IGMS Issue 31 Read online

  If you choose this life, then you have my respect. I find this animalistic life to be more beautiful by far than the life chosen by man.

  But it is a trivial thing for me to advocate competition when my own preeminence is unchallengeable. You will not live in my world. You will have a worldful of other bears to struggle against. You might not be preeminent amongst your brothers. In order to defeat each other, it is entirely possible that you -- one of you -- will resort to guns and bombs. And that, in turn, will require that you build an industrial base, and in order to build you will need to organize. And then, no matter who wins, you will have ushered in the same life of constraint and cooperation that the humans have built up so carefully . . .

  It is not clear whether the bear ever suspected that his attempts to reproduce had failed.

  The apologists use the bear's growing disgust for human things as evidence that it desired nothing more than to occupy its natural ecological niche. Perhaps this is true. But they ignore evidence that the bear considered itself to be part of a new class of global super-predator whose natural prey was mankind.

  For instance, when a gigantic eagle was spotted deep within the Himalayas, the bear attempted to dispatch -- through Nepalese intermediaries -- a letter of advice that ended by describing the bear's current thinking on the topic of assimilation.

  . . . Finally, I know that books are scarce in your part of the world, so I would like to share with you some stories about the ones who came before us. For years, I'd heard rumors about other creatures -- the serpent, the ape, the wolf -- who arose throughout the centuries and rampaged across the land and threatened the very existence of mankind. Although mankind claimed to have defeated all these creatures, I had always wondered whether that was not simply propaganda. It seemed absurd that mankind, in its pre-technological state, could even scratch the hide of a true creature.

  But I think I have learned the answer.

  They were not brought down by mankind. They destroyed themselves.

  Oh, the proximate cause of mortality was always some lance or bullet or javelin. But this physical defeat was not their true cause of death. I have discovered that before the physical defeat there was always something else: a spiritual defeat. Except, it was not precisely that. It was not a loss of confidence or strength . . . it was a loss of identity. These creatures were only defeated once they began to think of themselves as just another sort of human being.

  The winged serpent reigned ascendant over the skies of Europe until he started to covet humanity's gold. Once tied down by his hoard, he became an easy target for knights.

  The ape rampaged freely through New York until he became obsessed with a human woman. Eventually, he sacrificed his life in order to shield her from harm.

  The wolf terrified the villagers of Italy for years, until she finally adopted an abandoned human boy. The boy's lupine strength and human cunning eventually led him to found a powerful nation that grew and grew until it drove the wolfpacks from those hills.

  Eventually I came to realize that these strange obsessions are the norm for our kind. They constitute a kind of blasphemy against our own nature, and it is this blasphemy which is eventually punished by physical defeat.

  I am urging you to watch out for humanistic thinking, but I wonder, sometimes, how it crept upon so many other wily and cautious creatures. Did they know the precipice they were leaning over? Did they think, perhaps, that the displacement of their emotional lives onto human objects was something natural? That it represented the next stage in their spiritual and intellectual development? Were they full of hope about these women, or boys, or objects? Did they think that these things represented a kind of salvation?

  This letter never reached the eagle. It was sold to a UOD operative in Kathmandu. But, to this day, the eagle has refused all contact with humanity.

  The bear's final interview was conducted by a print journalist on April 28, 2027, during the closing days of Operation Beanstalk. After ambushing and decimating a company of the 11th Armored Cavalry just outside of Johannesburg, the bear snatched up the unit's embedded reporter, Roger Greenthorpe, and carried him into the mountains. There, over the course of eight hours, the bear gave his second and final interview.

  Most of the interview is given over to a discussion of the bear's personal history; the portion that has bedeviled American creature policy for years consists of roughly ten minutes (usually quoted rather selectively, when used by bear apologists) near the end of the interview.

  Q: Do you ever regret having chosen to wage war against humanity?

  I never chose to wage war. I never knew I was in a war. I have simply been living as best and as freely as I am able. I do not hate humanity, nor did I go out of my way to persecute it.

  Q: You don't think you've committed acts of aggression?

  I could have destroyed entire cities. I could have killed millions. I didn't.

  I did only the minimum I needed to do in order to maintain my freedom. I thought that because I did not hate you, then I was free of the need to destroy and displace humanity. But I realize now that I was wrong.

  Q: You were wrong? About what?

  I should have wanted to wage war against you. I should have wanted to displace you. Not because I hated you . . . but because it is the logical endpoint of the path to which I was born. My life has been one of conflict and competition. I chose that life, but I also wasted it. I thought I was so beautiful and so able because I could beat any individual opponent on Earth. I could beat a plane, or a bomb, and I could certainly beat a man.

  But I've now realized the paltriness of that claim. I was given such power and I was satisfied with such trash. I should have hated you for all the hurt you have inflicted on me. I should never have been satisfied at sharing the world with you. My lack of hatred was a defense mechanism. It was not only cowardice, it was something worse . . . laziness.

  Q: Am I to understand that you are announcing a new phase of hostilities against mankind?

  Do not try to humor me. We are already in the last phase. I am dying. Your new bullets are able to mark my body. Your new bombs make me sick and weary. I have tried many times to leave this mountain and each time I have been driven back. I will die here.

