Exceptions to Reality_ Stories - Alan Dean Foster [88]
Sitting down hard on the useless hoard, the otter slowly removed his feathered cap from between his ears and let it dangle loosely from his fingers. “I don’t suppose—I don’t suppose you ’ave a worthy spellsong for rescuin’ this sorry situation, do you, mate?”
Bringing the duar around, Jon-Tom shrugged. “No harm in trying.”
But Pink Floyd’s “Money” did not turn the tokens to real gold, nor did all the otter tears that spilled into the black river all the rest of that memorable day…
Redundancy
This story was originally commissioned for UNIX magazine. New intelligent software had been developed that allowed a computer to make decisions not only based on a predetermined set of standards, but also by appraising and evaluating situations and reaching an appropriate conclusion on its own. Similar software helps the Mars rovers to navigate independently while out of the range of communication with Earth.
The tale never appeared in UNIX magazine because, according to the editor who commissioned it, his superiors felt that a science-fiction story was not appropriate for a venue that dealt with actual science. This would, I think, be news to several generations of scientists, engineers, and researchers who have ofttimes been inspired by the science-fiction stories they read while growing up.
In composing stories, I frequently have to try to put myself in the mental and physical position of various aliens. Though designed by humans, nonhumanoid machines still qualify as perfectly alien. What, really, is your computer thinking when you put it, and yourself, to sleep? Relying entirely on the standards and practices that have been programmed into it, how could one possibly make what in the last analysis amounts to a moral or ethical decision?
In Tom Godwin’s classic SF story “The Cold Equations,” a human is forced to make a life-or-death decision in a machine-like fashion.
What if the reverse were true?
Amy was only ten, and she didn’t want to die.
Not that she really understood death. Her only experience with it had come when they had buried Gramma Marie. Now the funeral was a wisp of a dream that hung like cobweb in the corners of her memory, something she did not think of at all unless it bumped into her consciousness accidentally. Even then it was no more than vaguely uncomfortable, without being really hurtful.
She did not recall a lot about the ceremony itself. Black-clad grown-ups speaking more softly than she had ever heard them talk, her mother sobbing softly into the fancy lace handkerchief she never wore anywhere, strange people bending low to tell her how very, very sorry they were—everything more like a movie than real life.
Mostly she remembered the skin of Gramma Marie’s face, so fine and smooth as she lay on her back in the big shiny box. The fleshy sheen mirrored the silken bright blue of the coffin’s upholstery. Such a waste of pretty fabric, she remembered thinking. Better to have made skirts and party dresses out of it than to bury it deep, deep in the ground. She liked that idea. She thought Gramma Marie would have liked it, too, but she couldn’t ask her about it now because Gramma Marie was dead, and people couldn’t talk to you anymore once they were dead. Not ever again. That was the thing she disliked most about death: not being able to talk to your friends anymore.
Thinking about it made her shiver slightly. She knew she was in big trouble, and she didn’t want to end up looking like Gramma Marie.
The potato vines and the carrots and the lettuce had not yet begun to die, though the leaves on the fruit trees were already starting to droop. Some had been killed by the explosion, torn to bits or ripped up and hurled violently against one another. One of the big pear trees had been blown to splinters. Smashed pears lay scattered across