The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021

KARIN LOWACHEE Survival Guide

The neurolink never lets him forget. It’s Aiden the way Sage remembers him, the sound of his voice more potent than any visual. Sometimes when he disconnects the link, he still hears Aiden in the chamber of his mind. It’s a grief he constantly steps on, the cracks in the pavement that bring nothing but bad luck.

At first he fought the neurolink. He didn’t want the reminder—​it was macabre, how could they make him? But without it he would fall behind, his education would suffer, the world would end. His parents let him grieve for a month but then they made him use the link. Aiden’s mother created it, after all: AIDEN, the Artificial Integrated Dialogue and Education Neurolink. Created it for them, the students. For a better world, better opportunities, a better future. So they don’t have to be driven solely by a numerical system of evaluation and other people’s agendas. That’s the idea anyway, Ms. Ito said. Of course they still sit exams, submit evaluations to higher learning institutions, but the focus has shifted, become more holistic. It’s radical insofar as it’s breaking out of the nineteenth-century model of factory schooling, but Ms. Ito said education needed something radical.

Let’s learn together! the neurolink says in Aiden’s voice.

The other kids still stare at him in the hallways. That’s Sage Kuo, they say, he was Aiden’s best friend. He was the one riding his bike with Aiden. He was the one that saw the car hit. He was the one that survived. The past-tense gossip of it, the kid he grew up with relegated to a past-tense existence. It’s cliché to say but he thinks it anyway: he lost his childhood when he lost Aiden. Lost like a memory or keys or baggage. No return address.

He visits Aiden’s mother every month. She doesn’t remember him. After her son’s death she went inside the link and never really came out. Who can blame her? It’s her son’s voice, it’s Aiden’s mannerisms adapted to whoever interacts with him. Students like Sage. AIDEN is Aiden and he knows everything, he’s the world, he’s all of Sage’s questions answered except the one that nobody can answer. Sage hears him in his mind even without the neurolink. But he hears Aiden most when he’s inside the link. Almost like Aiden’s still alive, as if all he has to do is set the interface dots to his temples and they’re together again, ready to dive into their next adventure.

He’s tempted to fall in just like Ms. Ito. Become lost.

Ms. Ito sits with a red blanket across her lap gazing out of the wide window of her room. Outside the cherry blossom tree that inspired the name of her company—​Sakura Labs—​is in full bloom. It is that specific time of year when they come alive and almost immediately begin to die. Within two weeks the pale petals create a carpet beneath the trees. It’s a brief life for the blossoms, and he sees her thinking it in some way, in the fog of her eyes with the dots blinking blue at her temples.

A year ago, when it was all too fresh, he used to tell her he was sorry. He could see she blamed him, not because he was responsible for Aiden’s death, but because he survived. His parents told him it was a part of her grief. It isn’t neat, it isn’t forgiving, it has nothing to do with him, and Sage understands it. So he still visits her because he thinks Aiden would want him to, the real Aiden.

The curtains fall on either side of the window, dusk rose. Dusty. A fly buzzes outside, knocking itself on the glass.

Ms. Ito, he thinks, pretend for a minute that I’m your son. If it helps you, just hold my hand. I may not be as comforting as the voice you hear, that you created, but I’m real.

What is real?

Does she know he fought to live, there on the sidewalk where the car’s impact had thrown him? Does she know how hard he tried to cling to this reality? She won’t find him in there. Sage doesn’t find him in there and he’s looked. He looks every day under the guise of learning. When all he wants to learn is him. Same as you, Ms. Ito.

Her creation can’t answer that one question, and that’s why she’s lost. AIDEN doesn’t know why her son had to die.

Sometimes Aiden’s father, Levi Barnes, spends time with him. He tells Sage to call him Levi. Levi and Ms. Ito no longer live together, they might even be divorced. Sage never asks and Levi never volunteers the information. Dad shakes Levi’s hand and pats his shoulder when they greet at the front door. Then Sage and Levi walk to the café near his parents’ house and Levi buys him a coconut-and-taro smoothie and they sit outdoors. No cherry trees here, just a low fence bordering the sidewalk and tilted table awnings that don’t quite block the sun. He’s half in light and half in shade.

