Year's Best SF 17

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 out, and they told him it was.”

He stops, wonders how to go on.

“Who was I?” she says, finally.

“They didn’t use a real name for her,” he says. “There’s no knowing.”

(The black-market programmer was also a sucker for stories; he’d tagged her remnant “Galatea.” Mason will take that with him to the grave.)

She looks at him.

He thinks about the first look she ever gave him, wary and hard in an expression he never saw again, and the way she looked as Galatea fell in love with Paul, realizing she had lost herself but with no way of knowing how much.

He thinks about her avatar leaping over the balcony and disappearing.

He’d leave with her tonight, take his chances working on the black market, if she wanted him to. He’d cover for her as long as he could, if she wanted to go alone.

(God, he wants her to live.)

“I can erase what we did,” he says. “Leave you the way you were when Paul woke you.”

(Paul won’t notice; he loves her too much to see her at all.)

Her whole body looks betrayed; her eyes are fixed in middle space, and she curls her fingers around the edge of the chair like she’s bracing for the worst, like at any moment she’ll give in.

He’s reminded for a second of Kim Parker, who followed him to the Spanish Steps one morning during the Mori Academy study trip to Rome when he was fifteen. He sat beside her for a long time, waiting for a sign to kiss her that never came.

He’d felt stupid that whole time, and lonely, and exhilarated, and the whole time they were sitting together part of him was memorizing all the color codes he would need to build the Steps back, later, in his program.

Nadia is blinking from time to time, thinking it over.

The room is quiet—only one of them is breathing—and it’s the loneliest he’s felt in a long time, but he’ll wait as long as it takes.