The Best of All Possible Worlds
A standalone sci-fi short story.
It’s well and truly winter in my part of the world now, so here’s a chilly short story set in Edinburgh. Enjoy!
John decided to walk through George Square Gardens on his way home from the church. It was a brittle brown winter day, the sun shining low and thin through ribs and broken clavicles of trees, the wind off the Firth of Forth as bitter and cold as long-dead bones. He wanted to walk the hedged labyrinth at the north end of the square, to breathe, to think, to pray. He was deeply unsettled by what had just happened. Then again, he wasn’t sure there was anything that one could say had actually happened. He knew he needed to think about it all the same. He was glad the gardens and the labyrinth had been spared, through all the years of turmoil.
He saw the old man in his peripheral vision, huddled on a bench in a sheltered corner of the hedge. John swerved automatically to the other side of the path. The old man and the bench were behind him when he heard the man call quietly.
“John!”
He stopped, startled, and turned sharply, then took a couple of steps back towards the bench. He didn’t recognise the man, but his memory wasn’t so good these days. He turned over faces in his mind, trying to match the crumpled figure on the bench with people he had met recently, in the services or the homeless shelter or the lunch club.
“You don’t recognise me, do you John?” said the man. A thin mist of breath rose from his mouth.
John walked up to the bench, and suddenly, perhaps from the angle of the sunlight on the man’s forehead, perhaps from the faded memory of a voice, the image resolved itself, all at once, the way an optical illusion does when the trick is revealed.
“Emmanuel!” he said.
The shock must have shown on his face.
“Changed days, eh?” said the man on the bench. He wasn’t old, now that John could see him properly. They were the same age, after all. It was the beard, and the gauntness beneath the layers of clothes, and the sadness in his eyes.
“Emmanuel!” he said again, then sat down on the bench. The metal bit cold through the seat of his trousers. John half-turned so he could look at this apparition from the past, his old friend. He smiled, half-laughed, felt a rush of joy and sorrow and pity and shame, held out his hand.
Emmanuel looked around cautiously, then smiled, took John’s hand, and drew him into an abrupt hug. He smelt of weed and stale sweat, sweet and organic. He let go quickly, and motioned John to the end of the bench.
“Gardener’s coming,” he said. He looked at his watch, an ancient Casio tied at the wrist with string. “In about a minute. Try and look normal. Keep your voice down.”
John nodded. He wasn’t bothered about the gardener himself, but he knew that plenty people on the margins – and he guessed that Emmanuel, from the looks of him, was somewhere in these margins – tried to attract as little attention as possible.
He took a deep breath. He wasn’t sure where to begin. So much time had passed, so much had happened, since they had shared an office in the Bayes Centre and tried to solve the world’s problems.
“So,” said Emmanuel. “I guess you made the right decision after all, when you left. Are you still saving the lost?”
“I…” John started, hesitated, not sure how to respond. “I’m still a minister. But it’s not about me saving anyone, you know.”
He paused, trying to think how long it had been since he had lost touch with Emmanuel. It had been some time after he’d left the lab. They had gone to each other’s weddings. He had visited Emmanuel and his wife in California one year, when Emmanuel was seconded to work on some hush-hush project and he was going to a pastors’ conference. When the kids had been born, and money was tight, there was no way to travel. They’d exchanged messages from time to time, and then Emmanuel had dropped out of sight. He felt ashamed of not having tried to reconnect.
“When did we last see each other?” John asked. “Was it that time in America?”
Emmanuel nodded. “Happy days, eh?”
“I’m sorry,” said John. “For losing touch…”
“My fault as much as yours,” said Emmanuel. “How’s life been treating you?”
John tried to shape an answer. Life hadn’t been easy, but that was true for most people. He and Chris were still together, the kids were just about grown up and none of them had gone off the rails, his work was both tremendously challenging and hugely fulfilling.
“I feel blessed, I guess,” he replied eventually. “It’s not always been easy, but on the whole, I am blessed.”
He looked with compassion at his former colleague and friend.
“How have things been with you, brother?”
Emmanuel shrugged. “Could be worse.”
“What are you living on?” asked John. “UBI?”
Emmanuel nodded. “Most of our department got made redundant, oh, maybe ten years after you left? One or two found other jobs. The rest of us are living it up on UBI. That’s a laugh, eh? Universal basic f-, I mean, effing, income.” He spat the words like splintered bones. “Pardon my French.”
He paused, and John saw the gardener approaching, trailing a small whining storm of yellow and brown as it blowed and sucked what remained of the dead and fallen leaves. It trundled past without looking at them, though he knew its sensors would pick up any conversation within at least a ten-metre radius. When it had gone out the gate at the side of the garden, Emmanuel relaxed a notch.
“Can you believe we worked on that thing’s great-grandfather?” he said with a wry smile.
“I know,” said John. “Our cute wee robot lawnmowers, eh? Remember the way kids would follow them around the park? Little did we know!”
“We could have known,” said Emmanuel. “If we’d listened. At the very least, you’d have thought, that with at least us two in the department, we’d have done a better job of the algorithms. We could have trained the Brain better.”
John shook his head. “Two Black guys in a massive research team was never going to be enough to shift the balance. We weren’t the only ones either, you know. It was, all things considered, as diverse a team as you could get. It just wasn’t enough, and we just didn’t see that at the time. No-one did. At least, no-one in the Edinburgh group.”
