The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  “Who are you?” I yelled.

  He laughed in my face.

  And kept pouring it on. He was threatening the integrity of my implant, going at me down on the microcosmic level, attacking the molecules themselves. Fiddling around with electron shells, reversing charges and mucking up valences, clogging my gates, turning my circuits to soup. The computer that is implanted in my brain is nothing but a lot of organic chemistry, after all. So is my brain. If he kept this up, the computer would go and the brain would follow, and I’d spend the rest of my life in the bibble-babble academy.

  This wasn’t a sporting contest. This was murder.

  I reached for the reserves, throwing up all the defensive blockages I could invent. Things I had never had to use in my life, but they were there when I needed them, and they did slow him down. For a moment, I was able to halt his ball-breaking onslaught and even push him back—and give myself the breathing space to set up a few offensive combinations of my own. But before I could get them running, he shut me down once more and started to drive me toward Crashville all over again. He was unbelievable.

  I blocked him. He came back again. I hit him hard and he threw the punch into some other neural channel altogether and it went fizzling away.

  I hit him again. Again he blocked it.

  Then he hit me, and I went reeling and staggering and managed to get myself together when I was about three nanoseconds from the edge of the abyss.

  I began to set up a new combination. But even as I did it, I was reading the tone of his data, and what I was getting was absolute cool confidence. He was waiting for me. He was ready for anything I could throw. He was in that realm beyond mere self-confidence into utter certainty.

  What it was coming down to was this: I was able to keep him from ruining me, but only just barely, and I wasn’t able to lay a glove on him at all. And he seemed to have infinite resources behind him. I didn’t worry him. He was tireless. He didn’t appear to degrade at all. He just took all I could give and kept throwing new stuff at me, coming at me from six sides at once.

  Now I understood for the first time what it must have felt like for all the hackers I had beaten. Some of them must have felt pretty cocky, I suppose, until they ran into me. It costs more to lose when you think you’re good. When you know you’re good. People like that, when they lose, they have to reprogram their whole sense of their relation to the universe.

  I had two choices. I could go on fighting until he wore me down and crashed me. Or I could give up right now. In the end, everything comes down to yes or no, on or off, one or zero, doesn’t it?

  I took a deep breath. I was staring straight into chaos.

  “All right,” I said. “I’m beaten. I quit.”

  I wrenched my wrist free of his, trembled, swayed, went toppling down onto the ground.

  A minute later, five cops jumped me and trussed me up like a turkey and hauled me away, with my implant arm sticking out of the package and a security lock wrapped around my wrist, as if they were afraid I was going to start pulling data right out of the air.

  * * *

  Where they took me was Figueroa Street, the big black-marble 90-story job that is the home of the puppet city government. I didn’t give a damn. I was numb. They could have put me in the sewer and I wouldn’t have cared. I wasn’t damaged—the automatic circuit check was still running and it came up green—but the humiliation was so intense that I felt crashed. I felt destroyed. The only thing I wanted to know was the name of the hacker who had done it to me.

  The Figueroa Street building has ceilings about 20 feet high everywhere, so that there is room for Entities to move around. Voices reverberate in those vast open spaces like echoes in a cavern. The cops sat me down in a hallway, still all wrapped up, and kept me there for a long time. Blurred sounds went lolloping up and down the passage. I wanted to hide from them. My brain felt raw. I had taken one hell of a pounding.

  Now and then, a couple of towering Entities would come rumbling through the hall, tiptoeing on their tentacles in that weirdly dainty way of theirs. With them came a little entourage of humans whom they ignored entirely, as they always do. They know that we’re intelligent, but they just don’t care to talk to us. They let their computers do that, via the borgmann interface, and may his signal degrade forever for having sold us out. Not that they wouldn’t have conquered us anyway, but Borgmann made it ever so much easier for them to push us around by showing them how to connect our little biocomputers to their huge mainframes. I bet he was very proud of himself, too: just wanted to see if his gadget would work, and to hell with the fact that he was selling us into eternal bondage.

