The Best Science Fiction of the Year

by Neil Clarke

  “Ten more days,” she wheedled. “For sixty.”

  She thought he had something incriminating on her. Or on her rich friends. If one of them had exposed criminal intent, if she knew he could make it public . . .

  “I guess you gotta care what they think, huh?”

  “Seventy-five,” she said. “Handsome, come on. You’re dying to say yes.”

  He was. For a second, he almost relented. All that Brill. If the increased attention of the Sensorium kept her in check . . .

  Really? An internal cacophony of unhinged laughter. You still think you’re cleverer than she is?

  “Immediate payout on the original offer,” Drow said, testing. “And I still walk.”

  No pause this time. “I’ll want all your files.”

  “I could . . . send the info to the middleman.” A siren wailed and he saw her flinch. “’Course, for that, I’d need you to leggo both my sidekick and my—”

  He’d almost said father.

  “Your . . . ?”

  It would endanger Jerv, wouldn’t it, if she thought he mattered to Drow?

  Tag the feels later. “I can’t give you anything without my tech guy to assure transparency.”

  “He’ll be released immediately.” She folded herself into the car, settling in with the look of someone expecting a long ride. “Sure I can’t drop you?”

  He managed a shivery hyena-laugh. “I’m parked on this grate until someone I know comes to peel me off.”

  “Well. Sensorium has it your elderly landlord and your roommate are apparently on their way. It’s rather sweet.”

  Drow found himself smiling at the thought of old Imran, dragging his deaf ass out in the dead of night just because the two of them had bonded over the care and washing of ancient Mason jars.

  As for Marcella . . . it wasn’t too late to refriend. Trevon, too.

  And Seraph?

  Time would tell.

  Tala brought him back: “I’d have made you immortal, you know.”

  “Your definition of immortal? Is deeply warped.”

  “Fame is the only eternity someone like you can afford.” She clarified her goggs, taking a last ravenous look at him. Drow sketched a trembly bow: the unfinished work in progress. The one who got away.

  The limo door slammed and the vehicle purred off.

  “Smart knows when to walk now!” he shouted after the retreating car. But once the taillights vanished, relief dropped him to his knees.

  Bravado could say what it liked, but smart wasn’t walking anywhere.

  Instead, Drow leaned sideways, struggling to sit, to settle, however temporarily, within the grate’s torrent of warm air. Peeling off his wet sock, he massaged feeling back into the bottom of his foot.

  He found tattoos there, too. Worms, under his toes, on his heel, writhing around a sketch of the bones of his foot.

  Instead of giving in to hysterical laughter, Drow wiggled his toes, drawing in the sour breath of the city’s underworld, lifesaving sigh of burnt machine oil mingled with the piss stench of a nighttime drinking crowd. Fumbling on his rig, he waited for Imran and Marcella—he’d even settle for Jerv—to reclaim him.

  Feeling at once skinned and yet, somehow, unencumbered, he hummed along with the molten shriek of the poor man’s chariot, seeking a melody within the rattle and clash of the subway cars as they brought his rescue ever closer.

  Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the Hugo, Sturgeon, Locus, and Campbell Award-winning author of over 30 novels (most recently Ancestral Night and The Red-Stained Wings) and over a hundred short stories. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, writer Scott Lynch.

  OKAY, GLORY

  Elizabeth Bear

  Day 0

  My bathroom scale didn’t recognize me. I weigh in and weigh out every day when it’s possible—I have data going back about twenty years at this point—so when it registered me as “Guest” I snarled and snapped a pic with my phone so I would remember the number to log it manually.

  I’d lost half a pound according to the scale, and on a whim I picked up the shower caddy with the shampoo and so on in it. I stepped back on the scale, which confidently told me I’d gained 7.8 pounds over my previous reduced weight, and cheerily greeted me with luminescent pixels reading HELLO BRIAN:).

  Because what everybody needs from a scale interface is a smiley, but hey, I guess it’s my own company that makes these things. They’re pretty nice if I do say so myself, and I can complain to the CEO if I want something a little more user surly.

