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

by Gardner Dozois

  “Yeah.” I would have liked a mezcal myself but I wasn’t allowed to drink until I’d taken the test. The muffled sound of cumbiaton started up from behind Rafaella’s bedroom door.

  “Anything new?” said Arturo.

  “They did a new emotion detection thing.”

  “La telecomedia?” said Omar.

  I wondered how he knew. “Yeah. It wasn’t a problem. Oh, and my boss told me Simagre is thinking about dropping Cantabrian. They’re not making any progress on the leak.”

  Omar smirked. He was a twenty-year-old Syrian Mexican who’d got his start as a programmer for a cartel-owned darknet start-up in Guadalajara. One of his superiors must have judged him trustworthy enough to recommend him for a position in the cartel itself, which was baffling to me, because Omar was so blatant about his eagerness to sell his talents to the highest bidder that he practically handed out auction paddles. I found it surreal that he, of all people, was now responsible for the evaluation of loyalty. Even Arturo had to take Omar’s test every week before I arrived, which was topsy-turvy. You could argue that loyalty was not exactly personified in Arturo, whose job, after all, involved stealing from his old employer on behalf of his new one; he had worked in pipeline security for Pemex before he brought his expertise to the Nuevos Zetas. But where Omar treated the cartel like it was just another tech internship he could drop at any time, Arturo treated the cartel as if it was just another state-run company with a pension plan. They were both, in their own ways, deluding themselves. They were both, in their own ways, pragmatists. The difference was that Arturo, the oldest of the three of us, still clung to his belief in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, even if that honest day’s pay came from men who liked to roast their enemies alive on cinder-block barbecues. In my presence he always talked as if he was getting charged by the word, although Omar had told me that he had once overheard Arturo teasing one of his four daughters over the phone and he had sounded like an entirely different person.

  “You ready?” I said.

  “I just installed an upgrade,” said Omar. “Still a little jinky. Should be OK, though.” The cartel used the same software as Cantabrian, although it was a pirated, adapted version. Omar got up off the couch so I could sit down in his place. I compliantly adjusted the camera on the coffee table to make sure it would have my whole face in shot. “Hey, you notice anything different about the jaina today?” Omar said, nodding towards the bedroom door.

  I shrugged. Rafaella was in her final year of studying law at UNAM. The “gifts” in the shopping bags came with receipts so that she could return them for cash. And the cartel also paid the rent on the apartment. Apart from that, I didn’t know the contractual details. I only knew that when Omar and Arturo left, and I had to stay in the apartment for another few hours to keep up appearances, she let me go to bed with her, without enthusiasm on her part but also without open resentment. This had been going on for three months, and presumably it was worth her while. “The way it works is, the pussy’s part of your fee,” Omar had once told me. “So if you don’t hit that shit every week, it’s like you’re leaving money on the table.” With that remark, he had succeeded in making every sexual encounter I had with Rafaella feel even more poisonous.

  Omar slapped the knuckles of his left hand with the palm of his right. “Somebody put a ring on it. She’s engaged. She told us.”

  “I didn’t even know she had a boyfriend,” I said. But it didn’t surprise me. She was gorgeous. And although her bedroom was decorated with throw pillows and Christmas lights and those artificial flowers that changed colour through the day, she’d left the rest of the apartment almost untouched—it still looked like a generic bachelor pad you’d see pictured on a real estate website—which I took to mean she regarded her concubinage as strictly provisional. Whenever I went into her room she’d turn off all the photographs on her shelves, so we fucked beneath dozens of pale Huawei logos like sponsors’ billboards.

  “You didn’t notice there’s always Tecate Light in the refrigerator now?” Omar said. “Who the fuck drinks Tecate Light?”

  “Aren’t Cantabrian going to wonder why I’m still over here every week if she’s engaged?”

  “Are you kidding me? These chilango putas? If she’s only spreading for two guys, that counts as she’s a virgin. Anyway, none of this shit is gonna change. She isn’t moving out any time soon. It’s gonna be one of those old-school long engagements or whatever.”

