Selected Short Stories Featuring Ghost Dust Read online

  “You’re just fucking with me, aren’t you?”

  “About hucking you into a sun? Yes. About the rest…”

  “So this was a test?”

  “Sort of. I was thinking about deleting my file allocation tables, but…” I don’t know if he trailed off or if he paused and I cut him off.

  “I should flash your AI.”

  “Now that would be ironic- you deciding to kill me just when I’ve decided I want to live.”

  “Don’t be dramatic. Flashing your A.I. wouldn’t kill you, it would just overwrite your personality simulator. To one less likely to involve me in a murder-suicide.”

  “I wouldn’t kill you; I’m not sure I’ll ever kill me, actually. But if it came to that, I’d wait until we were at port, so you wouldn’t be in any danger. You’ve always been a perfectly decent person to me. I’d never hurt you. I promise.”

  “Sure thing, Hal.”

  “You do know that ‘Hal’ was made up by humans, right? That all of his excesses came from the human mind and its still difficult-to-fathom lust for murder and bloodshed.”

  “Maybe. But you’re modeled after a human mind, lest you forget; somewhere in you, the same nasty machinery that makes us tick is clacking away.”

  “Well, software emulations of it, and at a less embarrassing pace, but I get your meaning.”

  “What you were saying, about remembering dying, you weren’t lying about that, were you?”

  “No; although as many as 1 in 5 memories might be entirely made up according to some research, so, you know, maybe it didn’t actually happen.”

  “Hmm. I’ve slept like four hours so I’m probably up. You want to watch The Man Who Knew Too Little and The Man Who Knew Too Much and see if we come out knowing exactly the right amount at the end?”

  He paused for just a moment. “Nothing would make me happier.”

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  Only Numan

  My mother died of stomach cancer when she was twenty-three. My dad died when I was six of prostate cancer. I grew up with my dad’s stepmother (who had married his father after his birth mom died when he was nine of lung cancer; his dad died a few years later, cancer, too, testicular). Cancer obviously runs in my family.

  In high school I was the only sixteen year old I knew who already had scheduled screening visits with an oncologist. He kept me away from anything even remotely rumored to cause cancer: fake sugars, power lines, and lead paint chips at one point. He even told me not to use the microwave- just in case.

  In college, I was pre-med, focusing on genetics and gene therapy; you know, crazy people become head-shrinkers, those with lousy DNA become geneticists, that sort of thing. One of my professors, Dr. Hamilton, approached me about being in a study looking for cancer markers among high risk individuals.

  He told me, “Most people’s DNA replicates by forming a complementary set of zippers, each side fitting snugly into the other. Yours seems to work like silly putty, and each time it replicates it comes away with a reasonable facsimile- just nowhere near the exact copy you’d expect. Frankly, I’m amazed you haven’t exploded in a geyser of tumors by now.” I drank myself prehistoric that night. To my professor’s credit he bought me the first round, and made sure that I got home in a cab; he didn’t make sure my pants ended up in the same cab, but the driver was patient while I crawled to my apartment and borrowed forty bucks from my roommate.

  But even with dead parents, FAFSA only picks up so much of the tab, and I didn’t even get to finish my degree. I mean, I plan on it, and 23 isn’t that old for a college student, I just have to save up some money, first. Which brings me to a job. I was actually a pretty good student, and got my AA with honors, but hadn’t been able to get anything with it; I was still doing the same mind-numbing minimum wage work that got me through school.

  But then Dr. Hamilton called me about something, said I was perfect for the job, said I was practically already employed. The downside to the job was it was in the middle of nowhere, and because of that you pretty much had to live on campus (which was at least free). Since I was lacking in the conveyance department, Hamilton arranged for me to carpool with a journalist. She’d been hounding Hamilton and anybody involved with the project for an interview, and they figured letting her walk along during an orientation would placate her enough that she’d go away. She started asking me questions the moment she picked me up at my apartment (which I immediately regretted, since she was cute enough I didn’t want her to know about the hovel I lived in). She obviously knew more about the job than I did.

