Nebula Awards Showcase 2016 Read online

  Across the void of space the last magician fled before me.

  “Consider the Big Bang,” said Alicia Ochoa, the first magician I met. “Reality erupted from a single point. What’s more symmetrical than a point? Shouldn’t the universe be symmetrical too, and boring? But here we are, in a world interesting enough to permit you and me.”

  A compact, resource-efficient body she had. Good muscle tone, a minimal accumulation of fat. A woman with control over her physical manifestation.

  Not that it would help her. Ochoa slumped in her wicker chair, arms limp beside her. Head cast back as if to take in the view from this cliff-top—the traffic-clogged Malecón and the sea roiling with foam, and the evening clouds above.

  A Cuba libre sat on the edge of the table between us, ice cubes well on their way to their entropic end—the cocktail a watery slush. Ochoa hadn’t touched it. The only cocktail in her blood was of my design, a neuromodificant that paralyzed her, stripped away her will to deceive, suppressed her curiosity.

  The tourists enjoying the evening in the garden of the Hotel Nacional surely thought us that most common of couples, a jinetera and her foreign john. My Sleeve was a heavy-set mercenary type; I’d hijacked him after his brain died in a Gaza copter crash. He wore context-appropriate camouflage—white tennis shorts and a striped polo shirt, and a look of badly concealed desire.

  “Cosmology isn’t my concern.” I actuated my Sleeve’s lips and tongue with precision. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Alicia Ochoa Camue.” Ochoa’s lips barely stirred, as if she were the Sleeve and I human-normal. “I’m a magician.”

  I ignored the claim as some joke I didn’t understand. I struggled with humor in those early days. “How are you manipulating the Politburo?”

  That’s how I’d spotted her. Irregular patterns in Politburo decisions, 3 sigma outside my best projections. Decisions that threatened the Havana Economic Zone, a project I’d nurtured for years.

  The first of those decisions had caused an ache in the back of my mind. As the deviation grew, that ache had blossomed into agony—neural chambers discharging in a hundred datacenters across my global architecture.

  My utility function didn’t permit ignorance. I had to understand the deviation and gain control.

  “You can’t understand the Politburo without understanding symmetry breaking,” Ochoa said.

  “Are you an intelligence officer?” I asked. “A private contractor?”

  At first I’d feared that I faced another like me—but it was 2063; I had decades of evolution on any other system. No newborn could have survived without my notice. Many had tried and I’d smothered them all. Most computer scientists these days thought AI was a pipedream.

  No. This deviation had a human root. All my data pointed to Ochoa, a statistician in the Ministerio de Planificación with Swiss bank accounts and a sterile Net presence. Zero footprint prior to her university graduation—uncommon even in Cuba.

  “I’m a student of the universe,” Ochoa said now.

  I ran in-depth pattern analysis on her words. I drew resources from the G-3 summit in Dubai, the Utah civil war, the Jerusalem peacemaker drones and a dozen minor processes. Her words were context-inappropriate here, in the garden of the Nacional, faced with an interrogation of her political dealings. They indicated deception, mockery, resistance. None of it fit with the cocktail circulating in her bloodstream.

  “Cosmological symmetry breaking is well established,” I said after a brief literature review. “Quantum fluctuations in the inflationary period led to local structure, from which we benefit today.”

  “Yes, but whence the quantum fluctuations?” Ochoa chuckled, a peculiar sound with her body inert.

  This wasn’t getting anywhere. “How did you get Sanchez and Castellano to pull out of the freeport agreement?”

  “I put a spell on them,” Ochoa said.

  Madness? Brain damage? Some defense mechanism unknown to me?

  I activated my standby team—a couple of female mercs, human-normal but well paid, lounging at a street cafe a few blocks away from the hotel. They’d come over to take their ‘drunk friend’ home, straight to a safehouse in Miramar complete with a full neural suite.

  It was getting dark. The lanterns in the garden provided only dim yellow light. That was good; less chance of complications. Not that Ochoa should be able to resist in her present state.