  “Can we get on with the test?” I said. I waited while Omar disabled my prosthesis and initialised the emotion detection software. Then I looked into the camera as he read questions from a list. The more general ones would also have been posed to Arturo before I arrived.

  “Are the numbers you’ve given us this week comprehensive and accurate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any reason to think Simagre is suspicious? Or Cantabrian?”

  “No.”

  “Are you being careful? Are you taking every precaution?”

  “Yes.”

  “Does anybody outside this apartment know about what’s happening here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you planning to fuck with us in any way?”

  “No.”

  Omar tapped a few more keys. Then he frowned. “OK, hold up.”

  I knew I couldn’t have failed the test, because I was telling the truth. “What?”

  A grin spread across Omar’s face. “So we got two emotions showing up on your face here. Lust and sadness.”

  I wasn’t feeling either of those. Except in the sense that I was awake. “Are you sure the upgrade worked out?”

  Omar turned to Arturo. “You know what that means? Lust and sadness? That’s jealousy! Like, sexual jealousy. He’s bummed because the jaina’s getting married! He thinks he’s her boyfriend for real! He’s on some true love shit!” He could not have been more gleeful.

  “No, Omar, I’m not.”

  He turned back to me. “Sorry, guero, the software doesn’t lie. Unless you’re crushing on Arturo. Or me!”

  “So he wasn’t lying on the questions?” said Arturo in Spanish.

  “No…”

  “Then just give him the fucking computer.”

  Omar put the laptop down on the coffee table, still giggling. I leaned forward and started typing in the pipeline data I’d memorised earlier in the week, about the timing and pressure of flows from the oil fields along the Gulf Coast. With the intelligence Arturo collated from his various sources, the cartel’s engineers could place their taps so efficiently that by the time Cantabrian’s armed response teams arrived they would already have made off with thousands of barrels of crude. Back in the days of the Pemex monopoly and the original Zetas, the cartel would simply have bribed or extorted local oil workers, but Simagre made sure that no one outside their DF headquarters had access to the operational data in advance.

  It might have been easier for me to send the figures in code from an anonymous email account or a prepaid phone, without leaving the comfort of my apartment. But Omar seemed to feel that his laptop was the only electronic device in the whole of Mexico that couldn’t be compromised by Cantabrian or the Federales or the Sinaloans. In the circumstances his paranoia was probably well-founded. Anyway, I had to be physically present to take the loyalty test every week, so in practice it was no further burden.

  Like Rafaella, I hoped my concubinage would end one day. But no matter how protracted her engagement, it would be nothing compared to my indenture. She would celebrate many, many anniversaries before I was cut loose. After all, the Neuvas Zetas had saved my life. The etiquette may vary, but perhaps I would owe them until I died.

  Back in Houston, I had been the vice president of a small petroleum distributor called Magnolia Fuels that was owned through a shell by the Sinaloa Cartel. We moved about fifty thousand barrels of stolen Mexican petroleum condensate a month. The president was a Vietnamese guy named Luong. Neither of us had any stake in the busi
ness, and as long as our revenue was stable the cartel didn’t pay close attention, either to us or to the American oil market, so there was no incentive to get Magnolia the best possible deal. With that in mind, we set up a shell company of our own in Oklahoma City and began to sell that company a percentage of Magnolia’s condensate every month. On my lunch break I would sit in my car with my laptop, reselling that same brothy oil at a better price, so that Luong and I could split the difference between us. Neither of us was compromised by a debt or an addiction or an affair. We just wanted the money. We knew perfectly well what happened to Mexicans who ripped off the cartels. But we were Americans, and in an office suite in downtown Houston, across the hall from a company that distributed aromatherapy pet hammocks, the Sinaloa Cartel felt very far away.

  Of course, they weren’t. I still don’t know exactly how they discovered our scam. Luong’s body has never been recovered, but his abduction was caught on security camera. I only survived because he managed to dictate a text message to me before they tossed his phone from the van. After I read it in the locker room at my gym, I told a gym attendant that a divorce server was waiting in the lobby to serve me divorce papers. He let me leave by the back exit. As I got into a cab, I knew that I would probably never see my family again. On the bright side, I also knew that I would definitely never see Lauren again.

