The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Volume 1

by Paula Guran

  As the trolls intensified their campaign, Sara sent us patch after patch for the armor. She added layers with names like adversarial complementary sets, self-modifying code detectors, visualization auto-healers.

  Again and again, the armor held only briefly before the trolls found new ways through. The democratization of artificial intelligence meant that they knew all the techniques Sara knew, and they had machines that could learn and adapt, too.

  Abigail could not hear me. My pleas fell on deaf ears; perhaps her armor had learned to see me as just another angry voice to screen out.

  Emily Fort:

  One day, Mom came to me in a panic. “I don’t know where she is! I can’t see her!”

  She hadn’t talked to me in days, obsessed with the project that Hayley had become. It took me some time to figure out what she meant. I sat down with her at the computer.

  She clicked the link for Hayley’s memorial video, which she watched several times a day to give herself strength.

  “It’s not there!” she said.

  She opened the cloud archive of our family memories.

  “Where are the pictures of Hayley?” she said. “There are only placeholder Xs.”

  She showed me her phone, her backup enclosure, her tablet.

  “There’s nothing! Nothing! Did we get hacked?”

  Her hands fluttered helplessly in front of her chest, like the wings of a trapped bird. “She’s just gone!”

  Wordlessly, I went to the shelves in the family room and brought down one of the printed annual photo albums she had made when we were little. I opened the volume to a family portrait, taken when Hayley was ten and I was eight.

  I showed the page to her.

  Another choked scream. Her trembling fingers tapped against Hayley’s face on the page, searching for something that wasn’t there.

  I understood. A pain filled my heart, a pity that ate away at love. I reached up to her face and gently took off her glasses.

  The trolls had trained my mother’s armor to recognize Hayley as the source of her distress.

  She stared at the page.

  Sobbing, she hugged me. “You found her. Oh, you found her!”

  It felt like the embrace of a stranger. Or maybe I had become a stranger to her.

  Aunt Sara explained that the trolls had been very careful with their attacks. Step by step, they had trained my mother’s armor to recognize Hayley as the source of her distress.

  But another kind of learning had also been taking place in our home. My parents paid attention to me only when I had something to do with Hayley. It was as if they no longer saw me, as though I had been erased instead of Hayley.

  My grief turned dark and festered. How could I compete with a ghost? The perfect daughter who had been lost not once, but twice? The victim who demanded perpetual penance? I felt horrid for thinking such things, but I couldn’t stop.

  We sank under our guilt, each alone.

  Gregg Fort:

  I blamed Abigail. I’m not proud to admit it, but I did.

  We shouted at each other and threw dishes, replicating the half-remembered drama between my own parents when I was a child. Hunted by monsters, we became monsters ourselves.

  While the killer had taken Hayley’s life, Abigail had offered her image up as a sacrifice to the bottomless appetite of the internet. Because of Abigail, my memories of Hayley would be forever filtered through the horrors that came after her death. She had summoned the machine that amassed individual human beings into one enormous, collective, distorting gaze, the machine that had captured the memory of my daughter and then ground it into a lasting nightmare.

  The broken shells on the beach glistened with the venom of the raging deep.

  Of course that’s unfair, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true.

  “Heartless,” a self-professed troll:

  There’s no way for me to prove that I am who I say, or that I did what I claim. There’s no registry of trolls where you can verify my identity, no Wikipedia entry with confirmed sources.

  Can you even be sure I’m not trolling you right now?

  I won’t tell you my gender or race or who I prefer to sleep with, because those details aren’t relevant to what I did. Maybe I own a dozen guns. Maybe I’m an ardent supporter of gun control.

  I went after the Forts because they deserved it.

  RIP-trolling has a long and proud history, and our target has always been inauthenticity. Grief should be private, personal, hidden. Can’t you see how horrible it was for that mother to turn her dead daughter into a symbol, to wield it as a political tool? A public life is an inauthentic one. Anyone who enters the arena must be prepared for the consequences.

