Nirvana or Bust by Michael Swanwick (Analog, March-April 2022) opens with an exo-skeleton wearing woman called Huiling dangling her feet into the Grand Canyon when she is found by another woman called Catherine McClury. McClury tells Huiling that an assassin is coming for her. After this the pair sit in silence for a short while, and then McClury asks Huiling if she is going to introduce her exoskeleton:
“Nerve, this is Catherine McClury. She was my advisor at Cornell, my mentor, my everything. Catherine, this is Nirvana or Bust, my research partner.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Catherine said.
“Charmed,” the exoskeleton replied. “But also a little puzzled. Exactly who is it you told you could find Huiling?”
“The folks at the department of technology security. Not just her; I promised to locate you both. Good thing I did, too.” p. 49
After McClury shows them the assassin’s ship’s path towards them on an app the exo-skeleton downloads, the two woman go to a nearby cabin. They have tea, and later make love.
When (spoiler) the politely spoken assassin (“a chromed mantisform a good seven feet tall”) arrives, it tells Huiling that it is there to communicate and reason with her (although it concludes these opening remarks with the observation that murder is a form of communication!) Then we get to the meat of the story, which is that Huiling and Nirvana or Bust are a merged being, something between symbionts and a complete union. When the assassin confirms this is the case—during the interview it asks Nirvana or Bust why an AI would do this—it states that they must die. But, before the assassin can do anything, McClury intervenes and executes a dataphage that was hidden in the applet—and Nirvana or Bust is erased. The assassin, satisfied with what McClury has done, leaves. McClury tells Huiling that it was a mistake creating AIs in the first place and, “we’re not going to make that same mistake twice.”
The final part of the tale sees Huiling rebooting the exoskeleton on with a copy of the AI, and then there is an final authorial comment: “This is the story of how our civilisation was born.”
This isn’t bad but there is far too much going on here in far too short a space—as with a lot of Swanwick’s stories—and in this case it is mostly talking heads explaining matters to each other.
** (Average). 3,200 words.
1. The Analog magazine version of this story has a really bad text error at the end of the story—ignore the material in black (an errant cut and paste of the biographical material at the end).
