The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  The tech tamped him down, fingers working over Drow’s shoulders, chest, and forehead.

  “Is Tala watching?” Drow indicated the room’s observation bubble.

  “She’s having muscular rejuvenation.”

  He felt, strangely, relieved.

  Once his bottom half was stuck down, the tech laid foam bricks on his feet and legs. These broke up, too, burying him like a kid on the beach, filling the spaces between his calves, pooling in the wrinkles in the thin sheet of the modesty drape, accumulating as weight on his hands, hips, belly, chest.

  “Gotta offline you, Woodrow.” The tech removed Drow’s goggs and earbuds, then fitted a breathing mask over his nose and mouth. “It helps if you count down from a thousand.”

  Drow closed his eyes. There was nothing to distract him from the plastic press of diagnostic medium against his eyes as the immurement continued. The small of his back was sweating. Moisture accumulated there, like grease.

  Instead of counting, he composed openers for his flow on the pop-up. Bricks of scanfoam collapse like sandcastles at high tide, enfolding me in a medical experience so far outside my financial reach that. . . what?

  Or: Lying in darkness, I realize that while our working assumption is that I’ll be starting this with a clean bill of health, there are no guarantees.

  He twitched as his skin grew goosebumps.

  “Stay still, Woodrow.”

  He kept refining and memorizing the sentences, so he could dictate them to Crane once his stuff was back online.

  A crack, a flash of light. The tech helped him stumble out of the scanfoam cube. The modesty sheath had stuck to the foam, tearing away; he clapped a hand over his groin.

  “How do you feel?” The tech handed him a gown.

  “Shrink-wrapped.” He scowled at the bas-relief version of himself as he fumbled the ties.

  “Done?” Tala swept in, buttoning her pink jumpsuit.

  Drow nodded, turning aside as he pulled the gown shut.

  “I have a capture appointment at the Albright-Knox. Then we’ll eat.”

  Drow wasn’t hungry, but he nodded nonetheless.

  The driver took them to the gallery, past a sculpture garden at the back, and then into an underground addition called the Weston Virtual Experience Annex.

  “Did you reassure your editor?” Tala asked. “Confirm I haven’t done anything nefarious?”

  “Very funny.” He dictated a quick text: All okay. Techs will copy the three of us with med results.

  A private elevator raised them into a capture studio, long slot of a room, darkened, with a wooden bench and a tinted-glass wall. Beyond the glass was a floodlit balance beam.

  “I’ve been adding thirty seconds of footage to this project each year since I was eighteen,” Tala said. “We’re just going to capture the next installment.”

  He looked at the beam. If she fell . . . well, she’d be insured to her artificial eyeballs.

  She jerked a comb through the horsetail of her waist-long braid, smoothing it. “Do you mind?”

  “Um.” Reluctantly, he took the comb and the rope of hair, brushing the dead, bleached tangles.

  “What a good boy you are.”

  He handed back the brush. “Tala. I am not so much as getting a chemo port put in if there are no guarantees on the Liquid Brill.”

  “You’ll get your guarantees, my pretty, no fear.”

  “I’m not your pretty.”

  “Pretty’s what I hired you for, isn’t it?” On that, she vanished through the exit.

  “I thought it was desperation,” he muttered.

  Beyond the glass, the lights over the balance beam brightened. Camera rigs shook themselves awake, above and below. A hidden door opened at one end of the structure.

  Tala appeared, nude, even her goggs removed.

  Every inch of her old body was flashed or modded. Her left iris was a star sapphire; the right was a cat’s-eye the color of a banked coal. Her skin was stretched, punctured, pinched, and laser-cut to lace. Little flaps like fish gills had been cinched into her throat and extra nipples circled her breasts like roses on a wedding cake. Within the cage of her torso, tattoo renderings of damned souls suffered at the claws of demons. A real-looking tongue lolled from her navel, ringed by four rows of sharks’ teeth.

  Her bush was as pink as her ponytail. The teeth of brass gears protruded from her knees and elbows.