  Everyone who shared that girl’s memorial online, who attended the virtual candlelit vigils, offered condolences, professed to have been spurred into action, was equally guilty of hypocrisy. You didn’t think the proliferation of guns capable of killing hundreds in one minute was a bad thing until someone shoved images of a dead girl in your face? What’s wrong with you?

  And you journalists are the worst. You make money and win awards for turning deaths into consumable stories; for coaxing survivors to sob in front of your drones to sell more ads; for inviting your readers to find meaning in their pathetic lives through vicarious, mimetic suffering. We trolls play with images of the dead, who are beyond caring, but you stinking ghouls grow fat and rich by feeding death to the living. The sanctimonious are also the most filthy-minded, and victims who cry the loudest are the hungriest for attention.

  RIP-trolling has a long and proud history, and our target has always been inauthenticity.

  Everyone is a troll now. If you’ve ever liked or shared a meme that wished violence on someone you’d never met, if you’ve ever decided it was okay to snarl and snark with venom because the target was “powerful,” if you’ve ever tried to signal your virtue by piling on in an outrage mob, if you’ve ever wrung your hands and expressed concern that perhaps the money raised for some victim should have gone to some other less “privileged” victim—then I hate to break it to you, you’ve also been trolling.

  Some say that the proliferation of trollish rhetoric in our culture is corrosive, that armor is necessary to equalize the terms of a debate in which the only way to win is to care less. But don’t you see how unethical armor is? It makes the weak think they’re strong, turns cowards into deluded heroes with no skin in the game. If you truly despise trolling, then you should’ve realized by now that armor only makes things worse.

  By weaponizing her grief, Abigail Fort became the biggest troll of them all—except she was bad at it, just a weakling in armor. We had to bring her—and by extension, the rest of you—down.

  Abigail Fort:

  Politics returned to normal. Sales of body armor, sized for children and young adults, received a healthy bump. More companies offered classes on situational awareness and mass shooting drills for schools. Life went on.

  I deleted my accounts; I stopped speaking out. But it was too late for my family. Emily moved out as soon as she could; Gregg found an apartment.

  Alone in the house, my eyes devoid of armor, I tried to sort through the archive of photographs and videos of Hayley.

  Every time I watched the video of her sixth birthday, I heard in my mind the pornographic moans; every time I looked at photos of her high school graduation, I saw her bloody animated corpse dancing to the tune of “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”; every time I tried to page through the old albums for some good memories, I jumped in my chair, thinking an AR ghost of her, face grotesquely deformed like Munch’s The Scream, was about to jump out at me, cackling, “Mommy, these new piercings hurt!”

  I screamed, I sobbed, I sought help. No therapy, no medication worked. Finally, in a numb fury, I deleted all my digital files, shredded my printed albums, broke the frames hanging on walls.

  The trolls trained me as well as they trained my armor.

  I no longer have any images of
Hayley. I can’t remember what she looked like. I have truly, finally, lost my child.

  How can I possibly be forgiven for that?

  KEN LIU is the winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards; he wrote The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (starting with The Grace of Kings), as well as The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories and The Hidden Girl and Other Stories. He also authored the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker. Prior to becoming a full-time writer, Liu worked as a software engineer, corporate lawyer, and litigation consultant. Liu frequently speaks at conferences and universities on a variety of topics, including futurism, cryptocurrency, history of technology, bookmaking, the mathematics of origami, and other subjects of his expertise.

  LOGIC PUZZLES

  VAISHNAVI PATEL

  The daughter hates this new country with its methodical streets and packed supermarkets, hates the way every inch of space has been scrubbed clean of character, hates her teacher who speaks to her slowly and loudly as if she is deaf instead of merely unfamiliar with a language that follows no logic. America is devoid of the chaotic magic of her homeland, devoid of any kind of magic. She tells her father, I would rather die than stay here one more day. Please can we go back to India.

