The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “,” you say, “?”

  You don’t know what it would have been like if you were in Lillian’s shoes, if your mother had to make the same decision as you. But as your mother smiles at you, sadness tinging the light in her eyes, the curve of her lips, you know she understands.

  “,” she says.

  Of course.

  The waiting room is much starker than the consultation room you were in before: the seats are less comfortable, the temperature colder; you’re alone except for a single TV playing world news at a low volume.

  You read the paperwork, doing your best to understand the details of the procedure—for all you pride yourself on your English, though, there are still many terms you don’t understand completely:

  The Company’s (proprietary?) algorithms (iterate?) through near-infinite (permutations?) of sentences, extracting a neural map. The (cognitive?) load on the brain will cause the Applicant to experience a controlled stroke, and the Applicant’s memory of the Language will be erased. Common side effects include: temporary disorientation, nausea. Less common side effects include partial (aphasia?) of nontarget languages and (retrograde?) amnesia. Applicant agrees to hold Company harmless . . .

  You flip over to the Chinese version of the contract, and, while some of the terms raise concern in you, you’ve already made your decision and can’t back out now. You scan the rest of the agreement and sign your name at the bottom.

  The lab is clinical, streamlined, with a large, complicated-looking machine taking up most of the room. An image of the brain appears on a black panel before you.

  “Before we begin,” the technician says, “do you have any questions?”

  You nod as you toy with your hospital gown. “Will I be able to learn Mandarin again?”

  “Potentially, though it won’t be as natural or easy as the first time around. Learning languages is usually harder than losing them.”

  You swallow your nervousness. Do it for Lillian. “Why can’t you make a copy of the language instead of erasing it?”

  The technician smiles ruefully. “As our current technology stands, the imaging process has the unfortunate side effect of suppressing neurons as it replicates them . . .”

  You can’t help but wonder cynically if the reason why the neurons have to be suppressed is to create artificial scarcity, to inflate demand in the face of limited supply. But if that scarcity is what allows you to put Lillian through college, you’ll accept it.

  The technician hooks electrodes all over your head; there’s a faint hum, setting your teeth on edge.

  As the technician finishes placing the last of the electrodes on your head, certain parts of the brain on the panel light up, ebbing and flowing, a small chunk in the back active; you try to recall the areas of the brain from biology classes in university, and, while different parts of your brain start to light up, you still don’t remember the names of any of the regions.

  The technician flips a couple switches, then types a few commands. The sensation that crawls over you is less of a shock than a tingling across your scalp. Thoughts flash through your mind too fast for you to catch them; you glance up at the monitor and see light firing between the areas the technician pointed out, paths carving through the brain and flowing back and forth. The lights flash faster and faster until they become a single blur, and as you watch, your world goes white.

  The technician and nurse keep you at the institute for a few hours to monitor your side effects: slight disorientation, but that fades as the time goes by. They ask if you have anyone picking you up; you insist that you’re fine taking public transportation by yourself, and the technician and nurse relent. The accountant pays you the first installment of the money, and soon you’re taking the steps down from the institute’s main doors, a cool breeze whipping at your hair.

  The bus ride home is . . . strange. As you go from west Los Angeles toward the San Gabriel Valley, the English-dominating billboards and signs starts to give way to Chinese. Although you can still understand the balance of the characters, know when they’re backwards in the rearview mirrors, you can’t actually read them—they’re no more than shapes: familiar ones, but indecipherable ones. You suck down a deep breath and will your heart to stop beating so quickly. It will take time to adjust to this, just as it took time to adjust to being thrown into a world of English when you first immigrated to the United States.

  A corner of the check sticks out of your purse.

  You’ll be okay.

  Your family is celebrating Chinese New Year this weekend. You drive with Lillian over to your mother’s senior living apartment; you squeeze in through the door while carrying a bag of fruit. Your mother is cooking in the tiny kitchenette, the space barely big enough for the both of you. She’s wearing the frilly blue apron with embroidered teddy bears on it, and you can’t help but smile as you inhale the scent of all the food frying and simmering on the stove.

