by Neil Clarke
You can command the bots, Kim Trang wants to say, and then thinks of how Vy and the others would view this ability—not as a useful skill, but merely a prelude to their own enslavement. “You’ll learn.”
Mei’s hands tighten into fists. “Not as well as you do, and not as fast. I wasn’t born into this world.”
“We can wait.”
“Can you? You have no space for dead weight.”
Feeling useless. Kim Trang knows how that goes. Even if there weren’t a hundred stories about sleepers waking up too early, she would know in her bones. “You could—”
“Design something here?” Mei shakes her head. “Vy would never let me do it. Besides—” She makes a short, stabbing gesture. “I’m not sure I know better than her, when it comes to design.”
“She’ll come around.”
“Will she?” Mei’s gaze is shrewd.
“You’re—” Kim Trang takes a deep, shaking breath. “Vy thinks you’re not one of us.”
“Mm.” Mei’s hands rest at her side, quietly, looking at Kim Trang with an odd expression on her face. Before Kim Trang can protest that she doesn’t think that way—not even sure if that would be a lie—Mei says: “She’s right.”
“No,” Kim Trang says. “You—”
“I’m a danger to you all,” Mei says. “The tiger in the story. The predator that undoes you in the end. I’m thankful you saved my life, Kim Trang, but it’s best if I left.”
She—she. No. Kim Trang can’t hear anything save the roar of blood in her ears, a hundred different lineage calls, wondering how to fix a broken situation, finding no way out. “You can’t leave. You’ll just die out there.”
“Credit me with a little resourcefulness.” Mei makes a short, stabbing gesture—the crab-bots gather from the berth above them, watchful and still—awaiting orders. “The entire world remembers. I’m—” Her face twists in a terrible expression that wraps around Kim Trang’s chest like a metal fist. “I’m not like you girls.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to leave!”
Mei rises. It would have been worse, in many ways, if the crab-bots had followed, but she’s let go of her hold on them, and they’re inert again, crawling over the wreck of the berth looking for anything they can use. “It does. It’s what I am. Too many implants, too many gen-mods—to take them out of me would kill me.” Her expression softens for a bare moment. She lays a hand on Kim Trang’s shoulder, with nothing of desire or lust in it. “Don’t feel bad. It’s the way the world has to be, and I’m by no means blameless. Atonement, perhaps, for what I did to you and your ancestors.”
Kim Trang scrambles to her feet, struggling to find words. She can’t leave. She—Vy has to be wrong, of course she can stay with them, she’s not a danger—again and again in circles in her mind. “Mei! Please—” She does the only thing she can think of. She grabs Mei by the shoulder as she’s walking away, turns Mei towards her with all the strength she uses to wrench cables out of sockets and chips out of their compartments.
“Don’t touch me!”
It’s like being electrocuted—a jolt of current that seizes all of Kim Trang’s limbs, sends her to the ground, spasming, struggling to breathe—arms and legs refusing to obey, her entire being screaming with one voice. She has to stop; she has to be still; she has to bow down. Every single lineage-memory breaks around her until the only one that remains is old, as vivid as yesterday: her faraway ancestor bowing to a sleeper after repairing their vehicle, and the rush of pleasure that seizes her, stilling her where she stands.
No. No.
The world is broken, centuries have passed, and her ancestor is long dead.
Slowly, agonisingly slowly, she pulls herself to her feet—and it can’t have been that long after all, because Mei is still standing, watching her with horror in her eyes. Her mouth opens, closes—words come, dragged out of her. “I didn’t mean to—Kim Trang—I—”
And then she’s gone, running away from the debris-strewn courtyard. Follow. Kim Trang has to follow her, or she’ll lose her forever. She—she can barely stand, and the thought of catching up to Mei—the thought of her fingers resting on Mei’s warm skin—makes her stomach heave.
