The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  He powered down the house things: thermostat, smoke detector, fridge, oven, blender, toaster, the lights that went on and off automatically as he moved between rooms, hydrators for the houseplants, step counters in his shoes, all the musical instruments. Marcella had a few things he couldn’t access remotely, so he pulled their batteries, stomping their ready signs like so many roaches before setting them out in the freezing rain to die. Last he shut down the modem, leaving him and Crane islanded.

  He’d made the agenda Tala had suggested. First, he’d revise the newsflow he’d written, all those months before, on the pop-up clinics. Then he’d try writing a song. Surely if the Brill was working, he’d be able to compose again.

  He wouldn’t even think about what it might mean if he couldn’t.

  Third, he’d consider ways to stanch his cap bleed. After that, he’d research chemo outcomes.

  Flipping the beer coaster, he got the redtooth to hack into his injection smartport. Taking out the first of the ampoules marked Bennett’s Food Coloring, he snapped it into place, sitting in the increasingly chilly house and watching the status bar as it claimed to load him up with smarts. Or, possibly, food coloring.

  Final stage: powerdown and flip his coaster so it was just a coaster again. Hide the other Bennett’s ampoules. Scrub any archival video Crane had made.

  “Brilliance FAQs suggest taking on a simple task first, sir, something clerical with multiple steps.”

  “Okay.” He walked Crane backward through the powerdown sequence, the two of them prepping a macro for the house so that next time, Drow could just shut everything off with a single command.

  “Do I sound smarter, Antiquated Sidekick?”

  “Simple tasks, sir, simple tasks,” crooned Crane. “Here’s your draft of the chemo pop-up exposé.”

  Drow fell into refurbishing the bones of the feature, laying out history on virtuosi who’d taken the cure and rehashing the death of a jazz virtuoso named Psyche. No criminal charges had been brought: Rumor had it the Pharmas paid the family.

  Charges. He researched and sidebarred some legislative history, riffing on the rise of medical superstitions, enumerating the court challenges that had eventually determined Canadian citizens had the right to poison themselves in the name of scientifically dubious preventative healthcare.

  Universal mandatory vaccination had come in with legislation that said individuals couldn’t endanger the herd. Ironically, this same ruling meant the state couldn’t prohibit unnecessary treatment, if patients footed the bill and didn’t harm others.

  He saw his evolution as a journo within the date-tags on the strings of notes. Here, the first smattering of thoughts, after he’d shared with Trevon and scented the opportunity for a serious feature. He’d been entirely focused on turning his rent-paying journo gig into a source of strokes for his social cap at that point, and from there relaunching himself as a musician. Exposing the chemo pop-ups, at first, felt like it might curry favor among the virtuosi the clinics sometimes exploited.

  Then Seraph joined Newsreef. Seraph, who was all about commitment, about truth and purity in journalism. Seraph, who hated shortcuts and thought smart was different from clever. Another set of date-tags showed Drow’s deep dive into the research vaults, buttressing his pitch, finding other superstitions so he could create a series, build up to the chemo pop-ups organically.

  Later still: an archive of legal cases relevant to medical scams.

  Now he read those cases again, closely this time, pushing through precedents like a diesel-fueled snowplow going at three feet of slush. His head filled with legalese and he juggled the phrases, assembling a hypothetical court case. If he could clear a path proving secondary harm done to loved ones . . .

  “Embarking on a third career seems a bit of a tangent at this point,” Crane said.

  “What?”

  “You appear to be writing a law brief.”

  Right. He was a reporter, not a litigator.

  Not a reporter not really just a gig for the payables, I’m a composer . . .

  A composer who doesn’t compose?

  Seraph’s voice, clear as the day she’d spoken the words. You could be outstanding at the journo thing if you just got over thinking you were outside it all. It’s more than a lark for strokes and cash balance—

  “Sir? Your port is empty.”

  He shook away the clamoring internal argument. “Full dose administered?”

  “Yes. Take out the ampoule, hide the evidence, hash this conversation, and we can dive back into Sensorium.”

