The Year's Best Science Fiction - Thirty-Third Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “I saw two different things,” she told her mother, “and tried to make them part of the same story. Captain Chernov was right about that, at least.”

  “He was wrong about everything else. And you are too hard on yourself,” her mother said fondly.

  “I wonder where I got that from?”

  “Can the poor men you rescued be cured?”

  “They’re under heavy sedation and undergoing cognitive therapy. They’re no longer scared to death, but purging the prions from their brains won’t be easy.”

  “It sounds as if you have found a new project.”

  “I’m wondering if it’s a general problem,” Katya said. “This particular prion caused a gross behavioural change, but there may be others that have more subtle effects. We think that we are separate from the biosphere of Venus, yet it is clear that we are not. All of us, Russians, Americans, British, we have more in common with each other than with the people from our homelands. We came from Earth, but we are all Venusians now. Venus is in our blood, and our minds.”

  “So you have a new research topic, and a new way of getting into trouble,” her mother said. “What about this new man of yours?”

  “We’re taking it slowly. He forgave me, at least, for giving him a bad concussion, and injuring his pride.”

  Although Arkadi had said, the first time they had met in quarantine, that if he had been piloting the drone he would have had no problem returning the favour.

  “A man who puts love before pride,” her mother said. “Now there’s a lovely example of a new way of thinking.”

  It Takes More Muscles to Frown

  NED BEAUMAN

  Maintaining an expressionless “poker face” can be a considerable advantage in high-stakes games, in personal relationships, in corporate intrigue, and even in espionage, but as the vigorous and violent tale that follows demonstrates, keeping one can be a lot easier if you have a little high-tech help.…

  Ned Beauman was born in 1985 in London. His debut novel, Boxer, Beetle, won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Fiction Book and the Goldberg Prize for Outstanding Debut Fiction. His second novel, The Teleportation Accident, was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel, Glow, was published in 2014. He has been chosen by the BBC’s The Culture Show as one of the twelve best new British novelists and by Granta as one of the twenty best British novelists under forty. His work has been translated into more than ten languages.

  Tonight’s interrogation was a sitcom. The subject of the sitcom was me, although I never appeared on screen. I recognised the actors, and the oversized Manhattan apartment set in which they sat around bantering, because I’d seen several episodes of the sitcom before. But today their voices and movements were contrived by an algorithm. They were talking about how I’d recently made a disastrous blunder at work and I was struggling to cover it up; how I was sabotaging Simagre’s operations on behalf of a rival oil company; how I was embezzling money; how I was selling confidential information to a journalist or a hedge fund or a cartel; how I was compromised by a debt or an addiction or an affair. These were serious subjects, but they were being slotted into time-tested, all-purpose joke structures that could accommodate almost any concept and still be funny if the delivery was right. On both sides of the screen were cameras pointed at my face. It was a fine simulation of what watching TV must be like for a paranoid schizophrenic.

  The software would see if my mouth was laughing but my eyes weren’t. It would see if I began to laugh but then the laugh died away when I realised how disturbingly accurate the joke was. It would see if I blanched at the joke and then forced a laugh slightly too late. It would see if I laughed at everything, even the lines that weren’t funny, to cover my panic. It would see if my face was tense with the effort to look natural. It would see if I made involuntary cringes of anxiety between my other expressions, even for only a thirtieth of a second. “Leakage” was the technical name for self-betrayals of this kind. And if the emotion detection software did notice anything out of the ordinary, it would modify the script of the following scene to hone in on whatever had caused that reaction. The sitcom, as they used to say, was filmed before a live studio audience.

  I’d heard rumours about this method, but I’d never experienced it firsthand. Usually I just got the basic interview: a few dozen questions, many of them quite innocuous, from a face on a screen. The face was digitally composited, like the sitcom actors, although we’d been told that about once in every five sessions the face would be a mask for a trained subcontractor in Kenya or the Phillipines. We’d also been told, repeatedly, that the software was almost infallible. Cantabrian were keen for us to believe that, because their software would work better if the sinless felt they had nothing to fear and the sinners felt they had everything to fear.

