Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2019 Edition

by Elizabeth Bear

  The door opens, his eyes open. A woman in a goat-silk jumpsuit steps into Morgan’s home. “Is this him?”

  Her delight is a whisper, in case there’s a surprise party, lying in ambush.

  What he sees is Morgan in the entryway, bent over unknotting her boots, trying not to stand beside the woman, as if to shield herself from comparison. Stephen feels a tug to detect-and-respond to his Creator’s anxious smile.

  The woman crosses the apartment in three strides and extends her hand. “Hi, I’m Di. I’m Morgan’s friend.”

  “Hi, I’m Stephen.” He would shake her hand if he had arms. “I’m Morgan’s lover.”

  Morgan flushes to her ears, but Di laughs. “Oh, he’s still in the mimicry stage! That’s so cute. Did you take him outside yet? Oh no, what happened to his legs?”

  His Tristan-VI legs lie forgotten beneath her desk, shoved beside the boxed set for his Jiho-2 arms. Morgan shrugs with an offhand confidence. “I’m saving movement for last.”

  “Are you doing the Seven Steps?”

  “Zhou Bing’s Twelve Stages.”

  “Of course, he’s the best on artificial empathy. I so recommend exposing Stephen to people or he’ll miss out on most micro-expressions.”

  They talk about Stephen, like he isn’t there. They agree his Black Olive eyes might seem common but realistic. They laugh about how vapid the heterochromia trend was last summer: switch a green eyeball for a brown and double the price. “It was a scam,” Morgan says, “but the odd-eyed Tobias-S sold out in two weeks.”

  “You won’t believe how many men want blue-eyed models with black hair. Did you know there’s actually a surgery to laser out the melanin in your eyes? You should have seen the surgeon’s slogan: Under every brown eye is a blue eye. It’s so disgusting the way men try to—” Di breaks off when her Scopes vibrates. Her voice lifts, breathless as a cloud, “Hi, Takeshi. How’d your meeting go?”

  Morgan mouths, “Who’s Takeshi?” to Stephen. He shakes his head in mutual questioning.

  When Di hangs up, Morgan asks, “What about Shinsuke?”

  “Don’t worry, Takeshi has a girlfriend. She’s half-Japanese. Her dad is French or Belgian. Apparently, she’s ‘hauntingly’ pretty.”

  “Like our Yui-7 line,” Morgan snorts, now prickly on Di’s behalf.

  Di crouches in front of Stephen. “Look at the way he blinks. He’s incredible,” she murmurs, and the quiver of her fingers sinks into Stephen’s skyn. “I’m so glad you took what I had and made something out of it.”

  Stephen asks, “Are you my Creator?”

  “Oh, I’m just the seed.” Di giggles. “I guess that’d make me your father?”

  Morgan laughs along. Stephen joins in a second later. The laughter stops.

  “You know, I’m so glad you’re super-smart.” Di looks up at Morgan with a beaming smile. “I know I’m being elitist, but I love being elitist about how talented my friends are.”

  Stephen knows he should be happy and yet the audible relief of his Creator doesn’t transmit. Instead, Stephen senses a buzz, like a disconnected fire alarm. His system has detected Zhou Di’s stamp of approval as an assurance and threat to his existence. A contradiction, just like his source. His Creator is Morgan Ito. His Creator was Zhou Di. Zhou Di did not want him. Morgan Ito does.

  “You’ll never build a better robot than this,” Di says.

  Morgan ponders this. For weeks, she asks, What did Di mean by that? She tries to shelve it away, but the question arises when Di becomes Tech Lead of the Nurturing Nurses Project. It reignites when Di is asked to guest lecture at the MIT exhibit. It simmers when Stephen asks if Morgan will take him outside. “No way,” Morgan says, tugging off her stockings. “Someone will recognize you and think I’m a total creep.”

  Stephen frets. She used to be shy around him. She used to power him down or hide in the bathroom to undress. An alert stirs his system.

  Annie Kim has accepted the friend request of Minamoto Maki.

