Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  Sam’s gut tightened. “You don’t mean that. Everyone has to follow some kind of routine; that’s hardly the same as being in prison. You’ll get used to it again. You just need to give it time.”

  Emma gazed at him defiantly for a second or two, but then the energy she’d summoned ebbed away, and she turned back to the TV.

  10

  Laura shuddered fitfully, a sign that she was dreaming, but then she became ominously still. “Aren’t you ever going to sleep?” she asked Sam, exasperated. She turned to the clock beside her. “It’s a quarter past two!”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t quite know how he managed to disturb her just by lying motionless beside her, but her ability to sense his wakefulness even as she slept only made the prospect of him joining her even more elusive. “Do you want me to move into the office?”

  “Don’t be stupid. Those days are over.”

  “Maybe they shouldn’t be.”

  Laura raised herself up on the pillows and stared at him. The room was almost in darkness, but Sam’s eyes had adapted and he could see her face well enough.

  “We can’t just give in to her,” she said. “It was one thing when she had no choice—and when the whole world was willing to accommodate the runners. But if she goes back to it now, it’ll ruin her life. What kind of job could she have? What kind of family?”

  “And if we’re crushing all the joy out of her, what will that do?” Sam didn’t want to believe it himself, but he saw it on the faces of the other ex-runners every day.

  “This was her thing,” Laura replied. “It made her feel special, and now she’s missing it. It’s like when they moved the children out of London into the countryside during World War Two, to escape the blitz. It was an adventure while it lasted, but now it’s just … rationing and austerity and having to be normal again.”

  Sam couldn’t deny that there might be some truth to that. Even in his early twenties, the freedom to stay up all night had seemed sweeter than any other perk of adulthood. If he’d been granted the same ability at Emma’s age, it would have felt like he’d conquered the world, and he would never have given up the power willingly.

  “I’m not saying she’s dishonest, at heart,” Laura added. “But she’s nine years old, and she wants what she wants. When I was ten, I faked an illness for three months, without a moment’s compunction. Everyone thought I was an angel back then, but I would have said anything to get my own way.”

  At breakfast, as Sam poured himself a third cup of coffee, Emma glanced at him knowingly: The pills say wake up, and we wake up. But unlike him, she’d slept through the night; he’d tiptoed into her room to check, afraid he might find her on the floor making sketches in the dark.

  At school, his lessons went like clockwork, and not in a good way: he read from his notes, and transcribed them to the blackboard, barely thinking about what he was saying. His students dutifully wrote it all down. He didn’t pause to ask any questions, as much afraid that he’d lack the concentration to frame them properly as he was that nobody would offer an answer.

  In the staffroom, he sat at a table by himself, staring at the noticeboard on the opposite wall, not so much drifting toward sleep as hovering on the verge of a waking hallucination.

  Someone clapped him on the shoulders. “You look like shit,” Sadiq announced cheerfully, pulling up a chair.

  “But I showed up,” Sam replied. “That’s what we do, isn’t it? Because everything would fall apart if we all just followed our own rhythms.”

  “Yeah, very funny. I’ve got to admit it, you proved me wrong: you and your friends made the whole thing work.”

  “We did, didn’t we?” Sam managed a bemused smile. “The Apollo missions, the Manhattan Project, Bletchley Park … and the runners’ schools.”

  But the government was never going to let them start up again. It was an open secret that they’d paid their share of the ransom, and whether or not they ever managed to claw the money back from the prisoners’ scattered cyptocurrency accounts, they expected that to be the end of it. No one wanted to hear that the cure that cost so much was worse than the disease. Sam didn’t want to hear it himself.

  That night, exhaustion broke the spell: he fell into bed at nine and slept soundly, until Laura shook him awake at half past six. He hadn’t even heard the alarm.