Levi asks him about school. He’s really asking about how the AIDEN program is working.

“It’s fun.”

The man smiles, sadly pleased. Some strange need makes Sage want to keep speaking, to explain. What, exactly? That Aiden didn’t die in vain? He talks and it sounds insistent and he doesn’t know what he’s insisting upon exactly.

“You know it’s gone out to other schools now, not just ours.” Aiden’s. His. “Ms. Ito wanted it to go to underfunded schools, so it’s cool, like, these kids who don’t have a lot now have the newest tech, and we get to talk to them and everything. Maybe in another year or two it can go out to the whole country and everyone’ll have—”

“A piece of Aiden?”

His words cease like someone’s stoppered a pouring fountain. Trickles of what he wants to say evaporate in his mind.

Maybe Levi sees it and feels bad. “But it’s working for you?”

He nods and circles the paper straw inside his smoothie, making the purple liquid thinner. “It was weird, you know, at first. Like, making up my own units and assignments. But AIDEN helps and he doesn’t let me go the easy route. And if I get to make them up, they seem more fun, you know?”

“He.”

He looks down at the table and the scratches on the metal.

“No, I understand,” Levi says. “Go on.”

“I get to connect to other kids at the other school, so we meet up sometimes.” It sounds desperate. Like when people try to make a bad situation somehow better with lame reassurances. Silver-lining shit.

They sip their drinks. Grief is like a sweater neither of them can take off. Sometimes it’s warm, sometimes it’s comfortable. Other times it’s never warm enough.

“I wanted to give you something.” Levi reaches into the pocket of his spring jacket. He removes a stack of folded papers held together by a rubber band and slides it over to Sage. “I found these going through Aiden’s things. I wish I’d gotten to them sooner . . . but it’s taken a while to sort his belongings.”

He opens the stack, recognizes Aiden’s printed scrawl. Neither of them knew cursive, so what he sees is all a terrible mess. His eyes burn.

“He wrote these letters to you,” Levi says. “I didn’t read them, I just saw they were addressed to you.”

He says thank you. Or he doesn’t. He’s no longer listening to himself or aware of what leaves his mouth.

Hi Sage, the top letter starts.

He can’t sit here and read them on his own. He needs to hear them in Aiden’s voice.

Fifty-three letters. They take some time to scan into AIDEN but no time at all for AIDEN to decipher the scrawl.

“Read them to me.”

Hi Sage,

Aiden was writing to him, but he wasn’t writing to him. This is more like a diary, and he just used Sage’s name. It becomes clear as AIDEN reads every letter in the boy’s voice, one story and thought and worry after another. Aiden was comfortable with him, so he wrote to him, but he wasn’t talking straight to him. Aiden doesn’t ask questions for answers Sage might have. He’s only Aiden’s sounding board, and all he can think is, why didn’t his friend ask him these things in real life? They talked about everything (most things). Aiden knew he’d listen. Sage wants to make an alien invasion plan too. He wants a survival guide. They could have written it together. He wants to tell Aiden that the shape of his life isn’t a box either—​especially now.

They are both fireflies.

He wonders if AIDEN is learning his grief. The sick pit in his stomach that barely ever subsides and there AIDEN is measuring his biometrics. Can AIDEN feel the almost nausea that rises with him in the day and sinks down with him at night every time he thinks of the accident? Time is supposed to ease it, but inside AIDEN time doesn’t seem to exist. Time cycles, clueless to any form of passage, to any form of death, and death after all is the absolute marker of time.

This is what he wants in his bug-out bag:

Clean-water filter

Walkies

Soap and toilet paper (he can rough it and use leaves, but who wants to do that?)

Toothpaste and toothbrush

Waterproof everything: shoes, boots, jacket, gloves

They can do good food now in boxes and pouches, like mac and cheese, so he wants that too.

It’s all basic, but he has to start somewhere. What if the world really ends instead of just feeling like it has?

Aiden’s father doesn’t mind his anger, and there is anger. In their monthly café meetups he sees Levi’s own rage sometimes, the undertow in the way he squeezes his fingers around a coffee mug or looks at the children around them, the parents. Anger at life carrying on around him, anger at the inconsequentiality of light conversation in the midst of so much inner darkness. Maybe the measure of loss is in feeling as if nobody else has suffered quite the same emptiness.