  “Bongmong?” you say in Cantonese. It’s one of the few words you can remember—as the days passed, you realized that some of your Cantonese had been taken too, its roots intertwined and excised with your Mandarin.

  “(???). (???????),” your mother says, gesturing toward the couch. You and Lillian sit down. A period drama plays on the television. The subtitles go by too fast for you to match sound to symbol; Lillian idly taps away on her phone.

  A few moments pass like this, your gaze focused on the television as you see if you can pick up something, anything at all; sometimes, you catch a phrase that jogs something in your memory, but before you can recall what the phrase means, the sound of it and its meaning are already gone.

  “(???)!”

  Lillian gets up, and you follow suit. The small dining room table has been decked out with all kinds of food: glistening, ruby-red shrimp with caramelized onions; braised fish; stir-fried lotus root with sausage; sautéed vegetables . . . you wish you could tell your mother how good it looks; instead, you can only flash her a smile and hope she understands.

  “(?????????), (?????????),” your mother says.

  Lillian digs in, picking up shrimp with her chopsticks; you scold her and remind her of her manners.

  “But (??????) said I could go ahead,” Lillian says.

  “Still,” you reply. You place some food on your mother’s plate first, then Lillian’s; finally, you set some food on your own plate. Only after your mother’s eaten do you take a bite.

  Lillian converses with your mother; her Mandarin sounds a little stilted, starting and stopping, thick with an American accent, but her enthusiasm expresses itself in the vibrant conversation that flows around you. You stay quiet, shrinking into yourself as your mother laughs, as Lillian smiles.

  You’re seated between Lillian and your mother; the gap across the table from you is a little too big, spacing the three of you unevenly around the table. As the syllables cascade around you, you swear the spaces between you and your mother, between you and Lillian, grow larger and larger.

  After dinner, as your mother washes up the dishes—again, she refuses your help—you and Lillian watch the Spring Gala playing on the television. An invited pop star from the US, the only white person on the stage, sings a love ballad in Mandarin. You don’t need to know what she’s saying to tell that she doesn’t have an American accent.

  “I bet she bought her Mandarin,” Lillian says. It’s an offhanded comment, but still you try to see if you can detect any disgust in her words.

  “Is that so bad?” you ask.

  “I don’t know; it just seems a little . . . (appropriative?), you know?”

  You don’t know. Lillian doesn’t know. You were planning on telling her the instant you came home, but you didn’t know how to bring it up. And now . . . you want to keep your sacrifice a secret, because it’s not about you—it was never about you. But it’s only a matter of time before Lillian finds out.

  You don’t know how she’ll react. Will she understand?

  Lillian rests her head on your should
er. You pull her close, your girl who’s grown up so fast. You try to find the words to tell her what you’d do for her, how important it is that she has a good future, how much you love her and want only the best for her.

  But all you have is silence.

  Samantha Murray is a writer, mathematician, and mother. Not particularly in that order. Her fiction has been seen in places such as Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Escape Pod, Flash Fiction Online, Nature Magazine, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies, among others. She was the winner of the 2016 Aurealis Award for best SF short story. You can follow her at www.mailbysea.wordpress.com or on twitter as @SamanthaNMurray. Samantha lives in Western Australia in a household of unruly boys. “Singles’ Day” was inspired by the “Technology and the Good Future” SF workshop, which was jointly hosted by Ant Financial Services Group and Future Affairs Administration in Hangzhou, China.

