Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld
“My customers are not molecules of gas! They are individuals, and I revel in their eccentricities. That’s why my tickets are more expensive than yours!”
“Oh, ticket prices is it? Who’s talking throw-weights now?”
“Number-cruncher!”
“Intuitionist!”
Soon, the war ended in a conversational equivalent of mutually assured destruction: almost simultaneously, both parties terminated their transmissions. The two flecks of organization and intelligence passed each other in frosty silence against the chaotic wilds of metaspace.
The Queen Favor (the smaller of the two ships in the dialogue) turned back to its conciergial tasks with redoubled efforts. Who did that monstrosity of a slaveship think it was? The Favor flipped through the other vessel’s deck plans with disgust: artificial beaches and lethally high absailing walls and zero-g parks the size of soccer stadiums. The gross entertainments required for the distraction of twenty thousand souls. The Favor lovingly accessed the slender volume of its own passenger manifest, 1,143 customers, each one psychologically and physically profiled to a level of detail that the most repressive security state would envy. (But were such a comparison made to the Queen Favor, another battle royal would doubtlessly result.) It was almost dinner time. The craft had already spent hours preparing for the meal, but it scrutinized the arrangements with renewed fervor. Most of the passengers were eating in the many restaurants of the Medina, of course. There, low stone walls guided windy cobblestone roads onto unexpected tableaux—exquisite fountains, river walks, false desert vistas—all under an artificial sky that held a different drama each night. Subtle dramas, of course: a building storm, the slow rise of a comet, not the alien bombardments doubtless playing in its giant cousin’s skies. The Queen Favor made slight changes in the Medina’s layout every night. It generally knew where individual passengers intended to dine, through an overheard conversation or a request for advice, but the ship sometimes subverted its charges’ desires. It enjoyed guiding like-minded parties into proximity through the shift of a wall here or a suggested table just there. When the waiters arrived at their stations, they might find their restaurant slightly larger or smaller, or perhaps hidden behind some new feature of the landscape to accomplish these ends.
It had been a good trip, so far. A late-evening brawl between two factions of NaPrin Intelligencers had seemed a disaster at first, but the passengers had buzzed with excitement about it for days. Several of the combatants had even become friends. That was the NaPrin for you. But a very few of the passengers seemed not to be enjoying themselves. Unavoidable, perhaps, among hundreds, but tonight the Queen Favor was not in the mood for rationalizations of scale.
A young woman traveling alone was usually not a difficult charge. The one in question spoke numerous languages, and the ship had introduced her (explicitly and through connivance) to artists, athletes, politicals, aristocrats, lottery winners, drug addicts, absconding criminals, mercenaries, and even a very deadly though civilized species of brain parasite whose legally dead host was quite handsome. She had impressed them all, but she herself had never seemed more than politely engaged; worse, she had never answered any of their requests to dine together. Not even to say no.
Her profile was odd, too. She was beyond rich. Economically Disjunct, to be exact. EDs were rare, but one encountered them often enough in the super-charged economy of humanity’s four-hundred-year expansion. A patent on a universal application or a prospector’s claim on a unique resource created individuals whose wealth was no longer worth keeping track of. Entities such as the ship (itself disinterested in money, a necessary fiction used by humans to organize themselves) simply allowed the Economically Disjunct to indulge themselves limitlessly, while quietly redistributing their real wealth as they saw fit. The informal agreements that sustained Economic Disjunction were not strictly legal, but being ED was a hard life to complain about. And it was certainly a more humane fate than the crushing burdens of absolute, planet-buying wealth. The life of an ED was without care, without limits on experience except those of the imagination.
And yet again she was dining alone.
The Queen Favor accessed, not for the first time, the woman’s profile. The document was replete with the usual medical, financial, and personal data, the sort of preference file one accumulated over a few decades of high-end travel: the customs, temperature, and dominant color palette of one’s home planet; the formality level that serving drones should use; the sleep patterns preferred when shifting gradually between the different day-lengths of planets of call. But the data for this woman seemed strangely flat. The usual surprises, contradictions, and rough edges of highly personal data were missing, as if her life were merely a textbook example composed with a deliberate lack of remarkable features. True, at the beginning of her life there was a fifteen-year gap in her personal history; a strange absence of data. Of course, even in the Expansion displaced orphans were not unknown, or perhaps the missing data had to do with the unusually high level of her security clearance. But she seemed to have emerged from this historical lacuna fully formed, without neuroses or physical trauma, and fantastically wealthy. There was an absence of interests, hobbies, phobias, and obsessions in the profile. No glaring request to be left alone, but equally no hooks or obvious pathways that would match her to suitable companions. Her habits, her social skills, even her brainwaves all gleamed as smooth and frictionless as a wall of glass.
Presumably, she was just the sort of passenger that a giant, barbarous passenger ship would leave to her own devices, expending no more effort than absolutely necessary. But for the Queen Favor, the woman posed an irresistible challenge. If nothing else, the ship would find her someone to have dinner with.