  I was a sinner, but I wasn’t afraid. And the curtained privacy booth was comfortable, like the back of a very small limousine. So I sat there and watched the show as if I was at home on the couch. Yes, it was written and acted by an algorithm, but it was funny, in a dated sort of way, and I laughed at a lot of the jokes. Including the joke about how I was selling pipeline data to a cartel. Even though that joke was in pretty bad taste. Even though that joke hit pretty close to home.

  The episode concluded with the logo of the company who had produced the original sitcom back in the 1990s, the logo of the company who now owned the rights to both the sitcom and the actors’ likenesses, the logo of the company who developed the emotion detection software, and of course the logo of Cantabrian, who handled security for Simagre Petroleum across Mexico and Guatemala. “Thank you very much for your patience,” said a voice. “We hope you have a pleasant evening.”

  There was very little chance of that. I’d already agreed to go out for drinks at a mirrory lounge on Calle Schiller with my boss and a few of my coworkers. By now they would be waiting for me beyond the security gates in the lobby. The next four or five hours would be a greater drudgery than the afternoon I’d just spent at my desk, and it wasn’t as if I’d get overtime.

  My boss, Gabriel Obregón, a Mexican American with an MBA from Sloan, was an efficient and fair-minded manager but also the most insecure conversationalist I had ever met. When he was telling you a story, you had to stage a continual pantomime of emotional involvement, otherwise he’d worry you weren’t following. And if the story had a punch line, you had to laugh as loud and as long as Obregón himself did, which was very loud and very long. But he wasn’t the sort of narcissist who would cheerfully lap up the most blatant sycophancy. He was convinced that he could distinguish fake smiles from real ones better than any software, even though in practice he was about as reliable as a coin toss; “I don’t want you to laugh at my jokes just because I’m the boss,” he would say to us, even though our working lives would have become unfeasibly awkward if we’d ever stopped.

  Before I moved from Houston to Mexico City, Obregón would have been my undoing. Tweaking my face into socially acceptable configurations had always been a challenge for me. I’d long since given up smiling for cameras, because even when I tried my best it looked as if I was making a sarcastic parody of a smile. This was a hereditary incompetence: when we were especially bored, my father and I both suffered from what was affectionately known in my family as “death face,” our attentive expressions decaying minute by minute into grimaces so extreme that onlookers would often assume we’d been taken ill. We never realised we were doing it until it was pointed out, and all my life it had been a liability, in seminars and meetings and first dates and family reunions. There was nothing physically wrong with me. I had all the right muscles to be insincere. But I just couldn’t seem to array them very well or fix them for very long.

  I’m not trying to imply that somehow it taxed me so much because I’m fundamentally more honest than other people. As my personal history demonstrates, that is not at all the case. All I mean to say is, when those cartel surg
eons hid 43 electroactive polymer units inside my new face, it was as if, at very long last, I had graduated from finishing school.

  Earlier in the year, a small-batch añejo from Fushimi had won Best Tequila at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition, causing uproar in the Mexican media and at least one speech before the Chamber of Deputies. By eight o’clock, Obregón had already had four rounds of a tequila made with gin botanicals in the same distillery, even though each measure cost as much as a good dinner. I was sipping Negra Modelo, because the maximum amount of fun I could possibly have with my coworkers still wasn’t worth a hangover in the morning.

  “You can’t even imagine how much crap I insulate you guys from,” Obregón was saying. We all looked curious. “I mean, coming down from above. It isn’t easy sometimes.” We all looked sympathetic. “Look, I’m not whining. It’s my job to look out for you. I just, you know, hope you realise.” We all looked grateful.

  “They aren’t happy upstairs?” said Soto, who worked at the desk next to me. Everyone here could speak Spanish, but Simagre was a multinational company and it functioned in English.

