Baby Steps by Lettie Prell (Analog, November 2015) opens with Fu-Hau calling a computer tech-type called Jayden to say that one of her patients has just died and that the upload to a virtual reality afterlife has not worked. As Jayden types in his report later on, the “subject has failed to coalesce on upload and has no VR form at present”.
Jayden quickly takes control, and the point of view switches from Fu-Hau to him as he works on the on the dead woman’s file. As he does he sees a strange corruption in the code and, when he later talks to what he thinks the virtual copy of the woman, gets odd responses:
“Hi Angela. My name is Jayden.”
“I am-was Angela. True. Yet it is also true that I’ve burst into existence only now, from the seed state of humanity. I am an unfurling of consciousness from the enfolded places into something greater.”
Whoops. Not out of the danger zone yet. He should get to work on that file next. He shifted his gaze to the other screen and swallowed hard. The mystery file was humongous. An extra eight gig, easy.
Meanwhile, the stream of words continued. “Much self was coiled up tight in other dimensions, unexpressed in the ordinary facets of the physical world, and suppressed by what was once the core identity. No longer. I am free. I know now.”
He’d been thinking what to do with the mystery file. “Know what?”
“Curled inside mundane words are worlds of meaning. I should not expect you to understand.”
He realized he was holding his breath. He tried to think what to say. He wanted to ask something.
“A tree. A rock. A cloud.”
Holy hills she’d gone on random shuffle. Whatever he’d been starting to think this might be, some advanced mind . . . He took it all back. It was like a whole jug had been poured over his head. This gibberish was his call to action. That mystery file had to go. p. 48
It will be pretty obvious to most readers that a nascent AI that has come to life during the dead woman’s upload process, so I’m not quite sure why Jayden is dismissing the idea (probably because the writer wouldn’t then be able to expand the piece into a novella1).
Eventually, Jayden manages to prune the excess from the file and the old woman coalesces. Jayden welcomes her to her afterlife in VR, and then goes home. The story closes with him in the parking lot remembering that he has forgotten to delete the mystery file. . . .
This didn’t grab me as I’m not interested in stories about stereotypical computer types (or their Jordans, caffeinated water, or Chinese take-out littered work spaces—it’s one of those stories with that sort of detail), or in story about a newly born AI and its cod-profundity (I’m pretty sure I read enough of those in the cyberpunk era).
The story is also a fragment that reads like the beginning of a longer piece (and now is, see below).
* (Mediocre). 2,050 words.
1. This piece forms the beginning of Prell’s novella, Uploading Angela (Analog, May-June 2021). The beginning of the novella is almost identical to this story (although the point of view in the first section of the original short story is changed from Fu-Hau to Jayden in the novella).
The introduction to the novella wrongly identifies the earlier story as Emergency Protocol (Analog, September-October 2017).