Year's Best SF 15 - By David G. Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer Page 0,188

executive function suite. You fix the hurricanes.”

“Actually, sir, there’s some overlap,” Cal put in. “The bipolar design is complex. But, yes, essentially that’s true.”

“So what are you doing, Aeolus?”

“I am enthusiastically fulfilling all program objectives.”

“But you let one through, didn’t you? People died because of you. And a historic monument was wrecked, at Canaveral.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“I’m from Oversight. I’m here to find out what happened here and to decide what to do about it. So what do you have to say?” Allen waited, but Aeolus offered no further explanation. “What a mess this is,” Allen said to Freddie.

“Actually, this is again typical of AxysCorp,” Freddie said. “Given immense budgets, huge technical facilities, virtually unlimited power, and negligible scrutiny, AxysCorp technicians often took the opportunity to experiment. Of course a willingness to meddle was necessary for them to be able to proceed with Heroic-Solution geoengineering projects in the first place.”

“They used the climate disaster as the cover for crimes,” Allen said. “The purposeless crippling of sentiences, for example. We have to acknowledge their achievements. But it’s as if the world has been saved by Nazi doctors.”

“Humans are flawed creatures,” Fortune said. “Most of them are bumbling mediocrities. Like your grandfather, Allen, whose solution to the world’s ills was to exile me up here. To tackle monstrous problems, you need monsters.”

“Well, the hell with it.” Allen was growing impatient. “I need to study your bipolar AI. I’ve some gear in my luggage. Freddie, this will be technical. Why don’t you take a walk around the station?”

Bella said eagerly, “Oh, let’s. I’ll show you.”

“And you,” Allen said to Fortune, “show me back to my cabin. Please.”

With bad grace, Fortune stomped off.

Bella gave Freddie a tour of the habitable module and its facilities: cabins, mostly unused, galleys, washrooms, a virtual recreation room. Everything was drab, utilitarian, and old.

Bella told Freddie a little about herself. “My protocols are quite strict.” She tried to push her hand into the wall. Sparks scattered from her palm, and Bella screwed up her face in pain. “I can’t go flying around in vacuum either. I have to eat and drink. I even have to use the bathroom! It’s all virtual, of course. But Fortune says he designed my life to be as authentically human as possible.”

Freddie said carefully, “But why did he create you at all?”

“I give him company,” Bella said.

Freddie, an academic who was careful with words, noted that she hadn’t explicitly confirmed that Fortune had “created” her, as the AxysCorp engineers had created Cal and Aeolus, any more than Fortune had admitted it himself.

They soon tired of the steely corridors, and Bella led the way to an observation blister. This was a bubble of toughened transparent plastic stuck to the bottom of the module’s hull. Sitting on a couch, they looked down on the Earth, a bowl of light larger than the full Moon. Freddie was thrilled to see the white gleam of Antarctic ice. But the fragmented remnant cap on that green-fringed continent was the only ice visible on the whole planet; there was none left on the tropical mountains, Greenland was bare, and at the north pole was only an ocean topped by a lacy swirl of cloud.

Bella’s thin, pretty face was convincingly painted by Earthlight. “Of course, we’re suspended permanently over the middle of the Atlantic. But you can see day and night come and go. And if I ever want to see the far side, I can always call for a virtual view.”

She had no real conversation, under the surface. She was an empty vessel, Freddie thought. Beautifully made but unused, purposeless. But then the only company she had ever had was the reclusive Fortune—and perhaps the station’s artificial minds, Cal and Aeolus. “I’m no expert. But I can see that this environment doesn’t offer enough stimulation to you as a sentience. You’ve a right to more than this.”

Bella seemed moved to defend herself, or perhaps Fortune. “Oh, there are things to see,” she said. “It’s a marvel when Earth goes dark with night, and you can see the stars. And you can see AxysCorp facilities, studded all over the sky. Sometimes you can even make out the big Chinese space shields. The Heroics, Fortune’s generation, saved the world. You can see it in the sky.”

Freddie suspected these views were just watered-down versions of Fortune’s opinions, the only human mind Bella had ever been exposed to. “But people on Earth,” she said, “don’t always feel that way. AxysCorp did fulfil the Heroic-Solution strategy,