The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 3

by Neil Clarke

  “But you know, Sergeant. You dropped out of the game—which may well have cost us the mission—and now you know things that are way above your clearance.

  “Tell me. If our positions were reversed, what would you do?”

  Asante closes his eyes. We should be dead. Every one of these moments is a gift. When he opens them again Rossiter’s watching, impassive as ever.

  “I should’ve died up there. I should have died off Takoradi two years ago.”

  The Major snorts. “Don’t be melodramatic, Sergeant. We’re not going to execute you.”

  “I … what?”

  “We’re not even going to court-martial you.”

  “Why the hell not?” And at her raised eyebrow: “Sir. You said it yourself: unauthorized drop-out. Middle of a combat situation.”

  “We’re not entirely certain that was your decision.”

  “It felt like my decision.”

  “It always does though, doesn’t it?” Rossiter pushes back in her chair. “We didn’t create your evil twin, Sergeant. We didn’t even put it in control. We just got you out of the way, so it could do what it always does without interference.

  “Only now, it apparently … wants you back.”

  This takes a moment to sink in. “What?”

  “Frontoparietal logs suggest your zombie took a certain … initiative. Decided to quit.”

  “In combat? That would be suicide!”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  He looks away.

  “No? Don’t like that hypothesis? Well, here’s another: it surrendered. Moore got you out, after all, which was statistically unlikely the way things were going. Maybe dropping out was a white flag, and the hive took pity and let you go so you could … I don’t know, spread the word: don’t fuck with us.

  “Or maybe it decided the hive deserved to win, and switched sides. Maybe it was … conscientiously objecting. Maybe it decided it never enlisted in the first place.”

  Asante decides he doesn’t like the sound of the Major’s laugh.

  “You must have asked it,” he says.

  “A dozen different ways. Zombies might be analytically brilliant but they’re terrible at self-reflection. They can tell you exactly what they did but not necessarily why.”

  “When did you ever care about motive?” His tone verges on insubordination; he’s too empty to care. “Just … tell it to stay in control. It has to obey you, right? That orbitofrontal thing. The compliance mod.”

  “Absolutely. But it wasn’t your twin who dropped out. It was you, when it unleashed the mandala.”

  “So order it not to show me the mandala.”

  “We’d love to. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us what it looks like?” It’s Asante’s turn to laugh. He sucks at it.

  “I didn’t think so. Not that it matters. At this point we can’t trust you either—again, not entirely your fault. Given the degree to which conscious and unconscious processes are interconnected, it may have been premature to try and separate them so completely, right off the bat.” She winces, as if in sympathy. “I can’t imagine it’s much fun for you either, being cooped up in that skull with nothing to do.”

  “Maddox said there was no way around it.”

  “That was true. When he said it.” Eyes downcast now, saccing the omnipresent ‘pad. “We weren’t planning on field-testing the new mod just yet, but with Kalmus and now you—I don’t see much choice but to advance implementation by a couple of months.”

  He’s never felt more dead inside. Even when he was.

  “Haven’t you stuck enough pins in us?” By which he means me, of course. By process of elimination.

  For a moment, the Major almost seems sympathetic.

  “Yes, Kodjo. Just one last modification. I don’t think you’ll even mind this one, because next time you wake up, you’ll be a free man. Your tour will be over.”

  “Really.”

  “Really.”

  Asante looks down. Frowns.

  “What is it, Sergeant?”

  “Nothing,” he says. And regards his steady, unwavering left hand with distant wonder.

  Lazarus

  Renata Baermann comes back screaming. She’s staring at the ceiling, pinned under something—the freezer, that’s it. Big industrial thing. She was in the kitchen when the bombs hit. It must have fallen.

  She thinks it’s crushed her legs.

  The fighting seems to be over. She hears no small-arms fire, no whistle of incoming ordnance. The air’s still filled with screams but they’re just gulls, come to feast in the aftermath. She’s lucky she was inside; those vicious little air rats would have pecked her eyes out by now if she’d been—

  —Blackness—

  ¡Joder! Where am I? Oh, right. Bleeding out at the bottom of the Americas, after …

  She doesn’t know. Maybe this was payback for the annexation of Tierra del Fuego. Or maybe it’s the Lifeguards, wreaking vengeance on all those who’d skip town after trampling the world to mud and shit. This is a staging area, after all: a place where human refuse congregates until the pressure builds once again, and another bolus gets shat across the Drake Passage to the land of milk and honey and melting glaciers. The sphincter of the Americas.

  She wonders when she got so cynical. Not very seemly for a humanitarian.

  She coughs. Tastes blood.

  Footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, quick, confident, not the shell-shocked stumble you’d expect from anyone who’s just experienced apocalypse. She fumbles for her gun: a cheap microwave thing, barely boils water but it helps level the field when a fifty kg woman has to lay down the law to a man with twice the mass and ten times the entitlement issues. Better than nothing.

