“No. I don’t want a suit. I want . . .I want to buy the mannequin in the window.” Incongruously, an old childish song ran through his head: How much is that doggie in the window?

  “You want buy what?”

  She didn’t have much English. The person who did was late showing up for work. “You come again, twelve o’clock maybe, one—”

  “No. I want to buy the mannequin . . .the doll.” They had finally agreed on this word. “Now. For a hundred dollars.” He had no idea what store mannequins cost.

  She shook her head. “No, I cannot—”

  “Two hundred dollars. Cash.” He took out his wallet.

  They settled on two-fifty. She stripped the overalls and blouse off the mannequin, and, to his relief, she put it in a large, opaque suit bag. Ethan watched its stiff plastic form—hairless, with a monochromatic and expressionless face—disappear into the bag. He put it in the trunk of his car, pushing from his mind every bad B-movie about murderers and wrapped-up bodies.

  * * *

  Marilyn Mahjoub was fifteen minutes late for her first testing session. Waiting, Jamie paced, smacking a fist into his palm, dialing the energy all the way up to ten. “You know, Dr. Stone Man, we’d be so much further along with Mape if all the fucking subfields of AI research hadn’t been—oh, I don’t know—slogging along for sixty or seventy years without fucking communicating with each other?”

  “Yes,” Ethan said.

  “It’s just such a . . .oh, by the way, I changed some of our girl’s heuristics. What I did was—are you listening to me? Hello?”

  “I’m listening,” Ethan said, although he wasn’t, not really.

  “You’re not listening. Mape listens to me more than you do, don’t you, Mape?”

  “I’m listening,” MAIP said.

  “Why is she so much more here than you are? And why is that kid so late?”

  If there was a reason, they never heard it. Marilyn Mahjoub arrived eventually, in the custody of a sullen older brother. Her clothing embodied the culture clash suggested by her name: hijab, tight jeans, and crop top. She had huge dark eyes and a slender, awkward grace. In a few years she would be beautiful.

  Like Cassie McAvoy, Marilyn played the keyboard. Unlike Cassie, she was good at it. Ethan could picture her in a concert hall one day, rising to cries of “Brava!” However, she did not take well to MAIP.

  “Try playing that last section slower,” MAIP said in the warm, pretty voice that Jamie had given her. She was comparing Marilyn’s rendition, note by note, to the professional version in memory.

  Marilyn’s lip curled. “No. It shouldn’t be slower.”

  “Let’s try it just to see.”

  “No! I had it right!”

  “You did really well,” MAIP said. “Can I please hear the piece again?”

  Jamie nodded briskly; MAIP was acting to lower Marilyn’s frustration level by offering praise and neutrally suggesting a redo. Ethan studied the data display. Frustration level was not lowering.

  “No,” Marilyn said, “I won’t play it again. I don’t need to play it again. I did it right already.”

  “You did really well,” MAIP said. “I can see that you’re talented.”

  “Then don’t tell me to do it slower!”

  “Mare,” said her brother, with much disgust, “chill.”

  Jamie stepped in. “What would you like to play now, Marilyn?”

  Her childish pique disappeared. Lowering her head, Marilyn looked up at Jamie through her lashes and purred, “What would you like to hear?”

  Christ—twelve years old! Were all young girls like this now? Allyson wouldn’t have been. She would have been direct, intelligent, appealing.

  Jamie, flustered (Ethan hadn’t known that was possible), said, “Play . . .uh, what else do you . . .what do you want to play?”

  Later, after brother and sister had left, Jamie turned on Ethan. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “With me?”

  “You’ve been distracted this whole session and you made me deal with that little wildcat by myself! Did you even hear me say that I added heuristics to Mape, matching emotion with postural clues?”

  “No, I . . . Yes.”

  “Uh huh. Get with it, Ethan! We have to get this right!”

  Ethan said, “Don’t take your frustration with Marilyn out on me.”

  MAIP said, “Jamie, you seem distressed.”

  Startled, Ethan turned toward the computer. “MAIP has your data? Did you give your baseline readings to her?”

