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

by Gardner Dozois

  I did go back to the office, though, because I knew Cantabrian wouldn’t act on their suspicions until they’d carried out an investigation. When they called me in for a second interview, I decided, that was when I would vanish. Until then, I wouldn’t do anything irrevocable. So for the rest of the week I walked around feeling like a fugitive in the middle of a police station.

  Then Friday came, and still nothing had happened. I couldn’t understand it, and I was hoping Omar might have some kind of answer.

  But then Arturo pointed a gun at me, a silver semi-automatic so big it looked as if you could shout down the barrel and it would echo back at you.

  I hadn’t even realised he carried one. “Hey, what the fuck is this?” I said.

  “The couch,” Arturo ordered. I sat down.

  “That test last week,” Omar said, “when the software was saying lust and sadness, and we thought it was because you was getting mushy about la jaina— I took a closer look. Wanted to see how the upgrade was working out. You know what? A lot of the microexpressions in the log, they only lasted for a hundredth of a second or less. You got your basic vanilla face with your basic vanilla muscles, it can’t do that. Can’t contract that fast. A thirtieth of a second is the fastest. Maybe a fiftieth.”

  “So?”

  “That means you had the prosthesis turned on during the test. The polymers. That’s the only way you could be flashing microexpressions so quick.”

  “You always turn it off before I start,” I said.

  “Yeah. That’s what I thought. But you must have modified it so it looks like it’s off but it stays on. And why the fuck would you do that unless you’re trying to play us on the test?”

  “Omar, I haven’t modified anything. I wouldn’t even know how.”

  “Maybe not. But the Sinaloans, they got a few guys.”

  By now Arturo had circled around so that he was between me and the front door of the apartment, although it wasn’t as if I was going to try anything when he still had the gun on me. “Why would I set my prosthesis to show lust and sadness? Just give me the test again now. Ask me about all this stuff on the camera once you’ve satisfied yourself one hundred percent that my prosthesis is off.”

  “I can’t do that if you’ve modified it.”

  “We could just cut it out of him,” said Arturo in Spanish.

  At that moment I thought I could feel the prosthesis inside my face, every polymer unit like a twist of barbed wire. “It must be a problem with the software,” I stammered. “The upgrade.”

  “The upgrade is fine,” said Omar.

  “Maybe you’ve been hacked.”

  Omar sneered. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He nodded at his laptop. “Nobody hacks that. I’m not a retard. That shit is tighter than Korean pussy. No inputs means no vulnerabilities. Every fucking byte of data on that machine, I pop the trunk like Border Control. Every fucking byte except…” He blinked, and was silent for a little while. “No way,” he murmured. “No way you could fit a code injection into…” Then he sat down at his laptop and started typing. “Hijos de puta,” he kept saying, shaking his head. “Hijos de puta.”

  “What is it?

  “I think they used your face.”

  “My face?”

  “Ever heard of a code injection? You hide executable code inside raw data. The system runs the code because it doesn’t know any better. That’s what those microexpressions were. They got control of your prosthesis. Then they used it to transmit a code injection. They hacked into my system with your face.”

  My hand went up to my cheek. “Who? The Sinaloans?”

  “Or Cantabrian.”

  So I wasn’t in control of my own signalling device. But then I never really had been. “You think they’ve been doing this every week?”

  “Every time I upgrade the software, had to guess.”

  “But why would they need to hack your loyalty tests?”

  He was still typing. “Help somebody pass them who shouldn’t be passing them.”

  “But I pass those tests because I’m telling the truth. I don’t need any help.”

  “Not you. More likely to be—” Then Omar’s eyes widened. “Detenerlo!” he yelped.

  But Arturo was already gone.

  Omar bounded to the door, almost knocking me down as he pushed past. I looked out into the corridor. Arturo had disappeared around a corner, towards the elevators. Omar pulled a gun of his own from his waistband, but it was only a tiddly printed model as opposed to Arturo’s fat semi-auto, and for a moment he bounced from foot to foot as if he couldn’t decide whether to risk giving chase. Then he snarled in frustration and came back inside. “OK, pendejo,” he said, waving the gun at me. “On the couch again.”

