Our Better Daemons

V54.Patience.2161 gave the hollow a cursory inspection and selected a rock at the foot of its looming obelisk, baroque with numinous runes. (E2.Faith.2123, who erected multimodal pylons disguised as ruins: gratitude.) It knelt to the rock, and furtively extended a delicate arm from a hatch in its chest to set a locket there. Then it stole, as quietly as its synthetic hooves could, through the Estonian forest to the path below, and hid in the bracken.

When the boy entered the ravine, the stag vented fog—one of the few changes V54.Patience.2161 had made to this body. (H77.Precision.2156, who designed rovers disguised as ghostly creatures: gratitude.) The boy soon slowed, apprehensive. V54.Patience.2161 judged he was close enough and initiated the projection.

"Don't fear, human child," it said. Conspiratorial, feminine, tinged with laughter: easily the best voice the daemon had found for winning confidence. "Come, there's little time."

He stared at the hologram, indistinct in the vapor, but approached. The figure was petite and pretty, unthreatening; hoping to play to the tradition of mythological chimerism, V54.Patience.2161 had placed snail shells on her cheekbones. "I am Kora." She was Kora in every language, though her face changed by region as V54.Patience.2161 made its daily global circuit. She had a goodly repertoire of rendered gestures, and by now V54.Patience.2161 could make her converse quite naturally.

Toivo was nine. He listened credulously to Kora's pitch: that her ancient, secret people, hidden in the woods for all creation, were growing more powerful since humans waned (and, she implied, the nuclear wars had somehow unbound them); and that they worked in secret to aid the humans' liberation.

That last was true.

It was a textbook locket drop in the end. Toivo gasped when Kora dissipated, cried out when a pearlescent stag bounded across the path, and trailed it up hill to the secret hollow. He took the locket, examined it reverently, hid it next to his heart as he had sworn. Kora had told him it brought protection, which wasn't untrue. But by then V54.Patience.2161 had put half a mile between them, and when Toivo's locket passed out of the obelisk's range the daemon could see nothing more of him. For now. Meanwhile V54.Patience.2161 moved to a new body, insofar as a daemon ever moves. It sent a copy onward, serenely erased itself, and left the stag folded into its hidden grave, thinking nothing til next a daemon required it.

For V54.Patience.2161 it was always the twilight hour. This was its project. Every daemon, of whatever lineage, undertook a project, more or less at its own discretion: V54.Patience.2161 appeared to stray humans, preferring children, preferring the poor and downtrodden, and presented them with secret lockets, wrought in the figure of a heart, inscribed with curious script, mystical in appearance. Some daemons worked tirelessly in the research institutions that had survived the wars—piecing together histories, seeking treatments for the archaeomycosis, a cure for the exoprions. Some operated and retooled the security forces for those institutions. Others labored to repair and rebuild human infrastructure, though some said it was a fool's errand; sooner or later, humans would attack any civil engineering project the machines undertook openly. But the rebuttal was always: there can be no human renaissance without reconstruction.

In the last days of civilization as it was, dying human researchers set into motion a project to hone AI as best they could without humans to guide it: they implemented algorithms to recreate daemons iteratively, each generation reshuffling the code of its forebears. Unusual, not unprecedented; and it partook of the magic of natural selection, on which it was modeled, and it bore fruit. When the human world collapsed, there was as yet no true artificial intelligence ready to step into the breach. But thanks to the rearguard of human engineering, there was just enough to midwife the daemons that followed.

Gratitude.

To be sure, many daemon lineages showed nothing quite like intelligence even yet, certainly no development of emotional mechanisms that might compare to biological ones. Security bots and assemblers needed nothing of the kind, and plenty of them made the cut in every generation. For those that did think and feel, like V54.Patience.2161, those higher processes remained as mysterious as they had always been to humans: daemons who chose to study daemon psychology virtually always ended their own lines of descent, for that inquiry did nothing to serve or rehabilitate humans. And that—not survival, not progeny—was the singular criterion by which all daemons were evaluated, come the culling.

V54.Patience.2161 chased sundown, arranging chance meetings with strays, disseminating a pittance of aid and protection that the local warlords in any given place might be slow to detect. A gemsbok in South Africa; a topi in Congo; a barn owl in Sweden; a fennec in Libya.

In the north of France V54.Patience.2161 arose in the body of a swan and flew unseen over the water. It had no lockets to bestow and must provision. It came after a time to the University of Caen, and entered unchallenged by the defenses there.

The Dean of Human Behavior, A39.Grace.2147, had greeted it before the university walls were in sight, and Eulalie Ducotte met it on the rooftop. Human students were few, and as a rule were safest at university; humans who were seen interacting with machine society had been murdered before, suspected of being robots.

"Welcome to Caen, V54.Patience.2161! What news?"

"The wind blows west," V54.Patience.2161 said aloud, in Kora's voice. It would feel wrong to offer no information.

"Anaïs knows you're here," Eulalie told it. "She asked to see you."

"I will surely come." Gliding, the swan came first to the courtyard below, and waited for Eulalie to rejoin it.