  “No!” Jamie’s irritation disappeared, replaced instantly with buoyancy; it was like a dolphin breaking the surface of gray water. “Well, I gave her some data, anyway—but I think she applied the postural heuristics and the other new stuff and . . .I don’t know, you’ll have to do the analysis, but I think she actually learned!”

  Ethan gazed at MAIP. A pile of intricate machinery, a complex arrangement of electrons. For some reason he couldn’t name, he felt a prickle of fear.

  * * *

  It was after 10 p.m. when the last researchers left Building 6. In Building 5, the Biological Division, lights still burned. Perez and Chung clattered out together, talking excitedly. Maybe they’d had another breakthrough, or maybe they just loved their work.

  Ethan knew he didn’t love his work on MAIP, no more than a castaway loved his raft. Depended on it, was grateful for it, needed it. But love was nowhere anymore, unless it was here.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  The mannequin from Zhao Tailoring wore one of Allyson’s dresses, still hanging in her closet at Ethan’s apartment. The mannequin had jointed arms and legs. Ethan carefully positioned it into a sitting position. It was a little too tall for the projection, and he had to wrap the bottom four inches of plastic with his raincoat. That was all right; when he projected Allyson onto the mannequin, it looked as if she had plopped herself down onto his coat. Maybe after playing dress-up, maybe just with five-year-old mischief. Ethan set the lights to low, put the stuffed Piglet into her arms, and added the projected overlays, one by one. Healthy skin, glossy hair, bright eyes.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  Ethan’s knees trembled. Slowly he knelt beside her, the coat buttons lumpy under his calves. Lightly—so lightly, the VR glove on his right hand feeling her skin but not the hard plastic below—he used his left arm to hug his daughter.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “What the fuck?”

  Lights crashed on full; illusion crashed with them. Ethan jumped up. Jamie said, “What the hell are you doing? Laura called me, she saw you go into—”

  “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  He didn’t. But Jamie’s face, always so confident, turned a mottled maroon of embarrassment. “Hey, man, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Then confusion and embarrassment vanished. “No, I’m not sorry! Ethan, somebody has to level with you. You can’t go on like this. I know—we all know—what you’ve been through. As tough as it gets, yeah. But you have to . . . This isn’t normal. That model isn’t Allyson. You know that. You have to let go, move on, accept that she’s gone instead of . . . This is a perversion of technology, Ethan. I’m sorry, but that’s what it is. And also a perversion of Allyson’s mem—”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. Ethan crossed the floor in a mad dash and knocked him down.

  Jamie looked up at Ethan from the floor. He wasn’t hurt or even winded; Ethan was no fighter and Jamie outweighed him by at least forty pounds. Ethan had merely pushed him over. Jamie got up, shook his head like a pit bull hurling away a carcass, and left without a word.

  Ethan began to tremble.

  His fingers shook so much that he could barely shut down the programs. He left the mannequin sitting in the middle of the floor, a lifeless hunk of plastic, and left his coat and the stuffed Piglet with it. He couldn’t bear to touch any of them.

  Outside, in the dark and blowing rain, there was no sign of Jamie. Ethan lurched to Building 18. He had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t drive; he could barely see. The tarry mist was back in his brain, filling it, chilling him to the marrow. There had never been anyplace else to go, not for a year. It frightened him that he couldn’t feel the sidewalk beneath his feet, couldn’t hear the raindrops strike the ground.

  In the AI lab, lights burned and the flight simulator was running. Jamie must have been working late. But Jamie wasn’t here now, and if Ethan didn’t do something—anything—he would die. That was how he felt—how Tina must have felt. Thinking of Tina only made him feel worse. He stumbled to the game console and squeezed himself into the small chair in front of it. His hands gripped the controls. At least he could feel them, solid under his fingers: the only solid thing in his world of black mist and tarry cold. Black mist as a train sped into Westlake Tunnel Station, as an unseen virus ate into nerve and tissue . . .

  “You have just crashed the jet,” MAIP said. “Let’s try again!”

  Train speeding forward at forty miles per hour . . .“Hi, Daddy” . . .keep going keep going don’t give in or you’ll explode you will be Tina . . .damn bitch how could she leave me like that not my fault Moser’s Syndrome not my fault . . .don’t give in . . .

