Nine Billion Turing Tests

by Chris Willrich

Genres: Alternative History sci-fi; Literary Fiction; Science Fiction

Synopsis

In a post-nuclear event Silicon Valley, a man grieving the loss of his wife struggles to find comfort when he is forced to communicate with his neighbors’ AI devices, rather than the people themselves.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: February 21, 2024

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 34

Sample

Saturday’s sky had the first blue in three weeks, a robin-egg river between white cloudbanks and slate thunderheads. On HoodChat people shared video of the neighborhood creek engorged like a vast brown snake eager to burst its levees and eat the Silicon Valley suburbs caging it. Word was they’d be okay, probably, but they were still on flood alert. Vijay, replacement knee and all, determined to go see for himself.

When Vijay fetched his cane and stepped out of the creaking door that Mara had insisted on painting red, he paused in the sunlight to see if the cat would follow. Old Kaali blinked and tottered from her bed near the door, nosed her bony frame outside below the awning, and flopped down like a tabby version of a Salvador Dali clock.

“I promised you’d finish out your time at home, Kaali,” Vijay said, hunching closer to the cat’s level with the cane’s help. A few tarrying raindrops hit his glasses as he petted her. It was too easy to feel ribs and vertebrae beneath the fur. “If we have to run, you need to hold on a while so I can bring you back when it’s safe. You hear me?”

Kaali gave him a green-eyed blink that seemed full of weary benevolence. “Anthropomorphizing again,” Vijay muttered, tapping contacts on his cane to run the JUNGBLOOD build and stubborning himself down the street.

With the sun out the court was full of people and therefore full of even more anthropomorphizing. Although Vijay lived creekside at the court’s end, the tree-crowded parkland back there was a tangle of sequoias and oaks and responsibility—power company, city parks and recreation, water district, who knew what else—and they all used AI to keep it all organized. ...