  His newfound clarity only made his classes more disturbing. He obtained an official list of ex-runners from the office, so he wouldn’t be relying on his own experience of who he had and hadn’t taught before—and the deficits they were suffering as a group went from anecdotal to indisputable. These kids showed up, more convincingly on some levels than any sleep-deprived caffeine zombie, but … screw the somnograms and the body temperature charts from the clinical tests that had given the green light to the zeitgeber, because his students were not okay, however wide-eyed and ambulatory the pills rendered them.

  When he raised his observations with Laura, she was skeptical. “Just because Emma’s not the only one dragging her feet doesn’t mean there’s anything more going on here than a collective sulk.”

  “Really? You think my seventeen-year-olds—with university admission and job prospects at stake—are willing to shoot themselves in the foot … because they want to spend their nights, not at wild parties, but with me or some other teacher, talking about exactly the same things as we talk about by day?”

  Laura was unmoved. “Some might be sulking, some might just be suffering from the disruption in their routine: a change of school, a change of teacher. You don’t have any evidence that it’s anything more.”

  And Sam still wanted to believe that she was right: that the world would be restored to order, soon enough, just so long as everyone kept their resolve and didn’t pander to a few ungrateful runners.

  “Are you feeling any better?” he asked Emma, on the drive home.

  She didn’t answer. He glanced at her; she was gazing out the passenger window. “Did you hear me?”

  She said, “Will it make any difference what I say?”

  That stung. “Do you think I don’t care about you?”

  “I think you don’t listen. I told you what it’s like, before, but that didn’t change anything.”

  There was nothing self-serving in her tone; just a chillingly wary disillusionment. Sam didn’t believe she was trying to manipulate him, spinning him stories out of some childish desire to break the shackles of bedtime. “Tell me again. Tell me how you feel, right now.”

  Emma took a while to reply. “I feel like it’s the middle of the night,” she said. “As if someone woke me up and dragged me out of bed, and everyone around me wants to do daytime things, but it’s not the time for all that. And even if I wanted to join in … I can’t! I can’t just pretend and play along with them. I don’t have the energy.”

  “So you’re tired?” Sam asked her. “Right now? As if it’s midnight?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “Tired, but not sleepy. That makes it worse. Even if I lie down in bed, I wouldn’t be able to sleep. And I know that when I really want to be reading, or talking to my friends, or playing, the sun will go down and the lights will go out and I’ll fall asleep before I can finish my thoughts that I couldn’t even think before, in the daytime.”

  “Okay. I think I understand now.” Sam’s insomnia messed him up, but it always went away in the end. To have your body going through the motions, day after day, while you were trapped inside, never able to bring yourself into synch, would be a kind of torture.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t listen to you,” he said.

  Emma shrugged wearily. “So what now?”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed. “But I’m not giving up; we’re going to fix this. Just let me find a way.”

  11

  Laura was the first hurdle; Sam couldn’t even think about backing away from the “cure” if he didn’t have her completely on board.

  But Laura needed solid evidence; she’d convinced herself that Emma’s testim
ony alone could never prove anything. Sam was at a loss to imagine how he was meant to prove what none of the labs testing the zeitgeber had even noticed, with all of their expertise and equipment. Then again, they might have been instructed not to look too closely.

  It came to him at night, as he stared at the digits of the bedside clock. The idea seemed so simple and right that he closed his eyes and let the afterimage fade, sinking into the darkness, before he could start questioning it. If there were obstacles, he could find them in his dreams.

  When he woke, he hadn’t changed his mind. He waited until Laura emerged from the shower, and he explained the plan while she was dressing.

  “It sort of makes sense,” she conceded reluctantly.

  “That’s not good enough,” he pressed her. “Either you commit to this, or you tell me why you won’t. No going back on what it means after the fact.”

  “I can choose the time? Without warning either of you?”

  “Yes.” Sam wasn’t sure if she really believed he’d try to cheat and contrive the outcome, but he was happy to banish any opportunity for doubt.

