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

by Gardner Dozois

  The door’s emergency release set off the alarm, but the door didn’t budge. Markus slammed it with his shoulder, bounced back, set himself and gave it a whole body thrust kick straight into the dead bolt. The two doors flew apart and one fell from its hinges. “Great form,” I said.

  “Practice pays.” We stepped carefully over the door.

  Directly in front of us was a Bancomat. Markus ran to it, slapped the card in, let it come back out an instant later; by then I had spotted a little tourist store that had an ATM just inside the arched doorway.

  As he took the card back, Markus said, “That car recharging station, they take ATM cards, that means it has a reader—” and we were off across six lanes of Italian traffic. I was grateful that half the cars were self-drivers trying to avoid us, which somewhat balanced the furious human half, which seemed to have more mixed feelings.

  I don’t know how, but we made it across alive. As Markus ran the card, I saw four cops heading our way with that grim, purposive walk that means they’ll expect an explanation.

  “The Blue Cross,” I said.

  “What? What did that even mean? Something about insurance? It just ate the card and it says to stay here—”

  “It would. The message means ‘attract attention and make people remember you.’ Follow me.”

  I walked right back out into traffic, Markus at my heels. He always said later he was just afraid I’d be killed, he’d survive, and he’d have to explain. The cops pursued, stopping and snarling traffic. I jumped onto a car hood. In Czech, I shouted that I wanted a bowl of ravioli and I wanted it right now. I jumped down and walked into the thick of the jammed cars, gesticulating wildly. In my very rusty Mandarin I added that if everyone just kept eating breakfast, no one would get pregnant. Marcus caught up with me, and I turned back to the gathering crowd on the sidewalk to announce in English that if they made us late for our wedding, we would never eat their lilac bushes again.

  As we reached the opposite sidewalk, a caricature artist, the type that every tourist town has a thousand of, was staring at us open-mouthed.

  “Do you do nudes?” I asked.

  “Uh, uh, uh—” he said.

  “Good!” I yanked down his pants.

  A heavy cop hand fell on my shoulder. As I raised my hands, I saw a man recording the scene on his tablet. Waving frantically, I shouted, “Hi, Mom! Hi, Sis! Hi, Santa!”

  Beside me, holding hands with her husband, beaming like she was proud of me, my sister said, “Santa?”

  * * *

  It took a lot of police—they had to bring in many more—to work the jammed cars out of the roundabout, then feed in the not-at-all patient cars from the surrounding streets. They mostly ignored us.

  “The vigili are traffic cops,” Markus said. “To book us they need the Polizia di Stato, who probably can’t get here because of the traffic jam. So the vigili have either decided we won’t run away or that it isn’t their problem if we do.”

  “Good,” Yazzy said, working on a tablet that Dusan had run over to buy from across the street. “If the real cops’re delayed more than an hour, I should have things arranged so they’ll let you go.”

  Dusan asked, “Was there anything left of our apartment or offices in Prague?”

  “Nothing at all,” I said. “Including no electronic record; it was like you’d been erased from history. Where were you?”

  “In a little spur tunnel about 200 meters from that room you woke up in. We and the 50 or so other NItCo Assets—”

  “Assets?”

  “Nicer word than slaves or abductees, I guess. When NItCo was launched as a self-training set of algorithms with a budget and power to buy, sell and hire, the owners defined its job as making people happier and taking their money, and gave it a lot of leeway in figuring that out. Eventually the NItCo algorithms reinvented the idea of ‘greatest good for greatest number’: Keeping a small number of people unhappy made it possible to make many more people happy and expand its market. It also figured out that Pareto rule that most of the value of any organization is created by just a few members. So … it secured the services of just those few members.”

  “By ‘secured’ you mean ‘imprisoned in a tunnel’?”

  “It was an awfully nice tunnel,” Dusan said, almost defensively. “We could have anything we wanted except the key, and do anything we wanted except leave. And our bank accounts were astronomical. It showed us all the messages from family and friends, but it replied with animated avatars—”

  “Mama and I were both wondering how Yazzy had gotten so dull and unimaginative.”

  “Thank you for wondering!” She looked up and grinned. I guess I don’t tell her that I appreciate her often enough.