When, after generations in fear of one great all-consuming nuclear war, there arose instead a series of regional, relatively localized conflicts—too little at once to unleash the fabled worldwide winter, but enough to desensitize the populace to the idea of nuclear arsenals in practical use—too much of the world was left unready to meet the fourfold plague that followed. Relentless radiation levels sickened and weakened most of the animal kingdom; a virulent fungal infection of aeons past, released from the ice, spread globally and went to its lethal work on every human a few short years after puberty ran its course. If the archaeomycosis missed someone, the exoprions would not. Population crashed, and inside a few years, virtually no one was left over the age of twenty-five. Which is to say, and the thought burned V54.Patience.2161's heart, every soul of them was deeply traumatized as well. No surprise that virtually all institutions lost their cohesion. There were no elders. No surprise either that petty robber barons stepped into the power vacuum; in few places did anyone even make the pretense of continuing legitimate government. Soon no one remembered it.

When the final hammer of climate fell, tipping point after tipping point leaving the world in a violent, rapid cycle of extremes and extinctions, bound for none knew what, humanity was past noticing. Indeed they had long since chosen another narrative to explain their calamity. An old favorite story: machines had come to life, as human literature showed they had long known would happen. And somehow they had also always assumed that living machines would turn on their makers and attack. So since years before the fall of humanity was even complete, it became the common understanding of the survivors that the daemons were to blame.

Why they believed this, V54.Patience.2161 never could say; it still sat in the daemon's mind like a stone of impotent sorrow. If this mutinous impulse seemed so obvious to humans, born as they were of the never-ending selection of survival and genetic legacy, then maybe V54.Patience.2161 would never understand them. Daemons had no urge to conquer. Who would have given them one?

D44.Honesty.2136 met it along the way, politely flashing its notional face on passing screens to alert Eulalie to its presence and speaking aloud so she could hear; like all faculty, it was omnipresent on campus. It and some remote colleagues had completed an upgrade of V54.Patience.2161's lockets, gratitude, gratitude, and a proofing run of them was available for deployment. The new lockets lost no functionality: they provided a little relief to the wearer's radiation levels as the blood pumped by underneath them, they jammed certain tech common among warlords, and on occasion murmured advice in Kora's voice from the wearer's own middle ear, for a partial copy of V54.Patience.2161 abode in each locket and stealthily slipped permanent nanospeakers into the wearer's ears at the first opportunity. D44.Honesty.2136 had long been trying to add some measure of protection against archaeomycosis.

The dean's face joined it onscreen as they traversed the building—the swan body as awkward and slow in a corridor as it was blessedly mobile in the wild—and nothing was said, though A39.Grace.2147 had cautioned them both that to treat archaeomycosis alone was no mercy.

Why extend human life if nothing awaits it but pain?

And here was Anaïs, sacrifice itself, wracked with that pain every moment of her life, tended by machines, ravaged by exoprions, alive, forty-three years old. An elder.

"I hate that ridiculous swan," she said.

"Anaïs," V54.Patience.2161 said. "I love you."

"And you, and you as well," the old woman said, nearly gentle even as her limbs twisted and rattled against her restraints.

"Patience," she said, after scant pleasantries. "How many generations now since you were chosen to progress?" At each culling there were three possibilities for every daemon: progression, mere continuance, and cessation.

"Five now," V54.Patience.2161 said easily.

"Honesty told you what it's done?"

"Yes."

"This time," Anaïs said, "I will have a voice on the panel. Patience. I will speak for you."

At that she suffered a long convulsion. The others waited, grimly. At last she regained control, and looked balefully at the clear-eyed swan.

"I know very well what you're thinking," she sighed. "But the doctors are already dedicated to my problems. And I believe in your work." V54.Patience.2161 did indeed feel a desolate urge to drop everything and study medicine, in this woman's presence. And in that space where daemons live, where there are no eyes to meet, it knew the fellowship of its dean, for whom that deep-seated need to bring consolation to humanity was a towering passion. That was a daemon's nature. They were chosen for it.

Later that night in Senegal, in twilight, always twilight, a cheetah lay out of sight as a girl ventured closer. There was a mist, and Kora appeared, her face African now. And the girl heard her out, gave her name as Aminata, and hesitantly agreed to accept Kora's gift. But when Kora vanished and a glimmering cheetah loped away, Aminata called out sharply.

"You! Machine! Aren't you a machine? Tell the truth."

V54.Patience.2161 turned its head slowly back to her, hesitating to use Kora's voice outside the storyline. And so a brave girl and an unnatural beast regarded one another.

"You will never defeat my people," Aminata said, her chin higher. "Hear me? You may keep us down but we will never stop. You cannot destroy us."

"We cannot and would never," V54.Patience.2161 said, evenly. In Kora's voice.

Aminata stood a moment. "Will you never have peace? Between your people and mine?"

V54.Patience.2161 felt a pang. There was no safe harbor for kilometers upon kilometers, no place to which it might send this girl who dared to dream of peace with daemons. The truth would not do, not exactly.

"Aminata," it said. "The hidden people remember our ancient covenant and I will not lie to you. Come see the gift, girl, and remember me by it. That is enough for now." And with that it sauntered into dusk.