  Momentum was building on another front: the older ex-runners were beginning to disappear from his classes, taking their fate into their own hands. Sam wasn’t ready to join them yet, but he’d already had oblique enquiries from some of his ex-colleagues from the runners’ school. Just because they couldn’t use the same building didn’t mean it would be impossible to start again.

  Laura bided her time, to the point where Sam began to wonder if she’d lost her nerve and decided to renege. But then, on the fourth night after they’d spoken, she shook him awake.

  “You’ve covered the clock,” he observed, amused. She’d also taken his watch from the bedside table.

  “That way, you can’t give her any secret signals.”

  “Like Clever Hans?” Sam asked mockingly.

  “What?”

  “The horse that did arithmetic.”

  “Don’t start. Are we going to do this?”

  They walked together in the dark to Emma’s room, and Laura knelt beside the bed.

  “Darling? Can you wake up for me, please?” She touched Emma’s arm and waited for her to respond.

  “What is it?” Emma asked. Her voice was thick with sleep; she sounded like any child woken in the night. Sam’s confidence wavered. He’d committed to the experiment as much as Laura; if it failed, he’d have nothing left to argue.

  Laura said, “I just want to know, can you tell me … what’s the time in your head?”

  Sam felt the darkness tipping. If Emma really was still a runner, in some deep place untouched by the zeitgeber, she would still be on the old schedule. But if it was all a ruse, a bid for attention, she’d have long ago forgotten what she was meant to be feeling, at some unknown hour with no clock in sight.

  “Ten past ten,” she replied. “In the morning. And I wish I could get up and go outside, but my legs won’t let me.”

  Laura started weeping as she handed Sam his watch. The second row of digits she’d summoned from the app read 10:13 AM. “I’m sorry,” she told Emma. “I’m so sorry!”

  Emma said, “It’s all right. But can I please stop taking the pills now?”

  About the Author

  Greg Egan published his first story in 1983, and followed it with a dozen novels, several short story collections, and more than fifty short stories. During the early 1990s Egan published a body of short fiction – mostly hard science fiction focused on mathematical and quantum ontological themes – that established him as one of the most important writers working in the field. His work has won the Hugo, John W Campbell Memorial, Locus, Aurealis, Ditmar, and Seiun awards. His novel Dichronauts is the first in a new science fiction universe.

  Copyright © 2019 by Greg Egan

  Art copyright © 2019 by Sally Deng

  One/Zero

  Kathleen Ann Goonan

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  Vida Zilan

  Kurdistan

  My brother struggles as I crush him to my side. Aunt Ezo, at the front door, her AK-47 at the ready, yells “Runrunrunrun GO!”

  I rush through the back door into air and fall, still holding Azul: The step is gone. Thunderous thuds echo behind me and end with machine gun chatter, which spurs me to my feet. Azul fights like a wild animal. “Let go! My party!”

  Drones dart through smoke-filled air. Dodging sparking wires, I gain the pergola and set Azul on his feet. Winter-dry grape leaves ignite. Licked by their flame, twenty helium birthday balloons pop as I drag him behind the stone fireplace.

  Two soldiers leap from the back door and sprint toward us. Ezo, silhouetted in the doorway, raises her gun.

  The men drop. Then Ezo spins and collapses into the courtyard, clearly dead.

  Azul yanks my arm, but I can’t move. In the last five minutes, I was informed that our parents had just died in a souk bombing. At that moment, our house was attacked. Now Ezo, a revolutionary soldier for twenty years, is gone. She came today to plead with my parents to leave. “The battle is coming this way,” she said. But they had heard this before. Their response, as always, was “This is our home,” and it was—the nucleus of our extended family since 1930, nearly a century.

  Then they went out for last-minute party supplies.

  The back wall of our two-story stone house crashes to the ground, burying Ezo and the dead soldiers. Azul shrieks “Dapîra!” as our grandmother’s red shawl floats from the inferno, crisping to ash.

