Rosebud by Paul Cornell

Published by Tordotcom on April 26, 2022

The five crew members of the Rosebud are artificial intelligences taking the forms of (respectively) a goth, an aristocratic scientist, a swarm of insects, a half-tiger person, and a body creation artist (and his family, all waving their hands at once). Humans in physical bodies wouldn’t fit on the Rosebud because the ship is tiny. Some were human once. Bob was made to believe he was human, but he was created as a Russian bot to troll social media. Quin is a product of insects’ foray into AI, an experiment that didn’t go over well with humans, leading to hive burnings that are part of Quin’s ancestral memory. This is a recycled crew that, to some extent, is grateful to have a continuing digital existence.

The Company dispatched the Rosebud in the distant past to send rocks on a path that will take them near Earth, where other ships will mine them for valuable ores and minerals. The crew has a vague understanding of Earth. At least when they were created, it was a repressive place where transgenders had to identify themselves with pink and blue badges.

The Rosebud has detected a sphere that must be another tiny ship because it is too smooth and regular in appearance to be a rock. Is it a pirate ship? Is it the product of alien technology? The greatest fear of the Rosebud’s crew is that the Company will come to investigate the sphere and, in the process, learn that the AIs haven’t been following protocol. In the absence of updates, they have started to experience the horror of freedom. They kind of like it and don’t want the Company to mess with it. They regularly profess their loyalty to the Company, their gratitude that the Company saved them, in the hope that the Company will not decide they need to be reprogrammed.

The crew decides to conduct its own investigation, traveling to the sphere in artificial bodies that include a tiger-man, a wasp, Dracula, the body once inhabited by the aristocratic scientist, and Bob Ross (the TV artist who, older readers might recall, once taught viewers to paint). After they make contact, they experience moments which their memories and their memory backups seem to diverge. They develop a theory about alternate futures and altered pasts based on entangled particles and probability waves, an aspect of theoretical physics that fascinates me despite my utter inability to wrap my head around it.

The story makes clever use of theoretical physics, eventually making the reader understand that the past is whatever you want it to be, at least if you know how to control entangled particles. Paul Cornell leaves it to the reader’s imagination to fill in much of the story, including the origin and role of the mysterious Company. That’s not a problem for science fiction junkies, as a powerful Company, a private enterprise that functions as a (or the) government, is a fixture of futuristic fiction.

The theme of AIs who aspire to some sort of personhood is another fixture, but that’s not actually what’s happening in Rosebud. Some of the AIs are based on people who once lived and none of them really aspire to be human. They’re just happy to have developed their own personalities and, in that limited sense, to have slipped the Company’s yoke. That’s an interesting idea. Cornell develops the idea about as much as it needs to be developed to tell a story that comes to a satisfying resolution — or at least one that satisfies the characters, bearing in mind that aliens who control entangled particles, like writers, can create any ending they want, including one that makes everyone happy.

RECOMMENDED