The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “What she did was desperate, I admit, but. Calculated, too.”

  “Crane,” he said. “I need you.”

  “Sir?”

  “Infograph my social standing and share to Seraph.”

  It scrolled between them. Capital commensurate with a disgraced politician, a suspected sex offender. Bank balance teetering. Marcella threatening to quit the apartment and leave him ass-hanging, rent in arrears. Endless streams of censorious comments. Notices from everyone from his cloud backup service to the grocery, saying his privileges had been downgraded. No credit, no discounts, no extras. No love for Drow, unless he met the terms of his user agreements. Endless whirls of little black bubbles streaming from the holes in his reputation.

  “I am torpedoed, Seraph.”

  “I didn’t say you weren’t paying. I said it wasn’t your fault. I green-lighted that newsflow because everything in it was true. Cascayde did mine the virtuosi hit parade for the bones of Cataract. Even I can hear that. She pulled the stunt because you’d all but proved plagiarism.”

  The stunt. Blood spraying in his mouth as he snarked. “I hurt her. Played it for laughs and strokes.”

  She swallowed. “I love that in you.”

  “What?”

  “That you feel it so deeply. That you’re sorry. But insensitivity is not a crime.”

  “Stop.” Her words were kicking everything out from under him. She’s wrong she’s right she adores me not adores me too I love that in you she said she said she said . . .

  “Forgo the chemo course,” Seraph said. “Find another way. I’ll pay your rent. Stay home, compose music, regroup. Be smart.”

  “If I catch Tala out, we score—”

  A twitch, in those fingers. “You. You score.”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s no we. There’s an emergency, inglomerate. Suddenly I’m needed in the London press office for a month or six.” She tightened her grip on his head. “Focus, Drow! Your contract’s been passed on. I don’t know who’s editing the chemo flow.”

  “Hey! That’s why the draft I sent you bounced.”

  “Seraph threatens oversight, Seraph gets washed from the picture.”

  “And I love that in you. The paranoia.”

  That thing she did. The slow breath. She’d reached the end of her patience. “That’s all you have to say?”

  He paused. Turned it over. “If you’re not my boss anymore, maybe I should kiss you?”

  She pushed him away, fingers flexing as if she’d set a volleyball, bouncing him off the back of the couch. Towering over him, she paused, for a second, where Cascayde had been.

  He’d been yelling into her undeservedly famous, tear-streaked face. Why should she have all those follows, all those strokes, for stolen work?

  He remembered the silver flick of the blade. And stepping back, out of the razor’s reach.

  Seraph’s words hung like breath in frozen air. “You know the difference between smart and clever, Drow?”

  “Stepping back. Failing to commit.” Big step with long panicked legs, too far back to stop Cascayde. He’d saved himself. He’d sunk himself.

  “Stop telling me what you think I want to hear!”

  “Was I? I guess I was. But—”

  “Smart knows when to walk away, Drow.”

  I should visit Cascayde in the hospital.

  Not until my hair’s fallen out.

  God, Tala will love that.

  “Sorry. What?” he said aloud.

  “Mer Raffe appears to be leaving,” Crane said.

  It was true. She’d walked through the symphony and slipped into her boots. Moisture had pooled in the bottoms of her goggs. “Good luck, Drow.”

  He should persuade her to stay.

  “Ten more minutes?”

  The door shut on his words.

  After a second, Crane asked, “Do you wish to resume the symphony?”

  “Leave it. I’ll pick it up . . . you know, next time.” Feeling winded suddenly, Drow circled the ground floor, looking for things to clean. He stripped the couch cushions, throwing the cover slips into the wash. He disinfected the counter, even though nobody had cooked. The smell of bleach was comforting. He tossed Marcella’s leftovers, ignoring the fridge’s protests that they were okay.

  Climbing upstairs, he stared at himself in the bathroom mirror. Shave tomorrow. Look dapper for the first round of chemo, the first round of footage. He finger-combed his hair, wondering what his scalp would show when it was exposed.

  The toothbrush pinged a soft reminder and he took it up, circle around, gum massage, usual bedtime routine. There’d be smarts left over tomorrow. You didn’t Charly off the Brill all at once.

