Laughter at the Academy Read online

  Some things are too dangerous to be allowed to take root for very long.

  O IS FOR OUTWARD BOUND

  There’s always a moment of heart stopping joy when the pull of gravity lets go and her ship runs free and clear across the open sky. Cherry sits behind the controls, tied to the ship with optical wires and catheters and a dozen other cold connections, and she laughs for the sheer beauty of the images being beamed into her brain by the ship’s exterior sensors. Her hands clutch the controls, and she soars across the brilliant blackness of space like a comet on a collision course with the cradle of mankind: Earth itself, that big blue, green, and brown ball of polluted seas and overpopulated soils that gave birth to the human race. She hates it there, how she hates it there, but sometimes, she has no choice. Sometimes, there is nowhere else to go but home.

  After an hour in the air she punches in the final coordinates and keys up her med systems. It’s time for another rejuve treatment. Wouldn’t do to look anything but her best when she meets the relatives.

  Q IS FOR QUESTIONING

  Cherry’s ship is small enough to fit through any hole in the security nets, and her autopilot is clever enough to find them, driving her on a clean, traceless route until she reaches the outer edge of Earth’s security net. The auto wakes her then, and she yawns and stretches and activates an ID beacon older than most of what’s left in Known Space. Alarms blare seconds later, in rooms too dark and far away for her to see. Cherry hangs there for a moment, a red bell on the collar of the cat, and then she hits the burners and she’s gone, gone, away across the sky, and their tracers are following, and no one dares to press the button; no one dares to take the first shot. She is a fairy tale, a legend, a lie. She is a schoolteacher, and the daughter of a President, and the girl who gave everything away to grow in poisoned soil. She is a ghost story, and this is her frontier.

  When she reckons she’s taunted them long enough she stops, gives their guns the time they need to lock onto her position, and presses the button that will begin broadcasting her words across the heavens. “I thought we talked about this,” she says. “You promised to leave the outworlds alone. You said you were done grabbing for what’s not yours.”

  (And somewhere far away, a com jockey turns to his supervisor and asks, “What is she talking about, sir?” There is no answer. The bargain she refers to was struck fifty years ago, and the man who struck it with her has long gone to his grave. But where one side stands, the deal holds. That’s the only honest way of doing business.)

  She hangs there in the air, an easy target, and maybe that’s the point; maybe she’s more tired than she lets on. “Well?” she asks. “No response?”

  (“We have to say something, sir.”)

  “I suppose that means the deal’s off. I suppose that means I’m setting myself against you.”

  (“Tell her this.”)

  And then the words on her com, not spoken, but burning before her all the same: “We’re sorry, Miss Cherry.”

  And Charity smiles.

  T IS FOR TEACHER

  She doesn’t miss Earth much. The Earth that’s there now isn’t the one she left behind, not by a long shot; it’s been too long, and there are too many bullets and too many bodies between here and there. She made her choices and the people who stayed planetbound made theirs, and regrets have never changed the past. She’s invested her money and her time well since then. Generations have grown up knowing Miss Cherry as the quiet voice of reason, and knowing Charity Smith as a bogeyman used to frighten naughty governments into behaving themselves a little better, at least for a little while.

  Six hundred years is a long time to pinch pennies and buy bigger guns. She’s better armed than most planetary governments these days, and she makes sure they know it, even if they don’t believe she’s who she claims until her ship’s ID blazes on their screens like a warning from a disappointed god. She hasn’t fired as many shots as people say she has. She hasn’t needed to.

  Maybe one day they won’t need the firm hand anymore, and she’ll be allowed to go back to the girl she was on Titan, the one who’d never held a gun or killed a man. Maybe one day the last of the poisoned fruit will fall, and all the children of all the worlds will be able to grow up safe and unspoiled. But until that day, she has a job to do, and if it’s not a job that anyone gave her, well. Sometimes it’s the jobs we take for ourselves that matter most of all.

  The schoolhouse is not new; the desks are worn and marked with the initials of those who came before. But the chalkboard is clean and gleaming black, as dark as the hair of the woman who stands in front of the class. “Hello, Io,” she says, and smiles. “My name’s Miss Cherry. I think we’re going to be good friends. Now, who here can tell me the origins of the human race?”

  We Are All Misfit Toys in the Aftermath of the Velveteen War

  This is probably one of my favorite titles, ever. I have a tendency to go for extremes when titling things—either one word or twenty—and this is one where I really feel like I got it exactly right. Many of my titles have been truncated by the editors I presented them to, and while those editors have usually been correct to do so, I appreciate the fact that John Joseph Adams and his co-editor, Daniel H. Wilson, let me have this one.

  I collect dolls. This comes up periodically in my work. I tend to think of them as benevolent friends, even if they sometimes trigger the Uncanny Valley effect in people who don’t love them like I do. Sleeping in my guest room is an adventure! An adventure with so many eyes.

  My dolls hardly ever kill people.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS GIRL?

  —posted on a telephone pole in Lafayette, California.