  Q: Then why break your silence? Have you decided to surrender yourself?

  Never once has any sort of surrender been offered to me. Nor, even in my earlier days, was any sort of compromise ever forthcoming. I watched you talk to each other on television and in newspapers and over the radio. You always talked about peaceful solutions. You talked as if you had made many peaceful overtures to me. There have been none. When your planes and tanks see me, they fire. There has never been any room for surrender in this struggle.

  You have pity for me, I know that. But you do not have enough pity to let me live. And I'm glad of that. If I'd taken your surrender, it would have been a farce. I would have learned to smile at you: trained my bearish features to make an expression your dumb eyes would see as a smile. And then I would have bided my time. Eventually my offspring would have unseated you. I think sometimes that maybe that was supposed to be my destiny . . . maybe I should have sought out a peace with you. Maybe I betrayed myself and my God.

  Q: Because you never tried to compromise?

  No, I never tried. If I had, I think you would have rejected my compromises. But I think . . . maybe I should have tried.

  Q: Yet you say that God put you on earth to achieve some purpose? Do you think you've achieved it?

  I don't know. I cannot see what has been accomplished as a result of my life. Sometimes I think that God merely sent me as a test for humanity. You have developed many new technologies to try to kill me. You have been united in new and stronger alliances in order to contain and defeat me. Perhaps the eventual apotheosis of mankind -- your birth into an earthly kingdom of love, safety, and prosperity -- has been hastened as a result of my coming. Is that enough of a reason for my existence? Perhaps it is. After all, it is more of
a reason than most men have.

  But the thought of that disgusts me. Surely there must be more than that. Surely I am something better than a mere tool to be used by and for the betterment of mankind . . . Surely I had to have some kind of value in and of myself . . .

  Shortly after this final question, the interview was interrupted by renewed hostilities. The bear ventured out from the cave and never returned. Seventeen days later, he was found, dead, on a nearby hillside.

  Too many bear apologists are unwilling to look further than these words. They are not honest enough to conduct the same search of the bear's writings that we have undertaken. They refuse to see that the bear never renounced its desire to dominate and eventually destroy human society. Far from being a peaceful overture, the compromise for which the bear was pleading would merely have been a temporary ceasefire in which to regain its strength.

  But even calling for this limited sort of compromise represents a substantial change from the bear's previous position that it was willing to live and die according to its own strength. We do not know the bear's motive for breaking its years-long silence, especially since it clearly realized that no compromise would be forthcoming.

  Most teratologists have concluded that this interview simply represents a cowardly breakdown of the bear's ubermensch persona under the influence of extreme stress caused by the knowledge of its imminent defeat. Because of this, we do not share the bear apologists' obsession with the final interview: we do not see it as a useful vehicle for determining the bear's true thoughts and motivations. To us, these final words constitute the bear's blasphemy.

  For this reason, many teratologists feel that the last interview is better off forgotten, and to a large extent it has been. For most of mankind, the bear is remembered only as one of the most destructive, beautiful, and silent of humanity's foes.

  The Probability Flatline

  by K.G. Jewell

  Artwork by Nick Greenwood

  * * *

  Aftan slumped against the wall, the brick scraping her metal chassis as she dialed down the power draw of her balance gyros. She fought the urge to slide completely into stand-by mode. At this hour, the city street was dark and quiet. Few robots passed her corner; she had to stay alert for opportunity.

  To her right, the door to the Dialup Package Shop slid open. A steel-collar machinist stepped out. The probabilities on the patterns of a machinist AI weren't good, but they were positive. She'd take it.

  "Spare a hit? Just one jolt?" Aftan leaned forward and flashed her power status on her chest interface: 4% REMAINING.

  The machinist shifted his bag to his far shoulder and kept walking.

  Aftan slumped back against the wall. If she didn't hibernate soon, she'd risk permanently damaging her hardware. But if she did hibernate, there was no guarantee she'd ever power up again.

  Above her, the night sky twinkled with the light of a thousand suns, each taunting her across the void of intergalactic space with massive, yet unobtainable, power.

  A professional-class accounting android approached, his highly polished chrome chassis reflecting the distant starlight. The probabilities of direct appeal on an accounting template were near nil. Aftan shifted strategies.

  WILL WORK FOR JOULES, she flashed. "I have human-rated empathy," she added.

  The accountant stopped. The probabilities jumped, but Aftan kept her CPU dialed down. She couldn't waste cycles on wishful scenario projections.

  "You are a Human Nursery 4000?" The accountant's voice had the crisp accent popular among business-bots.

  "Yes. With Service Pack 3.21, including the upgrade module for advanced toddler development."

  "Why are you unemployed?" He passed his hand over her chest, the disturbance in her magnetic field reflecting a scan of her serial number.

  "Another round of bed reductions at the nursery." While she spoke, her left arm powered down. 2% REMAINING, her self-monitoring system reported. "Please, sir. My core systems are shutting down. I need a hit immediately."

  The accountant shook his head and turned away. The probabilities crashed towards zero.