  Nobody has ever figured out why the Entities are here or what they want from us. They simply came, that’s all. Saw. Conquered. Rearranged us. Put us to work doing god-awful unfathomable tasks. Like a bad dream.

  And there wasn’t any way we could defend ourselves against them. Didn’t seem that way to us at first—we were cocky; we were going to wage guerrilla war and wipe them out—but we learned fast how wrong we were, and we are theirs for keeps. There’s nobody left with anything close to freedom except the handful of hackers like me; and, as I’ve explained, we’re not dopey enough to try any serious sort of counterattack. It’s a big enough triumph for us just to be able to dodge around from one city to another without having to get authorization.

  Looked like all that was finished for me now. Right then, I didn’t give a damn. I was still trying to integrate the notion that I had been beaten; I didn’t have capacity left over to work on a program for the new life I would be leading now.

  “Is this the pardoner over here?” someone said.

  “That one, yeah.”

  “She wants to see him now.”

  “You think we should fix him up a little first?”

  “She said now.”

  A hand at my shoulder, rocking me gently. “Up, fellow. It’s interview time. Don’t make a mess or you’ll get hurt.”

  I let them shuffle me down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office with a ceiling high enough to give an Entity all the room it would want. I didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk at the far end. It looked like a toy desk in that colossal room. She looked like a toy woman. The cops left me alone with her. Trussed up like that, I wasn’t any risk.

  “Are you John Doe?” she asked.

  I was halfway across the room, studying my shoes. “What do you think?” I said.

  “That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”

  “I give lots of names. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”

  “Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”

  “You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”

  “Please,” she said. “This’ll be easier if you cooperate. The accusation is illegal entry, illegal seizure of a vehicle and illegal interfacing activity, specifically, selling pardons. Do you have a statement?”

  “No.”

  “You deny that you’re a pardoner?”

  “I don’t deny, I don’t affirm. What’s the goddamned use?”

  “Look up at me,” she said.

  “That’s a lot of effort.”

  “Look up,” she said. There was an odd edge to her voice. “Whether you’re a pardoner or not isn’t the issue. We know you’re a pardoner. I know you’re a pardoner.” And she called me by a name I hadn’t used in a very long time. Not since ’36, as a matter of fact.

  I looked at her. Stared. Had trouble believing I was seeing what I saw. Felt a rush of memories come flooding up. Did some mental editing work on her face, taking out some lines here, subtracting a little flesh in a few places, adding some in others. Stripping away the years.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m who
you think I am.”

  I gaped. This was worse than what the hacker had done to me. But there was no way to run from it.

  “You work for them?” I asked.

  “The pardon you sold me wasn’t any good. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, but when I tried to get through the wall, they stopped me just like that and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then we would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat.”

  “I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” I said.

  “Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”

  Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. I had trouble looking into them.

  “You still want to kill me?” I asked. “Are you planning to kill me now?”

  “No and no.” She used my old name again. “I can’t tell you how astounded I was when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. I used to wonder years ago if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, No, not a chance; he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they brought in this John Doe, and I saw your face.”

  “Do you think you could manage to believe,” I said, “that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s the truth.”

  “I’m sure it’s been unending agony for you.”

  “I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted. You’re the one I’ve regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”

  She considered that. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it even for a fraction of a second, but I could see that she was considering it.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked after a bit.

  “I stiff people because I don’t want to seem perfect,” I told her. “You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere, and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”

  “You deliberately cheated me.”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought you did. You seemed so cool, so professional. So perfect. I was sure the pardon would be valid. I couldn’t see how it would miss. And then I got to the wall and they grabbed me. So I thought, That bastard sold me out. He was too good just to have flubbed it up.” Her tone was calm, but the anger was still in her eyes. “Couldn’t you have stiffed the next one? Why did it have to be me?”

  I looked at her for a long time.

  “Because I loved you,” I said.

  “Shit,” she said. “You didn’t even know me. I was just some stranger who had hired you.”