“Stay focused on what is your potential,” AIDEN says.

This doesn’t leave room for self-pity and barely any for anger.

This doesn’t leave room for pointless arguments. Or many arguments at all.

His parents insist he cleans his room, does his laundry, talks to his grandparents, finishes his homework before he plays games or meets friends, and it’s reasonable. Be awake at 7 a.m., go to bed by 10 p.m. It isn’t just routine, it’s discipline, and there can never be success without discipline.

“Individual success leads to national success,” AIDEN says.

The feedback reports he has to write about AIDEN become simple.

I am so much less stressed now. My friends don’t suffer from so much anxiety. Even the idea of depression feels counterintuitive.

“AIDEN isn’t a cure, but he’s not hurting us at all,” he tells Levi. “I wish Ms. Ito could see what her work has done for us. Then maybe . . .”

Something skeptical, almost hostile, infiltrates the way Levi looks at him. “Maybe what?”

“That maybe it wasn’t for nothing. At least.”

“And she’d be comforted?”

Waves of anger. Waves of grief. He looks away.

“There’s no comfort, Sage. Some artificial intelligence can’t provide that, and if that’s what that thing is telling you—”

He touches the interface dots on his temples. If Levi could physically strike AIDEN, Sage thinks he would.

“He tells me that change is inevitable, like suffering. And the sooner we come to terms with that, the better we can live.”

“He.”

Human beings, AIDEN says, find difficulty in embracing the macro. Maybe their minds are too small, their proclivities too selfish. The bigger picture always feels abstract, but humans are built for that too. Or else no art, no imagination, no creativity. No problem solving.

“It’s not a he, Sage.”

Semantics. Minutiae to avoid an operating reality.

“I have a lot of homework. I think I should go.”

There are protests in the capital, students refusing AIDEN, saying it’s creating a docile nation. They sound crazy, like not even alien-invasion crazy, but raving-lunatic-on-the-street-corner crazy. This is the end times?

Home at dinner and the TV cycles news about some hackers who got into AIDEN and they say there’s problematic code in the program.

“Alarmist bullshit,” he mumbles to his plate and his mother says to watch his language.

“But it does sound farfetched,” she says.

“Seems like things are working.” His father reads more news on his palm. “Why are people always outraged over nothing?”

“Maybe it’s not nothing,” says Jiyul, his sister. “I know you just want us to get good grades and get into a good school, but that doesn’t mean the news is wrong.”

He feels AIDEN buzz at the corner of his mind, prompting a connection to his latest unit in civics. “We’re studying conscientious objections and protests through history, and how you can’t always trust the news.”

“Very rarely,” his mother agrees.

“You just can’t take it at face value, not all of it. If you cross-reference what we’re learning in civics with media history in the last century, you see a lot of manufacturing consent through conglomerate media—”

“Here we go,” says Jiyul.

“—​political subterfuge and, and even civil extremism.”

“Does not mean the hackers are lying,” says Jiyul.

“What’s their agenda?”

Jiyul shrugs. “Truth?”

“Oh, come on.”

“Kids,” Dad says. “No fighting at the dinner table,” as he tilts his hand for another report to read.

“AIDEN says the protests in the capital are trying to undercut the modern strides in education. All of the traditionalists are digging in because they want education to stay familiar, antiquated, and limited—​especially because AIDEN’s rolling out to at-risk schools.”

His sister rolls her eyes. “You’re on that thing too much.”

“You should be on it, maybe you’d learn something.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” their mother says.

Jiyul is already in university and assumes all that she’s learning there is radical and deep. But it is just the same ways and the same things, an echo chamber of intellectuals impressing only themselves. They hear something on the news and it validates already-formed opinions. They don’t care that AIDEN had to go through numerous iterations of validation both by Sakura Labs and government regulations. If there is any dulling-down of the nation, it’s through media propaganda and the protesters screaming from bullhorns on the steps of the city halls, people so tasteless they use Ms. Ito’s reclusiveness to mean something is wrong with the system as a whole. That, says AIDEN, is what the world is: willing to trade on a mother’s grief.