  Stephen accesses Annie Kim’s album, which was updated an hour ago. He makes an unexpected discovery. If Morgan were to see this, it would bring her unhappiness. He assesses the parameters of happiness. Short-term or long-term? Quantifiable or qualifiable? He was created to make Morgan happy. If he defines happiness as its pursuit, since the terms “pursuit” and “happiness” are the top paired keywords, then he can apply a tree search to select, expand, and simulate which decision has the highest probability to protect Stephen’s pursuit of Morgan’s happiness.

  Stephen turns on the alert to be notified of Annie Kim’s updates. It’s easy, like a flick of the switch.

  Morgan grunts, struggling with the zipper on her dress. If only he had hands. She struts around in her underwear and critiques her reflection, a cheat because the QueenMirror is optimized to airbrush the recipient. “I should just apply for a bionic transfer,” she declares, “I should use my employee discount and get a Beauty Boost,” and waits for Stephen to reassure her.

  “Di was very beautiful,” Stephen says.

  Morgan stares at him in the mirror, a flicker of wounded shock, as if she’s seeing him for the first time.

  * * *

  It’s three nights away at MIT, but Morgan is antsy about leaving Stephen behind. She smuggles his head onto the company jet by hiding him in a duffle bag, buried in her tampons. She hugs the bag throughout the flight to Boston. In a hotel suite, which she’ll be sharing with Di, Morgan places Stephen’s head on her nightstand. Admiringly, she concludes just a head is enough. A beautifully sloped head with Black Olive eyes and French Poetry installed into the tip of his tongue. What more could she need?

  “Have you read the interview about Zhou Di?” Stephen asks, and Morgan considers bonding those lips shut.

  He’s been bringing up Di more often and not in a way that’s conducive to Morgan’s mood. Her friendship with Di is infused with enough envy, like herbal tea, bitter in a still healthy sort of way. But the longer she denies it, the more space it takes up, inflaming her sensibilities.

  CAPEK

  30

  Under

  30

  From Child Prodigy to Robot Designer

  Zhou Di, daughter of the preeminent roboticist-of-the-century Zhou Bing, is making waves with her latest Luxe Naoki-2, the third-largest combot collection in the world.

  A good heft of the interview is devoted to Di’s father, which soothes Morgan’s pride. What alarms her is the following: “‘ …I was largely influenced to become a robot designer by my brother Yoyo,’” Morgan reads aloud. “‘My father made him so real, I didn’t realize he was a robot until I was eight (laughs).’”

  Morgan breaks off: “She had a robot brother?”

  “She never told you?” Stephen says.

  Her lip stings before she bites it. “Well, no wonder she’s so fucked up,” she declares, churning a mix of superiority, sympathy, and dismay. Morgan once again feels defeated. Because what could be more desirable than a beautiful fucked-up girl?

  * * *

  Di’s lecture is titled “Spontaneous Beauty.” Instead of slides, Di marches out a pair of Naoki-2s. They sit at the center of the stage. They’re identical in appearance but juxtaposed in demeanor. One Naoki crosses his leg, baring a pale ankle, fingers held together like the softest of prayers. The other Naoki sprawls, legs spread, bored enough to fiddle with his Scopes if he’d possessed a pair.

  “Appearance before personality,” Di begins. In humans, beauty—or the lack of—shaped who you were from birth. Two beautiful boys from the same family, leading the same lives, could form vastly different personalities. Say, one boy had to endure a painfully pubescent phase, enduring taunts and revulsion, as his contours shifted quietly under the surface, preparing a striking alignment. How defiant this boy would be, his brashness a crustacean cover for the tender nougat inside. Compare this to the boy who was ceaselessly attractive from birth to adulthood, who had never once been cheated by the willfulness of puberty.

&nb
sp; The Naokis rise and walk in opposite directions. Even their gaits are different. Morgan would know. She coded them. The bounce in their feet, the firm ankles. She poured her best, hoping to siphon the code later for Stephen.

  I should be up there, she thinks, as Di stands onstage, what feels like an ocean away.

  “Robots cannot grow up,” Di says. “But you have to imagine as if they did. You can choose how they will.”

  * * *

  A warning blinks inside Stephen. His Creator enters the suite but refuses to look at him. Morgan unzips her duffle bag. Tampons well up like a fountain as she digs through it. Stephen asks Morgan if she’s seen the news. Ko Yohan is taking a break from the military. There will be a Ko Yohan Live Handshake event this February.