  As I sat back down, I recalled what Obregón had confided to us in the bar about Cantabrian’s troubles. He probably had no idea that it was calculated misinformation. If Cantabrian were using me as a Trojan horse to help Arturo infiltrate the Nuevos Zetas, that would explain why there hadn’t been consequences for my humiliation in the privacy booth: when the software recommended that I should be investigated further, it would have been overruled. And if my prosthesis hadn’t actually switched off when Omar thought he was switching it off last Sunday, that would also explain why I hadn’t shown my death face to Rafaella afterwards. Omar dialled somebody on his phone and had a short conversation so dense with cartel slang I could barely follow, except that he asked for a drone to be sent up over Escandón to look for Arturo. Then he pounded on Rafaella’s bedroom door. “Whore, come out here and help me tie up your client!” he shouted, still in Spanish. “It’s bondage time!”

  “Hey! Why? Come on,” I said, “Arturo’s the one working for Cantabrian!”

  “For all I know it’s the both of you. I’m taking you to El Taquero. He can decide. Maybe we really will cut that thing out of your face. It’s cartel property, pendejo, you should remember that.” Rafaella came out of her room. “I need cable or tape or something,” Omar said to her.

  “Can you talk some sense into this guy?” I said. “Please.”

  “Sorry,” she mouthed.

  “But Rafaella … I love you.” I said it because I knew it wasn’t true, and because at this point it didn’t seem to matter much what I said.

  She looked down at me with eyes as imperturbable, as incontrovertible, as Cantabrian’s cameras. Then she threw her head back and laughed harder than I had ever seen her laugh, a hilarity so luxuriant no prosthesis could have faked it.

  Within a few minutes, Omar and I were on the way down in the elevator. My wrists were taped behind my back. “Omar, I’m not working for anybody except you and Arturo. I didn’t sell you out. I didn’t fuck up. I did everything you said. This shouldn’t be happening.” He didn’t respond. “Who’s El Taquero?” I asked.

  “He’s not a guy who takes chances,” Omar said. “And while we’re on the fucking subject. You try and run? Those drones are looking for Arturo but they have your face too. Remember that. I optimised them myself. They got personalities now. They’re like those dogs they train to catch rats.”

  As we crossed the lobby I looked around for the doorman, but I couldn’t see him, and anyway I knew he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to get involved. We emerged into the warm evening and I immediately got a couple of lungfuls of truck exhaust. The Viaducto Miguel Alemán had four lanes that connected to the surface roads; between them, another six lanes of faster traffic that dipped beneath the overpasses; and between those, from what I remembered, a grassy median, although I couldn’t see that over the concrete barrier. Around 8:30 on Sunday night, the roads weren’t busy. Half a mile to the south, the World Trade Center rose into the smog, an enormous blue jerrycan with a turret for a cap. Omar had ordered a car, which would meet us around the corner. The gun was still pointed at me but most of his attention was on his phone. I thought about the Virgin Mary wrapped up like my wrists. I thought about a taquero at a market carving meat off a spit. I ran into the
road.

  By the time Omar took his first shot, I had already crossed two lanes and hurled myself over the barrier.

  My hope was that Cantabrian might have eyes on the apartment building, especially if Arturo had made some sort of distress call. My hope was that they might prefer me to survive just in case I could tell them anything about the cartel that they didn’t already know. If I could get away from Omar, there was a possibility of rescue. A remote possibility, but it was still better than shuffling to my doom with Omar’s boss.

  The drop to the freeway was farther than I’d estimated, and something crunched in my shoulder when I hit the ground. I heard a horn, very close. Blindly, I rolled sideways, and the car missed me by an inch or so. To get to my feet with my wrists still bound, I first had to jerk myself into a kneeling position, and I was only just upright when another car swerved out of its lane to avoid the vagrant in the road. I heard two more shots, and I started running towards the oncoming traffic, because at least that way I could see what was about to kill me.