  Screw journalism. What about becoming a crusading lawyer for the poor? Memorize the rules, screw around with the rules, it’d be so easy, and didn’t he owe the world some good deeds? Drow bleached and recycled the glass tube. Then, with Crane’s help, he made it to his crate of instruments without downloading the LSAT first.

  “Music, sir. Write music now. Remember this intro?”

  “I probably can’t even—”

  The intro played. Time disappeared.

  He assembled two tracks. A ballad, first, and then something akin to a classic rock anthem. The ballad he fine-tuned and wordsmithed, working it up into a penitential ode to Cascayde. He burnished metaphors for regret, put sorrow in the high notes. Cried a little, finally, finally.

  Shouldn’t have ripped Cascayde’s mask off, he thought. If I’d reached out, maybe. Told her: Make your own thing. Stop cobbling together everyone else’s scraps . . .

  Instead he put it all into song. He couldn’t release it as a single, not yet. If anything, it’d plunge him further into the lightless depths of social oblivion. But one day, after a show of remorse had already given him one boost . . .

  “We could automate that,” he said to Crane. “When my prosocial rank’s out of the bottom thirty percent, I’ll regain access to the indy music reefs. We’ll do a limited release, just for the club. Someone’ll leak it.”

  “I’ll set an alert—”

  “No, it’s fine, trigger it. Here’s text . . . great. Flushed and forgotten.”

  “If you say so, sir.”

  The other song Drow could tool up himself, use it for something worthwhile, something original, and he was definitely crackling now. Reading law was one thing but he’d teethed on music. Saxophone at four, piano at seven, contemporary collab at ten . . . and this was good. He worked up original soundtrack for the chemo newsflow.

  Hey! Another cap mitigator would be to clap together some mixes. He must know a dozen virtual clubs who’d trade him some strokes and some good wordo if he built decent sequences for their deejay apps.

  He shuffled music as he paced the living-room floor, assembling decks, five at a time. Maximum return on years of concert-going. Mashing sounds gleefully, mixing the best of all those long, fun nights at dance clubs. He’d taken Seraph nine months ago, in the middle of a heat wave.

  “One, two, three, hit send.”

  “Have we moved on to amending your social collapse?” Crane asked.

  “Maybe. I don’t know. But . . . if I dash off the right kind of sob story to that girl Eleanora, from school. Remember Eleanora? She’d take it in mind to get her church to send me some strokes. You gotta love Christian charity, right? It wouldn’t, technically, be cap manipulation. Because the law says—”

  Crane interrupted, “You’d have to compose the sob story.”

  “Work of a minute—” A tumble of noise, pounding bass rhythm, made him duck behind the counter. “Is that me? Am I drumming?”

  “It’s the front door.”

  He bolted to the top of the stairs, the very peak of the house. Pressed himself against the wall. Last time someone showed up unannounced . . .

  “No, please, please—”

  “It’s your editor, sir.”

  “Seraph? Seraph’s not here to cut her throat.”

  Bambambam.

  “She’s likely concerned for your well-being. But engaging with the public in your current state—”

&nb
sp; “Seraph’s not public. Seraph’s famlike. She adores . . .”

  Adores?

  Catch up, chump.

  He goggled at that, spinning through possibilities and complications, tagging some feels . . . “Wow. This is big. Did I know? Will she know that I know?”

  Her cartoon face bloomed in his peripheral. “I know you’re in there, Drow.”

  He pounded his way back down the stairs.

  Crane murmured. “Make a polite excuse—”

  “It’s fine. I’m leveling off.”

  Jerv used to say that.

  “She’ll never notice.”

  Yep, that too.

  “Your current task—”

  “That’ll be all, Crane.” He threw open the door.

  Seraph had re-upped her honeycomb buzz cut, intricate yellow hexagons that didn’t hide the burnished gold-brown of her scalp. Snowflakes danced around her, fighting gravity.

  She jumped to the point: “Ninety percent of Weston’s work is in private collections, tucked away from public display. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Been composing.”

  Her mouth fell open. “That’s . . . that’s great, Drow!”

  “Is it?”