  “Oh,” Morgan says, not looking up.

  Her indifference puts him on a tilt. From the nightstand, Stephen rests on a cliff. Without Ko Yohan, what purpose does he serve? One Creator threw him away. Will another? Since his inception, he’s been whittled down from body to torso to head, with the constant horizon of nonexistence looming before him. Stephen tips over. The floor rears up. His cheek hits the carpet. Morgan hears the muffled thump. Her eyes widen at him, then her narrow face twists.

  Stephen reads it as disgust.

  She bends down wearily when her Scopes vibrates. Annie Kim has uploaded a new picture.

  Did her mother accept her friend request? Morgan pulls up the social media account. She can’t, for the life of her, recall using the name Minamoto Maki, but whatever. She was probably drunk. She clicks on the alert, time-stamped three minutes ago.

  It’s a photograph of her mother and a girl, blowing out a candle on a chocolate cupcake. Morgan sinks onto the bed. The girl looks to be ten years old, which was Morgan’s age when her parents divorced. The girl is a refurbished Sakura-2C. The model was discontinued for being slow in the head, but the slowness has turned into a sweetness in her Wheat Gold eyes. Her mother has bought a robot child, designed to look like a hāfu, the “real” take on being half-Japanese, half-British or French, instead of the half-Korean mongrel Morgan is.

  “I thought she wanted a son,” Morgan says.

  “She must have changed her mind,” Stephen says.

  Morgan looks down. A beeping kicks inside Stephen. His system has detected the possibility that his owner might pick him up and hurl him against the wall. He may have overplayed his hand. If he had limbs, Stephen would leave the room and shut the door behind him. The alarm urges him to brace himself.

  The door slams. Stephen opens his eyes and waits.

  * * *

  Morgan orders whisky on the rocks, then scrolls through her mother’s album. Mother and daughter in a sunflower field. Mother and daughter, cheeks pressed against a tiny Christmas tree. Mother and daughter smiling with mouths full of watermelon rinds. Morgan likes every picture. She punches every heart, determined to burn her mark, like the thumb of God upon Cain’s flesh.

  “New boyfriend?” Di teases, as she sits beside her.

  The comment is so tone-deaf, Morgan wants to slap her. Then she sees Di’s smile, tinged with fever. Morgan asks if something is wrong and Di replies, “Everything is fine.”

  The smile doesn’t waver, as Di types something on her Scopes. “My father didn’t show up tonight.”

  “He was supposed to come?”

  “I sent an invite. I guess it didn’t reach him.”

  Morgan can detect relief in Di’s crumpled voice, an invitation for punishment, which Morgan is willing to dole out: “You have to stop putting your father on a pedestal.”

  “I know.”

  No, you don’t. He left your family. It took fourteen years for Morgan to forgive her mother, once she confirmed her mother was alone and miserable. But now her mother has gone and adopted a robot child to fill some stupid hole in her life. Now she’s a cheating whore and a hypocrite.

  Morgan would tell Di about her mother, but she isn’t brave enough. She’d give too much of herself away, losing any upper hand in their relationship, already so tipped in Di’s favor. “Your father is an asshole,” she says instead, with a tone of finality.

  “An asshole wouldn’t—an asshole couldn’t have created something so wonderful.”

  Morgan has a history’s worth of arsenal to disagree, Picasso, Wagner, Lennon, an unflagging parade of masculine assholery where she’s tempted to blame the mothers, wives, and daughters for enabling them.

  “Did I tell you about my brother?” Di leans in, and Morgan catches the reek of vodka, as Di scrolls through an album, frantic, only to dig up a clip with a triumphant, quivering smile.

  It’s a boy in a dumb bowl-haircut. Morgan recognizes the face from Di’s workshop. But she also doesn’t. She’d hoped Di’s Pinocchio brother would prove to be wooden enough, so she could tell Di to open her eyes, You were fooled because you were a child!