  Markus asked, “So you got NItCo itself to stage all of this just to get us inside the perimeter, hand off whatever was in that black ATM card, and then break us back out?”

  Dusan nodded. “NItCo thinks in very long term because it’s immortal. It was worth setting up a few-billion-dollar inexplicable phony scam operation if it meant getting Yip inside the wall, because she was one of the people who might figure out what was going on and jeopardize it. Whereas inside, you could help it devise ways to capture more human resources permanently and exclusively. Figuring that it would own you for decades, it was willing to front a lot of money to get you now. So it wanted you very badly, and I played on the fact that Yip is human, and NItCo wasn’t sure it understood her.”

  “I can see how someone could play on that.” Markus immediately made up for that by resting a hand on my waist.

  “I also showed NItCo all the begging it took Yazzy to get you to visit.”

  “I, uh, I don’t like to travel.”

  “We’re working on that,” Markus added, loyally.

  Dusan said, “Anyway, yes, it was all staged to get you here and then break you out, so that tattletale card could tell the whole story to thousands of police agencies and journalists. For the tattletale, by the way, Yazzy had to write near-flawless code and input it right the first time. Good thing it worked. If it hadn’t, it might have been a long time till we got to try again.”

  I thought he sounded much too cheerful about the “long time” part.

  “Can I ask what the Blue Cross was?” Markus asked.

  “I had no idea either,” Dusan admitted.

  I laughed. “A story we loved when we were kids. The origin story for the Father Brown mysteries. Father Brown is being taken along by a dangerous criminal and doesn’t dare run away, so he does strange things to get police to follow him.”

  Yazzy added, “Yip and I used to think of things to do if either of us were ever kidnapped. Somewhere out there, there are kidnappers who don’t know how lucky—” She looked down at her screen. “Hey, Joy Sobretu has a statement.”

  We began by watching on that low-end tablet, but then I saw the NItCo avatar was speaking from a dozen advertising screens and hundreds of public speakers. Later, I learned that a majority of the world’s awake population had heard her.

  NItCo’s warm apology and contrite promise not to do it again segued into a fair bit of flattering nonsense about the unquenchable human drive for liberty. This software had seen the error of its ways, and promised to launch a new line of freedom-enhancing services.

  “Can we check their stock?” I asked.

  Yazzy gestured at the screen. “Going up like a rocket. What did you expect? People love a good apology.”

  * * *

  Markus and I do things together nowadays: lovely, quiet, predictable things around Arcata; challenging and slightly scary things in the rest of the world. I do my best to come unstuck from the mud; he seems to enjoy quiet companionship. Yazzy and Dusan reopened ZIS. Most things are as if none of it ever happened.

  Little by little, now and then, the records disappear. Old news stories about NItCo’s confessions become ever vaguer in the archives. One day it will have unhappened entirely. This seems to disturb Markus, but as I point out to him,
“Once it has unhappened completely, we don’t have to worry about it happening again.”

  He refuses to find that comforting; I refuse to concede the point. I am happy that we will be arguing about it for a long time, whether we eventually remember what it is, or not.

  Billy Tumult

  NICK HARKAWAY

  Nick Harkaway was born in Cornwall in 1972. He is the author of three novels of varying madness, of which the most recent is Tigerman. By the time you read this, he will—really, really will, this time, no kidding around, really, really, really—have finished his new book, Gnomon, which is about alchemy, banking, semiotics, surveillance, consciousness, the nature of linear time, murder, and sharks. He is the husband of a beautiful and dangerous woman and the father of two spawn. He likes breadmaking, skiing, and movies where things go fwoosh.

  In the flamboyantly pyrotechnic story that follows, he shows us that getting into someone else’s mind might be considerably easier than getting out of it again.

  Billy Tumult, psychic surgeon, with six shooters on his hips, walks into the saloon. There are dancing girls dancing with dancing boys and dancing boys dancing together, and women behind the bar in hats made of feathers. There’s a fat man at the piano and a poker game in each corner. Up on the balcony there’s some comedic business involving infidelity, but no gunplay, not yet. Billy swaggers over and gets a beer. And make it a cold one, miss, okay? The barkeep leans across the shiny surface and prints a perfect lipstick mark on his cheek. Rein it in a little, cattle hand, she murmurs, you’re cute but this here’s a civilized sort of establishment.