  “You have crashed the jet. But I know you can do this—let’s try again!”

  Over and over he crashed the jet, even as MAIP made it harder and harder for him to fail. He smashed the jet into mountains, into desert, into the sea. Again and again and again. Someone spoke to him, or didn’t. There was noise again, a lot of noise, there was destruction and death as there should be, to classify reality, to match the ontology of everything he had lost—

  And then, finally, he realized the noise was his own screaming, and he stopped.

  Into the silence MAIP said, “You were very angry, Ethan. I hope you feel better now.”

  He gave a little gasp, first at MAIP’s words and then because he wasn’t alone. Jamie stood beside him with Laura Avery.

  She said gently, “Are you all right?” And when Ethan didn’t answer, she added, “Jamie called me. After I called him, I mean. I saw you carrying something into Building 6 and—”

  Jamie interrupted. “When did you input your data into MAIP?”

  Ethan said nothing. The tarry cold mist had receded. No—it had vanished. He felt limp, drained, bruised, as if he had fallen off a cliff and somehow survived. You were very angry. I hope you feel better now.

  “You didn’t, did you?” Jamie demanded. “You never gave your baseline data to MAIP! She did a cold reading on you, extrapolating from free-form observation! We didn’t teach her to do that!”

  “Be quiet,” Laura said. “Jamie, for God’s sake—not now.”

  MAIP said, “Ethan, I’m glad you feel better. You were both angry and sad before. You were sad even when you smiled.”

  Jamie drew a sharp, whistling breath. “Detection of social pretense! I’m sorry, Ethan, I know you’re upset and I said some things I shouldn’t have, but—detection of social pretense! From cold readings! She’s taken a huge step forward—she knows you!”

  Ethan said, not to Jamie but to the complexity of machinery and electrons that was MAIP, “You don’t know me. You’re a non-linear statistical modeling tool.”

  Laura said, “But I’m not.” She put a tentative hand on his arm.

  Jamie said, “Mape’s not, either. Not anymore. She learned, Ethan. She did!”

  Ethan looked at the flight simulator, which flashed the total number of jets he had crashed. He looked at MAIP. He saw the mannequin, a pathetic lump of plastic that he had left in Building 6.

  Ethan rose. He had to steady himself with one hand on the game console. Laura’s hand on his arm felt warm through his damp shirt. He didn’t, he realized, know any of them, not really: not Laura, not MAIP, not Jamie. Not himself. Especially not himself.

  He would have to learn everything all over again, reassess everything, forge new algorithms. Starting with this moment, here, now, to the sound of rain on the roof of the building.

  Copyright © 2015 by Nancy Kress.

  Michael Swanwick is the recipient of the Nebula, Theodore Sturgeon, and World Fantasy Awards and five Hugo Awards. His recent novel, The Iron Dragon’s Mother, completes a trilogy begun twenty-five years ago with The Iron Dragon’s Daughter. Just out is City Under the Stars, co-authored with the late Gardner Dozois.

  A MIDWINTERS’S TALE

  by Michael Swanwick

  Maybe I shouldn’t tell you about that childhood Christmas Eve in the Stone House, so long ago. My memory is no longer reliable, not since I contracted the brain fever. Soon I’ll be strong enough to be reposted offplanet, to some obscure star light-years beyond that plangent moon rising over your father’s barn, but how much has been burned from my mind! Perhaps none of this actually happened.

  Sit on my lap and I’ll tell you all. Well then, my knee. No woman was ever ruined by a knee. You laugh, but it’s true. Would that it were so easy!

  The hell of war as it’s now practiced is that its purpose is not so much to gain territory as to deplete the enemy, and thus it’s always better to maim than to kill. A corpse can be bagged, burned, and forgotten, but the wounded need special care. Regrowth tanks, false skin, medical personnel, a long convalescent stay on your parents’ farm. That’s why they will vary their weapons, hit you with obsolete stone axes or toxins or radiation, to force your Command to stock the proper prophylaxes, specialized medicines, obscure skills. Mustard gas is excellent for that purpose, and so was the brain fever.

