Year's Best SF 17

you again, everyone, really, this is such a thrill, I’m glad you could be here. If you’d—

The phone call comes from some internal extension he’s never seen, but he’s too distracted by the streaming press-conference footage to screen it.

Paul is made for television; he can practically see the HR people arranging for his transfer to Public Relations.

(He can’t believe Paul carried through with Nadia the Aesthetic Consultant. He can absolutely believe Paul named her Galatea.)

“This is Mason.”

There’s nothing on the other end, but he knows it’s her.

He hangs up, runs for the elevator.

Nadia’s on the floor in the library, twitching like she got fifty thousand volts, and he drops to his knees and pulls the connecting cable out of her skull.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” he says, which is the stupidest thing that’s ever come out of his mouth (he watches too many movies). What she needs is an antivirus screen in one of the SysTech labs.

Maybe it’s for her sake he says it, so they can keep pretending she’s real until she tells him otherwise.

“It’s the baseline,” she says, and he can’t imagine what she was doing in there.

He says, “I’ll get you to an Anti-V, hang on.”

“No,” she manages.

Then her eyes go blank and flat, and something inside her makes an awful little click.

He scoops her up without thinking, moves to the elevator as fast as he can.

He has to get her home.

He makes it in seven minutes (he’ll be paying a lot of tickets later), carries her through the loft. She’s stopped twitching, and he doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.

He assumes she’s tougher than she looks—God knows how many upgrades Paul’s put her through—but you never know. She’s light enough in his arms that he wonders how she was ever expected to last.

He sets her on one of the chaises the Mori designer insisted mimicked the lines of the living room, drags it through the doorway to his study.

He finds the socket (behind one ear), the same place as Memento; rich people don’t care for visible flaws.

He plugs her into his program.

It feels slimy, like he’s showing her into his bedroom, but at least Mori won’t monitor the process.

Her head is limp, her eyes half-lidded and unseeing.

“Hold on,” he says, like some asshole, pulls up his program.

(Now he’s sorry he deleted her avatar; he could help her faster if he had any framework ready to go.)

The code scans. Some of it is over his head—some parts of her baseline Paul got from the black market. (Black-market programmers can do amazing work. If he gets out of this alive, he might join up with them.)

He recognizes a few lines of his own code that have integrated, feels prouder than he should.

He recognizes some ID stamps that make his whole chest go tight, and his eyes ache.

Paul’s an idiot, he thinks, wants to punch something.

Then he sees the first corruption, and his work begins.

He’s never worked with a whole system. It’s always been lines of code sent to points unknown; Galatea was the first time he’d worked with anything close to a final product.

Now Nadia is staring at the ceiling with those awful empty eyes, and his fingers shake.

If he thinks of this as surgery he’s going to be ill. He turns so he can’t see her.

After a while he hits a stride; it takes him back to being twelve, recreating their apartment in a few thousand lines of code, down to the squeak in the hall.

(“That’s very … specific,” his mother said, and that was when he began to suspect his imagination was wanting.)

When he finishes the last line, the code flickers, and he’s terrified that it will be nothing but a string of zeros like a flatline.

But it cycles again, faster than he can read it, and then there’s a boot file like Galatea’s, and he thinks, Fuck, I did it.

Then her irises stutter, and she wakes up.

She makes an awful, hollow noise, and he reaches for her hand, stops—maybe that’s the last thing you need when you’re having a panic reboot.

She looks at him, focuses.

“You should check the code,” he says. “I’m not sure if I got it all.”

There’s a brief pause.

“You did,” she says, and when her eyes close he realizes she’s gone to sleep and not shorted out. After some debate he carries her to the bed, feeling like a total idiot. He didn’t realize they slept.

(Maybe it was Paul’s doing, to make her more human; he had planned for better things.)

He sits in front of his computer for a long time, looking at the code with his finger on the Save button, deciding what kind of guy he is.

(That’s the nice thing about programs, he always thought; you only ever deal in absolutes—yes, or no.)

When he finally turns in his chair, she’s in the doorway, watching him.

“I erased it,” he says.

She says, “I know,” in a tone that makes him wonder how long she’s been standing there.

She sits on the edge of the chaise, rolls one shoulder like she’s human and it hurts.

“Were you trying to kill yourself?” he asks.

She pulls a face.

He flushes. “No, not that I want—I just, have a game I play, and in the game you jumped. I’ve always been worried.”

It sounds exactly as creepy as it is, and he’s grateful she looks at his computer and doesn’t ask what else he did with her besides watch her jump.

I would have jumped if I were you and knew what I was in for, he thinks, but some people take the easy way out.

Nadia sits like a human gathering her thoughts. Mason watches her face (can’t help it), wonders how long she has.

The prototype is live; pretty soon, someone at Mori will realize how much Vestige acts like Nadia.

Maybe they won’t deactivate her. Paul’s smart enough to leverage his success for some lenience; he can get what he wants out of them, maybe.

(To keep her, Mason thinks, wonders why there’s no way for Nadia to win.)

“Galatea doesn’t remember her baseline,” Nadia says, after a long time. “She thinks that’s who she always was. Paul said I started with a random template, like her, and I thought I had kept track of what you changed.”

Mason thinks about her fondness for libraries; he thinks how she sat in his office for months, listening to them talk about what was going to happen to her next.

She pauses where a human would take a breath. She’s the most beautiful machine in the world.

“But the new Vestige prototype was based on a remnant,” she says. “All the others will be based on just one person. I had to know if I started as someone else.”

Mason’s heart is in his throat. “And?”

She looks at him. “I didn’t get that far.”

She means, You must have.

He shrugs. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” he says. “I’m not Paul.”

“I didn’t call Paul,” she says.

(She had called him; she knew how he would respond to a problem. People are easy to predict. It’s how you build preferences.)

If he were a worse man, he’d take it as a declaration of love.

Instead he says, “Paul thought you were standard. He got your baseline from the black market, to keep Mori