  The father barely hears her plea through the fog of exhaustion that has settled over him like a shroud. He drives two hours every morning to a small factory, where he crawls inside devices that churn out plastic bags while his fellow workers taunt him for the color of his skin and leave him in the maw of the machinery if he complains. He tells his wife, This is all for a better future. I may not see our daughter, but at least she will have a good life.

  The mother hoardes gold, hiding every piece of jewelry she received as a wedding gift and converting her family’s meager savings to bars. In India, gold could turn to silver turn to iron turn back to gold, a strange alchemy of the air that twisted plans as they were made. But here she buys as much gold as she can and slips them into boxes filled with packing peanuts in the crawlspace and clothbound covers of books of Hindi poetry. She tells her daughter, When I die, check the whole house. You never know where you might find treasure.

  The mother is right. Her daughter discovers real treasure in the dead of a Midwestern winter, when the snow has lost all novelty and the memory of warmth is failing. Her mother has brought back a paper grocery bag filled with books from the library’s bag sale, tattered copies of trade novels published decades ago with perfect white children on the cover, and cookbooks yellowed and warped with age worshipping someone named Betty Crocker.

  But near the bottom, the daughter’s hand brushes against something soft and unmarred, and her fingers close instinctively around the prize. The cover has a glossy finish, and the pages are thick with the dreamlike scent of new books. Inside lie beautiful puzzles, the clean black grids printed against stark white paper, each puzzle a self-contained story far more interesting than her sixth-grade reading materials, with clearly spelled out rules and right answers. These are the first things to make sense in this godforsaken country. She immediately senses magic in these pages, a different sort of magic than that of her childhood, but magic nonetheless.

  Tulips are pushing out in the small front yard of the townhouse by the time the daughter finishes the book. As she pencils in the answers to each puzzle, power washes through the page and she begins to understand the logic that governs her new world. Her teacher praises her growth on the second trimester report card, writing, Integrating nicely with other students and, Great progress toward normalizing speech patterns.

  What she means, of course, is, Assimilating well. The teacher’s pride in her own tutelage drips from every word, an ode to her ability to scrub color from voices and culture from minds. Perhaps, as the teacher believes, it will help the daughter. Perhaps it will buy her an American job, a Caucasian husband, a white-picket fence. Or perhaps, unmoored from the people that look and sound like her, the daughter will waste away into nothing at all, a soft sigh in the ripping wind of progress.

  But the daughter is not unmoored. She spends her evenings sitting in a hot pink plastic chair and drawing puzzles of her own with a thick No. 3 pencil onto wide-ruled notebook paper, all bought on discount at the local dollar store, a haven for the Indian community. She usually hates going there, watching her mother socialize while she waits impatiently by the cart, but now she brings paper and pencil and hopes her mother runs into another friend. She writes clues, painstakingly spelling out, The daughter preferred the black socks, or, The daughter went to bed after the mother. Her favorite clues are grouped, the family together and separated at the same time: Out of the mother, the daughter, and the father, one likes striped socks, one goes to bed last, and one is not a parent.

  And if, the next day, her mother goes to bed before her and wears striped socks around the house, the daughter thinks nothing of it. Her mother has a headache from the sharp antiseptic supplies she uses to clean the homes of demanding white ladies, and she has not had time to do laundry, so striped socks are the only clean ones left. In India, the daughter could never use magic. She was simply an observer of the fleeting transformations that emerged from the chaos and slipped away again, watching with delight as a snake became a branch or a flock of birds materialized from thin air. It does not occur to her that here, a place steeped with the magic of stability and rules, she can harness it herself.