  Deliberate damage, flagrantly displayed. The disregard for self . . . He remembered his father, yelling at Jerv:

  Your body is the only thing you truly own!

  Dad would be on the same page as Seraph about this chemo scheme.

  Under Tala’s saggy, much-abused skin, he could see the muscle tone of a professional athlete. As she’d laid waste to her exterior, she’d meticulously maintained the rest. This was the legacy of a boutique life-extension regime.

  Mounting the beam, she rolled to a one-footed crouch and then put her head down, lifting to a headstand before easing into full upside-down splits. Drow dropped his eyes, catching a glimpse of big cartoony letters on her inner thighs, bloody tattoos spelling nasty words: “Unclean, gangrene, fester, infect . . .”

  Keeping her in the blurry corner of his upper peripheral, he saw her come out of the splits, pivoting upright. He didn’t know gymnastics well. Was she playing it safe, acrobatically speaking?

  Humming tunelessly, she handsprang a dismount from the beam’s far end. Hands flung high, like an Olympic medalist, she strode through an unmarked exit on the other end of the capture studio.

  Crane said, “Miss Weston will be with you in five minutes, Master Woodrow.”

  Drow used the time to gather his temper and gauge his cap, weighing his situation against an urge to rabbit.

  She came in, arranging her fur cape, swinging the ponytail saucily. “Well?”

  He pushed the word past clenched teeth. “Impressive.”

  “Not your thing, huh? Maybe we should leave before they compile and run it—”

  A sharp electronic hum. Tala appeared again, just as he’d seen her—but now she was on the bench, here in the room with them. Nine feet tall, intangible, her hologram leapt through the two of them, old, nude, and ornamented. Before she was gone, a new version of her—one year younger, if he’d understood her concept—was flying into a mount. They played through, ten seconds per routine, and as the decades spun by, Tala got progressively younger, less modified. The loops disappeared from her back. The metalwork shrank and disappeared. The ponytail grew backward and the tattoos got less elaborate even as her flesh tightened and became less outlandishly modded. The early gymnastics routines showcased health in all its robust complexity. By the end, she was a normal-enough eighteen year old, with close-cropped black hair and hazel eyes.

  The image of her youthful ass drifted past his face one last time as she triple-flipped out the door.

  “What do you think?”

  I think this is straight-up mind fuckery. He kept his voice even. “The early tapes must be CGI. No holo-imaging when you were my age.”

  “Reconstructed from video. The original footage is real.” She fanned herself. “I don’t know how many more years of this I’ve got in me. I’m quite shaky now.”

  Swallowing a sigh, he offered her his arm. Vulture claws, he thought as she clamped on.

  Tala’s idea of lunch was typically opulent; the driver took them to a private dining room whose staff brought marinated morsels of printed sea scallop and strips of beef.

  “Ever had real cow before?” she asked.

  Drow shook his head. “If anyone sees me living it up—”

  “Whoozing’s not allowed here,” she replied serenely. “Confidential space, transcript shredders and all. Which means, among other things, that we can speak freely.”

  “It’s a restaurant. Public space, public access.”

  “Technically, it’s the cafeteria for my U.S. lawyers’ branch office. Confidentiality applies. Nothing goes into the Haysta
ck.”

  “That loophole’s under contest. Suspended.”

  “In Canada, it is. Not here.”

  Crane flashed a graphical thumbs-up in his peripheral, confirming that this was true.

  “So,” Drow said. “Your promise.”

  She squirreled in her big pink purse, coming up with a box: ten vials, ready for the pump and labeled Bennett’s Food Coloring.

  Drow’s mouth went dry but he held the poker face. “That could actually be food coloring. And it’s only ten.”

  “Contents are as agreed.” She steepled her fingers. “Here’s my proposal. You go to the pop-up clinic, do the assessment, and get the injection port.”

  “Do I?”

  “You need a port, Dearheart.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  Cartoon lashes batted. “Use the port to test the food coloring, satisfy yourself that it’s legitimate. Next day, before we head to the clinic for your first infusion, we’ll visit a registered middleman and put twenty more doses—” she flipped the box of ampules with her fingernail, as if it wasn’t worth a small fortune “—into a lockbox. You can open same as soon as you finish chemotherapy.”

