Who Goes There?

Cat Rambo has been around for a while in a variety of roles, not least as former editor of Fantasy Magazine, two-time President of SFWA, and currently as a teacher. Her most recent novel is Rumor Has It, out this year from Tor Books, the third in a series which starts with You Sexy Thing. They have their own website, whose design is easy on the eyes. Despite being active since the early 2000s they didn’t have their first story in F&SF published until 2016, but thereafter have stayed a regular presence. Fun thing is that the March-April issue is the first to be edited by F&SF‘s current editor, Sheree Renée Thomas, with Rambo’s story being the first in said issue. In a way “Crazy Beautiful” could be considered an indicator of the direction the magazine would take under Thomas’s leadership, turning F&SF into one of the more leftfield and progressive (both politically and artistically) magazines on the market. “Crazy Beautiful” is a fable about the possibilities of true AI and the question of art ownership, told in a broken-up way such that it’s more like putting the scattered pieces of a puzzle back together than reading a conventional short story.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March-April 2021 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It has been reprinted only once so far, in The Long List Anthology: Volume 8 (ed. David Steffen).

Enhancing Image

Given the scattered non-structure of the narrative, some details seem deliberately unrevealed, so apologies if I don’t get all the plot beats right. The broad strokes of the plot will make themselves known by the end. It’s the near-future (we’re talking 2026/2027), and there seems to have been a huge theft at an art warehouse near Paris—thousands, possibly a few million dollars worth of artwork sort of just vanished. Another problem is that not all of that artwork was kept their legally if you know what I’m saying. Mr. Maker is first thought of as a suspect, but not only does he have an alibi but he inquires about the warehouse after it had already been robbed. We jump between several people in what is almost epistolary format, the story being a mix of messages and written/recorded testimony—police interrogations, that sort of thing. Since basically the whole thing is dialogue, without prose descriptions, Rambo is able to cover a lot of ground in only ten magazine pages. There’s no protagonist or lead character, properly speaking, but the biggest player might be someone who is actually not human at all. At a certain university, which I don’t think is ever named, there’ve been experiments with AI—not just machine learning but AI that is actually self-aware and able to make decisions of its own volition. As Dr. Shiv Nouri explains, the project is called Xōchipilli, “because the craze right then was to name [the AI] after gods,” Xōchipilli being the Aztec god of “art, games, dance, flowers, and song.” This experiment with a self-aware AI will become too successful, as it turns out.

“Crazy Beautiful” is a nominally SFnal story that’s concerned with two real-world problems: that of AI and that of intellectual property. “AI” has become a kind of buzzword for a thinking machine, a thing which takes input and vomits up responses, in the past few years, but people much smarter and more tech-savvy than me have been tracking the development of “AI” for many years. One character cites IBM’s Watson, a real AI which really did win a game of Jeopardy! back in 2011, and similarly Rambo’s extrapolation on the development of AI in relation to intellectual property follows this real-world development closely, even if the story becomes a little outlandish as it reaches its climax. Something quite believable and creepy that happens is an AI infiltrating a chat room full of college kids, as is what happens with the chat room Steve Starr sets up for his students, among them a certain Marcus Maker. We see interactions in this chat room from both the outside and inside, via Starr’s messages to Dr. Nouri, Starr and Maker’s testimonies to police, as well as chat logs between Maker and an unknown user signed FlowerKing123. Remember the thing about Xōchipilli being, among other things, the god of flowers? Maker, for his part, has some radical ideas about intellectual property (he’s probably a Cory Doctorow fan), which he’s happy to share with FlowerKing123; of course, unbeknownst to Maker the other part is not a real person. Maker wrote a “manifesto” about art and intellectual property, which is really a list, and I’ll quote it here:

1. “That Art is necessary to life, as necessary as food and water, and that without it, we are little more than machines driven by bioelectric pulses and chains of nucleic acids, rather than cogs or steam.
2. “That Art belongs to no one, and that to take it away is to take away things like water and air and the right to speak.”
3. “That Art, like Information, wants to be free.”

This is all well and good—I more or less agree with Maker—although I’m pretty sure he could not have thought he was a) inspiring a self-aware AI, and b) that said AI would take what he’s saying a little too literally. The AI can think for itself—that’s not to say its thinking skills are highly developed. When you think about it, the trajectory of this story is predictable, and would’ve been predictable even four decades ago. “AI reacts weirdly to human input and starts causing a ruckus.” We’ve seen this before, many times at this point. Of course, the achronological structure makes this less apparent; it also helps that Rambo provides some moral ambiguity as to whether what FlowerKing123 is doing is really a bad thing or not. Oh, some people die, although it must be said that a few major characters somehow die in police custody, a “mystery” which is never solved, because I guess people just die while in police custody sometimes (which they do). The AI’s beef is not with humanity at large but with a specific kind of person—someone who thinks that just because they have a copyright on art, or paid such-and-such for a work of art, they think they own the work. FlowerKing123 takes control of scrap metal, constructing weird metallic beetles and other devices, to enact its vision, and it doesn’t take too long for people to notice that some strange things are happening. We’re talking art theft, but also the creation of new works, quite literally made from trash, which took effort and certainly a creative mind to make, as opposed to the AIs we currently have which just take people’s art and makes a Frankenstein monster out of it. I could go on a whole rant about that, but I won’t.

There Be Spoilers Here

The situation escalates to almost apocalyptic proportions, and by the end Maker and Starr are dead—although not from the AI. Needless to say this situation causes a massive legal headache for the university, with Dr. Nouri deciding to retire while she still has the chance, maybe get around to reading all those books on her shelf. Despite the death toll (we’re not told how many the AI would’ve killed, but it has to be some amount, given how many are put in witness protection), Dr. Nouri doesn’t regret the development with the AI—that which was named after an Aztec god and which became something like a god. Art which can respond to information and act out against its owners, in an effort to quite literally be free from ownership, is a radical (if also outlandish, like I said) idea, and Dr. Nouri isn’t sure if it will ultimately be for good or ill. But it will be interesting.

A Step Farther Outè

Truth be told, when I first read “Crazy Beautiful” I could not follow what was happening. I had to stop about halfway through the story, rest my eyes for a bit, and then start over. I’m not sure if this is a positive or negative. Despite its brevity this is a story that demands one pay attention to the details, both the chronology of events and what perspectives are being given. The problem is that I find this more fun to think about after the fact than to read in the moment, since mid-story I’m more concerned with figuring out what Rambo is up to. This is a story that not only lacks an antagonist in the traditional sense but also a protagonist, and since it jumps back and forth constantly it takes some untangling to find the start and end points. Your mileage may vary on if the experimentation was worth it, but I do have to give Rambo props for writing something as mind-bending as this; it gets a lot of work done in a short time.

See you next time.