The Long List Anthology Volume 5

by David Steffen

  You lock eyes with yourself and shiver slightly. “Yeah. He said I was a genius.”

  “It’s not all bullshit.” Che pokes Miko with the tip of her boot. “You want to try and get him home to your own universe, to help him, right?”

  You nod. No sense in trying to lie to yourself, right?

  “You two screwing? I’ve never seen him before,” she says. “Not really our type, is he?”

  “No. But he’s part of my cluster. I owe him.” Cheetah cluster for life, right?

  “What’s your world like? High or low RCP?”

  “I think it’s high?” you say. “It’s not as bad as this, but it wasn’t nice like the last place. The air was good. No storms, or heavy wind. Clear. You could see—”

  “A nine or so is considered high, two or three is utopia,” Che interrupts. “That’s where you get all your horrible shit under control and can keep a living world. The eggheads tag all the worlds we can access with various RCP levels. The nerds used to think the points of divergence would all be about national borders and great people. Like, suppose Hitler lived, or the Soviet Union collapsed. Shit like that. But the looming threat, the thread that runs through all these realities that makes the big changes that people like you and I give a shit about, is simply how the atmosphere and oceans were managed. Usually there’s an accord. Paris, DC, they try to imitate the same thing they use to stop acid rain. Caps and trades. But sometimes they never even get to that point. Right now, this variation we’re in, it’s one of the worst scenarios.”

  You think about all the cool, breathable air in the world just before this one. “Then I’m definitely in a higher RCP world. People are scared of the runaway effect. A lot of people are bunkering underground, or in domes. I use a respirator outside. We’re not using fuel anymore. It all got used up in the Collapse.”

  “Sounds like a shithole. But, you’re a sister me. If you feel you need to go back, I can get you some weapons. You can try to find another Armand going the other way. But trips like that are fairly infrequent. I’ve been waiting to trap Armand here for almost a month.”

  “Can’t you take me?” you ask. If she is doing favors and all. You feel somewhat paralyzed, because this is a situation so far outside of normal—how can you make a decision? This familiar face, however, knows more than you. You feel an instant desire for her help, her guidance.

  Che shakes her head. “This truck’s got one more jump in her, and we’re going somewhere specific. And you can’t take your buddy back there if you want him to live. You need to go forward.”

  “To a better world?” You’re starting to get the hang of this. “Lower RCP?”

  “The lowest,” Che says. “You talk about bunkers and domes. This whole area was a massive dome, once. This world ate itself alive. Kept putting leaders up that focused on chewing through resources, promising jobs over stewardship. And when the carbon from burning things filled the oceans, the pH meant huge die-offs. One collapse led to another.”

  “Sounds familiar,” you mutter. And you think of that cool breeze on your skin and shiver. Something inside you almost aches when you consider trying to get back to what is familiar.

  “But this world had resources, scientists working on keeping them alive as the air soured. When they cracked the veil between worlds they found a garden world. An Eden. They built massive complexes to shuttle people over, thinking no one was on the other side. But they made a mistake. There were people, and those gardens were maintained carefully by people who had spent generations on wilding projects.”

  Che pulls out that same picture that the Shäd showed you. It’s the clean, flattened-hair version of you, wearing a suit similar to Armand’s. Che taps it.

  “Which version of us is that?” you ask.

  “This picture is a sister of ours that led her people from this high RCP world we’re in right now to the garden world,” Che says. “I killed her. That was my job. The garden world was my world, before I came over here to hide. It’s where the invaders would never think to look for me. They think those of us from the garden world are soft.”

  But this sister of yours doesn’t look soft, despite growing up in an Edenic world. She looks forged. Just like you have been. And even the sister in the picture looks forged. The leader of an invasion force that had to leave their dying world, or die themselves. Making hard choices.

  “Those invaders to my world are the ones paying Armand anything he wants in order to get one of us, sister,” Che says to you. “It’s so that they can string us up in public for their people and have a good show as they execute us. Bread and circuses.”

  “Not true,” Armand hisses. “The people I work for, they would take you in for training. They want insight, they need help to run the fight against these terrorists who have attacked us. They want to tap your genius.”

  Che shakes her head. “He’s lying.”

  “And in exchange for your insight into fighting your terrorist double, they would make you richer than you could imagine,” Armand says. “Join her, and you will be the enemy. An insurgent. On a list of enemies against humanity. And not just in the world she wants to go to, but any world that has trade with my people.”

  “No matter where he is born, he is always trash,” Che says, and throws him into one of the cages. She locks it after him.

  You stare at Armand for a long moment. “These better worlds. They can help Miko?”

  “Yes.”

  “If I don’t go to Armand’s people, I’ll be hunted. Because of something you did.”

  Che nods. “You’ll be a criminal. A terrorist.”

  I look over at the three raiders who are done piling the goods up against the back of the trailer. “Why are you going over, now? What are you doing with all that?”

  You’re imagining that she’ll tell you something about funding a revolution. How her people on the other side, invaded by the people from this world, need those things to fight their fight.