  “That’s just it. There I was full of all kinds of crazy instant lunatic fantasies about you, all of a sudden ready to turn my nice, orderly life upside down for you, and all you could see was somebody you had hired to do a job. I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego. All I knew was I saw you and I wanted you. You don’t think that’s love? Well, call it something else, then, whatever you want. I never let myself feel it before. It isn’t smart, I thought; it ties you down, the risks are too big. And then I saw you and I talked to you a little and I thought something could be happening between us and things started to change inside me, and I thought, Yeah, yeah, go with it this time, let it happen, this may make everything different. And you stood there not seeing it, not even beginning to notice, just jabbering on and on about how important the pardon was for you. So I stiffed you. And afterward I thought, Jesus, I ruined that girl’s life and it was just because I got myself into a snit, and that was a fucking petty thing to have done. So I’ve been sorry ever since. You don’t have to believe that. I didn’t know about San Diego. That makes it even worse for me.” She didn’t say anything all this time, and the silence felt enormous. So after a moment I said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: Who was he?”

  “He wasn’t anybody,” she said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “He isn’t a who. He’s a what. It’s an android, a mobile antipardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Culver City. Something new that we have going around town.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

  “The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”

  “It gave me one, too. Turned my brain half to mush.”

  “You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while, it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned hacker, you know that?”

  “Why did you go to work for them?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Everybody works for them. Except people like you. You took everything I had and didn’t give me my pardon. So what was I supposed to do?”

  “I see.”

  “It’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for T.T.D.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for T.T.D.?”

  “Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”

  “To whom?”

  “The system always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive. You’ll work for us.”

  “You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” I said, amazed.

  “It beats T.T.D.,” she said.

  I fell silent again. I was thinking that she couldn’t possibly be serious, that they’d be fools to trust me in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to let me near their computer.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do it. On one condition.”

  “You really have balls, don’t you?”

  “Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. OK?”

  “You know you aren’t in any position to lay down conditions.”

  “Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t make me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”

  She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”

  “Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”

  “You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”

  “Let me find that out.”

  “But what’s the point?”

  “Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” I said.

  She went along with it. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and pretty soon they brought in the android I had encountered in the park, or maybe another one with the same face. It looked me over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.

  Someone came in and took the security lock off my wrist and left again. She gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to me and we made contact. And I jumped right in.

  I was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but I knew what I needed to do and I knew I had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a terminal, it was just a unit—and go for what lay behind it. So I bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. I went right around it while the android was still setting up its combinations, dived underneath, got myself instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level and gave the master Culver City computer a hearty handshake.

  Jesus, that felt good!

  All that power, all those millions of megabytes squatting there, and I was plugged right into it. Of course, I felt like a mouse hitchhiking on the back of an elephant. That was
all right. I might be a mouse, but that mouse was getting a tremendous ride. I hung on tight and went soaring along on the hurricane winds of that colossal machine.

  And as I soared, I ripped out chunks of it by the double handful and tossed them to the breeze.

  It didn’t even notice for a good tenth of a second. That’s how big it was. There I was, tearing great blocks of data out of its gut, joyously ripping and rending. And it didn’t know it, because even the most magnificent computer ever assembled is still stuck with operating at the speed of light, and when the best you can do is 186,000 miles a second, it can take quite a while for the alarm to travel the full distance down all your neural channels. That thing was huge. Mouse riding on elephant, did I say? Amoeba piggybacking on Brontosaurus was more like it.

  God knows how much damage I was able to do. But, of course, the alarm circuitry did cut in eventually. Internal gates came clanging down and all sensitive areas were sealed away and I was shrugged off with the greatest of ease. There was no sense in staying around, waiting to get trapped, so I pulled myself free.

  I had found out what I needed to know. Where the defenses were, how they worked. This time the computer had kicked me out, but it wouldn’t be able to the next. Whenever I wanted, I could go in there and smash whatever I felt like.

  The android crumpled to the carpet. It was nothing but an empty husk now.

  Lights were flashing on the office wall.

  She looked at me, appalled. “What did you do?”

  “I beat your android,” I said. “It wasn’t all that hard, once I knew the scoop.”

  “You damaged the main computer.”

  “Not really. Not much. I just gave it a little tickle. It was surprised seeing me get access in there, that’s all.”