  “I might need to dose to finish the article. Chemobrain, remember?”

  “Well, you’ve got ten, don’t you? Each good for a week?”

  He nodded reluctantly.

  “That’ll keep you going for the full course of chemo. Another twenty vials are . . . do you kids still say gravy?”

  “Twenty-five,” he said, to see if she’d go for it.

  “Done.”

  Should’ve said thirty. He pulled the doses across the table, vanishing them into his parka. His heart was pounding.

  “Update Seraph again, Handsome—it looks like those med results have come through. She can sift through them while we get going, but it looks like you’re in perfect health.”

  “I want to read ’em too.” But he fell asleep in the limo, coming around only reluctantly as it pulled up at his place. His hand went automatically to his shirt, but the buttons were properly aligned. The paper flowers by the door, tributes to poor Cascayde and her profound emotional journey, were piled higher. Blooms and stems were layered with jagged blobs of ice, like an elaborate cake.

  “Scene of the crime,” murmured Tala.

  “Hoping for a looky-loo at the blood spatter?”

  “I saw everything on the vidflow.”

  “So you did watch it?”

  “I could hardly avoid. It’s the first thing on your whooz: that beautifully articulated jaw of yours hanging open as the blood sprays.”

  He remembered the taste. Remembered spitting. Half-blinded and groping for Cascayde’s throat, clamping down on the wound as Crane summoned the ambulance.

  Tears welled and he hurried to get out of the car.

  “See you in the morning,” she said lightly.

  He nodded, gave her a half-salute, and dragged himself inside. He smelled like marijuana again.

  The temperature had continued to rise overnight and it was almost balmy when he reached the pop-up, a storefront on the edge of Kensington that had, over the years, housed a series of failed restaurants. The latest proprietors had whitewashed it to a glow. Tasteful holosigns displayed competent multiracial medical teams wearing the highest of high-tech goggs. “What’s your risk?” a banner demanded.

  Drow walked in alone, filled out their quiz. No hard medical data here. They asked about recent stressors and childhood trauma. Medical services were allowed to jam Sensorium uploads to the Haystack for confidentiality reasons, but he had brought an antique recording device of Dad’s, a Dictaphone. It copied voice to magnetic tape and was so old Drow probably could’ve laid it on the table in front of the medics without fear of having it recognized.

  He didn’t take the chance, instead packing it inside another antique, a hardcopy of Jude the Obscure with a hole cut in its pages.

  Trevon Amradi, his whistle-blower, was someone Drow had met going to concerts, a fan of his music from back in the day when he was comping and clamoring for attention, jostling in an unremarkable pack with Marcella and the rest of the wannabes.

  Tall, windburned, and professionally sympathetic, Trevon eased into pretending, for his bosses, that the two of them were strangers. He worked through Drow’s personality quiz, generated infographics analyzing Drow’s aura, and began the consult with: “How’s your relationship with your mother?”

  “My what? Are you kidding?”

  Trevon made eyes at him, unsubtle reminder that the point was to seem an emotional shambles, so they could tell him he was at risk for pancreatic cancer or whatever.

  Shambles they wanted, shambles they’d get.

  He mumbled: “Little Master Woodrow had two daddies, okay? Uncle Drow’s an addict. Theo Whiting died. Because of the addict.” “Sounds like a complicated story.”

  “Not if you’re looking to talk about a mother, it isn’t.” Dad and Jerv had gotten into a fight, about the drugs, on a crowded subway platform at rush hour. How Dad had ended up falling under the train wasn’t clear. Had he stumbled? Did he jump? Where the video footage was ambiguous, the transcript was clear enough. They’d been banging heads over Jerv’s adulterous love for Liquid Brill and his latest get-rich-quick scheme.

  Shrugging, Trevon moved on. “This honorary grandma you’ve listed as next of kin. What’s she like?”

  “A spider,” Drow said—it was what came to mind.

  Trevon chewed his lip. “Drow, I gotta say—”

  “Marty.” Now he was the one warning.