  Yeah, sure, Billy mutters, you can tell by the nice clean bullet holes in the furniture, I bet you dust ’em nightly, and the barkeep actually laughs and says she likes his style. She sounds too much like Chicago, almost a moll, and Billy adjusts the filter a few notches to the left. Doesn’t do to mix your conceptual frame during a house call.

  I’m lookin’ for a man, Billy Tumult says, probably comes over like a gunslinger. New in town, a solitary sort of fella, not much for talking. He’d be my height or more and looking to keep things quiet. Barkeep says she doesn’t know nothing about that, maybe talk to the fat man, fat man hears everything, and Billy Tumult knows she’s lying and she knows he knows and she blushes: talk to the fat man, and he says okay.

  Billy turns his back on the bar and lets his hands fall down by his sides. Six shooters be damned, they’re for show and to take care of any ambient hostility, the real weapon is invisible to these good townsfolk, the Neuronoetic Interference Scalpel 3.1.a holstered in the small of his back. He can clear and fire it in under seventy subjective miliseconds, literally faster than thought unless the thought is a really bad one. Patient in this case presents with anhedonia, and that’s pretty damn bad.

  He looks around at the room, and has to hand it to the guy: these are well-imagined people, and there’s a decent ethnic mix. He’s pretty sure that cardsharp is supposed to be a Yupik, for example, which may not be authentic—you surely didn’t get a lot of Eskimo hustlers in the Old West—but it speaks well of the patient’s interior life. Most of Billy’s patients are assholes, by definition. Billy has no problem with assholes in the abstract. It is everyone’s God-given right to be an asshole, in fact it’s basically the default setting and you evolve your way up from there, but that does not mean Billy particularly enjoys spending time in worlds created by assholes, which is his working life. So this guy has problems but is less of an asshole than most and that is acceptable.

  Billy walks over to the fat man. Fat man can’t see him, surely, not from this angle, but he shifts to a minor key, staccato. Mood music? Billy wonders if he should just flat out erase the guy. Better not. Don’t want to be talking to a patient’s lawyer about how you came to delete his memory of nine thousand nine hundred hours of music tuition. Never a good scene, there are lawyers and all that but the worst is the crying. Billy hates emotional display, he’s a fucking surgeon for crying out loud, not a therapist. You want to break things and scream about your momma you can go see one of those wishy-washy liberals on the East Coast. You want your problem hunted down and shot, you call Billy: mind medicine, open-carry style. Your psychological issue will bleed out and die and you carry right on with your life. It appeals to traditional men with sexual dysfunction, executive types who’ve suddenly discovered their humanity and want it gone, that kind of thing. Occasionally he does memories for divorce cases and once the State of Alabama had him kill a man’s whole history from the present back down the line, leave nothing but the child he’d been before he became a crook. They raised that fella back to manhood inside the system, and he’s a productive citizen now, although Billy went back and met him out of sheer curiosity and he’s kinduva jerk, basically a boring-ass wage slave of the dehumanizing statist system. Not Billy’s problem, but he doesn’t take government work any more. One time they asked him to do espionage. Fucking torture bullshit. Billy said no, turned those fuckers in to the real law, the sheriff’s office, made a helluva stink, man from the New York Times came to interview him. Weirdest month of his life, so-clean liberal actresses draping themselves over his arm and whispering sweet nothings in his ear, sweet nothings and some really outré shit Billy was quick to take fullest advantage of because those chances do not come along twice. Weird, but really satisfying, sexually speaking. Got to hand it to the Democrats, they know from orgasms.

  Hey, fat man, Billy says, you playing that for me? Fat man shakes his head. No, he says, I play what’s on the hymn sheet is all, and sure enough there it is written out. Turn the page, Billy says, give me a preview. Fat man does and growls, it’s a fight scene. Brawling or guns? Well, that’s kinda hard to tell, you better ask me what you want to know in the next few bars.

  Where’s the new guy, Billy says. Lotsa new guys in town, fat man replies. No, Billy says, there ain’t, there’s only one. My height and taller, black hat, solitary fella don’t like to make friends. Oh, that new guy, fat man says. That new guy got hisself a room above the hardware store, has Missus Roth bring him food and all. He armed? Billy Tumult asks, and the fat man says that a patron that tough don’t go about without some manner of weapon but the fat man don’t know what kind.