  “Hey, they’re never happy, right? But this last quarter they’ve been extra grouchy because of the Cantabrian thing, and who do they take it out on? Guys at my level.”

  “What Cantabrian thing?”

  Obregón hesitated. “This isn’t exactly water cooler material at this point…” But he’d had four tequilas. “You deserve to know, though. You all jump through their hoops every day.” He gestured at me. “You just sat through that stupid emotion detection show for twenty minutes. You deserve to know.” He exhaled heavily. “They’re thinking about dropping Cantabrian.”

  That was genuinely monumental corporate gossip. None of us had to fake our surprise. “Don’t we have another three years on the contract?” I said. I knew we were paying them a lot. The denationalisation of the Mexican oil market had been the biggest boom for the private security industry since the Bush wars.

  “Yeah, so either we pay the penalty, or we go to court to get out of it, but either way we’d be looking at … I don’t even know. Then the transition costs … So a lot of them are against it, upstairs. But Cantabrian have had their shot. They’ve had all this time to find the data breaches, and from what I hear, they’re just flailing. The taps are still killing our bottom line because the cartels always know every fucking thing we’re doing. Cantabrian can manage the low-level stuff fine—if you try to hijack one of our trucks, you’re going to get shot—but if that was all we needed, we could just hire the biggest gatillero in every cantina. Anyway, drop them, don’t drop them, either way everybody’s arguing, everybody’s in a crappy mood. And you know what I think?” He lowered his voice. “I think the leaks are coming from Cantabrian.”

  “Cantabrian don’t have access to any pipeline data,” I said.

  “But they built our security architecture. They have back doors.”

  “The programmers are in Singapore,” said Soto.

  “Doesn’t matter. The cartels have reach. Hey, that reminds me,” Obregón said, tapping his phone for another round. “So there’s this cartel boss’s son, right? Eight years old. And his nanny tells him that if he wants a lot of presents for Christmas this year, he should write a letter to Baby Jesus. Because if it wasn’t for Baby Jesus, we wouldn’t even have Christmas. So the boy sits down to write the letter, and first he puts, ‘Dear Baby Jesus, I’ve been a good boy the whole year, so I want a new speedboat.’ He looks at it, then he crumples it up and throws it away. He gets out a new piece of paper, and this time he writes, ‘Dear Baby Jesus, I’ve been a good boy most of the year, so I want a new speedboat.’ He looks at it, then he crumples it up and throws it away again. But then he gets an idea. He goes into his abuela’s room, takes a statue of the Virgin Mary, wraps it up in duct tape, puts it in the closet, and locks the door. Then he gets another piece of paper and he writes, ‘Dear Baby Jesus, if you ever want to see your mother again…’”

  Everyone guffawed. And even though I’d heard the joke told better before, my guffaw was more convincing than anyone else’s, at least visually. Because I had help.

  The electroactive polymer prosthesis had been developed at the UC Davis Medical Center as a treatment for facial paralysis. It still hadn’t been approved for use by regulators anywhere in the world. But the Nuevos Zetas’ hackers had stolen the designs and forwarded them to a fabricator in Guangzhou that specialised in biomedical prototypes. Presumably both Cantabrian and the company that made the emotion detection software were aware that the technology existed, but thought they had a few years’ grace before they had to worry about it.

  There wasn’t enough metal in my face to show up on a body scanner, and even under a close examination the lacework under my skin could easily be mistaken for the titanium alloy mesh sometimes used in facial reconstruction surgery. It worked on roughly the same principle as a shipbuilder’s powered exoskeleton, but in miniature: when you initiated a movement, the prosthesis detected that movement and threw its own weight behind it. A smile that would normally be thin and mirthless would instead dawn across your whole face. Then it would linger and fade, like a real smile, instead of clicking off like a fake one. Conversely, when you tried to keep your face neutral, the prosthesis would steady anything that might squinch or quiver or droop. No more nervousness, no more death face.