The Favor expanded its pursuit of a solution. Like a chess computer increasing the ply-depth of its analysis, the vessel cast aside current customs and plumbed its vast database. The search plunged into the great architecture of its memory core like the roots of some ancient tree searching for water, extending to sift the social rituals of other centuries, of alien species, of fictional realities. Finally, it discovered a solution in the annals of pre-Expansion Earth. It was simplicity itself, really. A purposeful mistake would be made, reservations erased and then reinstated. A shortage of tables, such as might have existed in the old days of scarcity and error, would be created. The woman would be forced to join another party’s table. A heady breach of etiquette protocols, but surely that was the point of being a person as well as a spacecraft: one could bend the rules. Best of all, the plan relied on a measure of randomness so complete that the usual predictive modelling techniques were worthless. The scheme was complex and would require many more machinations tonight; perhaps several attempts to get it right. Its pursuit was almost an act of faith.
Preparations were made. Quiet messages sent to various restaurant staffs, with attached conversational avatars ready to answer any objections. And somewhere below a cerulean sky just now darkening enough to see the first flickers of a deliberately sparse meteor shower, a few stone walls rumbled tardily into place.
Gas particles, indeed!
Mira waited until the sky was dark before going out.
She preferred to wander the streets at times of the ship’s day when she could be almost alone. During the height of dinner hours, the winding paths emptied of traffic; the restaurants, bistros, and cafes would be lit up and loud with talk and music, and she would share the thoroughfares with only a few intently hurrying latecomers. Looking into the light spaces from the darkness, cataloguing the modes and flavors of enjoyment without participating, like an observant foreigner travelling alone without any facility for the local language: fascinated but removed.
When she became tired and hungry, and as the first diners began to finish and drift into the street looking for fresh entertainment, she settled on a place without thinking. For Mira’s purposes, the restaurant had only to be dark and neither threateningly full nor revealingly empty.
Mira wore a garment that looked formal and expensive, but was without a designer’s imprint. Indeed, it had been costly only in the way of combat hardware. It generally appeared to be dark gray, but it contained a few terabytes of borrowed military code that gave it a subtle sort of camouflage ability. When she sat for a long time in one place, it gradually blended into the background, the ultimate wallflower’s petals.
The restaurant was three-quarters full. She let her mind flutter among the various languages of the customers, identifying and enumerating them without lingering for meaning. A cabal of pale humans power-gabbling in High Anglo Expanded; an overcrowded table, waiters weaving elegantly around its jutting extra chairs, full of Xian soldiers boasting in Pan-Semitic; a mixed-species party charmingly murdering Diplomatique. No tongues within hearing that she didn’t know. She often wished that her forgotten upbringing had left more holes in her linguistic skills. Concentrating, she tried to escape comprehension of the sounds, hoping to elevate them to some kind of alien music.
In the attempt, her focus shifted to the other lone diner in the restaurant. Not only silent, he was still as well, his head tipped up toward the overhanging trees as if to let the false stars in under his heavy brow. He was huge (especially for an artificial), human-shaped and coherent, without the floating peripherals and distributed core fashionable throughout the last decade. And his skin surface accentuated his solidness and stillness; it had a mineral sheen, igneous and rugged, that made her wonder if he weren’t simply a statue. She watched him carefully, trying to catch any movement. The menu arrived before she had seen even a hint of motion.
As overwrought as everything on this vessel, the menu started by describing its own elaborate construction: paper composed of roughage from the passenger’s own collected and sterilized shit (how witty), ink distilled from plant dyes (how rustic), the cover made from the skin of a real dead animal (how macabre). No, the old arts weren’t lost here on Queen Favor; you could visit the colony of religious technophobes who tilled the bucolic upper decks, complete with false seasons and infant mortality, and could buy their crude wares while their children gawked. At long last, a race of happily accurate flat-worlders.
The food, however, lacked any measure of the common touch. Exotic animals, specially hybrid plants, pure synthetics; handmade, machine-processed, wave-bombarded. The voyage had assaulted her with endless culinary flourishes, and they’d lost all distinction through their magnificent, consistent complexity. She craved bread and water.
She fingered her selections (the crude fibers of the paper were interlaced with touch-sensitive intelligence) and dutifully answered when pressed for endless specifics: degrees of cooking, spicing, psychoactivity.
When the ordeal was over, Mira rested her head in her hands, closing her eyes in the cave darkness behind her palms. She was growing tired earlier every night.
Judging from her coloring, Mira’s ancestors had lived in the Mediterranean basin. In the odd moments she spent searching for her past, she’d read that many of these cultures observed something called siesta, a day-breaking ritual of rest. In this pre-industrial sleep pattern, one rose early and went to bed late, making up for the long day with a nap in the afternoon. Lately, she had experienced a strange inversion of this custom welling up from her genes; perhaps mutated by new worlds and the empty spaces between the stars. She had begun to wake up later and later, and was sleepy by the time evening began. The inverted siesta came in the wee hours, an anti-nap in which she lay awake in darkness. But she refrained from drugging herself; instead, she remained carefully motionless through the growing hours of insomnia, reluctant to break the surface tension of night as if hoping to learn something in that dark, empty expanse.
