Read Interzone 251 for Free Online Page B

the view again. “What are you going to do?”
    I put my hand in my pocket, fingering the small box. “Mrs Charyn gave me some…some ashes.”
    “Yes. What were you thinking of doing with them?”
    I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Suddenly I was seeing Lucia lying in bed, this AI-inhabited cat curled beside her, keeping her company while she waited to die. My throat muscles cramped up and it hurt like hell. I looked out at the view for a while, not seeing it, while Domino waited.
    After a minute or two I took the box out of my pocket and set it on the floor at Domino’s feet. “You should take this. You were closer to her than I ever was.”
    The cat turned its head and regarded the box, touching it with the tip of its nose. Then it looked up at me. “Before she got sick, Lucia became interested in reports of another new-tech construction site.”
    “That’s not surprising. What were the rumors around this one? Portal to alternate universes? Starship? A radio for talking to aliens?”
    “A starship,” Domino said. “The rumors were that a consortium of AIs and augmented humans were building a starship, or at least a spacecraft of some kind. Lucia hoped to visit this site personally, as you and she did with the Fermilab site. This one is in Colorado, southeast of Denver.”
    “Southeast of Denver,” I repeated. “Why are you telling me this, Domino?”
    The cat pushed the box toward my feet. “I think we should go there, Neil. To scatter Lucia’s ashes in a place that would have been special to her, to honor her memory, and perhaps to find out what is – or was – being built there.”
    “Denver fucking Colorado?” I whined. “How the hell am I supposed to get there? Lucia was the one who was good at finagling transportation.”
    “I’ve just contacted an intelligence that owns a small aircraft as one of its components. I’ve described your situation and it has agreed to provide transportation for us.”
    I pondered, trying to think of reasons to refuse. I could pretend, like Lucia’s mother, that I believed there were terrible diseases running rampant out there, or armed gangs, or radiation, or any of those mythical bugaboos. But Domino knew me, and knew that I knew better. And as it probably also knew, I had nothing else to do. Utterly and literally nothing. I’d barely managed to drag myself out of a weeks-long drugged and hot-wired VR binge to bring myself to this memorial service. “Is there any reason to think there’s more to these rumors than all the others – Fermilab, for example?” Domino hadn’t been with Lucia at the time of our trip to Batavia. It wasn’t until a few months later that she’d connected with Domino; at that time a newly-born free agent living in the spare cycles of some pre-Wars hardware cache, mostly talking to Lucia through her phone.
    “It’s impossible to say,” Domino said. “Given how uncommunicative high-transhumans are, it’s to be expected that we have no firm information. But there are indications that some such projects have been carried to completion.”
    I thought about asking what “indications” meant, but decided against it. “When can we start?” I asked the cat.
    “If we leave early tomorrow morning, we can be there by afternoon.”

    ***

    Neurons are slow. They’re capable of massive parallel processing and there are a lot of them in the human neocortex, but compared to electronics they’re crushingly, numbingly slow. So building hardware equal to, and then vastly surpassing, the processing power of the human brain wasn’t too difficult. The difficulty, the snagging point, was in the software. It was in teaching these thinking machines how to think. Not just to calculate and compute and follow instructions, but to
think
.
    In fact, teaching a machine how to think turned out to be essentially impossible. To be an effective intelligence, an entity needs to have a basic understanding of how the world works. It has to