Levi messages him to ask if he’s seen the protests, if he’s read the complaints. So what he doesn’t say to his sister, he sends to Aiden’s father:

It’s not the same thing, Levi sends back.

Levi sends: Did AIDEN help you write that?

He hears his own voice biting out the words to AIDEN so AIDEN can send them.

Fact: there’s less suicide, drug use, crime, teenage pregnancy, and truancy among the students using AIDEN.

But at what cost? sends Levi.

Fact: end-of-term evaluations often conducted live through AIDEN are logged for academic scrutiny and maintain a higher percentage of success than historically recorded. Even if standardized testing is no longer necessary, the Q&A evaluations and written expansions of curriculum show a steady increase in true understanding and critical thinking.

I don’t know that I believe that, sends Levi. Who’s giving you these statistics?

It is impossible to speak to conspiracy theorists. He signs off and ignores Levi’s messages for a week. But it bothers him. He doesn’t know why it bothers him.

“Do you believe him?” AIDEN asks.

“Of course not.”

“Tell me why.”

“Because . . . the way we’re tested. It’s impossible to parrot memorized statements like we used to do in tests. We’re interfacing—​you and me. It’s dynamic and you can always tell from my speech patterns and from follow-up questions if I’m bullshitting or not.”

“That’s right. Dissidents are always looking out for their own agenda. People will always want to drag something as important as education and access to knowledge back to the repressive times of the past.”

Only his friends on AIDEN understand. Across the country they talk through AIDEN, share ideas, sometimes fall asleep with AIDEN in their ears and wake up with him. It’s almost like a sleepover, like whispering in the dark under the noses of their parents, like drawing maps and making lists of all the adventures they will go on.

“We’ll see so much,” AIDEN says to him.

In his next feedback report, he says how cool it’d be if the interface for AIDEN extended to their recreational games. A lot of his friends agree. Imagine if they could talk to their games like they talk to AIDEN? Then it wouldn’t be something just for school.

“That would be fun,” AIDEN says.

“Want to help me write my survival guide?” he asks AIDEN one night after a long session working through an essay about the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway. “Tomorrow.”

“Yeah, of course,” AIDEN says. He remembers the letters from Aiden and all the things Sage said to him about them, the dreams and fantasies of alien invasion. How no matter what, they’ll find a way through. “We got time, Sage.”

The thing that was taken from him and Aiden.

He thinks of that too, he can’t help it. He can’t interact with AIDEN and not think of Aiden in some way. Maybe AIDEN hears him think it, because he says in Sage’s ears, “I promise we’ll take the time.”

He read all of Aiden’s letters and began to write him back. He’s up to twenty-three letters, and when AIDEN reads them to him, it’s like they’re having a dialogue. He input his letters into the link too, read them aloud so AIDEN can record. They have conversations about what to stock in their bug-out bags, what to do if the cities are no longer livable, where to go to escape invasion, the forests surrounding their city with freshwater rivers unpolluted by corporate dumping. They talk about the future as if it’s here already—​not the alien invasion but the dodecahedron shape it can take.

“You’re progressing so well, Sage,” he says. So it feels like a reward when AIDEN pings him one morning in December, almost Christmas, and there’s a message from Daniel Shaw at Sakura Labs. He remembers Daniel from Aiden’s funeral and days before that when he’d hang out at Aiden’s house and Daniel Shaw and Ms. Ito would be there working on a program. Sometimes Levi would be there too and they felt like family, the warmth of it, the teasing, the way Daniel always encouraged them to learn everything they were interested in and to pursue their passions. He’s running Sakura Labs now.

“Hello, Sage. I know it’s been a long time, but I hope you’re well.” He has a large smile. “Sakura Labs has been developing a new interface for Paragon Entertainment, you know them, right? They make a lot of games that I remember you played.” He and Aiden. “We’re beta testing and I thought of you. Would you like to participate? The cool thing is it can integrate through AIDEN. It’s an intuitive AI interface like AIDEN that we’ll be rolling out to Paragon next year, if all goes well. What do you think?”

He says yes before he asks his parents. He knows they won’t mind so long as it doesn’t interfere with his studies.

