The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

A milky blue box on a living-room table. A photonic array tumbling over Terra Tyrrhena. Calculations made in billions of parallel universes. Each computer contains the other, and millions more besides.

The machines that are building Mars have more than just the viewpoint of gods. They have something of the power. Quantum computing, quantum engineering. If calculations can be made in multiple universes, one of which supplies the perfect solution, how much simpler to cut out the application of that answer and cut straight to the result? It’s mere extension of theory into practice to take those solutions out of the abstract into the real world. Model a thousand, a million, a billion quantum Mars; a slew of possibilities from Barsoom at one end of the probability spread to tripod fighting machines and delicate crystal cities at the other. Humped along the bell-shaped curve in the middle, the likelier, possible Marses. Simple school algebra will give you the best likely solution. Output, and let that be your reality. Terraforming by quantum leap. Nudges along the path to inhabitability. More than terraforming. Whole-universe-forming. The quantum machines, the AIs that have, in the private mindspaces where humans cannot go, given themselves the names and natures of angels, have always understood that reality is a construct of language. They know what the shamans knew; that words, whether in primal chant or machine code, have power over the physical universe.

And somewhere in that polyverse, lies that answer that makes the theory real, and, by the gods whose power they have usurped, the machines are going to have a go at it. But what kind of Mars? Whose dreams will frame it? An old cosmonaut, left on the pad like a jilted bride, who casually asked a foolish prophetic question of a plastic box. A young construction worker, who is shown the glory every day and every night has it taken away from him, whose mind is sent spinning across space by quantum computers. These, certainly, and others besides, millions of others, brought to this place that is white with the light of millions of universes, to speak their dreams and tell their stories.

“Well, I could as well argue you’re my illusion,” Antti Selkokari said to the young Indian man standing before him barefoot in an incongruous paper coverall. “After all, I can understand you and you can understand me, And where does that happen except in dreams? And you’re hardly dressed for the cold. You’d be dead after ten minutes in that, where I come from.”

“And what about you?” Ashwin Mehta argued. “An old man with a compass? Very allegorical.”

“All right, then,” Antti said. “We’ll agree that each is a figment of the other’s imagination. So, then, who imagined all these?”

Figures were advancing through the white fog on all sides. Men, women, children, all ages and races and stations, walking patiently, silently. Between them, Antti and Ashwin saw other figures emerging from indeterminacy. Beyond them, yet others. The two lost men stood at the center of a great congregation of people.

“Who are you?” Antti demanded, more bold than Ashwin in the face of a faceless mass. “Where is this place? What do you want?”

A woman stepped forward. She was small, dressed in a simple shift frock, barefoot, her hair badly cut, urchin crop. She had soft black eyes and when she spoke, both men heard her in their own tongues, with an American accent. She said, “In answer to your questions: first; my folk don’t really do names-we’re AIs-but if you want to call me something, call me Catherine. It’s as good as any. Second: that entirely depends on you, all, but at the moment it might help to think of yourselves as individuals accidentally caught up in an experimental superimposed quantum state. Or a convocation, if that helps. Third: your stories. Your visions. Your hopes. Your Marses.”

Silence across the white plain. The shabby little woman turned to the great mass of people.

“Hey! It’s your world. You all have a say in it. Say nothing, and that bit goes unsaid. Your works build it, your stories tell it. Listen: quantum reality is information, pure and simple. Language defines what’s real: it’s the same for AIs as it is for humans. Deep down, everything is a story. We’re all tales. Tell me. Tell me your stories. We’ve got a world to build, and build it right.”

Against reason, Antti found words bubbling up in his throat. They were not demands for explanations that made sense, to be shown the way home. They were heart words, old memories and passions surging up like water from a deep aquifer struck by a well. It was a story of Mars, and the story of his own life.