Days passed, and the tiger ate again. He regained strength and plumpness, though he could not find a place among the buffalo’s sisters and daughters. They spoke too fast, of concerns and concepts he wasn’t familiar with, and they refused to let the tiger touch the machines they were fixing. In the evening, he sat with the buffalo, speaking, not of the world before the breaking, but of small, inconsequential things; making small talk and jokes until the buffalo’s heart grew light again—until she forgot that she’d ever feared him.
He grew fat and sleek, and with his mind running around in circles, found no use for himself in a world that had moved on. So instead, he remembered the past, and the days when the ancestors of the buffalo had moved to do his bidding—the power that was still within him, as inseparably as his heart and liver, that had once made them kneel before him—and as he remembered, that power slowly woke up, unfolding within him as the tiger had once unfolded himself out of his coffin.
One day, he looked at the buffalo’s daughters—at their flat, blunt teeth, at their horns that could never be used as weapons, at their meagre meals of grass—and saw that he was more than them. “I can help you,” he said. They looked at him, incurious; and as the eldest turned away to look at her workbench, something stretched and broke in the tiger’s mind.
“Stop,” the tiger said, fiercely. “Listen to me.”
And the sisters and daughters of the buffalo, caught in the fist of his power, froze where they stood. The tiger watched all of them, as still as statues and awaiting further orders. He meant no harm, he told himself. He wanted to help them; to share the knowledge he bore from the sleepers’ land; the secrets of machines and chips in his blood—and did it matter if they didn’t want to listen to him? It was just that they didn’t realise everything he could teach them, the wealth of knowledge that he’d hoarded within his mind and that could be theirs so smoothly, so easily—the knowledge they desperately needed to survive.
He meant no harm, but the truth about tigers is this: They always end up thinking of themselves as kings and queens, no matter how changed the world might be.
At the pool, where Mei was first found:
At the bottom of the incline, by the water’s edge, Mei is skipping torn bits of metal in the pool, her arm a blur. With each movement she makes, more and more crab-bots bubble up from under the dark, greasy surface of the water, a spreading dark mass that seems to echo Mei’s gestures, some slow secret dance that pours out of Mei like liquid gold.
Kim Trang takes a deep breath, and starts the descent. Her first footsteps bring down a shower of rocks: Mei looks up and sees her and keeps on watching her as she descends. When Kim Trang gets near her, she turns, frowning, her face going tight with effort. The crab-bots vanish, sinking again into the depths of the pool.
She’s waking up, Vy said, but she was wrong. Mei is awake now. Kim Trang’s hands shake—lineage again, howling at her to bend the knee, to obey as her distant ancestor once did.
But the world was broken and taken apart and utterly changed.
“Kim Trang,” Mei says. “You see—” but Kim Trang doesn’t leave her time.
“You’re a coward,” she says.
Mei’s face tightens, and Kim Trang finally understands that what she thought of as Mei’s expressionless face is merely despair, spread so widely that it distorts everything.
“A coward,” Kim Trang says, again. “You’d rather run away than try to fix a problem.”
“I’m a danger to you.”
“So is my knife,” Kim Trang says, levelly. “So are the bots.”
“The bots won’t make you bend the knee.”
“They can kill me in other ways. They can go rogue or malicious.”
“You don’t understand,” Mei says. “Even if I don’t mean it, even
if I don’t have any delusions of grandeur or any intention to use my powers, they’re still here. In my blood. It’s who I am.”
“It’s who you once chose to be,” Kim Trang says. “In a world since long dead. Do you want to continue being that person? The one who entered the berth secure in the knowledge the world would be a paradise?”
“I—you saw it!” Mei raises her hands, and the crab-bots rise again from the depths of the pool, ring after ring of speckled darkness. The world remembers. “All I have to do is lose my calm, and it’ll happen again. How can you—”
Kim Trang thinks of being thrown to the ground, thinks of pain running through her limbs, of getting up and running after Mei. “I’ve been hurt before. The girls have been hurt before. Of course it will happen again. You’ll do the only thing you can do: apologise, make it better, and do your best so that it never happens again. We all stumble.”
“Not that way,” Mei says, darkly, but she watches Kim Trang with that peculiar hunger in their eyes. “You say it like forgiveness is easy to earn.”