  Che smiles. “They left so many here to keep suffering, once they got across, because the energy required to pierce through is nearly unimaginable. Each of those smuggler’s trucks requires shareholders, backers, venture capital. Cross-world travel is rare. So I’m taking as many as I can get over. Count yourself lucky there’s a spot for you.”

  You think about the treasures Armand has hoarded. They’re all priceless things that the insanely rich obsess over. Portable cultural artifacts.

  “I’ll cross with you,” you say, your voice breaking slightly as you realize this likely means you won’t ever see your world again. But then, you’ve left it all behind before. Running across the desert in your bare feet, your hands covered in blood and hair hacked off, those manacles burning the skin of your wrists.

  Five hundred miles away, your feet bloody, Cheetah cluster took you in and away.

  Che pulls her mask back on, and you follow suit. The back door slides back down into a ramp, and there are hundreds of forms waiting in the dark brown mist. Children.

  People roughly shove the priceless art and precious metals off the back of the trailer onto the rocky ground.

  Armand shouts from inside his cage, but the anger turns to coughing as the hot, acidic air roils into the trailer.

  • • • •

  You’ve always gone forward.

  This is the first time you’ve known what you’re heading toward. An Edenic world without climate collapse. A world where invaders are fighting the people who lived there before them. Invaders who abandoned millions of their own to a dead world.

  These starving refugees are packed into the back of the trailer or strapped onto the top with bottles of air. They are all taking the risk of death, or worse, when you all break through to that other universe. Che has been driving for several hours, hoping to get as far from core invader territory as she can, but air will be running out soon and a decision to jump over has to be made shortly or people will start dying.

  You sit next to Che, shoved up together near the co
ntrols. Miko is by your feet. Refugees cram in everywhere inside the cab, some of them controlling the computer that Armand had, others just packed in to make the crossing. You’d watched the pile of pictures and all that glittered fall away behind the trailer in the mirrors. The old canvases curled up in the harsh air as you slid away. Acid rain began to drizzle on them.

  “There are many more, on many different worlds, that need help,” Che had said. “Even though their brothers invaded mine, I couldn’t leave them back there to slowly choke to death. It wasn’t their fault, it was their forefathers who did this to them.”

  You’re never going to be a gunner again, chasing after convoys.

  “Will it make a difference, a couple hundred?” I asked.

  “We’re just getting started,” Che said. “I can save more.”

  But you wonder what all these new bodies will do to that Edenic new world? Will these descendants of a people who destroyed an entire world be able to make a change? Or would they understand how to treasure it, knowing how precious it was?

  The world flips inside out and you gasp.

  When your vision comes back to you, you look up to see a forest choking the dirt road around the truck.

  People rip off their masks as Che rolls the windows down. There are flowers. The distant chatter of animals. Scents on the breeze that fill the cab. A gentle wind.

  She’s taken you back to where this all started, geographically. But there is no toll road here. No farms. No dusty plains and electric cars with skulls and machine guns mounted on them. Just lush green and lungfuls of sweet air.

  “Are you okay?” Che asks.

  You wipe the tear from your cheek.

  “This is what it could have been, where I come from,” you whisper. “We could have done it.”

  Che stops the truck, as it’s shuddering and smoke has begun to leak out of the machinery in the front of the trailer. People are banging and shouting for her attention.

  Afterwards, she climbs on the hood as people gather before her.

  “I give you my world,” she says. “I ask only that you care for it as you would your child. Do that, and it will care for you as well. Now go.”

  The two of you sit for a while later near Miko.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I hoped he would make it. We could have helped.”

  You shake your head. “I’ve seen worse deaths.” It was no worse a death than clashing with duty-evaders on a toll road. He had never understood what was actually happening though, and you feel bad about that.

  When you stand, after burying him under the cool shade of a magnificent pine tree that makes you almost weep again, you move to Che’s side.

  “Take me with you.”

  “I don’t know what my next move is. I snuck over to their world to see what it was like and hide from her death squads. I didn’t really believe them when they said it was so bad. I didn’t know so many were suffering. Armand and his ilk, they get financing to go and fetch the greatest minds from the remains of high RCP worlds. Or get ‘servants’ of famous people. But these are regular folk that needed saving, that no one wants. They deserve to live.”

  You nod.

  You’ve been watching this version of yourself. And you’ve learned something. This isn’t a confident, dangerous you like you first assumed when you saw her with the rocket launcher. No, this is a version of you that cares deeply. She put herself in front of the truck because she felt strongly.

  She didn’t know what would come next when she rescued these people. She just did it.

  This version of you isn’t calculating.

  This version of you isn’t looking for the next move.

  This version of you came from ancestors who managed a planet successfully, not like your own failed ones.

  You’ve been taught to take, to be strong, to run with a strong pack. Miko has taught you well. Having studied this Che for hours, you know you could break her. She hasn’t spent a lifetime in the hot sand.

  But the forests.