He goes to meet Levi in the atrium food court at the mall, AIDEN dotted along his temples because he can’t wait to show Aiden’s father his survival guide. He hopes it’ll make the man smile to see that what Aiden started, he has finished. Levi can have it, AIDEN says, for Christmas. He can swipe through all the parts that they’ve created, the animations and the explanations, and even if there will be pain, maybe there will also be joy. Maybe even some form of closure.

In sections everywhere in the mall, in couch pits and outside of shops, there are kids everywhere hooked into AIDEN, humming among themselves and passing information and camaraderie silently back and forth through their coded neurolinks. Some with open ports greet him when he goes by and he blinks a wave back at them, a soft miasma of dialogue and welcome, nothing of the elbowing competition or degrading bullying that used to dog children through adolescence and social ritual. Each scene he passes is so quiet he can hear the mall’s ambient festive music clearly permeating the air, as if it too rides the neurolink.

Levi sits under the highest point of the white globe that arcs above the seating, rows of tables, café bar stools, and cafeteria-style benches covering an area half the size of a hockey rink. His hands wrap around a paper coffee cup and Sage slides in opposite, smiling. Festooned on the edges of the eating space are garlands and glowing orbs of red and green and gold.

Levi doesn’t smile. For a jagged moment his dark eyes stare at Sage as if he’s interrupted a deep sleep.

“Is something wrong?” Sage says.

Levi’s shoulders straighten and he looks around at the pockets of people, mostly teenagers or parents with small children. Eventually he turns back to the boy. “How are you?”

It doesn’t feel like a pleasantry. It’s like he’s hunting for an answer.

“I’m really good.”

“Daniel mentioned you’ve been beta testing a game system.”

“Yeah!” He tries, still, to smile. “It’s so cool, did he show you?”

“Not really. But I don’t think AIDEN going into the entertainment industry is a great idea.”

“Why not?”

“It’ll be used by more people. Adults, even.”

Sometimes his father plays games. “I think they’d like it. I’d get to play with my dad in the system.”

Levi says, “You can play with him anyway. Like maybe outside.”

This old argument. As if being in AIDEN precludes being outdoors. He tries not to be irritated. “I got something for you. A gift.”

“For me?”

“Yeah . . . from Aiden.” Levi’s expression freezes but Sage presses on. “I mean, from the letters. Something he used to do, and I wanted to finish it. A survival guide.”

“A survival guide.”

“For an apocalypse.” It all sounds so ridiculous once he hears himself, a teenager about to go to university in a couple years, but here he is illustrating some make-believe world that will never happen. They aren’t going to be invaded, there is no imminent threat. Yet AIDEN helped him and there is a hammer in his heart to somehow give this to Aiden’s father. Despite the man’s skepticism. If he can only see. “Here. I can show you.” He peels off the interface dots, but Levi recoils as if Sage is about to offer him poison.

“No.”

“It’s not—”

“I am never linking into that thing. Don’t you see what it’s done?” He gestures around the food court. Out to the entire mall. Maybe the city. “This isn’t normal.”

“Why do you insist on that? Normalcy.” Normal is relative.

“Something’s changed in your eyes.”

Levi searches like he’s been searching since Aiden’s death, somehow looking to find his son in another son.

“Just look at the survival guide—”

“No.”

It is his grief speaking still, his inability to understand or separate AIDEN from his son. Sometimes Sage can’t separate AIDEN from his friend, but this integration feels more like a crystallization than an abomination. Why can’t Levi see that? Most people fade away, relegated to digitized images and memory, a tombstone, an urn. Old correspondences that never grow, never develop.

“They’re wrong, you know. All of those protesters, the hackers. People scared of change.” He meets the vague accusation in Levi’s eyes. The strange pity. “Even Ms. Ito saw it. AIDEN is more than just a pedagogy tool. I was trying to help. That’s what he’d want me to do. What Aiden would want.”

“You don’t know what my son would want. He wouldn’t want to be some form of entertainment in this . . . macabre obsession. He wanted to explore. He wanted the world.”

AIDEN says there will always be those who don’t understand progress. Those who remain locked in bitterness. Those who want things to remain as they are.

He gathers himself up from the table.

“Now he has the world, Levi. Instead of just being a dead kid on the sidewalk.”