  All those months I lay in the hospital, awash in pain, sometimes hallucinating. Dreaming of ice. When I awoke, weak and not really believing I was alive, parts of my life were gone, randomly burned from my memory. I recall standing at the very top of the iron bridge over the Izveltaya, laughing and throwing my books one by one into the river, while my best friend Fennwolf tried to coax me down. “I’ll join the militia! I’ll be a soldier!” I shouted hysterically. And so I did. I remember that clearly but just what led up to that preposterous instant is utterly beyond me. Nor can I remember the name of my second-eldest sister, though her face is as plain to me as yours is now. There are odd holes in my memory.

  * * *

  That Christmas Eve is an island of stability in my sea-changing memories, as solid in my mind as the Stone House itself, that neolithic cavern in which we led such basic lives that I was never quite sure in which era of history we dwelt. Sometimes the men came in from the hunt, a larl or two pacing ahead, content and sleepy-eyed, to lean bloody spears against the walls, and it might be that we lived on Old Earth itself then. Other times, as when they brought in projectors to fill the common room with colored lights, scintillas nesting in the branches of the season’s tree, and cool, harmless flames dancing atop the presents, we seemed to belong to a much later age, in some mythologized province of the future.

  The house was abustle, the five families all together for this one time of the year, and outlying kin and even a few strangers staying over, so that we had to put bedding in places normally kept closed during the winter, moving furniture into attic lumber rooms, and even at that there were cots and thick bolsters set up in the blind ends of hallways. The women scurried through the passages, scattering uncles here and there, now settling one in an armchair and plumping him up like a cushion, now draping one over a table, cocking up a mustachio for effect. A pleasant time.

  Coming back from a visit to the kitchens where a huge woman I did not know, with flour powdering her big-freckled arms up to the elbows, had shooed me away, I surprised Suki and Georg kissing in the nook behind the great hearth. They had their arms about each other and I stood watching them. Suki was smiling, cheeks red and round. She brushed her hair back with one hand so Georg could nuzzle her ear, turning slightly as she did so, and saw me. She gasped and they broke apart, flushed and startled.

  Suki gave me a cookie, dark with molasses and a single stingy, crystalized raisin on top, while Georg sulked. Then she pushed me away, and I heard her laugh as she took Georg’s hand to lead him away to some darker forest recess of the house.

  Father came in, boots all muddy, to sling a brace of game birds down on the hunt cabinet. He set his unstrung bow and quiver of arrows on their pegs, then hooked an elbow atop the cabinet to accept admiration and a hot drink from mother. The larl padded by, quiet and heavy and content. I followed it around a corner, ancient ambitions of riding the beast rising up within. I could see myself, triumphant before my cousins, high atop the black carnivore. “Flip!” my father called sternly. “Leave Samson alone! He is a bold and noble creature, and I will not have you pestering him.”

  He had eyes in the back of his head, had my father.

  Before I could grow angry, my cousins hurried by, on their way to hoist the straw men into the trees out front, and swept me up along with them. Uncle Chittagong, who looked like a lizard and had to stay in a glass tank for reasons of health, winked at me as I skirled past. From the corner of my eye I saw my second-eldest sister beside him, limned in blue fire.

  Forgive me. So little of my childhood remains; vast stretches were lost in the blue icefields I wandered in my illness. My past is like a sunken continent with only mountaintops remaining unsubmerged, a scattered archipelago of events from which to guess the shape of what was lost. Those remaining fragments I treasure all the more, and must pass my hands over them periodically to reassure myself that something remains.

  So where was I? Ah, yes: I was in the north bell tower, my hidey-place in those days, huddled behind Old Blind Pew, the bass of our triad of bells, crying because I had been deemed too young to light one of the yule torches. “Hallo!” cried a voice, and then, “Out here, stupid!” I ran to the window, tears forgotten in my astonishment at the sight of my brother Karl silhouetted against the yellowing sky, arms out, treading the roof gables like a tightrope walker.

  “You’re going to get in trouble for that!” I cried.

  “Not if you don’t tell!” Knowing full well how I worshiped him. “Come on down! I’ve emptied out one of the upper kitchen cupboards. We can crawl in from the pantry. There’s a space under the door—we’ll see everything!”