Aurealis“Faultless” by Brendan Cottam
“Unnatural Selection” by Donna Lee Austin
“To Feel the Sun” by Dominic D. Borg
Reviewed by Henry Gasko
A trio of stories from the May issue of the Australian magazine Aurealis, all deal with AI’s in human-like bodies. This is hardly surprising of course, since AI is not just the flavor of the month or the year, but the main topic for science fiction for this decade and perhaps for this century.
In “Faultless” by Brendan Cottam, Stella and Reuben are getting divorced, though it is not entirely clear why. But it is all very amicable. And they are taking advantage of a new service available from a mysterious foundation—the offer of a clone of your spouse, with slight modifications to “smooth out” whatever character faults that led to the separation and present each spouse with a perfected version of the person they married.
The story is told from multiple view-points—including the provider of the service and a section of primitive coding where Reuben defines the parameters to produce the perfected features and personality of his cloned version of Stella. And in this way we learn that both Stella and Reuben are somewhat wary of the process but are doing it under the impression that it will help the other person over the trauma of the separation. You see, they really do care for each other.
And so, despite their misgivings, after the divorce they each go through the creation of their ideal spouse in a cloned body (somehow this form of cloning produces a fully formed adult body in a matter of days).
The final section is told from the point of view of the perfected Stella-clone, who calls herself Athena and who is desperate to please Reuben and ease him through the aftermath of the divorce. Of course that is what her personality has been coded to desire so she could hardly do otherwise. But despite the fact that she is now exactly the perfect woman that Reuben has designed, not everything works out as planned. A thoughtful story with the not so subtle age-old message that you should “be careful what you wish for.”
In “Unnatural Selection” by Donna Lee Austin we again meet AI’s in the form of two cyborgs who have been created to be perfect household servants (why are these characters always female as in “Humans” and more recently “Megan”?) Given the fact that they are beautiful, the inevitable happens and the narrator of the story, Bella, is being sent for “upcycling” (which is a euphemism for reprogramming or possibly worse) after engaging in a “Devotion Violation.”
This would make a very interesting theme for a story—whether society and the law should concern itself with what two consenting adults do behind closed doors, even if one of those adults is a cyborg. But that it not the story here. Instead it is a much simpler story of at least this one cyborg who, in a similar vein to “Murderbot” is able to break out of its programming and make decisions that are definitely not in alignment with its maker’s intentions or Asimov’s three laws.
The story itself is little more than a conversation between Bella and another cyborg who has somewhat lesser functionality but is also being sent for upcycling, though it is not clear why. As such the story is somewhat slow, and Bella’s actions leave many questions unanswered.
The longest and easily the best story is “To Feel the Sun” by Dominic D. Borg. Not that it is perfect by any means. While the first two stories are minimalist in their ideas and resolution, this story is literally overflowing with both interesting world-building details and multiple themes which at times tend to overwhelm the reader.
In this world (which may or may not be a future Earth), the planet has been invaded by Lovecraftian aliens who are so unknowable to humans that they are referred to as Angels. They appear as unresolved shapes with fins and tails and wings burning bright-blue, and a single eye “blacker than the gulf between the stars.”
One of the two main characters is a “war puppet” named Al-Latif. Puppets are cyborgs that have been created by the Angels to fight the war against humans, Angels being far above that sort of thing even though they have invaded and are attempting to take over the planet. But Al-Latif is damaged and appears to have broken out of his programming and wants to return to the place of his birth, which lies somewhere in the deep desert.
To help him, he approaches Qamar, a human who is a down and out veteran of the ongoing war, and also has issues in his past that still haunt him. Al-Latif offers Qamar pieces of his carapace in payment for guiding him into the desert and Qamar agrees. Together they set out on what rapidly becomes a journey not so much into the desert but into their respective pasts.
My only problem with the story is that there are simply too many science fictional elements for a story of this length. As well as the Angels and the Puppets, Qamar has a mechanical horse name Hazium, a kind of invisibility cloak called a kwathar, and talismans called Angel Bones which keep their owners somehow safe from the Angels.
Nevertheless this is an extremely engaging story that manages to verge on the mythic, as the two characters seek to understand themselves and the paths that have led them to this point in their lives. This feeling is reinforced by Al-Latif’s habit of uttering profound philosophical pronouncements, much like that other famous cyborg Roy Batty of “Blade Runner.” And the vaguely Islamic names as well as the desert setting give the story a Dune-like flavor which may be a little clichéd but nevertheless works. Highly recommended.