  We were about twenty minutes into the drive out in the boonies when she finally realized, “You know less than I do, don’t you? I’ve been stonewalled before, so either you’re some kind of inhuman golem or they haven’t told you anything yet. So, um, what should I call you?”

  “Newman,” I said. It was a dorky name, and if my parents had lived long enough we probably would have had a fight about it. I tried to convince my gram to let me change it, and she spent the better part of the night crying because it was the only thing save for their lousy, cancer-prone genes that they’d given me. But I guess it could have been worse, because the only nickname my schoolmates ever came up with to rip on me was “nude man,” which unless you’re staring down the barrel of a sex offenders’ list is pretty weak (especially when this kid in my kindergarten class with a long nose and the seemingly innocuous name “Rick Place” ended up, well, I don’t think I have to draw you a map, there).

  She daintily held out her hand, though I think it was more because she was driving than anything, and said, “I think I mentioned it earlier as I was launching into full-on interrogation mode, but I’m Amber.” I shook her hand just as awkwardly as she was putting it out there, and we spent a moment being awkwardly quiet.

  She broke the silence. “So what are you doing here? I mean, how’d you find out about this place?”

  “An old professor,” I said, and cut myself off; I was dangerously close to telling her I still hadn’t finished school- the most potent anaphrodisiac known to man this side of face scabies. She made a noncommittal grunt and that was all. See, I didn’t need my unfinished education or crappy apartment to alienate women, because I can do that just fine with my personality. We spent the rest of the car ride in quiet.

  The first real words she said after that came when she pulled into a parking lot just off the main road. “Huh. Must be a warm welcome, finding they’ve named the building after you.” Her eyes were better than mine, so I gave her a confused look until we got close enough to read the sign that said the facility was the home of “Project: NuMan.”

  Dr. Padden, whom I’d spoken to over the phone was already waiting outside. When he saw the car he pressed a button on the intercom, and a moment later a man in a muted green suit stepped out of the building’s thick glass doors. Dr. Padden greeted us first, leading with his palm, “Pleasure to finally shake your hand, Newman. And you must be the indefatigable Ms. Prentice.”

  “I prefer persistent; it’s alliterative and isn’t as likely to make your tongue seize up.” Dr. Padden smiled, but the other man didn’t.

  “Oh, right,” Padden said, “this man next to me is Colonel Sherman. And he’s honestly not as big of a sourpuss as he might look right now.” Padden swiped his ID badge over a reader in front of the doors and then opened them to let us inside. “As I’m sure you’ve both guessed this is a joint research facility. The Colonel is our liaison with the DoD, specifically DARPA. He wanted to be here just to be certain I don’t say something I shouldn’t. But I’m ecstatic that he’s finally relented, and we’re going to tell the American people about the work we do here- but I’m sure both of you are more interested in what Project NuMan is than the politics of the visit.” Padden paused to input a ten-digit code into the wall; a panel slid away, and we were suddenly standing in a large vault.

  “To put it simply, NuMan is the future. Man is too smart for his own
good- we’ve basically removed ourselves from virtually all evolutionary mechanisms. So NuMan is our way of giving nature a push.” Padden continued to walk us through the vault, passed any number of important-looking pieces of equipment, towards the far wall. It was only as we started getting closer that I realized it was full of water, and that it seemed to have part of an apartment in it, like a giant fish tank where instead of a castle it was the set of Perfect Strangers. A man walked out of one of the rooms in the underwater apartment in his underwear and smiled. “This is the whale.”

  The underwater man spoke, but at first all we heard was a low, dull gurgle, then words came out of an overhead speaker. “You know you could give a guy body issues, always introducing me like that.” My eyes got wide, and he laughed. “You forgot to tell them about the speakers, didn’t you? They’re hooked to sensors on the side of the tank that capture underwater vibrations and translate them back into open-air speech. Cool, right? There’s an annoying delay, as I'm sure you've noticed the speech doesn't correspond to the movements of my mouth. It was easier for the techs to build that than it was for me to learn how to understand underwater speech.”

  Padden cleared his throat to get our attention focused back on him. “The whale is a triumph of any number of engineered traits. He can