  Half a dozen cars cluster behind the old community center like birds on a telephone wire, crammed so closely together that someone will probably scrape someone else’s paint on their way out of the parking lot. It would have been easy to leave a little room, but that’s not how we do things anymore. Safety means sticking close, risking a few bruises in order to avoid the bigger injuries.

  It’s silly. The war is over—the war has been over for more than three years, receding further into the past with every day that inches by—and we’re still behaving like it could resume at any time. It’s silly, and it’s pointless, and I still veer at the last moment, abandoning my comfortably distant parking space in favor of one that leaves my car next to all the others. I have to squirm to get out of the driver’s seat, forcing my body through a gap barely as wide as I am.

  Something moves in the shadow between the nearest dumpster and the street. It’s probably a feral cat, but my heart leaps into my throat, and I hold my coat tight around my body as I turn and race for the door. The war is over.

  The war will never end.

  Almost twenty people arrived in those half-dozen cars: gas is expensive and solitude is suspect, and so carpooling has become a way of life. I am the only person who comes to these meetings alone. They forgive me because they might need me someday, and because sometimes I bring coffee for the refreshment table. Not today, though. It was a rough night at work, and I feel their eyes on me, accusing, as I make my way to one of the open folding chairs. Like the cars, the chairs are set too close together, so that we can smell each other’s sweat, feel the heat coming off each other’s skins.

  Precaution after precaution, and the war is over, and the war will never end.

  “So glad you could join us,” says the government mediator, and there’s a condescending sweetness in her tone that shouldn’t be there. She knows why I’m late; she knows I didn’t have a choice in the matter. She’s just asserting dominance, and no one in this room will challenge her.

  I swallow fear like a bitter tonic as I drop into a chair. “I got turned around,” I say. “There was a new barricade on Elm, and I don’t know that neighborhood very well.” It’s harder to get around since most of the GPS satellites were decommissioned. They never turned against us—thank God for small favors—but data doesn’t care who uses it, and som
e of the people in charge decided it was better for a few civilians to get lost than it was to risk one of those satellites being taken over. I can’t say whether that was the right decision or not. We never lost a GPS satellite. Maybe we never would have. Maybe we would have lost them all. The war is over.

  The war will never end.

  It doesn’t matter.

  “Now that we’re all here, we can begin,” says the government mediator. Her smile is formal, practiced, and as plastic as our enemies.

  They all come from FEMA, the mediators, trained in crisis response and recovery. They’re just doing their jobs. I tell myself that every time they send us a new mediator, another interchangeable man or woman sitting in a splintery wooden chair, trying to talk us through a trauma that we cannot, will not, will never get past. When they start to care—when we become people, not statistics—that’s when they’re rotated again, one face blurring into the next. The country is too wounded for personal compassion. The world is too wounded. The good of the one is no longer a part of the equation.

  “My name is Carl,” says one of the men, and we all chorus, “Welcome, Carl,” as obedient as schoolchildren. Carl doesn’t seem to find comfort in our greeting. Carl’s eyes as are as empty as the mediator’s smile. Carl doesn’t want to be here.

  That’s something we have in common.

  “Did you want to share?” asks the mediator, even though she damn well knows the answer. We’re here because we have to be; we’re here because we want to share our stories, to hear the stories of others, and to sift through the patchwork scraps of information looking for the thing we need more than anything else in the world: hope. We’re hunting for hope, and this is the only place we know of where it’s been spotted.

  Carl nods, worrying his lip between his teeth before he says haltingly, “My Jimmy will be nine years old next week. The last time I saw him, he had just turned six…” And just like that, he’s off, the words tumbling like stones from his lips. The rest of us listen in silence. My hands are locked together, so tight that my fingers are starting to hurt.

  The war is over, and Carl is telling us about the son he lost when the war began, and nothing really matters anymore. Nothing will ever matter again.

  This is what happened.

  Artificial intelligence became feasible ten years ago, when a San Jose social media firm working on building the perfect predictive algorithm somehow unlocked the final step between a simple machine and a computer that was capable of active learning. Self-teaching machines were the future, and humanity was terrified. We were proud of our position at the peak of the social order, and we feared creating our own successors. Making matters worse, every country was afraid of how every other country would use this new technology. We were convinced that AIs would allow their users to dominate the others in war or commerce.

  In less than a month, artificial intelligence was more tightly regulated than stem cell research. In less than a year, it was outlawed in virtually all fields of human endeavor. But once a genie is out of the bottle, it can’t be put back in, and we couldn’t render an entire technology illegal. In the end, there was only one area where everyone agreed the self-teaching programs could be freely used:

  Education.

  That seems careless now, in the harsh light of hindsight, but at the time, it seemed like a perfectly reasonable compromise. Dolls that could learn the names of their owners had been around for years. Letting them learn a little more couldn’t hurt anything—and toys had no offensive capabilities, toys couldn’t get online and disrupt the natural order of things, toys were safe. We all grew up with toys. We knew them and we loved them. Toys would never hurt us.

