The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

Francine nodded, unsurprised. We shared the same position on the Penrose theory; there was no need to discuss it again now.

I said, “I want to know if you’re going to have the operation.”

She continued drinking for a few more seconds, then released the straw and wiped her upper lip with her thumb, unnecessarily. “You want me to make up my mind about that, here and now?”

“No.” The damage to her uterus from the miscarriage could be repaired; we’d been discussing the possibility for almost five years. We’d both had comprehensive chelation therapy to remove any trace of U-238. We could have children in the usual way with a reasonable degree of safety, if that was what we wanted. “But if you’ve already decided, I want you to tell me now.”

Francine looked wounded. “That’s unfair.”

“What is? Implying that you might not have told me, the instant you decided?”

“No. Implying that it’s all in my hands.”

I said, “I’m not washing my hands of the decision. You know how I feel. But you know I’d back you all the way, if you said you wanted to carry a child.” I believed I would have. Maybe it was a form of doublethink, but I couldn’t treat the birth of one more ordinary child as some kind of atrocity, and refuse to be a part of it.

“Fine. But what will you do if I don’t?” She examined my face calmly. I think she already knew, but she wanted me to spell it out.

“We could always adopt,” I observed casually.

“Yes, we could do that.” She smiled slightly; she knew that made me lose my ability to bluff, even faster than when she stared me down.

I stopped pretending that there was any mystery left; she’d seen right through me from the start. I said, “I just don’t want to do this, then discover that it makes you feel that you’ve been cheated out of what you really wanted.”

“It wouldn’t,” she insisted. “It wouldn’t rule out anything. We could still have a natural child as well.”

“Not as easily.” This would not be like merely having workaholic parents, or an ordinary brother or sister to compete with for attention.

“You only want to do this if I can promise you that it’s the only child we’d ever have?” Francine shook her head. “I’m not going to promise that. I don’t intend having the operation any time soon, but I’m not going to swear that I won’t change my mind. Nor am I going to swear that if we do this it will make no difference to what happens later. It will be a factor. How could it not be? But it won’t be enough to rule anything in or out.”

I looked away, across the rows of tables, at all the students wrapped up in their own concerns. She was right; I was being unreasonable. I’d wanted this to be a choice with no possible downside, a way of making the best of our situation, but no one could guarantee that. It would be a gamble, like everything else.

I turned back to Francine.

“All right; I’ll stop trying to pin you down. What I want to do right now is go ahead and build the Qusp. And when it’s finished, if we’re certain we can trust it… I want us to raise a child with it. I want us to raise an AI.”

2029

I met Francine at the airport, and we drove across Sao Paulo through curtains of wild, lashing rain. I was amazed that her plane hadn’t been diverted; a tropical storm had just hit the coast, halfway between us and Rio.

“So much for giving you a tour of the city,” I lamented. Through the wind screen, our actual surroundings were all but invisible; the bright overlay we both perceived, surreally coloured and detailed, made the experience rather like perusing a 3D map while trapped in a car wash.

Francine was pensive, or tired from the flight. I found it hard to think of San Francisco as remote when the time difference was so small, and even when I’d made the journey north to visit her, it had been nothing compared to all the ocean-spanning marathons I’d sat through in the past.

We both had an early night. The next morning, Francine accompanied me to my cluttered workroom in the basement of the university’s engineering department. I’d been chasing grants and collaborators around the world, like a child on a treasure hunt, slowly piecing together a device that few of my colleagues believed was worth creating for its own sake. Fortunately, I’d managed to find pretexts-or even genuine spin-offs-for almost every stage of the work. Quantum computing, per se, had become bogged down in recent years, stymied by both a shortage of practical algorithms and a limit to the complexity of superpositions that could be sustained. The Qusp had nudged the technological envelope in some promising directions, without making any truly exorbitant demands; the states it juggled were relatively simple, and they only needed to be kept isolated for milliseconds at a time.