  Because the emotion detection software that Cantabrian used could also detect spikes in facial temperature and perspiration, I had a unit in each of my cheekbones to dispense a fizzle of magnetite nanoparticles into my facial veins, which in an emergency would partially neutralise both tells. So far, though, that had never been necessary, because the support of the electroactive polymers meant I was always relaxed about telling lies (or listening to jokes). If I started babbling or gnawing my fingernails or squirming in my seat, an interviewer would certainly notice, and there was nothing the prosthesis could do about that. But it was easy to train yourself not to show any of those signs. Whereas it was impossible, as far as anybody knew, to train the microexpressions out of your face.

  The prosthesis could be switched on and off wirelessly. On my phone I had a settings app disguised as a puzzle game. I took off my girdle for sleep and exercise and sex, otherwise I got a sore jaw. But the rest of the time, I kept it on. Once you get used to having full control over your face, it begins to seem very strange that you ever tolerated its delinquency. If a social network decided to broadcast your deepest feelings to the world without permission, spurting emojis left and right, you would delete your account. And yet your body does precisely that. Crying, blushing, sweating, goosebumps, involuntary facial expressions—not to mention erections, when visible, and stress-related incontinence, in extreme cases—are all serious data breaches. Strangers on the Metro have no more right to know how you’re feeling than strangers on the Internet.

  When we look at other people’s faces, we don’t see a muscular configuration that we interpret as an emotion: we see the emotion itself. That makes us feel as if the face is the raw membrane of the soul. We conflate ourselves with our faces. But in fact the face is no more than a signalling machine strapped to the brain. There’s no meaningful difference between a face and a mask. And people who happen to be bad at painting their masks don’t deserve to have more complicated lives than people who happen to be good at it.

  I once asked one of the Nuevos Zetas doctors about the maximum extension of the artificial muscles. He told me that in principle they could rip my face apart, but the prosthesis’ firmware would never allow that. I was reminded of a photograph from the 1860s that Lauren, my girlfriend back in Houston, had once showed me on her tablet: an old man getting his face electrocuted with metal probes to produce an expression of wild fright, part of a series of experiments that the neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne referred to as “the gymnastics of the soul.”

  “That’s how you look when you come,” Lauren said to me. She adopted a fond and jokey tone, but
she must have known it would sting. More than once we’d argued about her refusal to let me fuck her from behind in front of a mirror. She’d told me she found me handsome the rest of the time but when she saw me like that, framed in the mirror, it put her off so much she just wanted to stop. She’d even reappropriated the term “death face” to emphasise her point. By that time, I was already planning to break up with her, but in fact my situation in Houston went up in flames so suddenly I never even got the chance.

  In Mexico City, I had a new “girlfriend.” On Sunday night, I went for my weekly appointment with Rafaella, who lived on the seventh floor of a brand-new condominium overlooking the Viaducto Miguel Alemán in Escandón. If anyone from Cantabrian had ever decided to follow me—and they presumably already had, at least once, as a matter of routine—they would have observed that I arrived at the apartment around eight o’clock with two bottles of wine and a shopping bag containing jewellery or perfume or lingerie or heels or some other gossamer commodity, delivered to me that morning by a concierge service. About an hour later, a boy would arrive on a moped to hand over to the doorman the dinner we’d ordered. And at two or three in the morning, I would come back downstairs and take a car service home to my own apartment. Since my salary at Simagre wasn’t all that high, it might have occurred to the surveillance team from Cantabrian that I was stretching myself a little bit with all the expensive gifts. What would have reassured them was that it wasn’t quite the sort of overhead that made a guy take risks. It was only the sort of overhead that made a guy stay home playing video games the rest of the week to save money. All in all it must have seemed intoxicatingly romantic.

  But that was nothing compared to the passion we unleashed in private. As usual, Rafaella greeted me with a dry kiss on the cheek. Once I’d shut the door behind me she took the shopping bag and disappeared into her bedroom without a word. Arturo raised his glass of mezcal in greeting. Omar sat on the couch, typing on his laptop. “Everything cool this week?” he said.