Forever Magazine Issue 42 by Steven Popkes

Author:Steven Popkes [Popkes, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: magazine, novella, science fiction, science fiction magazine, short fiction, short story
Publisher: Wyrm Publishing
Published: 2018-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 2012.

The Cold Inequalities

Yoon Ha Lee

Sentinel Anzhmir only noticed the discrepancy because of one of her favorite books. At least, she was almost certain it had been a book, rather than a game, or an escritoire, or a pair of shoes. She had not accessed it in some time.

The archiveship’s master index showed no change. It was Anzhmir’s duty to monitor the jewel-flicker of her freight of quantum blossoms in their dreaming, as well as the more mundane systems that regulated navigation, temperature, the minutiae of maintenance. The archiveship’s garden consisted of a compressed and sequenced cross-selection of human minds, everything from pastry chefs to physicists to plumbers. The selection was designed to accommodate any reasonable situation the colony-seed might find itself in, and a great many unreasonable ones as well.

Anzhmir had reached for the book’s address in memory, and found instead a wholly unfamiliar piece of lore. The discrepancy could only mean one thing: a stowaway.

She knew what must be done, although she regretted it already. As sentinel, she was made to harvest lives. Hers was a useful archetype. And once she trapped the stowaway, she would zero it utterly.

The archiveship’s designers had compressed most of its contents, desiring to take as many blossoms and their necessaries of culture and knowledge as possible. The compression algorithm depended on the strict sequencing of the data, and the stowaway, by interfering with the sequencing, threatened the cargo entire. At the same time, the designers had realized that the sentinel would require maneuvering space both for her own sanity and to ensure that no stowaways escaped her gaze. So it was that Anzhmir could reconfigure the garden into a fortress, all firewall glory and cryptic gates, and populate it with foxes, tigers, serpents: a small fierce cadre of polysemous seducers, hunters, poisoners, the algorithmic extracts of old legends.

As she did so, a designated subpersona examined the intrusion that had been left where one of her favorite books had once lived. She cordoned off the subpersona to avoid any additional potential contamination.

That left a third task: reviewing the master index to assess the extent of the damage. The compression algorithm was finicky about placement. How much could be restored from backups? Assuming the backups hadn’t been corrupted as well.

If it had not been for the fact of failure already in progress, Anzhmir would have felt well-prepared to deal with the situation.

At this point, it is worth examining the matter of Anzhmir’s favorite books.

The Archive Collective usually refers to the sum of colonist-blossoms, rather than to their personal effects; but sometimes the term is used for the latter as well. It is too expensive to send people’s bodies, with their bloated tissues and fluids, to the stars. It is another matter to boil humans down to blossoms of thought, and to transport those, preserved in a medium of chilly computational splendor. Once the archiveship arrives and its nanites have prepared the site, only then will the blossoms be planted in bodies built atom by atom to accommodate the waiting environment.

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