  He peeled his slacks and peed, running his thumb over a mystery bruise on his left thigh as he climbed into bed and surfed entertainment streams. His preferred crime dramas felt clunky and overacted. Their soundtracks were clangy.

  “Music director deserves a strike or two,” he mumbled.

  “Perhaps you’d prefer this audioflow about medical litigation?” Crane suggested.

  “Thanks. LSAT in the morning, maybe, if I still feel the urge.”

  “Miss Weston asks if you wish to join her for breakfast before your first infusion.”

  “You’re getting security upgrades, right?”

  “Uploading as we speak.”

  “I will catch her at it, you know,” Drow said. “There’s a win here somewhere.”

  “If you say so.”

  I’m being humored by an app now.

  “Lights out, sir?”

  “No.” The full-body shudder took hold again. He saw a spider in the corner and, just as quickly, realized it was a speck of dust. “Leave the lights.”

  “Very good,” Crane replied. “Enjoy your show.”

  “Night, Crane.” A gust of wind punched at the house, flicking frozen raindrops against the window, the tinkle of slush turning, midair, to liquid glass.

  Drow listened to legal arguments and an imagined, fading snatch of orchestral music, trying to lull himself to sleep as the meaner half of the storm closed in, encasing his city, drop by drop, in a treacherous raiment of glittering ice.

  Crane cycled off for the first chemo cycle, despite heavy tweaks to his settings, despite security upgrades. He could provide no records for the two days after the infusion, days Drow spent in a daze on Tala’s smartchair, cameras ringed around him like guards. All Drow remembered was answering questions in a monotone as she interrogated him about side effects.

  He came out feeling fragmented and shaky, as if he’d been pummeled while down with a bad case of flu. There was a smattering of interest in Newsreef’s announcement that he was taking the chemo course, but the resulting likes hadn’t salvaged his cap; he couldn’t summon a ride home. Dragging himself south to the nearest corner, he caught the TTC streetcar. He streamed the whole slog for anyone who’d tagged his story.

  Marcella and Cole were having ah ah yes OMG yes! sex in her room as he arrived, so he couldn’t Brilliant up. He shouldn’t anyway: It had only been four days since the first dose. Last thing his body needed was more chemicals. He wasn’t loopy, and if the stories were true, he should still be vastly cleverer than usual.

  “Head down, donkey.” He dropped into Sensorium, asked Crane to keep him on task, and plodded through tightening up the newsflow sentence by sentence.

  And he was still jumped: Even in his current state, one that made a bad hangover feel like a dream of paradise, he snapped together a description of the infusion experience with almost casual ease. Straight-up news at this point, though he spooned in lots of subtext about the purifying charms of suffering. After Drow had run the full poisonous gauntlet, he’d splice in Trevon’s whistleblower interview and a full exposé on the scam.

  His back felt sunburned—scraped, really—and his mouth was parched. He filed the revisions with his new editor, some oily-voiced guy whose most memorable feature was not being Seraph. That accomplished, he cho
ked down some copper-flavored chicken.

  Fighting drowsiness and ill-formed imaginings—memories?—about needles, he wandered to the back porch.

  His landlord was part of the so-called Millennial Migration, one of the childless thousands who’d decamped to jobs in Hyderabad and Beijing, leaving aged parents moldering in their in-law suites. The arrangement made honorary grandchildren of young tenants, mortgage helpers shoehorned cheek-by-jowl into the apartments upstairs from Mom and Dad. For a cut in rent, Drow kept tabs on Ramir, who, thankfully, was puttering in the yard today. Discharging his obligation took no more than an exchange of waves and a photo upload to the son, Imran.

  Ol’ Gaffer’s still with us, send me a goddamned stroke.

  The backyard likewise came with strings attached, having been given over to carbon offsets. Voluntary for now, but the way things were going climatewise, they’d be required civic duty in another few years. A City of Toronto bamboo-baling operation had growcubes on half of what had, years ago, been private lawn and garden. Drow got strokes for watering the bamboo; Imran netted a homeowner’s tax break.

