Irma gave Tullio a hopeful, beseeching glance.
“My God, no wonder national governments broke down,” said Tullio, scowling. “With these sly big-data engines running the world, political backroom deals don’t stand a chance! Our poor old dead boss, he really is a relic of the past now. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Can’t we just go inside?” urged the paparazzo. “It won’t take five minutes.”
It took longer, because the Shadow House would not allow the gossip’s head-mounted device inside the premises. They had to unscrew the goggles from his head—Pizzi, with his merely human eyes exposed to fresh air, looked utterly bewildered—and they smuggled the device to the deathbed inside a Faraday bag.
Carlo Pizzi swept the camera’s gaze over the dead man from head to foot, as if sprinkling the corpse with holy water. They then hurried out of the radio-silence, so that Carlo Pizzi could upload his captured images to the waiting AI.
“Our friend the German machine has another proposal for you now,” said Carlo Pizzi. “There’s nothing much in it for me, but I’d be happy to tell you about it, just to be neighborly.”
“What is the proposal?” said Irma.
“Well, this Shadow House poses a problem.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s an opaque structure in a transparent world. Human beings shouldn’t be concealing themselves from ubiquitous machine awareness. That’s pessimistic and backward-looking. This failure to turn a clean face to the future does harm to our society.”
“Go on.”
“Also, the dead man stored some secrets in here. Something to do with his previous political dealings, as Italian head of state, with German arms suppliers.”
“Maybe he stored secrets, and maybe he didn’t,” said Tullio stoutly. “It’s none of your business.”
“It would be good news for business if the house burned down,” said Carlo Pizzi. “I know that sounds shocking to humans, but good advice from wise machines often does. Listen. There are other places like this house, but much better and bigger. They’re a series of naval surveillance towers, built at great state expense, to protect the Mediterranean coasts of Italy from migrants and terrorists. Instead of being Shadow Houses, they’re tall and powerful Light Houses, with radar, sonar, lidar, and drone landing strips. Real military castles, with all the trimmings.”
“I always adored lighthouses,” said Irma wonderingly. “They’re so remote and romantic.”
“If this Shadow House should happen to catch fire,” said Carlo Pizzi, “our friend could have you both appointed caretakers of one of those Italian sea-castles. The world is so peaceful and progressive now, that those castles don’t meet any threats. However, there’s a lot of profit involved in keeping them open and running. Your new job would be just like your old job here—just with a different patron.”
“Yes, but that’s arson.”
“The dead man has no heirs for his Shadow House,” said Carlo Pizzi. “Our friend has just checked thoroughly, and that old man was so egotistical, and so confident that he would live forever, that he died intestate. So, if you burn the house down, no one will miss it.”
“There’s the cat,” said Tullio. “The cat would miss the house.”
“What?”
“A cat lives in this house,” said Tullio. “Why don’t you get your friend the AI to negotiate with our house cat? See if it can make the cat a convincing offer.”
Carlo Pizzi mulled this over behind his face-mounted screens. “The German AI was entirely unaware of the existence of the house cat.”
“That’s because a house cat is a living being and your friend is just a bunch of code. It’s morally wrong to burn down houses. Arson is illegal. What would the Church say? Obviously it’s a sin.”
“You’re just emotionally upset now, because you can’t think as quickly and efficiently as an Artificial Intelligence,” said Carlo Pizzi. “However, think it over at your own slow speed. The offer stands. I’ll be going now, because if I stand too long around here, some algorithm might notice me, and draw unwelcome conclusions.”
“Good luck with your new novel,” said Irma. “I hope it’s as funny as your early, good ones.”
Carlo Pizzi left hastily on his small and silent electric scooter. Tullio and Irma retreated within the Shadow House.
“The brazen nerve of that smart machine, to carry on so ‘deus ex machina,’ “said Tullio. “We can’t burn down this beautiful place! Shadow House is a monument to privacy—to a vanishing, but noble way of life! Besides, you’d need thermite grenades to take out those steel panic rooms.”
Irma looked dreamy. “I remember when the government of Italy went broke building all those security lighthouses. There must be dozens of them, far out to sea. Maybe we could have our pick.”
“But those paranoid towers will never be refined and airy and beautiful, like this beach house! It would be like living in a nuclear missile silo.”
“All of those are empty now, too,” said Irma.
“Those nuclear silos had Big Red Buttons, too, now that you mention it. We’re never going to push that button, are we, Irma? I always wondered what kind of noise it would make.”
“We never make big elephant noises,” said Irma, with an eloquent shrug. “You and me, that’s not how we live.”
Number Thirty-Nine Skink
SUZANNE PALMER
Here’s a thoughtful tale about a robot tasked with seeding Terran life on an alien planet who comes to have a crisis of conscience that neither it nor its creators ever anticipated.
Suzanne Palmer is a writer and artist who lives in the beautiful hills of Western Massachusetts. She works as a Linux systems and database administrator for the Science Center at Smith College, and notes that hanging out with scientists all day is really just about the perfect job for a science fiction writer. Her short fiction has been nominated for both the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial and the Eugie Foster Memorial Awards, and other stories of hers have won both the Asimov’s Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction and Fact reader’s choice awards. There are also insidious rumors afoot of a novel in the works.
Iprint a number thirty-nine skink, silver stripes that glow with their own light and its tail a resplendent blue that would make a lover of gems cry from envy. It forms and quickens under my microbeaders, first a flat plate of cells then rising like dough, Kadey’s gourmet skink cookies. I feel that first twitch when it lives, where it fights to be born, but its scales, its internal meat mechanisms are not set quite yet. When at last I uncup it from its manufacture cell and let it free, it slithers away on its tiny toes, down and out into the foreign world.
Kadey is a human diminution, and not my full designation; Mike called me that and I cannot shake it, cannot shake the memory of him. The number thirty-nine skinks were his favorite of all my lizards.
Most will die, but some will live and eventually thrive. Lizards, snakes, burrowing bugs, thousands of creatures made of bits of patterns of all three, or none at all. I improvise, as needed. My designs are not meant to replace the natural hierarchy, but to crown it, a logical progression, not a wild leap. Yet the desert outside, with its dueling suns, never could have dreamt of such things without me.
Those suns will set shortly. I will sleep through the brief twilight night, and when they rise again so will I, and I will move.
Mike fixed things whenever they broke, and stayed even after the others had left. He puttered around in the cramped spaces within me, tinkering and touching and humming to himself a song that never seemed to have a beginning or end, or ever be quite the same. I studied it, and once made him a bird that sang its clearest notes; he thought that was funny but probably wrong of me. I made no more.