  SINGLES’ DAY

  Samantha Murray

  Singles’ Day, or Guanggun Jie, “Bare Sticks Holiday,” originated in China, and had become a global phenomenon, with the exception of most of the NoGoZo countries, by the mid 2030s. Singles’ Day is now unrivalled as the world’s largest shopping festival, with revenue and purchasing records continuing to be smashed every year, by billions upon billions of dollars. Singles’ Day is held on the eleventh of November annually, the so-called “Double 11” date, where the 1 represents an individual who is alone. By 2043, with Earth’s population continuing to rise more sharply than predicted, the coalition of Earth’s governments had restricted Singles’ Day savings to those who were, as the name had always implied, single, in one of many combined efforts to encourage the slowing of population growth.

  YU YAN

  Hangzhou, China

  If you timed it right, West Lake could sometimes almost approach a feeling of solitude. It was a very popular destination, both with tourists and locals, lovers and families and groups arriving by the busload; but after the restaurants were closing, with the sun dropped behind the horizon, on the eve of Singles’ Day, where most preferred the immersive shopping experience they could find in their own homes, you could imagine what it was like to not live in a city of so many million people, on a planet that groaned under the weight of nearly eleven billion. You could breathe.

  Yu Yan breathed, deeply. It was a misty night. There were no stars to see but the mountains that embraced the lake on three sides were obscured and the lights from the dwellings half-way up the hillside looked like they were suspended above the lake, wavering and flickering like a borealis. There was still the faint scent of the Osmanthus trees, and some of them were lit beneath with little lights, glowing like golden flames in the growing dark. All of the little traditional wooden rowing boats had returned to the shore now and were dark shapes docked by the water’s edge.

  West Lake, if you timed it right, was Yu Yan’s favorite place to be in the world. Stories and legends were woven around the lake, and it was like wrapping yourself up in a blanket of your childhood. Yu Yan’s favorite was the story about the Lady White Snake, who changed herself from a serpent spirit into a beautiful woman for the love of Xi Xian, young scholar. They’d met on the Broken Bridge, which looked as if it was sinking down into the water, when he’d offered her his umbrella.

  She’d brought Robert here, back in the early days when they were first dating. He’d kissed her, quickly and furtively, as they’d paused on the Broken Bridge of legend, of heartbreak, even though people streamed past them. This evening Robert was at his unit, if it could be called that. Small, gray and windowless, like those that housed many of the young working-class men. He could stand in the middle, and almost touch his hands to either side of the autoclaved precast concrete walls. Yu Yan had bought him a little plant as a gift once, but lack of direct sunlight, and, she suspected, lack of watering from Robert, had led to its demise. She always saw less and less of Robert as Singles’ Day approached, and his excitement would rise in inverse proportion till it was palpable. Many of Yu Yan’s friends spent much of their leisure time VRgaming, but Robert was not into those things. Singles’ Day however, was something else.

  This year, Robert was certain his bid to buy his own apartment, a proper apartment, would be successful. His own apartment, in one of the wind-farm zones, with windows. Their own apartment, with room enough for two. Maybe . . . room enough for three? Here, where no-one was watching, Yu Yan let her hand stray to her belly, as she had to consciously stop herself from doing most of the time. Secret child. Hidden child.

  If Robert procured the apartment on Singles’ Day he would do so at a remarkable discount. Prices were slashed on this day of the year, the crux of all discounts, for this one day only. Only singles were entitled to the savings though of course. Married folk or those in established relationships were ineligible. It hadn’t always been this way, but for twenty years the shopping benefits had been tied to the non-attached status of the populace. It was to encourage people to remain single longer, Yu Yan knew, to make sure everything was in place before starting the journey as a family, if they chose. It made sense, in so many ways it made sense.

  Yu Yan was starting to feel the chill now as the temperature dropped rapidly. She thought of Lady White Snake, waiting and wanting to become human for the sake of her love, even though it took lifetimes.

  She’d gone to see Robert earlier. He hadn’t been expecting her, but there were always things in your day that were unexpected. Surprising child. Beloved child. Unexpected child.

  “Not a good night for us to go out,” he’d said. “They’ll think we’re together.”