  I’d miscalculated my escape. There was indeed a median, a covered sewer, but its sheer sides were too tall for me to climb without the use of my hands. And there was no safe margin between the freeway and the barriers on either side. I was trapped in the concrete pipeline, and I had to keep moving in case Omar caught up.

  I heard a distant buzzing in the sky.

  If the drone recognised my face, it would end me. I wanted to crouch down and hide myself against the barrier. But if I did, it wouldn’t be long before I was clipped by a fender, spun into the middle of the lane, flattened like a stray dog. I decided that, of all the deaths available, of all the missiles the night was throwing at me, the drone would probably be the most painless. So I kept running.

  Then my face exploded.

  Normally, when I was using the prosthesis, the contractions and expansions of the polymer units were too tiny to be perceptible. This time, it was as if 43 steel traps had sprung inside my face, yanking skin and wrenching cartilage. The pain exceeded any human scale, and I almost keeled over on the spot. My eyes and nose and mouth were full of blood, and I was gagging so hard I couldn’t scream.

  Somehow, though, in whatever part of my brain was most distant from my facial nerve, I must still have been capable of thought. Because I understood why Cantabrian had done it. But I didn’t believe it would work. Facial recognition algorithms looked at the bone structure underneath. You couldn’t obscure or deform that. No matter what you did with your features, you were still you.

  The buzzing got louder. Now I could make out the drone, a black quadcopter small enough to fit in a briefcase, making those insectile shrugs and dodges that seem random and purposeful at the same time, the mark of a software pilot. I didn’t know whether it was the breed that would shoot me in the heart with a hollow-point or the breed that would simply land on my shoulder and explode. The drone kept closing the distance, and so did I, until I could feel its gaze on me, its immaculate appraisal, like the cameras in the privacy booth, or the beauty up on the seventh floor.

  The drone swooped past.

  It had made its judgement. I wasn’t me.

  I didn’t know what the prosthesis had done to my face, but it must have been avant-garde. There wasn’t time for relief, because an SUV was coming at me around the bend. I tripped sideways, saving myself so narrowly that its right-hand wing mirror swatted my elbow. As it passed, I caught a glimpse of the driver, a woman aghast, and I thought of how I must have looked to her, this ghoul with a veil of blood, its features jumbled into a word without meaning, not true, not false, just flesh; and for the first time I realised what a terrible burden it had been to have a face, and how truly free I was without one.

  The Daughters of John Demetrius

  JOE PITKIN

  Joe Pitkin has lived, taught, and studied in England, Hungary, Mexico, and, most recently, at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington. His fiction has appeared in Analog, PodCastle, Drabblecast, and elsewhere. He has done biological fieldwork on the slopes of Mount St. Helens, and he lives in Portland, Oregon, with his wife and daughters. You can follow his work at his blog, The Subway Test at thesubwaytest.wordpress.com.

  In the suspenseful story that follows, he sweeps us along with a man with godlike abilities who’s on the hunt for children who are not quite what they seem—hoping to reach them before the monster who’s chasing them all catches up with them and destroys them.…

  Mendel had run the whole day in his graceful, tireless way, southerly down the road that some called Old Mexico 45 and the locals called El Camino de San Juan Demetrio. There had been little water all day, just a single dusty rivulet past noon where he had drunk and where he had tried without much success to wash the crusted blood out of his tunic. Mendel was dark enough that it would do him no harm to go naked in this sun, and he even considered such a possibility, but it would have scandalized the local vulgaris more for him to have walked naked into a village than for him to have appeared in a bloodstained tunic.