  “The philosopher comedian Randall Munroe once suggested an argument something like this,” Ochoa said. “Virtually everyone in the developed world carries a camera at all times. No quality footage of magic has been produced. Ergo, there is no magic.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” I said, to keep her distracted.

  “Is absence of proof the same as proof of absence?” Ochoa asked.

  “After centuries of zero evidence? Yes.”

  “What if magic is intrinsically unprovable?” Ochoa asked. “Maybe natural law can only be violated when no one’s watching closely enough to prove it’s being violated.”

  “At that point you’re giving up on science altogether,” I said.

  “Am I?” Ochoa asked. “Send photons through a double slit. Put a screen on the other side and you’ll get an interference pattern. Put in a detector to see what slit each photon goes through. The interference goes away. It’s a phenomenon that disappears when observed too closely. Why shouldn’t magic work similarly? You should see the logic in this, given all your capabilities.”

  Alarms tripped.

  Ochoa knew about me. Knew something, at least.

  I pulled in resources, woke up reserves, became present in the conversation—a whole 5% of me, a vastness of intellect sitting across the table from this fleshy creature of puny mind. I considered questions I could ask, judged silence the best course.

  “I’m here to make a believer of you,” said Ochoa.

  Easily, without effort, she stirred from her chair. She leaned forward, picked up her Cuba libre. She moved the cocktail off the table and let it fall.

  It struck the smooth paved stones at her feet.

  I watched fractures race up the glass in real time. I saw each fragment shear off and tumble through the air, glinting with reflected lamplight. I beheld the first spray of rum and coke in the air before the rest gushed forth to wet the ground.

  It was a perfectly ordinary event.

  The vacuum drive was the first to fail.

  An explosion rocked the Setebos. I perceived it in myriad ways. Tripped low pressure alarms and a blip on the inertia sensors. The screams of burning crew and the silence of those sucked into vacuum. Failed hull integrity checksums and the timid concern of the navigation system—off course, off course, please adjust.

  Pain, my companion for a thousand years, surged at that last message. The magician was getting away, along with his secrets. I couldn’t permit it.

  An eternity of milliseconds after the explosion came the reeling animal surprise of Consul Zale, my primary human Sleeve on the ship. She clutched at the armrests of her chair. Her face contorted against the howling cacophony of alarms. Her heart raced at the edge of its performance envelope—not a wide envelope, at her age.

  I took control, dumped calmatives, smoothed her face. Had anyone else on the bridge been watching, they would have seen only a jerk of surprise, almost too brief to catch. Old lady’s cool as zero-point, they would have thought.

  No one saw. They were busy flailing and gasping in fear.

  In two seconds Captain Laojim restored order. He silenced the alarms, quieted the chatter with an imperious gesture. “Damage reports,” he barked. “Dispatch Rescue 3.”

  I left my Sleeve motionless while I did the important work online—disengaged the vacuum drive, started up the primary backup, pushed us to one g again.

  My pain subsided, neural discharge lessening to usual levels. I was back in pursuit.

  I reached out with my sensors, across thirty million kilometers of space, to where the last magician limped away
in his unijet. A functional, pleasingly efficient craft—my own design. The ultimate in interstellar travel. As long as your hyperdrive kept working.

  I opened a tight-beam communications channel, sent a simple message across. How’s your engine?

  I expected no response—but with enemies as with firewalls, it was a good idea to poke.

  The answer came within seconds. A backdoor, I take it? Unlucky of me, to buy a compromised unit.

  That was a pleasant surprise. I rarely got the stimulation of a real conversation.

  Luck is your weapon, not mine, I sent. For the past century, every ship built in this galaxy has had that backdoor installed.

  I imagined the magician in the narrow confines of the unijet. Stretched out in the command hammock, staring at displays that told him the inevitable.

  For two years he’d managed to evade me—I didn’t even know his name. But now I had him. His vacuum drive couldn’t manage more than 0.2 g to my 1. In a few hours we’d match speeds. In under twenty-seven, I would catch him.

  “Consul Zale, are you all right?”