  She loves making puzzles perhaps more than solving them. When she writes, the imaginary blurs into reality blurs into the imaginary in a gently pleasing manner, and an American normalcy seeps into her life. She makes friends, swaps lunches, watches Disney. Her puzzle about group project partners at school comes true, and she snickers at the tears her white classmates shed at being separated from their best friends. To her the pairs are perfectly balanced—orderly—so mean must be paired with nice, good with bad, smart with dumb. Every puzzle she writes makes instinctive sense, and she can barely remember the process of thinking up clues. They appear to her fully formed.

  Her mother asks questions in stilted English, bemused by this new hobby, but the daughter cannot voice how it feels to create order in her puzzles. It’s a different order than the perfectly square yard of their home, or the perfectly lined homes on their street, or the perfectly clean streets in their town. This order does not wrap its hands around her throat and suffocate all life’s joy; it takes her by the hand and leads her away from her American hell.

  She tries to explain anyways because she loves her mother. But the words, House, hands, choking, I love, I hate, do not come out quite right. It does not cross her mind to speak in anything other than English. That is the language of these puzzles.

  Once her mother loses interest in the conversation, the daughter starts writing another puzzle. Out of the mother, the father, and the daughter, one is very smart, one is very stupid, and—

  She has not seen her father in days. Her mother makes excuses for the fact that since moving to America her husband has barely seen his child for three hours a week, describing in great detail the sacrifices he makes to keep a roof over their head, food on the table, and other clichés taught in English learning programs. The daughter understands her parents’ division of labor, her father covering the essentials while her mother works to build up the all-important American Savings, but when her mother provides yet another justification for her father’s absence, all she can picture is him trapped comically within the factory, unable to come home. She imagines his belt tangled impossibly with a piece of machinery and giggles.

  Out of the mother, the father, and the daughter, one is very smart, one is very stupid, and one is stuck inside a plastic-bag-maker.

  The father comes home to find the kitchen table a mess, sheets of paper strewn about. His wife holds one such paper in her hand, shaking her head and sounding out unfamiliar words. What is this? he asks. What happened? His wife hands him the paper. An L-shaped grid and his daughter’s precise handwriting swim in and out of his blurring vi
sion.

  She’s writing, his wife says. I just don’t understand what it means. His muscles ache. He has been awake twenty hours. Children, he replies, shrugging his shoulders. He has not seen his daughter for far too long, pulling overtime at the factory, but this weekend he will. Just a few more shifts until then. How wonderful, this American concept of a weekend, a day off. He never once regrets moving his family here.

  The following afternoon, as the daughter tries to trade her dry cheese sandwich with another classmate’s lunch, a tinny voice on the classroom loudspeaker calls her down to the principal’s office. She takes a notebook and pencil with her, and when she reaches the office, a woman in a tight blue skirt and white blouse says, Oh Hon, have a seat.

  The daughter’s name is not Hon, but she obeys anyways. She begins drawing up another puzzle, naming her favorite character Hon. She includes the woman in the blue skirt, naming her Peacock. She adds her teacher and mother to round it all out. Today’s puzzle will be about favorite classes and favorite lunches.

  Just as she writes her first clue—Hon does not like sandwiches—her mother rushes into the office. Tears pour down her face, eyeliner streaking grotesque black fingers onto her cheeks. She babbles in halting, gasping Hindi. The daughter flinches away. If anyone overheard them speaking in this foreign tongue, her friendships, written into tenuous existence like so much erasable pencil, would dissolve.

  Why are you crying? she asks, enunciating each syllable so even her mother can understand.

  Your father, her mother says in thick-accented English, and then the word that will follow them forever: dead.

  At the funeral service, nobody from the father’s factory attends. Why would they? It was a freak accident for which they bear no responsibility, not the spotter who forgot to pull him out on time and left for his lunch break, trapping him inside the machine, or the newcomer who turned on the machine, not bothering with the lengthy safety procedures, or the rest of the staff that used to spend happy hours making fun of the stuffy immigrant. The company pays for the funeral, gives the widow a modest sum and even more modest condolences, and replaces the cog it lost.