  I didn’t want to rely on the authorities to protect me. I’d read too many news stories about prosecutions that had collapsed because some witness under federal protection had been hunted down, his body fished from the backyard swimming pool of a rented suburban house after a drone blew his skull open. As Obregón would later assure me, the cartels had reach. Instead, I went straight to the Nuevos Zetas. My value wasn’t what I knew about the Sinaloans, which was very little. My value was that the multinational companies at the centre of the new Mexican oil boom were notorious for their reluctance to employ anybody at a management level with any local roots. I was an American who spoke oil. And I’d do anything, for anyone, to stay alive.

  Three weeks later, I was in a clinic on the outskirts of Monterrey. I assumed I was just there to get a new face to match my new name and new biography. There was something strangely compelling to me about the period halfway through the facial reconstruction process when there would truly be no answer to the question of what I looked like. Nobody warned me that I was there to be made animatronic like a puppet in an old theme park.

  After Omar and Arturo left, I ate one of the merguez tlayudas we’d ordered, and then knocked on Rafaella’s door. Despite myself, I felt uneasy. I wasn’t in love with Rafaella, and I didn’t care that she was engaged. And yet living with my prosthesis had made me aware that my body was an exhibitionist, a whistle-blower, practically turning itself inside out in its eagerness to open me to the world. I didn’t necessarily know everything that was going on in my own head. Was it possible that the emotion detection software had tapped me like an oil pipeline? Was it possible that, in the course of sleeping with Rafaella every Sunday night for three months, I’d developed real feelings for her, and I couldn’t admit it to myself? I didn’t think so, but when Rafaella turned off her music and opened the door, I still felt oddly as if I was turning up for a first date.

  While she was undressing, I noticed she wasn’t wearing any engagement ring, but all the same I said in Spanish, “Omar told me you’re getting married. Congratulations. That’s terrific.” Even if my prosthesis had been turned on, I wouldn’t have looked sincere when I said it, because I felt so self-conscious about the topic that I completely forgot to smile.

  “Do you actually care?” she snapped. “If you don’t actually care, don’t say anything.”

  She’d never been so testy with me before. Clearly she didn’t want me even to brush up against her personal life. And yet her reply was a little unreasonable. Empty pleasantries were a prosthesis installed in every single human being, even cartel psychopaths. “If you don’t actually care, don’t say anything” was not a plausible rule of conduct. In fact, I literally couldn’t remember the last time I’d voiced an honest sentiment to anybody, so in effect she was asking me to be mute. Except that what flopped out of my mouth next really was a self-disclosure, authentic and involuntary. “Rafaella, you don’t think I’m just a big fake, do you?” She gave me a look so cold it probably would have crashed Omar’s software. I waved the question away, embarrassed. “Don’t answer that.”

  After that we pretended to be lovers.

  As usual, I finished by fucking her from behind in front of a mirror, fantasising that Lauren was spying on us jealously through the keyhole. These days, I tried to keep my face a little under control at the climax, so that I didn’t go completely Duchenne de Boulogne. But I didn’t bind it too tightly. Apart from my occasional weight training sessions, an orgasm was the only chance my face got to limber up without the prosthesis; and I had the irrational feeling that if I didn’t let the expression out, it might rot inside me. If Rafaella saw it and thought it looked like a death face, I didn’t care, because I was pretty sure she already held me in contempt, my unrequited, unconscious, unconfirmed sweetheart.

  But this time, when I ejaculated, although I was only making the gentlest effort to control my expression, my face was as blank as the headshot on my Simagre ID.

  The next morning, I sat at my desk, wondering what I’d done to myself. I knew that all prosthetics rewired the brain, even a peg leg, even a swimfin. Perhaps I’d been wearing my subcutaneous mempo for so long that the natural connection between my inner states and my outer surface had become vaguer, more diffuse, more circuitous, like some decaying telegraph network. That was the only explanation I could think of. One moment I might be clenching with ecstasy and somehow the signal wouldn’t reach my face. The next moment I might have an emotion so dim and inchoate that perhaps it wasn’t truly an emotion so much as a speculation or a potentiality and it would nevertheless cause a sputter of microexpressions.