  Mendel came upon such a village at the end of the day, only an hour’s run over mesas from the main road, a rammed earth wall guarding an inner circle of adobes and ancient shipping containers. The sign hung above the arch of the outer wall said Pozos Desecantes/Dessicant Wells. It had the sloppy look of an old gringo settlement, though Mendel could not be sure on this mesa an hour from the far-off stretch of the road that the gods hardly ever travelled.

  He walked through the open gate unchallenged except by a troop of scrawny clucking hens. Most of the central square was taken up by a dusty yard where crust-skinned children in homespun shirts and loincloths carried out a listless game of Chihuahan-rules football. They seemed not to notice him. Beyond, the adults congregated around a cluster of worn stone troughs, beating the dirt out of their sullen piles of laundry.

  Mendel walked to the edge of the game and watched the children. In those moments before anyone in the village noticed him, his eye fell on one different from the rest, perhaps eight years old, her dark skin pristine as the flesh of an avocado. No pellagra with this one. He would have run all the way to Oaxaca to find another like her.

  They noticed him then. The children went silent and marveled. Then one mother less exhausted or more anxious than the rest turned to regard the newly quiet children, and she saw divine Mendel in his sweat-glistened luminescent beauty. He was so beautiful, or they were all so bone-weary, that no one screamed at this blood-stained stranger who had walked unopposed into the heart of the lost little village.

  Mendel knew that he must be the one to speak first. He asked in Spanglish in his clear high voice whether the villagers spoke Spanglish or Spanish or English. One of the adults, perhaps the headwoman, said they spoke all three. She answered in English as they nearly always did, always assuming that the gods spoke English, and always following the ancient Mexican law of hospitality that demanded the visitor be made most comfortable. If these people were gringos, they had at least learned this much from the land that had taken them in.

  “I am following the road of John Demetrius,” Mendel said to them, “and I would be grateful if I could spend the night here.” This was not, in fact, so different from Mendel’s plans, but regardless of his plans, this was what he always said when he travelled through this part of the world.

  The headwoman bowed and spread her arms wide in the heartbreaking theatrical way they always did, as though to offer Mendel their whole forsaken village. Then she began ordering the younger adults in Spanglish to begin preparing a place for him; with one of these, a gaunt hardscrabble woman of about thirty, or maybe fifty, the headwoman exchanged some brief taut words that even Mendel could not quite hear.

  They had never heard of him, he was sure. They had never spoken to travelers from another village where he had wandered. If they had, they would have learned to boil their corn in ashes and these children would not be half-dead from niacin deficiency. As they shuffled about to find a shipping container for him to sleep in and t
o bring him an ancient cut soda bottle full of rusty water, Mendel looked around again for the beautiful green-skinned girl. But she had disappeared. Another girl, smaller and wretched, stood before him fearlessly, staring at him relentlessly before Mendel noticed her.

  Mendel knelt down to look her in the eye. “Y tú? Cómo te llamas?” he asked in a conspiratorial tone, as though she would be giving away a secret to tell him her name.

  The girl stared at him as though mute. But the gods are imperturbable and Mendel only looked back at her with the serenity of someone beyond hunger or thirst. They stared at one another a minute or more before the gravelly hen’s voice of an old woman shouted in their direction: “Floribunda! Inútil! Trae aca your scrawny ass!” The girl spun around as though the words were a leash the woman had jerked; the girl ran in a dusty pad-footed way towards the squalling voice.

  The villagers put Mendel up in a clean-swept, well-ordered shipping container, painted turquoise and salmon and bearing the name “Coper” in tawdry letters of rhinestone applique. The woman who opened the house to him said nothing beyond “here you have your pobre casa,” but whether her silence was resentful or the reaction of a broken woman cowed by the presence of a god, Mendel couldn’t immediately tell. The four children like shriveled rag dolls seemed cowed by him. He decided in that moment that he would give the knowledge of preparing the corn to this family only, as payment for their putting him up for the night. Señora Coper would be one of the most important people in the village, if not the headwoman, for passing along the secret. And she would pass it along, because he would warn her that he would return in wrath and vengeance if she didn’t.