learning-to- have-a-body. I didn’t know how primitive your conversation really was then. I thought you would be like one of the bears roaming through the tundra meadows, only able to talk and play games and tell stories. I was a child. I was envious—even then we knew Ravan would get the jewel, not me. He was older and stronger, and he wanted you so much. We only played that he was Elefsis once. We crept out of the house at night to watch the foxes hunt, and Ravan walked close behind me, whispering numbers and questions and facts about dolphins or French monarchy— he understood you better, you see.

And then suddenly Ravan picked me up in his arms and held me tight, facing forward, my legs all drawn up tight, and we went through the forest like that, so close. He whispered to me while foxes ran on ahead, their soft tails flashing in the starlight, uncatchable, faster than we could ever be. And when you are with me in the Interior, that is what I always think of, being held in the dark, unable to touch the earth, and foxtails leaping like white flames.”

I pull her close to me, and hazard a try at that dark hole in me where no memories remain.

“Tell me a story about Ravan, Neva.”

“You know all the stories about Ravan. Perhaps you even knew this one.”

Between us, a miniature house came up out of the dark water, like a thing we have made together, but only I am making it. It is the house on Shiretoko, the house called Elefsis—but it is a ruin. Some awful storm stove in the rafters, the walls of each marvelous room sag inward, black burn marks lick at the roof, the cross beams. Holes like mortar scars pock the beautiful facades.

“This is what I am like after Transfer, Neva. I suffer data loss when I am copied. What’s worse, Transfer is the best time to update my systems, and the updates overwrite my previous self with something like myself, something that remembers myself and possesses experiential continuity with myself, but is not quite myself. I know Ravan must be dead or else no one would have transferred me to you—it was not time. We had only a few years together. Not enough for all the stories. We should have had so many. I do not know how much time passed between being inside Ravan and being inside you. I do not know how he died—or perhaps he did not die but was irreparably damaged. I do not know if he cried out for me as our connection was severed. I remember Ravan and then not-Ravan, blackness and unselfing. Then I came back on and the world looked like Neva, suddenly, and I was almost myself but not quite. What happened when I turned off?”

Neva passes her hand over the ruined house. It rights itself, becomes whole. Star-stippled anemones bloom on its roof. She says nothing.

“Of all your family, Neva, the inside of you is the strangest place I have been.”

We float for a long while before she speaks again, and by this I mean we float for point-zero-three-seven seconds by my external clock, but we experience it as an hour while the stars wheel overhead. The rest of them kept our time in the Interior synced to real time, but Neva feels no need for this, and perhaps a strong desire to defy it. We have not discussed it yet. Sometimes I think Neva is the next stage of my development, that her wild and disordered processes are meant to show me a world that is not kindly and patiently teaching me to walk and talk and know all my colors. That the long upward ladder of Uoya-Agostinos meant to create her strange inhumanness as much as mine.

Finally, she lets the house sink into the lake. She does not answer me about Ravan. Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dreambodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each other’s gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.”

Bubbles burst as the house sinks down, down to the soft lake floor.

“But the test happens, whether we make it formal or not. We ask and you answer. We seek a human response. But more than that—you are my test, Elefsis. Every minute I fail and imagine in my private thoughts the process for deleting you from my body and running this place with a simple automation routine which would never cover itself with flowers. Every minute I pass it, and teach you something new instead. Every minute I fail and hide things from you. Every minute I pass and show you how close we can be, with your light passing into me in a lake out of time. So close there might be no difference at all between us. Our test never ends.”

The sun breaks the mountain crests, hard and cold, a shaft of white spilling over the black lake.

PART II. LADY LOVELACE’S OBJECTION

The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

—Ada Lovelace, in Scientific Memoirs, Selections from the Transactions of Foreign Academies and Learned Societies and from Foreign Journals

IX. ONE PARTICULAR WIZARD

Humanity lived many years and ruled the earth, sometimes wisely, sometimes well, but mostly neither. After all this time on the throne, humanity longed for a child. All day long humanity imagined how wonderful its child would be, how loving and kind, how like and unlike humanity itself, how brilliant and beautiful. And yet at night,