  Bamboo season was weeks away. Drow’s eye fell on the floor-to-ceiling porch shelves, piled high with dusty Mason jars and rusted-out lids.

  Just his kind of distraction.

  “Let’s fight some grime,” he muttered, quoting Dad, remembering the groans of years past from his young self and Jerv.

  Moving slowly, Drow cleared the shelves, laying the glassware on a towel on the kitchen counter. Whenever he got groggy, he took a jar outside, letting the icy wind slap him back to alertness as he scooped up a layer of newly fallen snow. Big clean-ups required big water. Like many neat freaks, he had learned to use snowmelt to stretch his hydro allowance.

  With the shelves emptied, Drow could wipe the frosty insides of the porch windowpanes, chilling his blood, cooling his pulsing, burnt-feeling skin. The cool and the motion helped him stay conscious.

  Awake was mandatory. He had enhanced smarts, a time-limited window, and a pressing need to outwit Tala Weston. “Talk to me, Crane. Why didn’t your security upgrade work?”

  “Miss Weston’s apartment is authorized for aggressive privacy protocols.”

  “Since when does an individual have the right to airlock my data?” The question looped him back to thinking about law school; he tabbed up a series of legal papers on privacy regulations.

  “I believe that particular windowpane is clean now.”

  “Do you sound more English than before?”

  “As my software ripens, so, too, does my personality.”

  “Did you just make a cheese joke?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know how, sir. The window?”

  Drow shifted, one pane left. His goggs superimposed privacy regs on dirty glass. Wipe, read, wipe. “Here, this—see if anything’s registered to Tala’s home address. Besides, you know, her home.”

  “Searching . . . ah! She rents an upstairs office to a psychiatrist.”

  “Bingo. Medical confidentiality. Bet the psychiatrist’s never actually there.”

  Crane condensed privacy regulations to bullet points. “All speech within the therapist’s workspace is protected. Modems handshake with the Sensorium via a medical-grade airlock. Apps with spyware capabilities—I suppose I do qualify, sir—can be downed without notice.”

  Drow swallowed. Was there any other way? “Crane, you’ll have to go to Jervis for code upgrade.”

  Pregnant silence.

  “Crane?”

  “If it happened to be the case, sir, that—”

  “Fuck! You already went?”

  “Custom security work being expensive, the only programmer with a reason—

  “Right, right, you had to. Desperate times, right?”

  “Desperate measures. Indeed.”

  He wrung the washrag as if it was someone’s skinny chicken neck. “Jerv ask to talk to me?”

  “He understands you have him blocked.”

  “And he couldn’t help?” Drow’s pulse trip-hammered. Jerv had been his toxic ace in the hole. “You powered down. Maybe I’m truly sunk.”

  “Mer Raffe wished me to remind you, were doubts to arise, that you can walk away from this project.”

  “Whose side are you on?”

  The app continued, “I wouldn’t say Master Jervis cannot help, precisely. He suggested you get a tongue-texting device, so you and I can communicate without being overheard by Miss Weston’s hearing aid.”

  “You just pointed out I can’t afford nice things.”

  “He will bankroll it, along with other expenses related to this project.”

  “He’s in the money again, is he?”

  “Some of his patents and app licenses—”

  “Don’t care, Crane. Why involve him further when he’s already failed to crashproof you?” The window made a brittle noise: He’d scrubbed too hard.

  “There’s something he needs,” Crane said. “He’s confident it would make a difference, to the programming.”

  “Oh, no.”

  Of course it was about the drugs.

  Bit rich, though, isn’t it? Did you even pause when Tala dangled Brill under your nose?

  He had run out of dirty window. Clean the shelves next, or the jars? Fuming, he pondered the grit on the bottom shelf.

  Crane said, “He would barter for two doses of your food coloring.”

  “How could you? How could you tell him about that?”

  “I provided details after he deduced the general shape of your scheme.”

  “How?”

  “Your gift for drug-seeking may be an inherited trait.”

  “Har de har.” Blue-tinted sun poured through the gleaming windows. Cold light; his legs felt leaden.

