The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  My Linh glanced at Hoc, who was looking up into the drone-choked sky as he kept pace with Huong’s scooter. Was there some clue to this mystery up there? My Linh followed his gaze, but found only writhing chaos above, mechanical disorder and the flickering of a dozen lenses, fixed of course on the raging industrial infernos. Somewhere, she heard a police loudspeaker announcement begin, commanding the crowds to go home immediately. She and her friends had barely made it past the trucks and tanks they’d seen on the road into the industrial zone. How could the cops have arrived so soon, unless they’d been waiting since the morning?

  Before My Linh had time to consider this any further, Huong shouted, “It’s here, right?” back to her, and she realized they were finally there: The massive, two-building Korean factory complex looked just like she remembered it, from a couple of visits as a kid. It was as placid as the Singaporean factory had been, the doors closed, though they weren’t chained shut. The company sign, in cryptic Korean lettering on the left, and block Roman letters on the right, was the same one My Linh had seen years before: It read DOOBONG AUTOFACT in bright red beside neat lines of Korean lettering.

  Every muscle in My Linh’s body was tense, and she realized she was holding her breath. Some deeply buried fear arose, impossible to explain beyond the knowledge that this was not how riots were supposed to happen, and some sense that she, and her father, and the whole of Binh Duong—not to mention wherever else riots had broken out—had been terribly, brutally tricked. The fear seemed to be choking her, and she forced herself to inhale as Huong revved the engine and they pulled up the long, empty driveway toward the dark factory.

  It wasn’t the fire that troubled Yoon-Seok, or the broken table, or the bruises on his forearm: He’d seen mobs do much worse in far less time. It was the way the leader had collapsed and gone into convulsions, frothing at the mouth. Yoon-Seok had seen a man react badly to Focus, once, but it was supposed to be one-in-a-million. Effortlessly, he recalled the statistics he’d looked up at the time: probability dictated that he ought never to see such a reaction again, much less so soon. And yet here lay the mob’s leader, his body twisted a chillingly familiar way.

  Before he had a chance to think, he shouted in Vietnamese: “Call an ambulance!” Poor though most of the mob was, half of them would have phones. But then Yoon-Seok remembered the phone network was down, and their calls—even repeated with Focused relentlessness—would never get through.

  Suddenly, a teenaged girl, a local, appeared out of nowhere, trailed by some friends, all three of them in school uniforms. She ran toward the light, until she saw the convulsing man at Yoon-Seok’s feet. She fell to her knees beside him.

  “Ba!” she screamed, and Yoon-Seok’s guts twisted, bile searing the back of his throat, as she turned to face him and, in astonishingly good English, shouted, “What did you do to him?”

  “I … nothing …” Then Yoon-Seok realized, mathematical probability had held true. This was the same man he’d seen have an allergic reaction a few years back, right there on the floor of Doobong Autofact.

  How could he have forgotten him? When the factory-wide Focus policy had come into effect, the worker had come to Yoon-Seok with a sob story about an allergy to Focus, claiming he’d discovered it the day his daughter had almost died getting her first routine dose at school. He’d been a good worker, otherwise, even management material: had he been Korean, the allergy ultimately might not even have mattered.

  “But you aren’t Korean,” he’d said to the man, straightforwardly. It was fact, after all, and if only the man had been able to dose on Focus, he would have appreciated the primacy of facts: how simple and pure they are, how crucial to the constitution of the world.

  And as the girl ripped open her father’s shirt and slapped him on the face, shouting desperately, “Ba! Ba!”, another fact nagged at Yoon-Seok: however implicitly the plan had been approved, and no matter which officials in Hanoi had quietly provided logistical support for it—the better to be rid of their own troublemaking dissidents—he knew the consequences for nonconsensual dosing of a worker were fatal.

  The phone network was out: there was nobody to ask what to do, and Yoon-Seok realized—without caring, with that strange reluctance to move or speak that his wife so often had complained about—what was happening even as his senses sharpened, as the haze and noise and blur of everything drifted into clear, tight focus. The girl, starting to choke. The smudge of dirt on the shoulder of her uniform. Her friends’ gasping nearby in the darkness.

  The choking sound of the stricken man. The beeping of phones being dialed, fruitlessly, over and over.

  One droplet—whether a tear or sweat made no difference to Yoon-Seok— dropped from the girl’s chin to her father’s cheek. The faint trail it left there was the only thing in the world for Yoon-Seok now.

  Linda Nagata is a Nebula and Locus Award—winning writer, best known for her high-tech science fiction, including The Red trilogy, a series of near-future military thrillers. The first book in the trilogy, The Red: First Light, was a Nebula and John W. Campbell Memorial Award finalist, and named as a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2015. Her newest novel is the very near-future thriller, The Last Good Man. Linda has lived most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and an independent publisher. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

  THE MARTIAN OBELISK

  Linda Nagata

  The end of the world required time to accomplish—and time, Susannah reflected, worked at the task with all the leisurely skill of a master torturer, one who could deliver death either quickly or slowly, but always with excruciating pain.

  No getting out of it.