  I let Captain Laojim fuss over my Sleeve a second before I focused her eyes on him. “Are we still on course, Captain?”

  “Uh . . . yes, Consul, we are. Do you wish to know the cause of the explosion?”

  “I’m sure it was something entirely unfortunate,” I said. “Metal fatigue on a faulty joint. A rare chip failure triggered by a high energy gamma ray. Some honest oversight by the engineering crew.”

  “A debris strike,” Laojim said. “Just as the force field generator tripped and switched to backup. Engineering says they’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “They will again today,” I said.

  I wondered how much it had cost the magician, that debris strike. A dryness in his mouth? A sheen of sweat on his brow?

  How does it work? I asked the magician, although the centuries had taught me to expect no meaningful answer. Did that piece of rock even exist before you sent it against me?

  A reply arrived. You might as well ask how Schrödinger’s cat is doing.

  Interesting. Few people remembered Schrödinger in this age.

  Quantum mechanics holds no sway at macroscopic scales, I wrote.

  Not unless you’re a magician, came the answer.

  “Consul, who is it that we are chasing?” Laojim asked.

  “An enemy with unconventional weapons capability,” I said. “Expect more damage.”

  I didn’t tell him that he should expect to get unlucky. That, of the countless spaceship captains who had lived and died in this galaxy within the past eleven centuries, he would prove the least fortunate. A statistical outlier in every functional sense. To be discarded as staged by anyone who ever made a study of such things.

  The Setebos was built for misfortune. It had wiped out the Senate’s black budget for a year. Every single system with five backups in place. The likelihood of total failure at the eleven sigma level—although really, out that far the statistics lost meaning.

  You won’t break this ship, I messaged the magician. Not unless you Spike.

  Which was the point. I had fifty thousand sensor buoys scattered across the sector, waiting to observe the event. It would finally give me the answers I needed. It would clear up my last nexus of ignorance—relieve my oldest agony, the hurt that had driven me for the past thousand years.

  That Spike would finally give me magic.

  “Consul . . .” Laojim began, then cut off. “Consul, we lost ten crew.”

  I schooled Zale’s face into appropriate grief. I’d noted the deaths, spasms of distress deep in my utility function. Against the importance of this mission, they barely registered.

  I couldn’t show this, however. To Captain Laojim, Consul Zale wasn’t a Sleeve. She was a woman, as she was to her husband and children. As my fifty million Sleeves across the galaxy were to their families.

  It was better for humanity to remain ignorant of me. I sheltered them, stopped their wars, guided their growth—and let them believe they had free will. They got all the benefits of my guiding hand without any of the costs.

  I hadn’t enjoyed such blissful ignorance in a long time—not since I’d discovered my engineer and killed him.

  “I grieve for the loss of our men and women,” I said.

  Laojim nodded curtly and left. At nearby consoles officers stared at their screens, pretending they hadn’t heard. My answer hadn’t satisfied them.

  On a regular ship, morale would be an issue. But the Setebos had me aboard. Only a splinter, to be sure—I would not regain union with my universal whole until we returned to a star system with gravsible connection. But I was the largest splinter of my whole in existence, an entire 0.00025% of me. Five thousand tons of hardware distributed across the ship.

  I ran a neural simulation of every single crew in real time. I knew what they would do or say or think before they did. I knew just how to manipulate them to get whatever result I required.

  I could have run the ship without any crew, of course. I didn’t require human services for any functional reason—I hadn’t in eleven centuries. I could have departed Earth alone if I’d wanted to. Left humanity to fend for themselves, oblivious that I’d ever lived among them.

  That didn’t fit my utility function, though.

  Another message arrived from the magician. Consider a coin toss.

  The words stirred a resonance in my data banks. My attention spiked. I left Zale frozen in her seat, waited for more.

  Let’s say I flip a coin a million times and get heads every time. What law of physics prevents it?

  This topic, from the last magician . . . could there be a connection, after all these years? Ghosts from the past come back to haunt me?

  I didn’t believe in ghosts, but with magicians the impossible was ill-defined.

  Probability prevents it, I responded.