  She was still in the house.

  I grab him and stumble through the ruined courtyard wall. Branches from the downed tree of life, which shaded years of cousins at play, whip our faces and rip my long, festive skirt.

  A car zooms down the alley. I wave my arms. The door pops open. I thrust Azul in first, and then climb in.

  A skinny, seedy-looking guy with a bleeding cut on his cheek is in the driver’s seat, but the self-driving light is on. The car accelerates, bucking over debris. The guy points at my hand. “Ring.”

  Ezo’s gold UN Human Rights ring, with its raised image of a child, is on my ring finger. Through the blur, I remember her pulling it from her own finger and slipping it onto mine, saying, “Your mama and papa are dead. Get out of the city. Remember us. Be strong.”

  The guy grabs my hand and yanks on the ring. Azul bites his ear, hard. He gives Azul a blow to the head. Azul kicks him in the side, his sturdy legs like battering rams.

  At the end of the alley, a bus halts, blocking the road.

  The door opens. A girl leans out and waves her arm: Get In! Hurry! I grab Azul as I leap from the car. The bus door shuts behind us, leaving the guy outside.

  Autonomous by design, with no steering wheel, the bus noses through the smoky city as we breathe pure, clean air.

  Children crowd the windows, pressing their faces against the glass. Most are quite young, ranging in age to perhaps thirteen. At seventeen, I’m clearly the oldest.

  A nearby house erupts in flames. “Keep away from the windows!” I yell. Azul and I huddle on the floor. I pull sobbing children close.

  “Does anyone have a phone?” We gain the open road and speed from the burning city toward snowy mountains.

  I search for news of the souk, our parents, and our neighborhood, but can’t bear watching the videos and curl up on the floor when Azul asks when Mama and Papa and Dapîra are coming.

  Today, he is three.

  Mai Davidson,

  Washington, D.C.

  As the Metro train sweeps into a tunnel, I read about progress on military AI applications in the Post and wonder if Zoe, my daughter, has anything to do with it.

  My husband, Ed, died two years ago. Our son John, a banker, lives in Hong Kong, and Zoe rides the roller coaster of Silicon Valley startups, each more luminously promising than the last. After the inevitable crash, she emerges from the very public debacle smelling like a rose, or its digital analogue, fielding offers and well
able to support an artist husband and their two children.

  I gather that soon, perhaps before we could possibly know it given the speed of the deep-learning superintelligences—SIs—in development, yet another self-made apocalypse could be upon us, and so long, folks! Any second now, we might be devoured by a ravening SI with intentions we cannot begin to fathom.

  I say yet another because, you know: nuclear weapons, nanotech gray goo, biological warfare—all of which could be SI tools if the initial algorithm on which their self-learning depends decides these methods would further their goals. The standard model is that SIs, presently isolated from the Internet, learn like children, through self-directed assimilation. Developers are gambling they’ll grow up much wiser than us. Given their source material, I find that hope misbegotten. They might choose to love us, but why?

  And could their imagined trajectories be any worse than our increasing totalitarianism? Or any worse than one of the main hallmarks of what it means to be human, which is to kill our fellows, or even send our own kin to torture or death if a certain “belief”—whatever a belief might be, neurochemically speaking—has taken up residence in our unfathomable brains?

  Bring it on, I say. The change might be for the better.

  Zoe’s dream is to distill a master algorithm for beneficence.

  And I once tried to levitate the Pentagon.

  My Metro stop is across the street from the Freer Gallery, where after leaving a long career, I’m living my lifetime dream of being a Chinese philosopher-painter in the Song Dynasty’s bureaucracy. I wander the Blue Ridge wilderness alone each weekend, failing to write pensive poems, but at least once falling into the moon’s reflection in the Rivanna River.

  My colleagues at the Foundation were dismayed when I left. They said, You’ve been so committed to social justice, fostering international literacy, improving economic conditions for women—