  But there were still things to do in the long, slow decline; final gestures to make. Susannah Li-Langford had spent seventeen years working on her own offering-for-the-ages, with another six and half years to go before the Martian Obelisk reached completion. Only when the last tile was locked into place in the obelisk’s pyramidal cap, would she yield.

  Until then, she did what was needed to hold onto her health, which was why, at the age of eighty, she was out walking vigorously along the cliff trail above the encroaching Pacific Ocean, determined to have her daily exercise despite the brisk wind and the freezing mist that ran before it. The mist was only a token moisture, useless to revive the drought-stricken coastal forest, but it made the day cold enough that the fishing platforms at the cliff’s edge were deserted, leaving Susannah alone to contemplate the mortality of the human world.

  It was not supposed to happen like this. As a child she’d been promised a swift conclusion: duck and cover and nuclear annihilation. And if not annihilation, at least the nihilistic romance of a gun-toting, leather-clad, fight-to-the-death anarchy.

  That hadn’t happened either.

  Things had just gotten worse, and worse still, and people gave up. Not everyone, not all at once—there was no single event marking the beginning of the end—but there was a sense of inevitability about the direction history had taken. Sea levels rose along with average ocean temperatures. Hurricanes devoured coastal cities and consumed low-lying countries. Agriculture faced relentless drought, flood, and temperature extremes. A long run of natural disasters made it all worse—earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions. There had been no major meteor strike yet, but Susannah wouldn’t bet against it. Health care faltered as antibiotics became useless against resistant bacteria. Surgery became an art of the past.

  Out of the devastation, war and terrorism erupted like metastatic cancers.

  We are a brilliant species, Susannah thought. Courageous, creative, generous—as individuals. In larger numbers we fail every time.

  There were reactor meltdowns, poisoned water supplies, engineered plagues, and a hundred other, smaller horrors. The Shoal War had seen nuclear weapons used in the South China Sea. But even the most determined ghouls had failed to ignite a sudden, brilli
ant cataclysm. The master torturer would not be rushed.

  Still, the tipping point was long past, the future truncated. Civilization staggered on only in the lucky corners of the world where the infrastructure of a happier age still functioned. Susannah lived in one of those lucky corners, not far from the crumbling remains of Seattle, where she had greenhouse food, a local network, and satellite access all supplied by her patron, Nathaniel Sanchez, who was the money behind the Martian Obelisk.

  When the audio loop on her ear beeped a quiet tone, she assumed the alert meant a message from Nate. There was no one else left in her life, nor did she follow the general news, because what was the point?

  She tapped the corner of her wrist-link with a finger gloved against the cold, signaling her personal AI to read the message aloud. Its artificial, androgynous voice spoke into her ear:

  “Message sender: Martian Obelisk Operations. Message body: Anomaly sighted. All operations automatically halted pending supervisory approval.”

  Just a few innocuous words, but weighted with a subtext of disaster.

  A subtext all too familiar.

  For a few seconds, Susannah stood still in the wind and the rushing mist. In the seventeen-year history of the project, construction had been halted only for equipment maintenance, and that, on a tightly regulated schedule. She raised her wrist-link to her lips. “What anomaly, Alix?” she demanded, addressing the AI. “Can it be identified?”

  “It identifies as a homestead vehicle belonging to Red Oasis.”

  That was absurd. Impossible.

  Founded twenty-one years ago, Red Oasis was the first of four Martian colonies, and the most successful. It had outlasted all the others, but the Mars Era had ended nine months ago when Red Oasis succumbed to an outbreak of “contagious asthma”—a made-up name for an affliction evolved on Mars.

  Since then there had been only radio silence. The only active elements on the planet were the wind, and the machinery that had not yet broken down, all of it operated by AIs.

  “Where is the vehicle?” Susannah asked.

  “Seventeen kilometers northwest of the obelisk.”

  So close!

  How was that possible? Red Oasis was over 5,000 kilometers distant. How could an AI have driven so far? And who had given the order?

  Homestead vehicles were not made to cover large distances. They were big, slow, and cumbersome—cross-country robotic crawlers designed to haul equipment from the landing site to a colony’s permanent location, where construction would commence (and ideally be completed) long before the inhabitants arrived. The vehicles had a top speed of fifteen kilometers per hour, which meant that even with the lightspeed delay, Susannah had time to send a new instruction set to the AIs that inhabited her construction equipment.

  Shifting abruptly from stillness to motion, she resumed her vigorous pace—and then she pushed herself to walk just a little faster.

  Nathaniel Sanchez was waiting for her, pacing with a hobbling gait on the front porch of her cottage when she returned. His flawless electric car, an anomaly from another age, was parked in the gravel driveway. Nate was eighty-five and rail-thin, but the electric warmth of his climate-controlled coat kept him comfortable even in the biting wind. She waved at him impatiently. “You know it’s fine to let yourself in. I was hoping you’d have coffee brewing by now.”

  He opened the door for her, still a practitioner of the graceful manners instilled in him by his mother eight decades ago—just one of the many things Susannah admired about him. His trustworthiness was another. Though Nate owned every aspect of the Martian Obelisk project—the equipment on Mars, the satellite accounts, this house where Susannah expected to live out her life—he had always held fast to an early promise never to interfere with her design or her process.

