The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Face your editor, sir?” said Crane.

  Drow appreciated the flow, old though it was, and blinked aside the stats on fishy carnage. “Hi, Seraph.”

  A pencil-sketch version of her appeared on the snowbank. “How are you?”

  “Sunk in shit creek without a press pass.”

  “I’m working on spin. We’ll raise you.”

  “Raise me? I’ve killed—”

  “Untrue!” Seraph interrupted. “The conniving little virtuoso’s gonna survive.”

  Drow missed his stroke, jamming the edge of the shovel into a crack in the pavement. “How?”

  Cascayde had doxxed him. She’d barged into his apartment, screaming about his latest, newsflow meant to prove she was not only a derivative songwriter, but actively pirating the ideas of her betters.

  Ambitious, risky followship-poaching. He’d hoped to expose the truth while flipping her fanbase, turning it against her while buoying himself, Seraph, and Newsreef. Instead, there she was, in his house, in his face, in hysterics. Stupidly, Drow had escalated, telling her six ways to fuck right off. Cascayde cut her own throat before he got to line item seven.

  Naturally, they’d both been streaming it live.

  Drow focused on the cartoon sketch. Seraph kept her hair buzzed into golden hexagons. Cartoon bees bumbled around the honeycombed scalp. When had he last seen her in person?

  “She lived?” he repeated.

  “Guess she didn’t cut deep enough.”

  His knees turned, momentarily, to water. At a loss for words, he fired off a string of emoji. Thumbs-up, indicating a like.

  “You don’t have to be nice about it. Well. Not to me.”

  “Ah, but you adore me.”

  “Adore you not.” She refused to be distracted. “Cascayde, pulling that stunt—”

  “I shouldn’t have baited her.”

  “You’re at fault? No.”

  “Thousands say yes.”

  “They’re wrong.”

  “It’s the virtuosi who closed ranks against me. The fanbase is just dancing their party line.”

  The music-journo gig was supposed to be a detour on his road to becoming virtuoso. The plan was simple: cover his expenses, build his social capital, and make the contacts who would one day level Drow’s own musical career.

  Little chance of that now. He’d burned all his networking bridges.

  Now what? Get used to street-cleaning?

  Seraph said, “You couldn’t know she was unstable, Drow.”

  “You’re being kind.” He’d gone for Cascayde’s plagiarist underbelly, expecting her fellow composers to fall into line, to denounce her. He’d expected a counter-play from her—damage control, some move calculated to keep herself from falling too far. But the desperation in her eyes as she’d flashed that antique straight razor . . . that was truth. Her fragile-waif persona was no affect.

  She’d been on some kind of edge. He’d kicked her off.

  Seraph said, “I’m calling because I can’t assign you anything new, Drow. You knew that?”

  “Reporters for Newsreef must maintain a sixty prosocial rating, with a banked surplus of three hundred strokes, to be eligible for new freelance assignments,” Drow said, quoting his user agreement with their employer. His shovel unearthed a fist-sized pile of dog turds; kneeling, he dug out one of his bags. “Why do you think I’m filter-feeding strokes out here in geezerland?”

  “But! I went through your unfinished contracts. Remember you were profiling musicians who buy into dangerous fads? You never finished the series.”

  “I don’t know if submitting newsflow on vaxxorcisms—”

  “There’s the chemo pop-up thing, remember?”

  “I remember.” Bullshit pitch at the Halloween party, eighteen months earlier. Drow as a new-minted reporter, Seraph his first ever editor: terra incognita. Their first night out, beer and face-to-face. He’d been wondering if a real conscience underlaid her elevated social capital. She’d wanted to know whether he was genuinely smart or just clever. That was how she’d put it, anyway, once they’d shared.

  Seraph was a true believer, in her way. She saw being a journo as a calling, no different from art. Both, she claimed, were the pursuit of truth, pure and simple.

  Drow wasn’t sure about his smarts, and he certainly knew better than to overshare when it came to the purity of his motives. But all those sermons! Those long earnest monologues saying as how Drow should see his journo gig as something more than just a stepping stone on the climb to fame. If they’d taught him one thing, it was Seraph went gooey about anything that smacked of Actual Journalism. “So?”