She opened her eyes to discover the maître d’ awaiting her attention with obvious embarrassment.
“Excuse me,” he began uncomfortably, “but there seems to have been a mistake.”
These were shocking words aboard the Queen Favor, as unthinkable as, “Pardon, but our drive is down, would you mind grabbing an oar?”
With fascination she waited for an explanation.
“When the young lady was seated, I had forgotten that all tables were reserved.” He made a hopeless sort of gesture toward a large party of uniformed young men. A sports team. Or perhaps soldiers. Aspirants to some new cult? “You may join them if you wish. Or perhaps join another table.”
She smiled. What a royal fuckup for the Queen Favor. She could imagine the reparations that would come later, hosts of supplicant avatars bearing gifts, deliciously detailed apologies. Mira rose, gathering her cloak around her. (It had already taken on the dappled pattern of leafy shadows.) She would simply take her meal in her cabin. It was only the ship’s wheedling that had gotten her out tonight, after all.
The evening was ending in the best possible way.
But then she caught sight of the statue-man again. He had moved, his head now cocked toward the rowdy new arrivals. The other clientele were looking toward them as well. Mira imagined the many stares that would follow her if she left now in the celebrity of this brief disturbance, and she shivered a little. “Perhaps I could join the artificial, the big one eating alone,” she said.
“Of course,” the maître d’ answered, bowing a little as he turned toward the statue.
The artificial looked at them and, without hesitation, nodded. He must have received the query through direct interface—the Queen personally handling this minor disaster. Mira smiled with reignited satisfaction as she walked toward his table. Now two passengers had been embarrassed and inconvenienced by the Favor’s screwup.
They were seated together for a few moments before he spoke; she had wondered for a second if he would.
“I should introduce myself. My name is Darling.” His Diplomatique was quite good, perhaps a little archaic, as if it had been formed before the new Contacts: the NaPrin and Chiat Dai influences were missing.
“Mira Santiarre Hidalgo,” she responded. He nodded and smiled as if the three names utterly satisfied, and lofted his gaze toward the sky again.
His lack of discomfort disappointed her a little. She’d been hoping to find him brittle, rude, only acquiescing to her request out of extreme embarrassment. But at least he wasn’t as terribly charming and resolutely civilized as all the other entities she’d met on the Favor.
As her moment on the moral high ground of inconvenience elapsed, Mira found silence reasserting itself, eased by the diffident habits of eating alone so many nights. She wanted to shake off the feeling, and her frustration made her aggressive. At last, she actually wanted to talk to someone on this ship, and he was being as laconic as a serving drone.
When his food arrived, and he began to consume it in the old-fashioned way (old-fashioned for an artificial, that is), she decided to play dumb.
“What are you up to, if I may ask?”
His hands were held stiffly at either side of the dish. The sensory strands that extended from his wrists criss-crossed over the plate, a cage of antennae imprisoning all but the tendrils of steam that rose from the dish. Even the mechanism was out-of-date: most artificials now used invisibly small filaments in their sensory arrays, or energy fields erected on the fly.
“I am appreciating this dish,” Darling responded politely. “Imaging its density in the millimeter band; cross-bombarding it with X- and UHF; reading the content of stray particulate mass; observing the cooling patterns of its constituent parts.” A few of the strands left their positions in the web to plunge through the crust that encased the pie, little geysers of steam erupting from their entry holes, and Darling sighed a bit to himself, his eyelids fluttering. “It’s a pleasingly complex dish: fruit, meat, and sugars at high temperature; extremely difficult to reverse-engineer. I may have to consult the menu.”
His eyes focused on her. “Because I don’t stick it down my throat?”
Mira laughed. His Diplomatique was awfully good; blunt statements didn’t come easily in the language. “Exactly.”
“What I’m doing is the same as what you do when you eat. You simply use nose and eyes (both remote sensors) and tongue (a thick but highly complex contact strand) to accomplish the task.”
“But the swallowing—!” she said, but didn’t know quite what words should follow.
“Ah, yes,” he supplied. “The changes in body chemistry that result from ingestion. A rise in blood sugar, the stimulation of bodily processes, the psychotropics of capsicum, caffeine, alcohol. All very intense sources of experience.”
“And the point of eating, actually,” she said. “Consumption.”
He smiled indulgently at her biocentrism. “Is sex without procreation uninteresting? Adrenalin without actual danger unstimulating?”
Mira shook her head. “No. Of course, not. Sorry. I was being provocative.”
“I enjoyed it. But allow me a provocation in return. May I observe as you take a bite?”
She must have looked dumbfounded.
“By observe, I mean monitor closely. Your reaction would intrigue me. Perhaps enlighten me.”
“Sure,” was all Mira could think to say.
A few of the sensory strands withdrew their attentions from the pie and snaked toward her. One wrapped around each wrist, oddly cool and dry, taking positions that would register minute finger movements, heart rate, any sweat from her palms. Another brushed her neck. She felt it radiate into multiple fingers. Feather-soft but assertive, they took up positions at her throat, her temples, in contact with the tiny network of muscles that make the eyes so expressive.