  “Of course,” she said. “Using what’s happened to recommit to your music? It’s the healthiest choice you could make at this point.”

  He rocked forward on his heels, unsure what to do with that. Rocked back. “So. Um. I soundtracked the chemo flow.”

  The relieved smile went brittle. “Can I come in?”

  Cascayde had barged in. He couldn’t bear it if Seraph barged. He shared the soundtrack as he stepped aside.

  The message bounced, for some reason.

  Adores me not?

  “Do you know anything at all about Tala’s artstorms?”

  “Yeah, actually.” Drow had Crane throw a blank conductor’s score on the kitchen counter, blobbing notes onto the bass and treble with a finger. Maybe if he multitasked, he could take this conversation at a convincingly normal pace. “She’s got a thing in the Albright-Knox. Body scarification and tumbling. You should see it, Seraph. Gross old GenXers cutting into themselves—”

  “Drow, listen. I found a catalog listing for something called Mass Grave. It’s from a massacre site in Louisiana, sometime like the twenties. It’s people coming to identify bodies.”

  “Family members?” He was filling in about two bars of music every time she uttered a sentence, making a symphony of the conversation before or possibly as it happened, and thereby staying attached to Seraph’s words. Her voice was weaving through his low brass section, sweet discord amid bombastic trombones and tubas. Long chords with villainous undertones. He shuddered.

  “Anyone who let Tala capture them as they identified their loved ones was given free burials for their dead. Boutique treatment compared to the pathetic state compensation. The listing for Mass Grave says it’s representative of her early work.”

  “Meaningless art-world phrasing.”

  “Studies of pain etched on faces, vid of people collapsing, soundtrack of wails—”

  “Legit journo does that. It bleeds, it leads.”

  “Then there’s Gauntlet, which is rumored to be a series where attractive young men run naked through an enclosure full of attack dogs.”

  Violin strings snapped in his mind’s ear. He gaped at Seraph. “That can’t be true.”

  “Controversy ensued. Consensus was that it had to be a sim.”

  “Had to be.” A sense of iced sweat, on the back of his neck, gathering for a run down his spine.

  “The catalog describes close-ups of bite wounds and portraits of terrified models in hospital, cuddled up to scary, muzzled mutts. Gauntlet sold to a guy who runs the most frequently investigated chain of hospices in Western Europe.”

  “That’s a category?”

  “Don’t deflect, Drow. There’s something called Slowburn. All I know about that is that it was confiscated under Sweden’s obscenity laws. Pediatric Transplant Harvest Fail, in private collection. Cold Turkey, Burn Ward, Slowmo Caning, Bedside Vigil. Private, private, private.”

  “Seraph, stop.” A screechy oboe solo, reminiscent of an ambulance siren, added itself to his symphony, almost of its own accord.

  “Then there’s the Sensorium chatter about her. Or really, the total lack of it. I found a few pearls among the plaudits, tagged to miseryporn, tortureporn. Tala gets off on suffering, Tala likes a good roofie—”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an oldie term for rapey drink-dosing.”

  A full-body shudder this time, like being zapped.

  Seraph saw it. Saw him, seeing her catch it. Fisted and unfisted her hands before continuing her liveflow: “I have interview transcripts from Tala’s previous models.”

  “Complaints?”

  “‘It was an honor to work with her,’” she said, quoting. “‘Cutting-edge productions, no regrets, true innovator, fearless.’ Blah blah.”

  “Sounds okay.”

  “Nobody has a bad word on record. But. Three of them committed suicide.”

  Suicide. Drow tasted fresh blood, realized he had bitten his lower lip. “Cascayde. Didn’t cut deep enough, you said.”

  Seraph stepped close, every sinew taut as drumskin. “Walk away, Drow. It’s dangerous.”

  Dangerous, agreed, his enhanced brain whispered. It’s also a story, if you . . .

  What? Cut deeper?

  He restrung his mental chorus of violins and glanced at the symphony. “Is there any more?”

  “Isn’t that enough?” When he didn’t answer, she said, “Art critics won’t touch her.”

  “Because they’re afraid, you think?”