  “I haven’t been able to talk to anyone associated with Red Oasis,” he told her in a voice low and resonant with age. “The support network may have disbanded.”

  She sat down in the old, armless chair she kept by the door, and pulled off her boots. “Have the rights to Red Oasis gone on the market yet?”

  “No.” Balancing with one hand against the door, he carefully stepped out of his clogs. “If they had, I would have bought them.”

  “What about a private transfer?”

  He offered a hand to help her up. “I’ve got people looking into it. We’ll find out soon.”

  In stockinged feet, she padded across the hardwood floor and the handmade carpets of the living room, but at the door of the Mars room she hesitated, looking back at Nate. Homesteads were robotic vehicles, but they were designed with cabs that could be pressurized for human use, with a life-support system that could sustain two passengers for many days. “Is there any chance some of the colonists at Red Oasis are still alive?” Susannah asked.

  Nate reached past her to open the door, a dark scowl on his worn face. “No detectable activity and radio silence for nine months? I don’t think so. There’s no one in that homestead, Susannah, and there’s no good reason for it to visit the obelisk, especially without any notice to us that it was coming. When my people find out who’s issuing the orders we’ll get it turned around, but in the meantime, do what you have to do to take care of our equipment.”

  Nate had always taken an interest in the Martian Obelisk, but over the years, as so many of his other aspirations failed, the project had become more personal. He had begun to see it as his own monument and himself as an Ozymandias whose work was doomed to be forgotten, though it would not fall to the desert sands in this lifetime or any other.

  “What can I do for you, Susannah?” he had asked, seventeen years ago.

  A long-time admirer of her architectural work, he had come to her after the ruin of the Holliday Towers in Los Angeles—her signature project— two soaring glass spires, one eighty-four floors and the other 104, linked by graceful sky bridges. When the Hollywood Quake struck, the buildings had endured the shaking just as they’d been designed to do, keeping their residents safe, while much of the city around them crumbled. But massive fires followed the quake and the towers had not survived that.

  “Tell me what you dream of, Susannah. What you would still be willing to work on.”

  Nathaniel had been born into wealth, and through the first half of his life he’d grown the family fortune. Though he had never been among the wealthiest individuals of the world, he could still indulge extravagant fancies.

  The request Susannah made of him had been, literally, outlandish.

  “Buy me the rights to the Destiny Colony.”

  “On Mars?” His tone suggested a suspicion that her request might be a joke.

  “On Mars,” she assured him.

  Destiny had been the last attempt at Mars colonization. The initial robotic mission had been launched and landed, but money ran out and colonists were never sent. The equipment sat on Mars, unused.

  Susannah described her vision of the Martian Obelisk: a gleaming, glittering white spire, taking its color from the brilliant white of the fiber tiles she would use to construct it. It would rise from an empty swell of land, growing more slender as it reached into the sparse atmosphere, until it met an engineering limit prescribed by the strength of the fiber tiles, the gravity of the Red Planet, and by the fierce ghost-fingers of Mars’ storm winds. Calculations of the erosional force of the Martian wind led her to conclude that the obelisk would still be standing a hundred thousand years hence and likely far longer. It would outlast all buildings on Earth. It would outlast her bloodline, and all bloodlines. It would still be standing long after the last human had gone the way of the passenger pigeon, the right whale, the dire wolf. In time, the restless Earth would swallow up all evidence of human existence, but the Martian Obelisk would remain—a last monument marking the existence of humankind, excepting only a handful of tiny, robotic spacecraft faring, lost and unrecoverable, in the void between stars.

  Nate had listened carefully to her explanation of the project, how it could be
done, and the time that would be required. None of it fazed him and he’d agreed, without hesitation, to support her.

  The rights to the colony’s equipment had been in the hands of a holding company that had acquired ownership in bankruptcy court. Nathaniel pointed out that no one was planning to go to Mars again, that no one any longer possessed the wealth or resources to try. Before long, he was able to purchase Destiny Colony for a tiny fraction of the original backers’ investment.

  When Susannah received the command codes, Destiny’s homestead vehicle had not moved from the landing site, its payload had not been unpacked, and construction on its habitat had never begun. Her first directive to the AI in charge of the vehicle was to drive it three hundred kilometers to the site she’d chosen for the obelisk, at the high point of a rising swell of land.

  Once there, she’d unloaded the fleet of robotic construction equipment: a mini-dozer, a mini-excavator, a six-limbed beetle cart to transport finished tiles, and a synth—short for synthetic human although the device was no such thing. It was just a stick figure with two legs, two arms, and hands capable of basic manipulation.

  The equipment fleet also included a rolling factory that slowly but continuously produced a supply of fiber tiles, compiling them from raw soil and atmospheric elements. While the factory produced an initial supply of tiles, Susannah prepared the foundation of the obelisk, and within a year she began to build.

  The Martian Obelisk became her passion, her reason for life after every other reason had been taken from her. Some called it a useless folly. She didn’t argue: what meaning could there be in a monument that would never be seen directly by human eyes? Some called it graffiti: Kilroy was here! Some called it a tombstone and that was the truth too.