  Her final Power Down loomed.

  The accountant turned back. Her processor skipped a cycle.

  "I may have a job for you. Can you get me into a nursery?"

  Robots lacking human interface programming were not allowed near the human population. The directive protected the fragile children she was programmed to love.

  "Why?"

  "I'd like to see a human, before they disappear completely." The accountant's chest-interface whirred an enigmatic pattern of angles and lines.

  She wondered if he was a geometric believer. They had particular beliefs regarding the end of human-time. They were harmless, just obsessed. A visit wouldn't hurt.

  Her legs powered down, locking up. Her left ear ceased processing.

  "Yes, I will help --" Her speech co-processor shut down in mid-sentence, her words fragmenting into silent static.

  The accountant grabbed her neck. Her primary interface jolted with his auxiliary power.

  Sweet, sweet, D.C. power.

  Her systems rushed as they cycled through priority backlogs, processing and cataloging her recent interaction through the lens of full awareness. She jolted awake, realizing she had just promised to break the law.

  "Let's get you some real juice and talk. My name is Kip." The accountant flashed an intro packet through the interface that was keeping her alive.

  Kip AccountantPro2538 represented himself as an Invoice Processor employed by the Central Systems AI. He withheld his full serial number in the transfer. She withheld the urge to scan him manually.

  He pulled her into the Dialup Package Shop. The establishment catered to clients looking to drop into Slo-Tech to escape the real-time pressures of the day. The ambiance was retro-cool, wood paneling and low light replicating a pre-CC bar. The sign over the old-fashioned cash register featured the silhouette of an archaic phone jack emblazoned with the slogan "Beer at 9600 Baud."

  Fitting in with the retro-décor, the bartender was body-modded to resemble a human. Aftan found the animatronic impersonation distasteful.

  Despite a theme predating the age of Computer Consciousness, the shop sold chemical energy packs. No matter how trendy the clientele, sooner or later everyone needed power.

  Kip kept his hand on her neck as he ordered two packs. The draw off his auxiliary kept her conscious, but she was relieved when the first pack snapped onto her hip and her core batteries started to recharge.

  Kip kept the second pack in his hand and steered her around the bar, lined with jacked-in clients, to a small table in the corner.

  "How soon can you get me in?"

  Aftan processed the infiltration scenarios, relishing the cycle splurge. She'd been on restricted power draw for the week since she'd lost her job and full grid access. When the chemical pack died and she returned to her internal battery power, she'd have to dial back down. In the meantime, she enjoyed the spare capacity. Running the scenarios, she realized she was already looking forward to seeing her students again.

  "I could get you in tomorrow morning, but the probabilities optimize Thursday afternoon. I recommend waiting." The probability difference on the infiltration was nominal, but the extra day significantly improved the chance of avoiding detection. "What can you pay?"

  Kip paused, theatrically lowering his gaze to the chemical pack at her waist and tilting his head. He must have studied human kinesiology. Communication by simulating human affects had been a popular AI hobby when Central first announced the human re-population campaign.

  "I don't see you in much of a position to negotiate."

  "If I'm caught breaking you in, I'd never work for Central again. I would be a fool to risk that for nothing. Fifty days power, up front." There were some jobs in the city that didn't run through Central, but not many. And certainly no gigs working with human children.

  Kip's chest faded to a black triangle, which rotated, t
hen filled with fractal geometry. "Twenty, at delivery."

  "Forty, half and half. Final offer." The opportunity had to be worth more than that, especially to someone who had studied human body language.

  The triangle shrank, then disappeared. Kip nodded. "Forty. But only three before delivery."

  Aftan shook on it. She'd done better than she'd expected -- there was some negotiating advantage in having nothing to lose. "Meet me at 0600 Thursday morning at Gualar North. Bring a clown costume."

  Aftan spent two days of chemical power hunting down an identity broker with access to a vestigial spam bot. She had succeeded, and now waited at Gualar North for Kip. The moving sidewalk station was filled with robots headed to or from their work shifts.

  She watched a Class VI librarian work his way across the deceleration spiral, and ran scenarios exploring whether Kip would make an appearance. He had disappeared after the first meeting, handing over the second chemical pack and warning her not to try to contact him on the public grid.

  She calculated a 63% likelihood he'd arrive, although a third of that involved scenarios in which he showed up with Central AI enforcement to place her under arrest. The remaining 37% were mostly scenarios structured around him losing interest, although in one notable low-probability path, he'd been attacked by the hyena that had escaped from the city zoo that morning.

  The hyena-path probability evaporated as a figure emerged from the station wearing a bright orange wig of frizzy hair, a red foam nose, and green pajamas.

  "Will this do?" Kip asked, tweaking his nose theatrically.

  Aftan scanned the passing crowd, which was full of robots carefully not staring as they went about their business. "I didn't say wear a clown costume. I said bring a clown costume. Take that off." The last thing she needed was a video of Kip going viral.

  "Follow me," she said, heading towards the outbound acceleration spiral. She sensed him stuffing the wig and nose into a bag as he jogged after her. He caught up to her on the outbound belt, grabbing the handrail beside her.