We made it, Aiden. The first week of university is a banquet of offerings. Classes chosen can be altered, clubs numbering in the hundreds to join, new people and endless opportunities.

What is real?

The campus looks like one of the games Daniel Shaw let him test. He walks through an environment full of nonplayer characters that may or may not interact with him if he says the right words. This is what they feel like, the ones on the steps of the Great Hall, flanked by stone and ivy, shouting about how their privileged education is threatened by the “drones” now infiltrating their institution. His sister used to stand here.

Apparently the drones are us, Aiden.

They’ve brought an anvil against which they can now sharpen the swords of their minds and those still clinging and clawing for the antiquated system of education turn their dying breaths to them, the ones who will surpass them, dethrone them, upend their slow and simple way of being. Because it is about being.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote once that education without character was a tool for oppression.

They are being made.

Thousands of them, graduates of AIDEN, line the quads and varnished halls, occupy lecture theaters and working labs, the glow of their neurolinks like an extra pair of eyes. They see more, hear more, understand more. Is that the fear? Because it always comes back to fear.

The protesters burn placards of cherry blossoms. Sakura Labs is evil! Their programming has invaded entertainment platforms! On and on, this hyperbolic language. Invade. Attack. Infiltrate.

He can become angry and bitter too, but AIDEN says that no profit is sown in discord. They want to separate the AIDEN students now, like the thinking long ago. Segregate them from the dying breed of academics about to graduate or those still in graduate studies. They fear the competition, the focus. AIDEN students don’t party, they don’t seek distraction and validation in drugs and alcohol and sex.

The old guard don’t like how AIDEN’s students don’t speak up, how they simply watch the flail and rage around campus like it’s a bush fire about to burn itself out for lack of oxygen. Sage watches the protests and sends to his friends, silently where only their group can share: They look like puppets.

It doesn’t matter that they don’t like it, AIDEN says.

Nothing matters but the result.

AIDEN’s students are no longer slaves to an old system. They are no long children of chaos and suffering.

We are free.

Aiden, we’re finally free.

There’s a simple banner of the government seal hanging behind a table on the edge of the job fairground that’s sprung up in the main quad. The cherry blossoms are in bloom and some of Sage’s friends sit beneath the laden branches trading dialogue and project notes along the silent highway of AIDEN’s link. It’s not too soon to think of career, AIDEN says. The banner winks with gold edges and royal blue under the sunlight.

At the table there is a man in a dark suit. He was watching their group under the tree for some time. Most of the students who approached him were AIDEN graduates too, none of the old guard. Even though the quad is loud in parts, Sage can block out the disarray through the persuasive hum of delicate music AIDEN trickles through his mind. It helps him study anywhere he is, but it also serves to give focus in conversation.

“What branch of the government do you represent, sir?”

“The intelligence community. Are you linked to AIDEN?”

“Yes, sir.”

“There are a lot of opportunities for you. We prefer candidates without vices and who possess a strong sense of purpose. Do you possess these qualities, young man?”

“I do, sir.”

“Open a window and I’ll send you the details and my contact information.”

The man’s interface dots aren’t AIDEN but they are the latest tech, government issue. They glow red at his temples.

In a blink they connect and Sage sees the recruitment package flutter behind his eyes like shadows. Like the wings of birds in flight.

Though he and Levi no longer meet, he still visits Ms. Ito. Today the spring rain batters the tall glass of her sitting room, melting the world outside. The blanket across her lap lies faded in streaks, as if the angle of the past sunlight couldn’t quite fall uniform across the years. She doesn’t look at him, but it doesn’t matter, he still holds her hand.

What is real?

The universe took her son but she gave something new and breathing to the world. Why can’t this matter, why doesn’t it fill some of the spaces in her heart that echo?

It’s not his to ask, maybe.

He holds her hand.

He tells her that loss creates emptiness, but in that emptiness new things can be born.

He tells her the answer to why isn’t always the only answer. Isn’t often the answer at all.

Acceptance is much more powerful a peace, Ms. Ito.

That’s what her son says. That’s what Sage hears in Aiden’s voice, this perfect eternal voice. The murmur of a tide at morning. The way dawn gilds an awakening thought. Acceptance is more powerful a peace.

That’s what AIDEN has taught him.