  I should, however, really talk to the customer interface people about that smiley.

  I didn’t think more of it, just brushed my teeth and popped a melatonin and took myself off to nest in my admittedly enormous and extremely comfortable bed.

  Day 1

  Glory buzzed me awake for a priority message before first light, which really should not have been happening.

  Even New York isn’t at work that early, and California still thinks it’s the middle of the night. And I’m on Mountain Time when I’m at my little fortress of solitude, which is like being in a slice of nowhere between time zones actually containing people and requiring that the world notice them. As far as the rest of the United States is concerned, we might as well skip from UTC-6 to UTC-8 without a blink.

  All the important stuff happens elsewhen.

  That’s one reason I like it here. It feels private and alone. Other people are bad for my vibe. So much maintenance.

  So it was oh-dark-thirty and Glory buzzed me. High priority; it pinged through and woke me, which is only supposed to happen with tagged emails from my assistant Mike and maybe three other folks. I fumbled my cell off the nightstand and there were no bars, which was inconceivable, because I built my own damned cell tower halfway up the mountain so I would always have bars.

  I staggered out of bed and into the master bath, trailing quilts and down comforters behind me, the washed linen sheets entwining my ankle like tentacles. I was so asleep that I only realized when I got there that—first—I could have just had Glory read me the email, and—second—I forgot my glasses and couldn’t see past the tip of my nose.

  I grabbed the edges of the bathroom counter, cold marble biting into my palms. “Okay, Glory. Project that email, 300 percent mag.”

  Phosphorescent letters appeared on the darkened mirror. I thought it was an email from Jaysee, my head of R&D. Fortunately, I’m pretty good at what my optometrist calls “blur recognition.”

  I squinted around my own reflection but even with the magnification all I could really make out was Jaysee’s address and my own blurry, bloodshot eyes. I walked back into the bedroom.

  “Okay, Glory,” I said to my house.

  “Hey, Brian,” my house said back. “The coffee is on. What would you like for breakfast today? External conditions are: 9 degrees Celsius, 5 knots wind from the southeast gusting to 15, weather expected to be clear and seasonable. This unit has initiated quarantine protocols, in accordance with directive seventy-two—”

  “Breaker, Glory.”

  “Waiting.”

  Quarantine protocols? “Place a call—”

  “I’m sorry, Brian,” Glory said. “No outside phone access is available.”

  I stomped over the tangled bedclothes and grabbed my cell off the nightstand. I was still getting no signal, which was even more ridiculous when I could look out my bedroom’s panoramic windows and see the cell tower, disguised as a suspiciously symmetrical ponderosa pine, limned against the predawn blue.

  I stood there for ten minutes, my feet getting cold, fucking with the phone. It wouldn’t even connect to the wireless network.

  I remembered the scale.

  “Okay, Glory,” said I. “What is directive seventy-two?”

  “Directive seventy-two, paragraph c, subparagraph 6, sections 1–17, deal with prioritizing the safety and well-being of occupants of this house in case of illne
ss, accident, natural disaster, act of terrorism, or other catastrophe. In the event of an emergency threatening the life and safety of Mr. Kaufman, this software is authorized to override user commands in accordance with best practices for dealing with the disaster and maximizing survivability.”

  I caught myself staring up at the ceiling exactly as if Glory were localized up there. Like talking to the radio in your car even when you know the microphone’s up by the dome lights.

  A little time passed. The cold feeling in the pit of my stomach didn’t abate. My heart rate didn’t drop either. My fitness band beeped to let me know it had started recording whatever I was doing as exercise. It had a smiley, too.

  “Okay, Glory,” I said. “Make it a big pot of coffee, please.”

  As the aroma of shade-grown South American beans wafted through my rooms, I hunkered over my monitors and tried to figure out how screwed I was. Which is when I made the latest in what had become a series of unpleasant discoveries.

  That email from Jaysee—it wasn’t from her.