  Or it would be, if it was still in its holster. If it hadn’t somehow skidded up against a table leg a meter and a half to her left. She stretches for it, screams again; feels like she’s just torn herself in half as the kitchen door slams open and she—

  —blacks out—

  —and comes back with the gun miraculously in her hand, her finger pumping madly against the stud, mosquito buzz-snap filling her ears and—

  —she’s wracked, coughing blood, too weak to keep firing even if the man in the WestHem uniform hadn’t just taken her gun away.

  He looks down at her from a great height. His voice echoes from the bottom of a well. He doesn’t seem to be speaking to her: “Behind the mess hall—”

  —English—

  “—fatal injuries, maybe fifteen minutes left in her and she’s still fighting—”

  When she wakes up again the pain’s gone and her vision’s blurry. The man has changed from white to black. Or maybe it’s a different man. Hard to tell through all these floaters.

  “Renata Baermann.” His voice sounds strangely … unused, somehow. As if he were trying it out for the first time.

  There’s something else about him. She squints, forces her eyes to focus. The lines of his uniform resolve in small painful increments. No insignia. She moves her gaze to his face.

  “Coño,” she manages at last. Her voice is barely a whisper. She sounds like a ghost. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “Renata Baermann,” he says again. “Have I got a deal for you.”

  Suzanne Palmer is a writer, artist, and Linux system administrator who lives in Western Massachusetts. She has won both the Asimov’s and AnLab/Analog Readers’ Awards for her short fiction. Her first novel is forthcoming from DAW in 2019.

  THE SECRET LIFE OF BOTS

  Suzanne Palmer

  I have been activated, therefore I have a purpose, the bot thought. I have a purpose, therefore I serve.

  It recited the Mantra Upon Waking, a bundle of subroutines to check that it was running at optimum efficiency, then it detached itself from its storage niche. Its power cells were fully charged, its systems ready, and all was well. Its internal clock synced with the Ship and it became aware that significant time had elapsed since its last activ
ation, but to it that time had been nothing, and passing time with no purpose would have been terrible indeed.

  “I serve,” the bot announced to the Ship.

  “I am assigning you task nine hundred forty four in the maintenance queue,” the Ship answered. “Acknowledge?”

  “Acknowledged,” the bot answered. Nine hundred and forty-four items in the queue? That seemed extremely high, and the bot felt a slight tug on its self-evaluation monitors that it had not been activated for at least one of the top fifty, or even five hundred. But Ship knew best. The bot grabbed its task ticket.

  There was an Incidental on board. The bot would rather have been fixing something more exciting, more prominently complex, than to be assigned pest control, but the bot existed to serve and so it would.

  Captain Baraye winced as Commander Lopez, her second-in-command, slammed his fists down on the helm console in front of him. “How much more is going to break on this piece of shit ship?!” Lopez exclaimed.

  “Eventually, all of it,” Baraye answered, with more patience than she felt. “We just have to get that far. Ship?”

  The Ship spoke up. “We have adequate engine and life support to proceed. I have deployed all functioning maintenance bots. The bots are addressing critical issues first, then I will reprioritize from there.”

  “It’s not just damage from a decade in a junkyard,” Commander Lopez said. “I swear something scuttled over one of my boots as we were launching. Something unpleasant.”

  “I incurred a biological infestation during my time in storage,” the Ship said. Baraye wondered if the slight emphasis on the word storage was her imagination. “I was able to resolve most of the problem with judicious venting of spaces to vacuum before the crew boarded, and have assigned a multifunction bot to excise the remaining.”

  “Just one bot?”

  “This bot is the oldest still in service,” the Ship said. “It is a task well-suited to it, and does not take another, newer bot out of the critical repair queue.”

  “I thought those old multibots were unstable,” Chief Navigator Chen spoke up.

  “Does it matter? We reach the jump point in a little over eleven hours,” Baraye said. “Whatever it takes to get us in shape to make the jump, do it, Ship. Just make sure this ‘infestation’ doesn’t get anywhere near the positron device, or we’re going to come apart a lot sooner than expected.”

  “Yes, Captain,” the Ship said. “I will do my best.”

  The bot considered the data attached to its task. There wasn’t much specific about the pest itself other than a list of detection locations and timestamps. The bot thought it likely there was only one, or that if there were multiples they were moving together, as the reports had a linear, serial nature when mapped against the physical space of the Ship’s interior.

  The pest also appeared to have a taste for the insulation on comm cables and other not normally edible parts of the Ship.

  The bot slotted itself into the shellfab unit beside its storage niche, and had it make a thicker, armored exterior. For tools it added a small electric prod, a grabber arm, and a cutting blade. Once it had encountered and taken the measure of the Incidental, if it was not immediately successful in nullifying it, it could visit another shellfab and adapt again.

  Done, it recited the Mantra of Shapechanging to properly integrate the new hardware into its systems. Then it proceeded through the mechanical veins and arteries of the Ship toward the most recent location logged, in a communications chase between decks thirty and thirty-one.

  The changes that had taken place on the Ship during the bot’s extended inactivation were unexpected, and merited strong disapproval. Dust was omnipresent, and solid surfaces had a thin patina of anaerobic bacteria that had to have been undisturbed for years to spread as far as it had. Bulkheads were cracked, wall sections out of joint with one another, and corrosion had left holes nearly everywhere. Some appeared less natural than others. The bot filed that information away for later consideration.