  Returning to the kitchen, he confronted the glassware. Sixty, maybe seventy Mason jars, crusted in dust and cobweb and full of snow, covered the counters. He deflated onto a barstool, taking it in. Instead of filling him with the usual sense of impending success, the thought of cleaning all that glass filled him with exhaustion.

  Upstairs, Marcella was at it again, Baby baby yeah yeah.

  “My friend Trevon, from the pop-up,” Drow said. “I can drop two doses with him.”

  “Jervis agrees,” Crane replied.

  So they were live right now, his sidekick and his father’s druggy widower. Talking behind his block.

  “He’ll visit Miss Weston’s home, to examine her uptakes and hardware.”

  “He gets caught, I’m breaching contract.”

  “Again, the food coloring—”

  “He’s saying he won’t get caught?”

  “I believe him, sir.”

  “And what choice do we have?”

  “The choice, as Mer Raffe—”

  “Breach of contract. Heard you the first time. Please don’t bring it up again.” Drow levered himself upright, leaving snow in the jars to melt. The thought of lying down filled him with dread, so he soaped a rag and began wiping down the shelves.

  It was a filthy, hopeless, perfect sort of job. The wood shelves caught the threads of the rag, splinters shredding the fabric. Wet silt flowed into oak grooves and knots, filth sinking in deeper.

  Idiotic use of his time, when he felt so strung up. But pushing the dirt away, wringing wet, gray smears out onto the snow as he cleared the house of muck, was starting to work its usual magic.

  A cobweb brushed his elbow. Feather-touch of dirty thread, a fall of grit on his exposed arm. Drow recoiled, throwing the brush.

  The spider dropped onto his right shoulder.

  Drow wasn’t arachnophobic, but as he clawed at the spider with his rubbery fingers, he had a sudden vision of maggots, writhing on his back. Small, white bodies pulsing at the edge of an open wound, an incision . . .

  He shrieked, lost his balance, and fell off the stepladder, banging into the empty shelves. They arrested his fall, without quite busting his ribs.

  Daddy Longlegs tried to flee.

&nb
sp; Let it go, it’s harmless.

  Why should it get away? Drow grabbed, crushing it with his pink-gloved hand. Acid churned in his guts as its body popped.

  He looked straight down his shirt, staring at the port incision, imagining maggots. Could it be a memory, something from the two days he’d lost? An image his goggs had superimposed on him, in sim? No way to tell. His skin was spotted with bursts of rash. No bugs, no rot, no open wounds.

  “Voodreau?”

  The old man, Ramir, had come up the porch steps.

  Shaking, Drow opened his hand. The spider was real enough, smear of innocent tissue and snapped needles. Broken wisp, like Cascayde.

  The old man nodded comprehension, took up another rag, patted Drow on his stinging shoulder, and then, apparently oblivious as his grandtenant gave in to an attack of the shudders, began smearing half-melted snow over another shelf.

  Day five of the first week: Drow’s physical recovery had peaked and the mental enhancement was noticeably, lamentably gone. The porch was a gleaming museum of canning hardware and spotless window glass, sterile enough for day surgery.

  Marcella stopped sex-bingeing eventually, leaving him alone to dose up, renew his impersonation of God. Drow finished the symphony, entering it in a government-sponsored contest because, really, what else did you do with a symphony? He fought Sensorium advertisements for a few hours so he could do prep for a law school exam he had no objective reason to take.

  He started learning ASL, the better to interact with Ramir downstairs—the Gaffer, it turned out, was pretty good company. He practiced sending Morse code to the new tongue-texting rig, a thin fibelastic loop, invisible as fishing line, cinched around the back of his tongue. Thus secured, it vibrated pulses: dot, dash, dot.

  For the next stage of the chemo newsflow, he made vid of himself researching the scary drug outcomes, listing all of the possible indignities and discomforts he had to look forward to.

  The weird burn on his chest wasn’t on the list. It had turned into a proper scabby rash, peeling splashes of red on white that did almost look granular, maggoty.

  He scanned legal textbooks while putting together a popflow, something based on the terrible earworm Marcella and her friends had been trying to assemble. Music for the mindless: It grew, like mildew, in under an hour.