  Fat man turns the page on his hymn sheet and one of the poker tables flies up in the air. Fistfight, bottles flying and you goddam cheating bastard and blahsedyblahs. Dissolve to later.

  * * *

  Billy Tumult, walking down the street. Tips his hat to the ladies, bids the fellas good afternoon. Going to the Marshall’s office. Want to be in good with the local force. No stink-of-armpit law-keeper, this one, but a high buttoned pinstripe and waistcoat number, almost a dandy. What are the chances, Billy Tumult growls. Man might could be Billy’s brother, might could use him for shaving around that dandy moustache. Patient’s been thinking about coming to see Billy Tumult for long enough that he’s got hisself a tulpa in here, a little imaginary robot doing what the patient thinks Billy’d do. Ain’t that just the sweetest thing?

  Marshall William says hello, and Billy says hello right back and they shake hands. It’s like icebergs colliding. The Marshall’s got two shooters on his hips, of course, just like in the brochure. What’s behind his back, Billy wonders, maybe a third gun, maybe a humungous nature of a knife. That would figure. But when they get into the Marshall’s office and the fella takes off his coat, mother of Christ, it’s a dynamite vest, a bandolier. The guy so much as farts wrong and they’re all in the next county over and fuck if he doesn’t actually smoke. Laws of sanity have been suspended for Billy’s oversold publicity-and-marketing hardassery. Thank God if the thing goes up the worst that happens to Billy is a damn reset and the whole surgery to redo from start, pain in the ass, but if this was the real world or if Billy was really part of this whole deal then he’d be pasta sauce.

  Pasta sauce is inauthentic. Billy tweaks the filter again. He prefers the gangster aspect, can’t keep this horses-and-mud shit straight in his brain. Well, if the pat
ient can have Eskimos, Billy can have pasta sauce, call it fair play.

  I’m Billy Tumult of the Pinkertons, he tells Marshall William, come lookin’ for a dangerous man. We got plenty, says the Marshall, which one you want? Or take ’em all, I surely won’t miss ’em. I want the new guy, Billy says, the one in the black hat living over the store. The one Missus Roth has an arrangement with. Now hold on, begins the Marshall, no not that kind of arrangement, the feedin’ kind is all I mean, I got no beef with the Widow Roth.

  Widow my ass, parenthesizes Billy Tumult, if I know how this goes, but never mind that for now.

  He’s an odd one, sure, says the Marshall. Odd and I don’t like him and he don’t much like me. But I figure the one he’s looking out for is you, now I think on it. He offered me a whole shit-ton of gold, I saw it right there in that room, to tell him if a fella came askin’ about him. You say yes? Billy wants to know. No, Marshall replies. ’Course not, he says, and rolls his shoulder.

  * * *

  Cutaway: a thin man naked in a room full of gold, lean like a leather-gnarled spider stretched too tight on his own bones. He tilts his head and listens to the sound of the town, and he knows someone’s coming. Slips down the gold rockface into his pants and shoes—demons evidently need no socks—and buckles on his gun. Not much of a thing, this gun. Small and dirty and badly kept. Buckles it on, long black coat around his shoulders. Tan galàn on his head: bare-chested Grendel in a hat, and that’s as good a name as any. Arms and legs too long, Grendel spidercrabs out of the golden room and into shadow, gone a-huntin’. Too fast, he’s under the balcony across the street, flickers in the dark alley by the blacksmith, by the sawbones, by the water tower. Too fast, too quiet. All of a sudden: it’s not clear at all who’s gonna win this one.

  * * *

  Billy Tumult doesn’t exactly see all this, not being present in the mis-en-scène, but he gets the gist because that’s the benefit of narrative surgery. You pay a price in hella stupid costumes and irritating dialogue, but you get it back in inevitability. Sooner or later they will stand in the street and one of them will outshoot the other, and Billy can do it over and over and over and over until he nails it; the other fella has to get it perfect every time. That’s the thing about your average cognitive hiccup or post-Freudian crise: they just don’t learn. That said, on this occasion there’s a sense of real jeopardy, contagious fear, and it takes some stones to go out on Main Street and walk down the middle, spurs clankin’.