  “You had a whistleblower. You compiled infographics on how the chemo pop-ups work. For the shallows, we have slideshows about virtuosi who bought in for ten weeks of treatment. All you’d need would be voice to knit it together and fresh video of an open clinic.”

  “No. It needs realtime profile. It doesn’t expose the clinics sufficiently, not if we don’t show ’em poisoning someone.”

  “Someone like who?”

  That brought him circling back to how he’d alienated his music industry friends. “An overview won’t rebuild my followship.”

  Without followship, he couldn’t get back to posting songs online, or playing live pop-in concerts.

  “It’d position you as a serious reporter.” Seraph was canny about such things. “Someone who tells the stories, damn the consequences. You’d be doing a good deed, too: Plenty of people know someone who’s been wrecked by chemo fraudsters.”

  Could it be the journo bridge wasn’t entirely burned? “I am definitely in karmic arrears.”

  “And a feature would pay in other ways.”

  “Money, you mean?”

  “Can’t buy you love. So go rack up some payables.”

  “Young man?” A pink-haired skeleton in old-fashioned LED goggs was waving from her stoop.

  “Hold on, Seraph.” Shovel in one hand, dogshit in the other, Drow gave the apparition an exaggerated pantomime—Who, me?—from within his sweat-soaked layers of downfill.

  He braced for more simulated squid ink. She’d probably been saving her front walk as guilt-bait for grandchildren.

  But she wasn’t waiting to strike or berate him. Setting her goggs to display a huge pair of blue cartoon eyes, she pointed at her garbage. The bin unlatched noisily.

  Grateful to have permission, Drow dumped the morning’s accumulation of bagged dog droppings and litter.

  “What is it?” Seraph asked.

  He switched her to ridealong mode.

  “Is that a person?”

  The pink zombie was gesturing. “Come into my parlor, sonny, and have some cocoa.”

  Drow whoozed her: Tala Weston, owner/operator of Mygalomorphae Productions. Performance artist. Crane, ever helpful, sourced up “parlor,” an archaic word meaning sitting room.

  “Should I do your front walk on my way up there?” Drow asked.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Researching Mygalomorphae Productions,” Seraph said.

  “I got nothing.”

  “Your privileges are restricted, remember?”

  He salted the walk, pollution be damned.

  “Nothing yet. I’ll drill down.”

  He’d reached the door. The old lady was waving him in. “You could’ve just carved a furrow. I’m not that wide. Recharge your shovel there.”

  “Thanks.” Drow stepped onto the runner, dusting his boots so they wouldn’t leave a puddle before he clipped the shovel in. It flashed a calorie burn on his display, numbers bright enough, for a second, to compensate for the fact that his goggs had steamed over.

  “Painkiller? Anti-inflammatories? I’ve got the good stuff.”

  He squinted through the condensation haze. She was short and Caucasian. A forest of steel quills, embedded in both shoulders and the back of her left hand, quivered as she moved. Working acupuncture on RSI damage, probably: half of Gen X had wrecked itself keyboard
ing, back in the days before input tech went virtual. He got a glimpse of metal, embedded in her chin. Mandible replacement?

  One pink braid, thick as a hangman’s rope, dangled to her mid-back. At the scalp, it was gathered up over her ears in a way that did nothing to conceal wraparound headphones and the LED screens of her goggs. It was an antique rig, but expensive. Defying the trend to barely visible headsets, this was . . . conspicuous. Flashy. The eyes screened out as well as in, treating him to that image of blinky anime eyes with long lashes. They must weigh a ton: he could hear the click of lenses switching and adjusting within as she squared to face him.

  Getting a portrait in case I turn out to be a serial killer. Drow dredged for her question. Painkillers. “Thanks. The aches haven’t set in yet.”

  “And you’re young as well as gallant and handsome.” She hung his coat on a hook. “Cocoa?”

  “Thanks.”

  What she poured was top-of-the-line drinking chocolate, sort of thing that couldn’t be carbon-neutral, not unless you subsidized half a Croatian swamp, or personally reconstructed topsoil for a ridiculous percentage of Saskatchewan. It was so rich, the first sip almost made him moan.