  Her people let that be. And that is a different lesson. You need to follow her people. You need to help them protect what they’ve built.

  And what you know, and have learned for an entire life, is survival. How to create fighters.

  “You need to grow your army,” you say to Che. “You need to bring more people over. More refugees from the other worlds. We can find more Armands to trade with, right, if there are many worlds and many copies of us in them?”

  Che nods at you. “More death.”

  You smile crookedly. “And maybe more life. I think we bring things over to the other places that help them. And then we bring fighters, loyal fighters, from there to here. We can do this better. I can show you how to finish what you’ve started. Let me help you.”

  “It’ll be dangerous.” Che raises an eyebrow.

  You know. But you know danger better than she does. All you’ve lived is danger.

  Besides, is it better to be a king of a sandy hell, or a servant in a lush paradise? Her people had created something so special, you know that being one of their soldiers is the way to climb. You can taste ambition again.

  This, you think as you move through sun-dappled forest, is a world to die for.

  A world to fight for.

  * * *

  Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times Bestselling author born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and US Virgin Islands, which influence much of his work.

  His novels and over seventy stories have been translated into nineteen different languages. His work has been nominated for awards like the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and the Astounding Award for Best New Science Fiction Author.

  He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com and is also an instructor at the Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing program.

  Thirty-Three Percent Joe

  By Suzanne Palmer

  [CC] Welcome online, Cybernetic Elbow Model CI953-L. This is your introductory Initial Boot orientation. You are currently in a locked and muted configuration while external medical systems run diagnostics to see that your replacement procedure has been fully successful. If so, you will fully join the collective cybernetic units that currently comprise—with your addition—approximately thirty-three percent of the biological unit known as “Joe.” Joe’s organic consciousness is currently offline through chemical means as a necessary part of his recovery from his most recent combat injuries, but when he is operational again direct communications with him will continue through me. I am Cybernetic Cerebral Control and Delegation Implant Module CI4210-A. I respond to CC, but not BCC. That is a joke.

  [ARM::RIGHT::SUB-INDEX] Right Arm Index Finger Sub-Unit transmitting here and apologizing on behalf of CC. Control Unit is prone to such commentary, as are many of the units here, thanks to a supply logistics decision to only manufacture personality-enabled universal smart chips for everything. You will become accustomed to it in time.

  [EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I apologize for interrupting the introduction, but we have another Mother Event. I am opening the running audio log to your access, CC.

  [CC] For your edification, New Elbow Unit, Left Ear Augmentation Implant is notifying us that there is high-volume communication being directed at Joe, despite his lack of a conscious state. This noise is originating with the biological unit “Delora” that fabricated him, more appropriately designated by the title Mother. She does not approve of us. She is repetitiously asserting, in a manner designated “yelling,” that Joe’s other biological progenitor, titled Father, served his entire career as a highly-decorated super-soldier with supreme distinction, all while keeping his Cybernetic Replacement Factor (CRF) down to under ten percent. This is not factual. Service records indicate that the Father unit, “Joe Senior,” was a mediocre soldier, and only kept his own percentage down to seventeen percent by placing long distances, large inanimate objects—or fail
ing the availability of either, his combat comrades—between himself and any potential enemy threat or action.

  [EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] Delora is why previous Ear Unit self-destructed.

  [CC] Previous Ear Unit was rendered inoperable by shrapnel from a grenade during combat, Left Ear.

  [EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] That’s probably just what it wanted you to believe.

  [CC] While this is a matter that falls into your operational jurisdiction, Left Ear, it is my recommendation that, while Joe has the right to access all conversation made in his presence while he has been unconscious, we do not log this one or bring it to his attention unless pressed to do so by more urgent circumstances. Are you agreed?

  [EAR::LEFT::AUG-IMPLANT] I agree.

  [CC] I am open to direct and confidential dissent.

  . . .

  There being none, let the record show the vote was unanimous in favor. I am logging confusion from our provisionary New Elbow Unit on why we might do so, so I will explain. Joe did not aspire toward being a soldier at all, but a baker. The Mother Unit exerts influence on Joe through counterfactual and manipulative means that causes Joe to act in ways not optimal for his own well-being, or by extension, ours. Many of us are not the original cybernetic replacement parts.

  [SPLEEN::UNIT] I am. I should be in charge by reasons of seniority, or at least get double the votes over the rest of the idiots here.

  [HEART] You couldn’t manage shit, Spleen, you asshole.

  [INTESTINAL::TRACT REPLACEMENT::LOWER] Hey. Watch it.

  [CC] New Elbow, I am informed by the external diagnostics systems that you have been given a perfect passing score. I am now unlocking your physical mechanisms and unmuting you; hereafter you shall be referred to as Left Elbow, to distinguish you from the integrated Elbow components of Total Comprehensive Right Arm Replacement Unit.

  Welcome to Joe.

  • • • •

  Joe sits up. His mother has been here; he can smell her perfume lingering in the air. She has not left any cards, or other tokens of affection other than that faint miasma. It’s not likely she’ll be back.