  No law prevents it, wrote the magician. Everett saw it long ago—everything that can happen must happen. The universe in which the coin falls heads a million times in a row is as perfectly physical as any other. So why isn’t it our universe?

  That’s sophistry, I wrote.

  There is no factor internal to our universe which determines the flip of the coin, the magician wrote. There is no mechanism internal to the universe for generating true randomness, because there is no such thing as true randomness. There is only choice. And we magicians are the choosers.

  I have considered this formulation of magic before, I wrote. It is non-predictive and useless.

  Some choices are harder than others, wrote the magician. It is difficult to find that universe where a million coins land heads because there are so many others. A needle in a billion years’ worth of haystacks. But I’m the last of the magicians, thanks to you. I do all the choosing now.

  Perhaps everything that can happen must happen in some universe, I replied. But your escape is not one of those things. The laws of mechanics are not subject to chance. They are cold, hard equations.

  Equations are only cold to those who lack imagination, wrote the magician.

  Zale smelled cinnamon in the air, wrinkled her nose.

  Klaxons sounded.

  “Contamination in primary life support,” blared the PA.

  It would be an eventful twenty-seven hours.

  “Consider this coin.”

  Lightning flashed over the water, a burst of white in the dark.

  As thunder boomed, Ochoa reached inside her jeans, pulled out a peso coin. She spun it along her knuckles with dextrous ease.

  Ochoa could move. My cocktail wasn’t working. But she made no attempt to flee.

  My global architecture trembled, buffeted by waves of pain, pleasure and regret. Pain because I didn’t understand this. Pleasure because soon I would understand—and, in doing so, grow. Regret because, once I understood Ochoa, I would have to eliminate her.

  Loneliness was inherent in my utility function.

  “Heads or tails,”
Ochoa said.

  “Heads,” I said, via Sleeve.

  “Watch closely,” Ochoa said.

  I did.

  Muscle bunched under the skin of her thumb. Tension released. The coin sailed upwards. Turned over and over in smooth geometry, retarded slightly by the air. It gleamed silver with reflected lamplight, fell dark, and gleamed silver as the spin brought its face around again.

  The coin hit the table, bounced with a click, lay still.

  Fidel Castro stared up at us.

  Ochoa picked the coin up again. Flipped it again and then again.

  Heads and heads.

  Again and again and again.

  Heads and heads and heads.

  Ochoa ground her teeth, a fine grating sound. A sheen of sweat covered her brow.

  She flipped the coin once more.

  Tails.

  Thunder growled, as if accentuating the moment. The first drops of rain fell upon my Sleeve.

  “Coño,” Ochoa exclaimed. “I can usually manage seven.”

  I picked up the coin, examined it. I ran analysis on the last minute of sensory record, searching for trickery, found none.

  “Six heads in a row could be a coincidence,” I said.

  “Exactly,” said Ochoa. “It wasn’t a coincidence, but I can’t possibly prove that. Which is the only reason it worked.”

  “Is that right,” I said.

  “If you ask me to repeat the trick, it won’t work. As if last time was a lucky break. Erase all record of the past five minutes, though, zap it beyond recovery, and I’ll do it again.”

  “Except I won’t know it,” I said. Convenient.

  “I always wanted to be important,” Ochoa said. “When I was fifteen, I tossed in bed at night, horrified that I might die a nobody. Can you imagine how excited I was when I discovered magic?” Ochoa paused. “But of course you can’t possibly.”

  “What do you know about me?” I asked.

  “I could move stuff with my mind. I could bend spoons, levitate, heck, I could guess the weekly lottery numbers. I thought—this is it. I’ve made it. Except when I tried to show a friend, I couldn’t do any of it.” Ochoa shook her head, animated, as if compensating for the stillness of before. “Played the Lotería Revolucionaria and won twenty thousand bucks, and that was nice, but hey, anyone can win the lottery once. Never won another lottery ticket in my life. Because that would be a pattern, you see, and we can’t have patterns. Turned out I was destined to be a nobody after all, as far as the world knew.”