  “Sit, dear.” She laid out a plate of gingersnaps.

  Drow sank into a plush smartchair by the front window and chose one of the cookies. She settled across the table. They drank, two strangers watching the weather.

  The thing in her chin was a piercing, embedded with an old brass gear . . . a watch cog? Some piece of tech that would have been antique even when she was young.

  “Steampunk.” She’d caught Drow staring. “You should see my tats.”

  He decided to breeze past the thought of wizened flesh covered in fading ink. “My name’s Drow.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “Course you do. I’m the man of the hour.”

  She put a hand out. “Tala.”

  “You’re a . . .” He paused.

  “Still drilling,” Seraph said. “She’s way under Sensorium radar.”

  He blinked silent acknowledgement and finished his sentence to Tala. “. . . performance artist?”

  “Largely retired,” the old lady said. “I still make the occasional artstorm.”

  He was more tired than he’d thought: The chocolate and the over-warm house were making him languid. “I didn’t get any samples when I whoozed you.”

  “My work is mostly in private galleries.”

  He pondered that: art you couldn’t access. Why bother?

  “I owe you an apology, Drow. I came out to say you could use my bins.” She tapped her cheek, next to the earbubble. “Hearing aids, they pick up more than they ought. I overheard your conversation.”

  “No worries.” He waved this away, noticing as he did that a blister was coming in on the palm of his left hand. The red spot and shiny edge of skin were oddly fascinating. Pushing on it, he felt the thick resistance of flesh over bubbled fluid.

  Her thin pink eyebrows were raised high. “Is your friend joining us?”

  Oh. He blushed. “Ah . . . Seraph? You staying?”

  “To watch you eat cookies? Later, Drow.” The cartoon popped like a soap bubble.

  “Sorry about that,” he said to Tala.

  “It’s what your generation does. But I confess I am interested in this story your . . . editor? Suggested.”

  “She’s taking pity. Brainstorming ways to keep me solvent while I regroup socially.” Anything, Drow thought, to avoid having to turn to Uncle Jerv.

  For one slippery second, he thought of asking Crane about Jerv. Had he reached out? Thrown an offer of financial or emotional support against the global block Drow had put on all such comms?

  “You have to be popular to do what you do,” Tala said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed, kicking Jerv to the back of his mind. Popularity was the circular trap of the stroke economy: If your social cap was high—virtuoso-high like Cascayde’s, say—you could jumble together any old stream of atonal musical Allstew and the Sensorium would, like as not, lap it up like this viciously sinful chocolate.

  If you strove and tried and reached for something really good, meanwhile, something true—if you labored in obscurity—none of your releases was apt to go anywhere.

  Was it any surprise he’d lapsed? Had he let petty ambition tempt him into assembling a hatchet job on a self-harming narcissist?

  The scaffold of needles on Tala’s shoulder jerked in sequence, administering charges to the tissue, forcing tired old fibers to twitch so she wouldn’t lose muscle mass. “The editor mentioned pop-up chemotherapy.”

  “An exposé on the clinics, yeah.”

  “But?” She poured more cocoa.

  “These pop-ups cover their eventualities. People go in to get assessed, right? Clinic charges just for that. Serious medical testing might make them liable for something, so they do personality profiling instead. Then they say, ‘Your pessimistic attitude puts you at risk for colorectal cancer, fifteen percent over the next decade. Your temperamental risk of . . . I dunno, sickle cell anemia . . . is seven. The chance you have rogue cells rampaging around your lymphatic system is better than fifty-fifty.’”

  “This keeps them from getting sued for misdiagnosis?”

  He nodded. “Once you’re terrorized, they sell you ten weeks of medical self-flagellation. Preventative course of chemo tailored to your so-called vulnerabilities.”

  “Straight-up con.” The cog in her chin bit into her lower lip.

  “You get cancer later, they’re covered. Terribly sorry. We didn’t actually scan you.” He toasted her and sipped cocoa.

  “Well and good. They should be exposed. But what I don’t understand, Drow, is that you’re in music. I’ve listened to your compositions. You’re extremely gifted.”