“I don’t know,” said Emmanuel. “Most of us are on UBI now, right? But Saxo is doing OK, got himself onto whatever special Advisory Committee. And Mark made a shedload of money investing in gold and who-knows-what. I think he used the Brain to get insider tips, before it learned not to give things away to humans.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me,” said John.
They were silent for a moment. A blackbird called from a tree across the path and its mate, hopping like a shadow on the faded lawn below, stopped and looked up. It felt like another life, John thought, those days when they were busy building smarter lawnmowers and the Brain was no more than a wild fancy. He had been born again when the Brain was in its infancy, when it was yet to learn good and evil, right and wrong. He had felt called to the ministry when they were trying to instil the Prime Directive. He tried to remember which of the team had insisted on calling it that. Precious few would recognise the reference now, he thought. They had built the Brain, and the Brain had built the next generation, and the next generation had built the gardeners and the soldiers and doctors and policy advisers and everything else. The Prime Directive still held. The Brain did everything to maximise human good, the most benefit for the most people, according to its algorithms, too vast and complex now for any human to understand. The best of all possible worlds.
Emmanuel reached into his coat pocket and took out a small thermos flask.
“Got a coffee cup?”
Surprised, John reached into his bag and found his folding cup. Emmanuel opened the flask, and poured John a generous golden measure. John raised it to his nose, sniffed, and gave Emmanuel an incredulous look. It had been years since he’d smelt that, the fragrance of peat and smoke and barley golden in the fields. He looked around, then dared to close his eyes and take another deep sniff, swirling the whisky slowly round the cup.
“It’s OK,” said Emmanuel. “No more gardeners the rest of the day. That’s why I like to come here.”
“But where did you get this?” asked John. He was stunned. The smell alone was releasing a thousand captive memories, ghosts of summers past, of camping on the west coast, of the roaring fire in a grand old hotel lounge in Inveraray, of Hogmanay with Chris’ family in the wild dark winters of the Western Isles. He took a small, slow sip.
“My dealer was here a little bit before you came along,” said Emmanuel.
“Your dealer?” said John. “What do you deal with?”
“This and that,” said Emmanuel. “I grow stuff. He has contacts in the west, one or two little off-grid distilleries, still making the good stuff and keeping out of the limelight.”
They sat and drank quietly. John supposed that the rich and powerful might still have access to alcohol, but even they would have to do it on the sly. His own children had never tasted anything stronger than the grape juice that was sold as wine these days. The Brain had decided the maximum human good did not include alcohol. This small subversive act made him feel light, light as a bumblebee or a blackbird, light as a dry leaf on the cold wind.
“Try and act normal, man,” said Emmanuel. “You’re grinning like an idiot.”
“Sorry,” said John. He brought his attention back to the man beside him, this stranger, this friend. “So,” he said, and stopped. He wanted to ask about Sue, but couldn’t see a wedding ring on Emmanuel’s finger and didn’t want to embarrass him. They might be long divorced, or he might have had to sell or trade the ring at some point. A lot of his parishioners were on UBI, and most had traded anything remotely valuable long ago. Universal Basic Income kept food on the table and clothes on their backs, just about, but there were so few real jobs now that most people had nothing else on top of it. His own income was more unpredictable than UBI, but they got by.
“So what were you thinking about, walking past just now?” asked Emmanuel.
John had forgotten about the labyrinth and why he was going there, in the strangeness and delight of this chance meeting. It came back to him with a sudden clarity. He shrank from it, and yet it had happened. He had sometimes thought about the possibility, and even discussed it light-heartedly with other ministers, but he had never expected it to really happen. He took another sip of his whisky.
“I was in church this morning,” he said. “We have a short service just before lunch. Just a reading and some prayer and a wee talk. Usually there are maybe ten or a dozen folk there. Anyway, I had just stood up to start the service, and in walked an Apollo. A new model. I’d heard about them but never seen one, you?”
Emmanuel shook his head. “I don’t think there are many of them around yet. I’ve heard they’re almost indistinguishable from humans, is that true?”
John nodded. “I didn’t realise at first, and I’m not sure most of my congregation noticed. It was… well, impressive, I suppose. I only noticed because it didn’t quite know when to stand and when to sit and so on. I mean, most people who come in off the street don’t necessarily know that either, but it meant I kept noticing when it sat and stood, and it looks like they haven’t quite figured out how to make that motion look, you know, completely natural. And sitting in the devotional talk, it didn’t fidget or yawn or shuffle in its chair like most people, it just sat and looked at me.”
“And that bothers you? That a robot came in and listened to you preach?”
“Yes,” said John. “And I can’t quite put my finger on it. I know it’s the kind of thing we talked about sometimes, back in the day, consciousness and soul and emerging phenomena and so on, but it was creepy, this thing that looked human, listening like it really wanted to understand.”
“They’ll be after your job next,” said Emmanuel, with a note of mischief in his voice. “Who do you think your folk are going to go for, John, you or a handsome white Apollo?”
John shook his head. “It sang, man! It sang the hymns. Bass, I think. It would have been beautiful, if I hadn’t known what it was. Maybe it still was beautiful. But I seriously have the serious heeby-jeebies about it.”
Emmanuel nodded. They both took another sip, John draining his cup. The wind fluttered the few leaves that remained overhead. The blackbird rustled at the old leaves beneath the bristles of the hedge. It was definitely winter, John thought, and shivered.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment or share!
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