  I loved my prosthesis, but I loved it only because I was still an obligate social mammal. In the back of my mind, I had always assumed that at some point in my life there would come a time when I wouldn’t have to perform for anybody ever again. I had an indistinct fantasy of settling into early retirement with a wife and two dogs in some fishing village down on the Nayarit coast. When I turned off the prosthesis for good, I didn’t want to find that it had hobbled me irreparably.

  Today, for the first time since taking the job at Simagre, I hadn’t, as ladies used to say, put my face on in the morning. My prosthesis was still disabled. On my way to lunch, I stopped by Obregón’s office. As always, his door was open, so I stood in the doorway. “How was your weekend?”

  I knew he’d have a story about his spouse or his kids or his soccer team. I didn’t pay attention to the content, only to the intonation, so that I would be able to tell when the punch line was coming up. “… but afterwards, I called the store, just to check, and you know what? They don’t even sell apple pie filling at Bodega Aurrera!”

  I laughed as hard as I could, and Obregón laughed too. But then his laughter trailed off. Granted, Obregón was no grand inquisitor, but in this instance the new expression on his face was so full of dismay that I knew the expression on my own must have been grievously miscalibrated. I hadn’t been sure which way this experiment was going to go, but it had proved that, without the prosthesis, I was less capable than ever of realistic mirth.

  “Sir?”

  I turned. A Cantabrian security officer stood just outside the doorway. I recognised her but I didn’t know her name. “Yes?”

  “If you’d be kind enough to accompany me to one of the privacy booths downstairs, we’d like you to sit for a security interview.”

  “But it’s Monday. It’s the middle of the day.”

  “We’re operating on a randomised schedule now.”

  I looked at Obregón, who nodded. “I had to do one first thing this morning. Pain in the butt.”

  I told myself th
at the test was no threat. All I had to do was discreetly turn my prosthesis back on before the interview started. I patted my pockets.

  I’d left my phone behind at my desk to charge.

  Without the phone I had no way to turn the prosthesis back on. “OK,” I said, “but I just need to swing by my desk to send one email. Then I’ll be with you.”

  “The new protocol is that you have to come directly to the privacy booth. It will only take ten minutes.”

  Hoping that he might intervene in some way, I shot Obregón another glance that conveyed “Surely we don’t have to put up with this shit?”—or at least I meant it to convey that, but I felt like such an amateur at this point that for all I knew it conveyed tenderness or patriotism or schadenfreude or some other mood entirely. Obregón just shrugged. “I think it’s so that you don’t sneak a zofrosil or anything like that,” he said.

  I knew I couldn’t protest any more without raising suspicion. In West Africa they sometimes used to hold trials where the accused were challenged to dip their hands in boiling oil. At that moment a vat of Campeche crude was almost more appealing than a camera. At least it was a test I could conceivably pass. “Fine,” I said to the security officer, hoping she couldn’t already see my fear. “Lead the way.” Somewhere inside a Cantabrian server the judges were waiting to score my gymnastics of the soul.

  “I need to tell you guys something about what happened at work this week,” I said.

  “No, guero, you need to tell us something about what happened right here,” said Omar.

  What I had been about to explain was that I had failed the pop quiz. Sitting there in the privacy booth, trying to remember what normal people looked like when they gave truthful answers to simple questions, it was as if I had no instincts or defaults any more, just a control panel inside me the size of a recording studio’s mixing desk. My face felt more cybernetic than it ever had with the prosthesis turned on. The more I thought about it, the worse it got. By the end my best attempt at a relaxed expression probably looked like someone having a stroke in a wind tunnel. I imagined the video going viral on the Cantabrian intranet, “the worst liar we’ve ever tested!” Afterwards, I still went out to get a torta, but I was too shaken to eat, and I almost didn’t go back to the office. I was ready to book it out of Mexico City just like I’d booked it out of Houston. When I asked the Nuevos Zetas for help, I wouldn’t have to admit to them that it was my own fault I’d failed the test because I’d left my prosthesis off.