  “Are we together?” Yu Yan had tried to say it lightly, in jest, but she wasn’t sure it had quite come out sounding that way.

  Robert had run his finger underneath her chin, but despite the tenderness of the gesture Yu Yan had felt the impatience too. “Well,” he’d said in a teasing tone that had all the lightness hers had tried for, “not officially.”

  Yu Yan had smiled up at him.

  When Yu Yan was among people—and it was hard, with the population of Earth cresting new and unsustainable levels every day, to not be among people—she smiled often. She smiled when she was uncertain, or when she was trying to get a point across, when she was in a crowd or meeting new people. It was a social instinct, the way she communicated, a way of filling the gaps within a conversation. “You’re always so happy,” people said to her. Casual acquaintances, colleagues and friends alike. “You’re so happy.” Even Robert. Especially Robert. “It’s what first drew me towards you,” he’d said more than once. “You always look so happy.”

  Am I? Yu Yan would ask herself when he said that. She didn’t think so. It wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the truth either. She would stop one day, stop smiling at everyone. One day she would not care anymore about what people thought or want them all desperately to like her. She would be old and cantankerous. It was an appealing thought.

  JEA

  Canberra, Australia

  Jea paid for all her Singles’ Day shopping with a smile. She knew, in fact, that she didn’t have to actually smile for the transactions to go through—the facial recognition targeted many key points of her face and its deep convolutional neural network really didn’t care which expression she wore. But the slogan was ‘Smile to Pay’, as it had always been, and faint strains of old advertising jingles she’d known as a kid seemed to float by just under the surface of her mind.

  And she rather thought that her smile had been a good one this time, a natural curve to her lips instead of the fixed grimace that she tended to struggle with. Of course, there was no-one there to see, and in the past she’d often thought she’d succeeded in smiling appropriately only to have people’s eyes get a little skittish and nervy, which probably meant she’d not managed it quite as well as she’d thought.

  Jea practiced smiling fifty times every morning in her mirror. Sometimes she cheated a little and skimped out with twenty or thirty, but not often. Every morning, the same routine, as her psych had in
structed: Think of something pleasing, with a positive association. Hmm . . . creamy coffee, lots of sugar. Real coffee. Tug the corners of her mouth upwards, watching to see that her reflection didn’t look creepy. Think of something else: avocados, before they were extinct. Drizzled with olive oil or smashed with lime and chili. Smile, show her teeth, then let her facial muscles relax before the smile hardened on her face into a rigor-mortis-like grimace. Think of something else: imagine she’s just been given a raise, smile. Again, smile, watch the creases at the corner of her mouth. Think of something else: imagine her sister is calling her on the phone, no, that one is not straightforward, now her smile is broadening, too much, no, no, think of something else, not Antony either no, that’s not right; the telescope she used to have when she was a kid, that’s right, the way she felt out there alone with the universe, like she was filled up with the night and the stars, now smile, curve her lips, just a little, smile, that’s right, smile.

  Jea had heard, years ago, of a mirror that only showed the reflection of someone when they smiled. It was meant for cancer sufferers, to uplift their spirits and hence boost their immune systems or some crock of rubbish and erasure. It was a flawed and stupid idea, and obviously hadn’t taken off, but Jea sometimes found herself wishing for a mirror like that of her own. Perhaps it worked backwards, too; if you weren’t smiling you were invisible. There was camouflage in that. Sometimes she would have settled for being invisible.

  XANTHE

  Minnesota, USA

  It was a long way down.

  The buildings were dazzlingly high, stretching both above and below her. The street was so very far away that she felt an encroaching vertigo, and there were even a couple of birds circling below. Gulls, it looked like. Gulls are a seabird, said one part of her mind, and I am a long, long way from the sea.

  “Take a step,” said a voice, her brother’s voice. Xanthe inched forward on the narrow plank, closer to the very end.

  It was a very, very long way down.