  Her address must have been spoofed, so I’d be sure to read it fast. I parsed right away that it didn’t originate with her, though. Not because of my nerdy know-how, but because it read:

  Dear Mr. Kaufman,

  Social security #: [Redacted]

  Address: [Redacted]

  This email is to inform you that you are being held for ransom. We have total control of your house and all its systems. We will return control to you upon receipt of the equivalent of USD $150,000,000.00 in Bitcoin via the following login and web address: [Redacted] Feel free to try to call for help. It won’t do you any good.

  The email was signed by T3#RH1TZ, a cracker group I had heard of, but never thought about much. Well, that’s better than a nuclear apocalypse or the Twitter Eschaton. Marginally. Maybe.

  I mean, I can probably hack my way out of this. I’m not sure I could hack my way out of a nuclear apocalypse.

  Long story short, they weren’t lying. I couldn’t open any of the outside doors. My television worked fine. My Internet . . . well, I pay a lot for a blazingly fast connection out here in the middle of nowhere, which includes having run a dedicated T3 cable halfway up the mountain. I could send HTTP requests, and get replies, but SMTP just hung on the outgoing side. I got emails in—whoever hacked my house was probably getting them too—but I couldn’t send any.

  It wasn’t that the data was only flowing one way. I had no problem navigating to websites—including their ransom site, which was upholstered in a particularly terrible combination of black, red, and acid green—and clicking buttons, even logging in to several accounts, though I avoided anything sensitive, but I couldn’t send an email, or a text, or a DM, or post to any of the various social media services I used either as a public person and CEO or under a pseud, or upload an OK Cupid profile that said HELP I’M TRAPPED IN A PRIVATE LODGE IN THE MOUNTAINS IN LATE AUTUMN LIKE A ONE-MAN REENACTMENT OF THE SHINING; REWARD FOR RESCUE; THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

  After a while, I figured out that they must have given Glory a set of protocols, and she was monitoring my outgoing data. Bespoke deep-learned censorship. Fuck me, Agnes.

  She would let me into the garage, but none of my cars started—those things have computers in them too—and the armored exterior doors wouldn’t open.

  In any ordinary house, I could have broken a window, or pried it out of the frame, and climbed out. But this is my fortress of solitude, and I’d built her to do what it said on the box, except without the giant ice crystals and the whole Antarctica thing.

  I went and stared out the big windows that I couldn’t disassemble, watching light flood the valley as the sun crested the mountains and wishing I cared enough about guns to own a couple. The bullet-resistant glass is thick, but maybe if I filled it full of lead that would warp the shape enough that I could pop it from the frame.

  Twilights here are long.

  Glory nestles into a little scoop on the mountainside, so a green meadow spills around her, full of alpine flowers and nervous young elk in the spring, deep in snow and tracked by bobcats in the winter. She looks like a rustic mountain lodge with contemporary lines and enormous insulated windows commanding the valley. The swoops and curves of the mountain soar down to the river: its roar is a pleasant hum if you stand on the deck, where Glory wouldn’t let me go anymore. Beyond the canyon, the next mountain raises its craggy head above the tree line, shoulders hunched and bald pate twisted.

  Glory is remote. Glory is also: fireproof, bulletproof, bombproof, and home-invasion-proof in every possible way, built to look half-a-hundred years old, with technology from half an hour into the future.

  And she’s apparently swallowed a virus that makes her absolutely certain the world has ended, and she needs to keep me safe by not allowing me outside her hermetically sealed environs. I can’t even be permitted to breathe unscrubbed air, as far as she’s concerned, because it’s full of everything-resistant spores and probably radiation.

  You know, when I had the prototype programmed to protect my life above all other considerations . . . you’d think I would have considered this outcome. You’d think.

  You’d think the Titanic’s engineers would have built the watertight bulkheads all the way to the top, too, but there you have it. On the other hand, Playatronics does plan to market these systems in a couple of years, so I suppose it’s better that I got stuck in here than some member of the general public, who might panic and get hurt—or survive and sue.

  At least Glory was a polite turnkey.

