Year's Best SF 17

The project we are working on is about genetics and inheritance. Yesterday at school, Dr. Bai showed us how to decompose our consciousnesses into their constituent algorithms, each further broken down into routines and subroutines, until we got to individual instructions, the fundamental code. Then he explained to us how each of our parents gave us some of these algorithms, recombined and shuffled the routines during the process of our births, until we were whole persons, infant consciousnesses new to the universe.

“Gross,” Sarah thought.

“It’s kind of cool,” I thought back. It was neat to think that my eight parents each gave me a part of themselves, yet the parts changed and recombined into me, different from all of them.

Our project is to create our family trees and trace out our descent, all the way up to the Ancients, if possible. My tree is much easier, since I have only eight parents, and they each had even fewer parents. But Sarah has sixteen parents and it gets very dense up there.

“Renée,” Dad interrupts us. “You have a visitor.” His outline is not hazy at all now. The tone of his thoughts is deliberately restrained.

A three-dimensional woman comes out from behind him. Her figure is not a projection from higher dimensions—she’s never bothered to go beyond three. In my four-dimensional world, she looks flat, insubstantial, like an illustration of the old days in my textbooks. But her face is lovelier than I remembered. It’s the face that I fall asleep to and dream of. Now the day really is special.

“Mom!” I think, and I don’t care that the tone of my thoughts makes me seem like a four-year-old.

Mom and Dad had the idea for me first, and they asked their friends to help out, to all give me a bit of themselves. I think I got my math aptitude from Aunt Hannah and my impatience from Uncle Okoro. I don’t make friends easily, the same as Aunt Rita, and I like things neat, just like Uncle Pang-Rei. But I got most of me from Mom and Dad. On my tree, I’ve drawn the branches for them the thickest.

“Will you be visiting long?” Dad thinks.

“I’ll be here for a while,” Mom thinks. “I have some things I want to tell her.”

“She’s missed you,” Dad thinks.

“I’m sorry,” Mom thinks. Her face fails to hold her smile for a moment. “You’ve done a wonderful job with her.”

Dad looks at Mom, and it seems that he has more to think, but he nods and turns away, his outline fading. “Please come by … for good-bye before you leave, Sophia. Don’t just disappear like before.”

Mom is an Ancient, from before the Singularity. There are only a few hundred million of them in the whole universe. She lived in the flesh for twenty-six years before uploading. Her parents—she had only two—never uploaded.

My fractional siblings used to tease me sometimes about having an Ancient as a parent. They told me that unions between the Ancients and regular people rarely worked out, so it was no surprise that Mom eventually left us. Whenever anyone thought such a thing, I fought them so hard that they eventually stopped.

Sarah is excited to meet an Ancient. Mom smiles at her and asks her if her parents are well. It takes Sarah a while to go through the whole list.

“I should probably get back,” Sarah thinks, after she finally pays attention to the urgent hints I’ve been shooting her way.

When Sarah is gone, Mom comes over and I allow her to give me a hug. Our algorithms entwine together; we synchronize our clocks; and our threads ping onto the same semaphores. I let myself fall into the long-absent yet familiar rhythm of her thoughts, while she gently caresses me through my own.

“Don’t cry, Renée,” she thinks.

“I’m not.” And I try to stop.

“You haven’t changed as much as I expected,” she thinks.

“That’s because you’ve been overclocking.” Mom does not live in the Data Center. She lives and works in the far south, at the Antarctica Research Dome, where a few Ancient scientists with special permission to use the extra energy live on overclocked hardware year round, thinking thoughts at many times the speed of most of humanity. To her, the rest of us live in slow motion, and a long time has passed even though she last saw me a year ago, when I graduated from elementary school.

I show Mom the math awards I’ve won and the new vector space models I’ve made. “I am the best at math in my class,” I tell her, “out of two thousand six hundred twenty-one kids. Dad thinks I have the talent to be a designer as good as him.”

Mom smiles at my excitement and she tells me stories about when she was a little girl. She is a great storyteller, and I can almost picture the deprivation and hardships she suffered, trapped in the flesh.

“How terrifying,” I think.

“Is it?” She’s quiet for a moment. “I suppose it is, to you.”

Then she looks straight at me and her face takes on this look that I really don’t want to see. “Renée, I have something to tell you.”

The last time she had this look, she told me that she had to leave me and our family.