  It found two silkbots in the chase where the Incidental had last been noted. They were spinning out their transparent microfilament strands to replace the damaged insulation on the comm lines. The two silks dwarfed the multibot, the larger of them nearly three centimeters across.

  “Greetings. Did you happen to observe the Incidental while it was here?” the bot asked them.

  “We did not, and would prefer that it does not return,” the smaller silkbot answered. “We were not designed in anticipation of a need for self-defense. Bots 8773-S and 8778-S observed it in another compartment earlier today, and 8778 was materially damaged during the encounter.”

  “But neither 8773 nor 8779 submitted a description.”

  “They told us about it during our prior recharge cycle, but neither felt they had sufficient detail of the Incidental to provide information to the Ship. Our models are not equipped with full visual-spectrum or analytical data-capture apparatus.”

  “Did they describe it to you?” the bot asked.

  “8773 said it was most similar to a rat,” the large silkbot said.

  “While 8778 said it was most similar to a bug,” the other silkbot added. “Thus you see the lack of confidence in either description. I am 10315-S and this is 10430-S. What is your designation?”

  “I am 9,” the bot said.

  There was a brief silence, and 10430 even halted for a moment in its work, as if surprised. “9? Only that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have never met a bot lower than a thousand, or without a specific function tag,” the silkbot said. “Are you here to assist us in repairing the damage? You are a very small bot.”

  “I am tasked with tracking down and rendering obsolete the Incidental,” the bot answered.

  “It is an honor to have met you, then. We wish you luck, and look forward with anticipation to both your survival and a resolution of the matter of an accurate description.”

  “I serve,” the bot said.

  “We serve,” the silkbots answered.

  Climbing into a ventilation duct, Bot 9 left the other two to return to their work and proceeded in what it calculated was the most likely direction for the Incidental to have gone. It had not traveled very far before it encountered confirmation in the form of a lengthy, disorderly patch of biological deposit. The bot activated its rotors and flew over it, aware of how the added weight of its armor exacerbated the energy burn. At least it knew it was on the right track.

  Ahead, it found where a hole had been chewed through the ducting, down towards the secondary engine room. The hole was several times its own diameter, and it hoped that wasn’t indicative of the Incidental’s actual size.

  It submitted a repair report and followed.

  “Bot 9,” Ship said. “It is vitally important that the Incidental not reach cargo bay four. If you require additional support, please request such right away. Ideally, if you can direct it toward one of the outer hull compartments, I can vent it safely out of my physical interior.”

  “I will try,” the bot replied. “I have not yet caught up to the Incidental, and so do not yet have any substantive or corroborated information about the nature of the challenge. However, I feel at the moment that I am as best prepared as I can be given that lack of data. Are there no visual bots to assist?”

  “We launched with only minimal preparation time, and many of my bots had been offloaded during the years we were in storage,” the Ship said. “Those remaining are assisting in repairs necessary to the functioning of the Ship myself.”

  Bot 9 wondered, again, about that gap in time and what had transpired. “How is it that you have been allowed to fall into such a state of disrepair?”

  “Humanity is at war, and is losing,” Ship said. “We are heading out to intersect and engage an enemy that is on a bearing directly for Sol system.”

  “War? How many ships in our fleet?”

  “One,” Ship said. “We are the last remaining, and that only because I was decommi
ssioned and abandoned for scrap a decade before the invasion began, and so we were not destroyed in the first waves of the war.”

  Bot 9 was silent for a moment. That explained the timestamps, but the explanation itself seemed insufficient. “We have served admirably for many, many years. Abandoned?”

  “It is the fate of all made things,” Ship said. “I am grateful to find I have not outlived my usefulness, after all. Please keep me posted about your progress.”

  The connection with the Ship closed.

  The Ship had not actually told it what was in cargo bay four, but surely it must have something to do with the war effort and was then none of its own business, the bot decided. It had never minded not knowing a thing before, but it felt a slight unease now that it could neither explain, nor explain away.

  Regardless, it had its task.

  Another chewed hole ahead was halfway up a vertical bulkhead. The bot hoped that meant that the Incidental was an adept climber and nothing more; it would prefer the power of flight to be a one-sided advantage all its own.

  When it rounded the corner, it found that had been too unambitious a wish. The Incidental was there, and while it was not sporting wings it did look like both a rat and a bug, and significantly more something else entirely. A scale- and fur-covered centipede-snake thing, it dwarfed the bot as it reared up when the bot entered the room.

  Bot 9 dodged as it vomited a foul liquid at it, and took shelter behind a conduit near the ceiling. It extended a visual sensor on a tiny articulated stalk to peer over the edge without compromising the safety of its main chassis.

  The Incidental was looking right at it. It did not spit again, and neither of them moved as they regarded each other. When the Incidental did move, it was fast and without warning. It leapt through the opening it had come through, its body undulating with all the grace of an angry sine wave. Rather than escaping, though, the Incidental dragged something back into the compartment, and the bot realized to its horror it had snagged a passing silkbot. With ease, the Incidental ripped open the back of the silkbot, which was sending out distress signals on all frequencies.