  You’ve probably read that I’m an eccentric billionaire who likes his solitude. I suppose that’s not wrong, and I did build this place to protect my privacy, my work, and my person without relying on outside help. I’m not a prepper; I’m not looking forward to the apocalypse. I’m just a sensible guy with an uncomfortable level of celebrity who likes spending a lot of time alone.

  My house is my home, and I did a lot of the design work myself, and I love this place and everything in it. I made her hard to get into for a reason.

  But the problem with places that are hard to get into is that it tends to be really hard to get out of them, too.

  Day 2

  I slept late this morning, because I stayed up until sunrise testing the bars of my prison. I fell asleep at my workstation. Glory kept me from spending the night there, buzzing the keyboard until I woke up enough to drag myself to the sectional on the other side of my office.

  When I woke, it was to another spoofed email. I remembered my glasses this time. I’d gotten my phone to reconnect to Glory’s wireless network, at least, so I didn’t have to stagger into the bathroom to read.

  This one said:

  Hello, Brian! You’ve had thirty hours to consider our offer and test our systems. Convinced yet?

  As a reminder, when you’re ready to be released, all you have to do is send the equivalent of $150,100,000.00 via [redacted]!

  Your friends at T3#RH1TZ

  What I’d learned in a day’s testing: I thought I’d done a pretty good job of protecting my home system and my network, and honestly I’d relied a bit on the fact that my driveway was five miles long to limit access by wardrivers.

  I use PINE—don’t look at me that way, lots of guys still use PINE—and an hour of mucking around in its guts hadn’t actually changed anything. I still couldn’t send an email, though quite a few were finding their way in. Most of them legitimate, from my employees, one or two from old friends.

  I even try sending an email back to the kidnappers—housenappers? Is it kidnapping if they haven’t moved you anywhere? The extortionists. I figure if it goes through either they’ll intercept it, or it’ll reach Jaysee and she’ll figure out pretty fast what went wrong.

  I have a lot of faith in Jaysee. She’s one of my senior vice presidents, which doesn’t tell you anything about the amount of time we spent in her parents’ basement taking apart TRS-80s when we were in eighth grade. If anybody’s going to notice that I�
��m missing, it’s Jaysee. Sadly, she’s also the person most likely to respect my need for space.

  Also sadly, I can’t send an outbound email even as a reply to the crackers. You’d think they would have thought of that, but I guess extortionists don’t actually care if you keep in touch, as long as there’s a pipeline for the money.

  I might have hoped that a day or two of silence might lead Jaysee or somebody to send out a welfare check. Except I knew perfectly well that I wasn’t a great correspondent, and everybody who bothered to keep in touch with me knew it too. Sometimes, if I got busy, emails piled up for a week or more, and I had been known to delete them all unanswered, or turn my assistant loose to sort through the mess and see if there was any point in answering any of them, or if all the fires had either burned themselves out or been sorted by competent subordinates.

  Which is why I have people like Mike and Jaysee, to be perfectly honest. I’m a terrible manager, and I need privacy to work.

  I make a point of hiring only self-starters for a reason.

  The Internet of Things that shouldn’t be on the Internet is really pissing me off. I decided I needed some real food, and went into the kitchen to sous-vide a frozen chicken. The sous-vide wand wanted a credit card number to unlock.

  I got past it by setting the temperature using the manual controls, but this is out of hand. Are they going to start charging me twenty-five cents a flush?

  Day 3

  This morning, the television was demanding a credit card authorization to unlock. This afternoon, it’s the refrigerator.

  “Okay, Glory,” I said, tugging on the big, stainless steel door, “why is my refrigerator on the Internet?”

  “So that it can monitor the freshness of its contents, automatically order staple foods as they are used, and calculate the household need for same.”

  “And why do the doors lock? That seems like a safety hazard.”

  “It’s for shipment,” she said brightly. “And as a convenience for dieters, lock cycles can be set through the fridge’s phone app . . .” Or by a remote hacker. Got it. “. . . so if you want to keep yourself from snacking on leftovers after dinner, for example, you just lock the door at 7:00 p.m.”