  Real praise or flattery? It nevertheless warmed him. “Gets me nothing if I don’t have friends.”

  “You picked a strange way to ingratiate yourself with the other virtuosi.”

  Other. She dropped it so casually, as if he were already one of them. “Anything I do, I tend to overdo.”

  She smiled, lips stretching almost to invisibility, revealing gleaming teeth. “Me too.”

  “Anyway, I’d have spun the chemo exposé as a music story. There’s usually virtuosi out there who’ve been suckered into taking the cure. But now I’m capped.”

  “What does your social capital have to do with it?”

  It was the sort of question only an obscenely rich person would ask. “No access. I meant to profile a celebrity as they did treatment. But given what happ—what I did to Cascayde, no virtuoso will let me near them.”

  “And the editor can’t help?”

  “Seraph’s kidding herself. She suggested the flow so she can feel less gilly. Giddy. Guilty. Sorry.”

  “No, no.” She offered him another cookie and he munched, liking the texture, the bite of ginger and cloves. Snow was obliterating the walk he’d just cleared.

  “You want to show someone famous on the chemo rack?” Tala steepled her fingers.

  “What I really gotta focus on is generating strokes—”

  “Your media profile’s sky-high.”

  “Buh?” He sloshed chocolate up his nose.

  “You. You’re what we fogeys used to call a trending story. Everyone knows who you are.”

  “’cause they’re threatening to burn my house down.”

  “No attention is bad attention.” Her tone was thoughtful. “You should get scans beforehand. Show you’re cancer-free. Throw in genetic risk assessment and you can side-by-side the data against whatever organs the clinic claims you’re bound to metastasize.”

  Suddenly she sounded like she knew plenty about assembling newsflow.

  “Forgeddid,” Drow said. “I’m not so capped I need to scourge myself with medically unnecessary poisoning. Or chemobrain.”

  “Oh, chemobrain can be offset,” Tala said.

  That brought him up in his seat. Did she mean . . . ?

>   No. Drow set down his cup, pushing away fatigue and fogginess. “Doctors don’t just give you smartdrugs, not even if you’re on chemo. It’s too risky.”

  “The risk’s inflated. Intellectual enhancement is contraindicated, primarily, because it hampers patient buy-in to life extension.”

  “Yes . . .” he agreed. Smartdrugs had always been Uncle Jerv’s poison of choice. Drow knew more about the relevant statutes than he probably ought to admit. And it was true that if you were rich enough for smartdrugs, you were discouraged from taking them—because the Pharmas didn’t want to lose the chance of streaming you, later, into the even more astronomical cost of buying yourself another century of life. But nobody wanted to live forever in a bubble of amnesia and dementia; smartdrugs did weird things to the teleromeres, stretching them out in ways nobody quite understood.

  Rumor had it that the ultrarich hired proxies to dose up, do their thinking for them. Was that where this was going?

  He stuck to the facts. “Unless you actually have cancer, getting a prescription for Liquid Brilliance is a nonstarter.”

  “So your only objection is availability? Logistics?”

  “Excuse me?”

  A coy shrug. “I know a lot of doctors.”

  He was starting to feel breathless. “I can’t afford—”

  “Pish.”

  “And Newsreef would have to pay for chemo.”

  “Pish again. Look around, kid. I’m loaded.”

  Smartdrugs. What if a dose of Liquid Brill helped him back into composing music?

  Really? Was he some drug-grubbing Jerv type, to be considering this?

  The cookie had turned to sandpaper on his tongue; he forced it down, vowing to thank Tala and walk once he’d finished his decadent, cooling chocolate.

  He’d definitely made enough bad choices for one week.

  He woke without realizing he’d fallen asleep, still in the smartchair, which had eased into recliner mode, elevating his knees, kneading his shoulders with an almost-imperceptible rolling motion to keep anything from stiffening. Perfect old-lady chair. The blind on the window had unscrolled, blocking the afternoon sun. It was bright green just for a moment; when he blinked, it was white again. Optical illusion or green screen?

  “Crane?” He queried his clock app. He’d been out for almost three hours.