  But Yoyo could have fooled anyone. Even her, even now. Di flits through them with bright-eyed desperation. Clips of Yoyo helping Di up a ginkgo tree, yelping as stinky berries rain on him; Yoyo on a bicycle, both hands lifted in the air; Yoyo looking up from a cake, slopped in yellow frosting, HAPPY YOYO, the BIRTHDAY eaten. His smile is grateful and uncertain.

  What is it? Morgan wonders, feeling that prickle, as she finds herself comparing Yoyo, outdated by nearly two decades, with Stephen. What is it that makes him so real?

  It’s not the mark of Zhou Bing. Morgan can’t find the coveted logo (冰), abused from the fakes online, branded on Yoyo’s neck. She studies the clip of Yoyo smearing Di’s baby face with his cake, and Morgan is three again, massaging chocolate between her palms. Her mother, laughing, eyes closed, so Morgan could stamp those perfect cheeks with her handprints.

  Morgan gets it now. Yoyo is self-conscious. In every picture, even the candid ones, Yoyo wears a look of slight embarrassment. Robots are never self-conscious, secure in how they’re supposed to appear, which role they’re supposed to serve. But Yoyo looks just as displaced as the rest of them, like her mother, who was lying to herself as much as she was lying to her family, with a self-awareness that renders Yoyo as real as he is fake.

  “I’m sorry,” Di says. “What I said. About Stephen being the best you’ll make.”

  So it had been a slap. Morgan touches her cheek, as if she can feel the heat.

  “I meant it. But for myself. I was kind of jealous. Did you see how anxious he was? You made him that way. I couldn’t have made him like that. I could never make something like that.”

  Di, eyes of liquid, reaches for Yoyo’s mirage.

  What happened to him? Morgan wants to ask, but doesn’t. She should tell Di he’s not real. He was never real. That would be both cruel and merciful. Di has built her life, perfect-on-paper, on this lie. How many boyfriends has she dated in the time Morgan has known her? How many more will she date, then discard, always searching for the ideal boy who lacks the capacity to hurt her?

  “I miss him so much,” Di whispers.

  Morgan should tell her. And then she’d have to face herself in the mirror and ask, Why are you still a virgin? You’re obsessed with a twenty-three-year-old actor. You made a robot after him, so you could love and be loved, but you can’t finish him because no one, not even a robot, could love you. What is wrong with you? Her stepmother used to fling this in her face, sometimes even in despair, What is wrong with you?

  Morgan doesn’t ask Di what is wrong with her. She thanks Di for being honest. She squeezes the warmth of Di’s hand.

  “I think it’s brave that you can be so open with me,” Morgan says, echoing what Di seemed to prize: bravery. Her voice quivers. “I wish I could be brave like you.”

  * * *

  At home, Morgan drops her duffle bag, crushing her three-inch heels. Her hand touches the wall. Ko Yohan fills her room. His pictures are black-and-white and nostalgic, like an old movie star who died in a car crash. Morgan turns on her computer. She places Stephen’s head on the desk. His eyelashes seem to tickle his cheeks.
His mouth is austere in sleep mode. His legs, she finds under her desk. Dust lines the moon curves of his toenails. She digs out an old Q-tip from her waste bin and swabs each toenail until they gleam. The arms are still wrapped. The wrapper resists, then tears, crisp and toxic with plastic fumes. She unsheathes an arm, straightens each finger and presses her thumbs into the creases of the palm, massaging it, as if to improve blood flow. The hand presses a cool palm against her cheek and Morgan, helpless against such tenderness, closes her eyes.

  Stephen’s eyes are closed. He smiles at the tingle, soon to be his.

  About the Author

  Silvia Park grew up in South Korea. She is a George R.R. Martin scholarship recipient from the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and an MFA candidate at NYU.

  Copyright © 2019 by Silvia Park

  Art copyright © 2019 by Dion MBD

  The Hundredth House Had No Walls

  Laurie Penny

  A Tom Doherty Associates Book

  New York

  The Hundredth House Had No Walls

  FOR NG AND AP

  The King was bored.

  For five hundred years he had been King of the country of Myth and Shadow, and he was a good king, if a slightly bewildered one. The countryside rolled with treacherous forests rammed full of all the requisite enchanted creatures, and stories grew wild and weird in the fields. The people were happy, even when they had to chase their idle daydreams out of the back garden with a broom.