  “Scared, yeah. Shitless.” She tugged his shirt open, exposing the chemo port, and ran a fingertip under the edge of the incision, the cut edge of the flesh.

  It’s a story or a lawsuit. Random ideas for thrillers about hero lawyers racked like billiard balls within his mind. Click. Click. Sound of teeth coming together. Opening notes of a soundtrack: The Crown vs. Tala Weston.

  Seraph was waiting for an answer.

  Drow tried to net the thoughts flashing past, shining ideas running ahead of his agendas. Musical chords and big exposés and Sensorium law schools.

  “There’s a bigger story here,” he said. “Tala. Moby Dick of stories.”

  “You think you’ll catch her out?”

  “If I outsmart her.”

  Of course he could outsmart her.

  “Can you hear yourself? Drow, I know this is hard. You’ve been through—”

  “Tala wants to make artstorm of me enduring needless chemo for sale to miseryporn fans,” he interrupted. “That’s what you’re saying.”

  “No! I’m saying Tala’s a maniac.”

  “She’s . . . what? Ninety.”

  “She’s hopped on life extension and getting a chemo clinic to flatten you! Whatever’s going on, I give the sadist zombie billionaire the edge.”

  “Is it illegal? You analyzed the modeling release.”

  “Forget the release! You just stop. Drow, you stop. Ghost on her. Call off the chemo course and get that abomination removed.”

  “No!” His hand rose, protecting the port.

  Seraph’s eyes narrowed.

  Oops.

  “This is serious journo, Seraph! If what she’s doing is assault, if it exceeds the remit of the modeling release . . . I should reread the release, shouldn’t I?”

  Did Harvard allow remote study?

  Seraph groped for the edge of the counter, as if she had lost her balance. “You embed yourself in the chemo story, and then . . . what? When you’re shattered from drug side effects, you luck out and catch vid of Tala feeding your left foot to a dog or something?”

  “She did dogs, she won’t do dogs again. But embed, I like that!” he said. “We’d need visuals and sound. She powers down unauthorized things within her studio. Do you think if I lured her here? No, she’ll have contingen
cies for that. If I can keep Crane from powerdown—”

  “What is wrong with you?”

  He clamped his lips shut over the answer to that one. An imagined safe-deposit box full of Brill battered at his teeth, vials tinkling.

  Should tell her, can’t do it, she’d be an accessory . . .

  Half a symphony already written. Who knew he had a symphony in him? Who knew what else was in there? How long had it been since he’d truly made music?

  Six years. Since you blocked Uncle Jerv.

  He pushed the unwanted response away by asking a question his subconscious couldn’t answer. What did you do with a symphony?

  Tala. The point was Tala. “We couldn’t use cameras or implants to catch her, not in her house. But she’d have her own footage, wouldn’t she? She’d capture everything, then cherry-pick stuff that wouldn’t quite get her prosecuted.”

  “Drow.”

  “Just listen! We have to get my things access to her network. If Crane can see through her cameras . . .”

  “Drow!”

  “Her goggs are old. How secure could they be? The two of us, Seraph, we can get in. Or. My uncle. Dad. I didn’t want to go this route but he codes, he’s a virtuoso in his own right when it comes to writing protocols for networked things—”

  Seraph took his hands. She had long fingers, strong wrists. Athlete hands. They were . . . no, she was shaking. She pulled him, mulishly resisting, to the couch where Marcella and company had been playing all his instruments. “Listen.”

  Drow made himself sit, imagining pizza farts. The upholstery felt like muddy sandpaper. “You have my full attention.”

  And she did: He knew her birthday and the name of her dog from high school and what her father said that one time and all her grades in journo. Adoring him, adoring him not, Seraph was what he’d have called a friend, back in the days before the word got verbed and debased.

  She deserves better.

  She put one hand on either side of his head, gently bringing them gogg to gogg. “Drow. I’m concerned. This looks like a breakdown.”

  “Pish.”

  “What happened to Cascayde was not your fault.”

  He must have jumped, or flinched; her big hands tightened their grip.

  “I should’ve reached out to her, outside the spotlight.”