Kim Trang shakes her head. She walks closer—no nausea this time, nothing to stop her but the memory of pain—and runs a hand on Mei’s skin. Part of her braces herself for another jolt, but there’s nothing. “It’s not. It never is. And atonement isn’t, either. Do you think it’s going to be easy to remember every day that you shouldn’t be giving orders?” Every morning, Mei will wake up and know the price of impatience or anger; she’ll see the crab-bots and try not to command them—see the girls and not think of the constructs of the past—like being able to breathe and deliberately holding it, forever and ever. Mei’s entire body is taut, like a wire about to snap. “No. But it’s never going to work, Kim Trang. You’ve heard the stories. You know how they end.”
“I know,” Kim Trang said. “But they don’t have to all go the same way.”
Mei’s face is a study in agony. “Kim Trang—”
Kim Trang comes closer and wraps her hands around Mei’s—warmth and smoothness, and the face she remembers, the woman trapped in a berth that she fell half in love with at first sight, the sleeper who should be their ancestral, implacable enemy. “Tell me a story,” she whispers. “A different one.”
A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy awards, Ken Liu (kenliu. name) is the author of The Dandelion Dynasty, a silkpunk epic fantasy series (The Grace of Kings (2015), The Wall of Storms (2016), and a forthcoming third volume) and The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories (2016), a collection. He also wrote the Star Wars novel, The Legends of Luke Skywalker (2017).
BYZANTINE EMPATHY
Ken Liu
You’re hurrying along a muddy path, part of a jostling crowd. The commotion around you compels you to scramble to keep up. As your eyes adjust to the dim light of early dawn, you see everyone is laden down with possessions: a baby wrapped tightly against the chest of its mother; a bulging bed sheet filled with clothing ballooning over the back of a middle-aged man; a washbasin filled with lychees and breadfruit cradled in the arms of an eight-year-old girl; an oversized Xiao Mi smartphone pressed into service as a flashlight by an old woman in sweatpants and a wrinkled blouse; a Mickey Mouse suitcase with one missing wheel being dragged through the mud by a young woman in a t-shirt emblazoned with the English phrase “Happy Girl Lucky”; a pillow case filled with books or perhaps bundles of cash dangling from the hand of an old man in a baseball cap advertising Chinese cigarettes . . .
Most in the crowd seem taller than you, and this is how you know that you are a child. Looking down, you see on your feet yellow plastic slippers decorated with portraits of Disney’s Belle. The thick mud threatens to pull them off your feet with each step, and you wonder if perhaps they mean something to you—home, security, a life safe for fantasy—so that you don’t want to leave them behind.
In your right hand you’re holding a rag doll in a red dress, embroidered with curved letters in a script you don’t recognize. You squeeze the doll, and the sensation tells you the doll is stuffed with something light that rustles, perhaps seeds. Your left hand is held by a woman with a baby on her back and a bundle of blankets in her other hand. Your baby sister, you think, too little to be scared. She looks at you with her dark, adorable eyes, and you give her a comforting smile. You squeeze your mother’s hand, and she squeezes back reassuringly, warm.
On both sides of the path you see scattered tents, some orange and some blue, stretching across the fields all the way to the jungle half a kilometer away. You’re not sure if one of the tents used to be your home or if you’re just passing through.
There’s no background music, and no calls from exotic Southeast Asian birds. Instead, your ears are filled with anxious human chatter and cries. You can’t understand the language or the topolect, but the tension in the voices tells you that they’re cries for family to keep up, for friends to be careful, for aged relatives to not stumble.
A loud whine passes overhead, and the field ahead and to the left erupts in a fiery explosion brighter than sunrise. The ground convulses; you tumble down into the slimy mud.
More whines sweep overhead, and more shells explode around you, rattling your bones. Your ears are ringing. Your mother crawls over to you and covers you with her body. Merciful darkness blocks out the chaos. Loud, keening screams. Terrified cries. A few incoherent moans of pain.
You try to sit up, but your mother’s unmoving body is holding you down. You struggle to shift her weight off and manage to wriggle out from under her.