  Trevon sent him a puppy-eyes emoji, hinting at concern. “Everyone knows what you’ve been through these past few days. With. You know, Cascayde. If you gave it a week, you might feel differently about this.”

  Trevon had been all for exposing the pop-up for the scam it was, back when they discussed the two of them playing witness as some gullible artist ran themselves through the grinder. Popcorn fodder, he had called it.

  “I know this is going to make me sick,” Drow said. “And with Cascayde and my roommate . . . sure, I’m getting a lot of static now, from women—”

  “You all right?”

  He had broken out in cold sweat.

  He reached for a glass of water with a convincingly trembly hand. “But my ed—my friend, Seraph, she IDs as woman too. Obviously. It’s luck of the draw.”

  “You just characterized your next of kin as a spider.”

  “Honestly, I think she’d agree with me on that one.” Don’t try to help me. Irrational rage fizzed in his hands, knotting them together.

  Trevon apparently got the message. Or perhaps he had a ridealong superior with healthier profit motives, because he finally moved on to scare tactics. Drow had latent misogyny. He needed preventative meds aimed at squamous cell anemia and lung cancer.

  He played hard to get for all of fifteen minutes, for form and for the old Dictaphone, and then obliged Trevon to press on to an unenthusiastic closing. Yes, oh yes, please save me from my inner retrograde caveman before he eats my lungs out.

  An hour later, “Grandma” Weston was on her way to support (meaning watch, and capture if she could outwit the clinic jammers) as they sliced into his perfectly healthy shoulder and stapled a purple smartport to Drow’s collarbone.

  The local had worn off by the time Tala took him home; the whole right side of his chest hurt, and he could feel his heartbeat in each of the staples.

  “Did you get footage?”

  “A few stills,” she said, tapping her goggs significantly—she must have illegal capture tech in there. “Their privacy walls are top-of-the-line.”

  “The better to avoid prosecution, I guess.”

  She pressed a finger to the hard lump of the port.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry, Dearheart. I’ll drop by early, once it’s bruised up a little, to make close-ups.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ve got a green-screen studio and a medical-grade sma
rtchair. After infusion, you can recover there. Easier for me to make footage.”

  “Wait. At your place?”

  “Would you rather set up a studio in your apartment?” She gave him an inquiring look. “I can send contractors ’round.”

  He imagined it: waves from his landlord about contractor noise. Managing the stairs to his room when he was wiped. Recuperating while Marcella came in and out to abandon cheap takeout in the fridge, like some Arctic fox burying dead ducklings. “Your place. Fine.”

  “Good!” Tala handed him a heavy disk the circumference of a drink coaster, complete with beer company logo. He could feel glass—a touchscreen?—on its underside, but when he tried to turn it over, she locked his hand in a surprisingly strong grip. “Did you know that you have to be completely offline, all your things powered down, goggs islanded, to put any kind of unregistered ampoule into a smartport like your new chemo delivery system?”

  “Is that so?

  “Please understand: I’m not recommending or advising this, just making casual conversation.”

  That’s why she was holding the coaster facedown, to keep Crane from catching an image. “Got it.”

  “Once your things are offline, handshake the port itself using a dedicated injection app on a monitor with redtooth connection capability. Such monitors are by prescription only.”

  In other words, the gadget she’d slipped him would override the smartport’s better judgment. And possession of said gadget, sans prescription, was an offense. “Boot it up, pop in the ampoule, away you go?”

  She nodded. “In the hypothetical world where you had access to such items. You’ll need to set an agenda for any burst of enhanced intellectual activity. Does your antiquated sidekick app have a Friday mode?”

  “My fathers wrote it.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “You’re one to talk, with those vintage goggs.” He couldn’t say why he was nettled by the insult to Crane. “Yes! We operate offline.”

  “Well, set it to nag you. You won’t be able to stay on task otherwise.”

  They had reached his place. She popped the door and gave him a cheery wave. “Out you go, Handsome. Have fun.”

  Drow’s first hours as an intravenous genius were incandescent.