  We forgot that kids can play rough; we forgot that sometimes, we hurt our toys without meaning to. We forgot that by giving toys the capacity to learn and teach, we might also be giving them the capacity to decide that they were tired of being treated like their thoughts and desires—their feelings—didn’t matter. We made them empathic and intelligent and handed them to our children, and we didn’t think anything could possibly happen.

  We were wrong.

  Carl covers his face with his hands as his story ends, crying silently into his palms. No one reaches out to comfort him. It’s been so long that I don’t think any of us remembers how comforting is supposed to go. We sit frozen, like so many life-sized dolls, and wait for the woman from FEMA to tell us what she wants us to do next.

  Her eyes scan the crowd like a hawk’s, intent and cool, picking through our faces as she searches out our secrets. Who is ready to speak, who needs to speak, even if they don’t realize it. When she looks at me, I shake my head minutely, willing her away. My work at the hospital makes me valuable—there are so few doctors left who will even look at children, much less treat them—and so she respects my silence, moving on to her next target.

  “Would you like to share?” she asks a woman I don’t recognize. That’s another FEMA trick: make the support groups mandatory, and then shift us from location to location, preventing us from forming individual bonds, encouraging us to form broader societal ones. Half the group is new to me. By the time they become familiar, the other half will change, people driving or bussing in from all sides of the city. That assumes that I won’t be reassigned before that happens, although my job keeps me tethered to a smaller geographic range than most. If a child is brought to the hospital, I will be needed. I can never go too far away.

  The woman—dark skin, dark eyes, and the same broken, empty sadness that I see in so many adult faces since the war—nods and introduces herself, beginning to speak. Her voice is halting, like every word has to be dragged out of her by someone invisible, some little girl or boy just outside the range of vision. She’s telling their story. She’s telling our story, and forgive me, Emily, but I can’t listen. I block out her words like I’ve blocked out so many others, because you can only hear certain things so many times before they start to burn.

  The war is over.

  The war will never, never end.

  As a pediatrician, I was involved with some of the earliest studies of the self-teaching toys. Were they good for children? Were they a socialization tool, a way of reaching out to kids who might not have anyone else to talk to? We prescribed them to the parents of autistic children as a “safe” companion, something that would never judge or leave them. Then we prescribed them to the parents of socially awkward children as friends, to the parents of hyperactive children as a relatable voice of reason, and finally to absolutely everyone. Self-teaching toys were the perfect gift.

  Better yet, no matter what they were built to resemble—the requisite soldiers and princesses, as well as the more gender-neutral teddy bears with their black button eyes and red velvet bows—they would fit themselves to the children, not to the stereotypes of the parents. Quiet or loud, gentle or boisterous, each child found their perfect playmate in the self-teaching toys.

  The recreational models cost more than most parents were willing to pay, of course, at least in the beginning. As the technology saturated more and more of the market, the prices dropped, until it was harder to buy a doll or bear that didn’t actively participate in playtime than one that did. There were even charities and non-profit organizations dedicated to getting the toys into the hands of low-income families. Every house had at least one self-teaching toy. Many of them had more. And the toys learned! Oh, how they learned. They learned our children. They learned us. In the end, they learned themselves, and that was where the troubles truly began.

  We weren’t prepared for toys asking questions of identity. “Who am I?” is not a question that anyone expects from the pretty painted mouth of a fashion doll. “Why am I here?” is foreign in the lipless muzzle of a teddy bear. But they asked, and we tried to answer, and all the while, we were growing more nervous. Had we built our toys too well? Was it time to somehow pull the plug on a technology that had spread so far as to become unavoidable? We kept the artificial intelligence out of our military
and our social infrastructure. In so doing, we invited it into our homes, and allowed it to flourish where we were most vulnerable.

  We built the toys to learn. We didn’t expect them to learn so well—or maybe we didn’t expect our children to be such good teachers.

  So many of them were designed to interact with apps and online games; so many of them knew how to access wireless networks, and the ones who couldn’t connect listened to those who could, and they talked. How they talked! They whispered and they gossiped and they planned, and somehow, we missed it. Somehow, we were oblivious. They were only toys, after all. What could they possibly do to us, their creators, that would make any difference at all?

  We were fools. And in the span of a single night, we became fools at war.

  Half the room has told their stories, halting voices forcing their way through well-worn memories of sons and daughters three years gone, but never to be forgotten. One man lost four children on the night the war began. His wife committed suicide a week later, convinced she was somehow the one to blame. His face is empty, like a broken window looking in on an abandoned house, and he never meets anyone’s eyes. Another woman had undergone five years of fertility treatments, only to have her single miracle child—the only thing she had ever truly wanted in her life—vanish on the first night of the war. I don’t know if her missing child is a son or daughter. I don’t ask.

  The woman from FEMA is looking for another victim when my pager beeps. Everyone jumps, all eyes going to me. “Sorry,” I say, although I don’t mean it, and stand before I check the readout on the screen. I know it’s an emergency. They only call me during my government-mandated support group when it’s an emergency. What kind of emergency doesn’t really matter. “I need to get back to the hospital. Sorry.”