The back of your mother’s head is a bloody mess. Your baby sister is crying on the ground next to her body. Around you people are running in every direction, some still trying to hold on to their possessions, but bundles and suitcases lay abandoned in the path and the fields, next to motionless bodies. The rumbling of engines can be heard in the direction of the camp, and through the swaying, lush vegetation you see a column of soldiers in camouflage approach, guns at the ready.
A woman points at the soldiers and shouts. Some of the men and women stop running and hold up their hands.
A gunshot rings out, followed by another.
Like leaves blown before a gust of wind, the crowd scatters. Mud splashes onto your face as stomping feet pass by you.
Your baby sister cries louder. You scream, “Stop! Stop!” in your language. You try to crawl over to her, but someone stumbles over you, slamming you to the ground. You try to shield your head from the trampling feet with your arms and curl up into a ball. Some leap over you; others try but fail, landing on you, kicking you hard as they scramble.
More gunshots. You peek between your fingers. A few figures tumble to the earth. There’s little room to maneuver in the stampeding crowd, and people fall in a heap whenever anyone goes down. Everyone is pushing and shoving to put someone, anyone, between the bullets and themselves.
A foot in a muddy sneaker slams down onto the bundled figure of your baby sister, and you hear a sickening crack as her cries are abruptly silenced. The owner of the sneaker hesitates for a moment before the surging crowd pushes them forward, disappearing from your sight.
You scream, and something pounds you hard in the gut, knocking the breath out of you.
Tang Jianwen ripped off her headset, gasping. Her hands shook as she unzipped her immersion suit, and she managed to peel it halfway off before her hands lost their strength. As she curled up on the omnidirectional treadmill, the bruises on her sweat-drenched body glistened dark red in the faint, white glow of her computer screen, the only light on in the dark studio apartment. She dry-heaved a few times before breaking into sobs.
Though her eyes were closed, she could still see the grim expressions on the faces of the soldiers, the bloody pulp that had been the mother’s head, the broken little body of the baby, her life trampled out of her.
She had disabled the safety features of the immersion suit and removed the amplitude filters in the algics circuitry. It didn’t seem right to experience the ordeal of the Muertien refugees with pain f
ilters in place.
A VR rig was the ultimate empathy machine. How could she truly say she had walked in their shoes without suffering as they did?
The neon lights of bustling Shanghai at night spilled through the cracks in the curtains, drawing harsh, careless rainbows on the floor. Virtual wealth and real greed commingled out there, a world indifferent to the deaths and pain in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
She was grateful that she had not been able to afford the olfactory attachment. The coppery odor of blood, mixed with the fragrance of gunpowder, would have undone her before the end. Smells probed into the deepest part of your brain and stirred up the rawest emotions, like the blade of a hoe breaking up the numbed clods of modernity to reveal the wriggling pink flesh of wounded earthworms.
Eventually, she got up, peeled off the rest of her suit, and stumbled into the bathroom. She jumped as water rumbled in the pipes, the noise of approaching engines through the jungle. Under the hot streams of the shower, she shivered.
“Something has to be done,” she muttered. “We can’t let this happen. I can’t.”
But what could she do? The war between the central government of Myanmar and the ethnic minority rebels near the country’s border with China was little remarked on by the rest of the world. The United States, the world’s policeman, was silent because it wanted a loyal, pro-U.S. government in Naypyidaw as a chess piece against rising Chinese influence in the region. China, on the other hand, wanted to entice the government in Naypyidaw onto its side with business and investment, and making a big deal out of ethnic Han Chinese civilians being slaughtered by Burmese soldiers was unhelpful for this Great Game. Even news of what was happening in Muertien was censored by a Chinese government terrified that sympathy for the refugees might mutate into uncontrollable nationalism. Refugee camps on both sides of the border were kept out of sight, like some shameful secret. Eyewitness accounts, videos, and this VR file had to be sneaked through tiny encrypted holes punched in the Great Firewall. In the West, however, popular apathy functioned more effectively than any official censorship.
