The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  The cops asked him some more questions, but Ben just kept saying, “I don’t remember” or “I didn’t see, I was worried about my sister.” After they finally left, my mom said very quietly, “I hope the charging station didn’t catch the plates on camera.”

  Ben just looked at her. “Yeah. Me, too,” he said. “But I couldn’t let them go out and disable him after he saved Sadie’s life.”

  Mom took a deep breath. “Ben. Sadie. We both know it’s probably going to come down to that, eventually. He can’t run wild forever. And we all know that Old Paint is just following the directives of his programming. He’s not really . . . alive. He seems that way because we think of him that way. But it’s all just programming.”

  “Saving Sadie’s life? Catching her in the back seat like that, cushioning her with air bags while he pounded that sedan into scrap?” Ben laughed and shook his head. “You won’t convince me of that, Mom.”

  The hospital let me go home that evening. We all went to bed right away. But about midnight, I heard my mom get up, so I did, too. She was looking out through the blinds at our parking stall.

  “Is he there? Is he okay?”

  “No, baby, he’s not here. Go back to bed.”

  Ben and I overslept the next morning and didn’t go to school. Mom hadn’t bothered waking us. We had a good six inches of snow outside, and school was cancelled for the day. When we came out to the living room, Mom was sitting at the computer watching a dot on a map. It wasn’t moving. There was a backpack at her feet and a heap of winter clothes beside her.

  “You kids get your homework off Moodle,” she said. “I’m going to be gone for awhile.” She sounded funny.

  “No,” Ben said. “We’re going with you.”

  We hiked through the snow to a bus stop and took a bus to a City Car rental lot and checked out a tiny car. Riding in it after riding in Old Paint was like crowding into a shower stall together. Mom sat in the single front seat and Ben and I had the back seat. There was barely room for us with our coats on. Mom plugged in the co-ordinates, and the car demanded that she scan her credit card again. It had a prissy girl’s voice. “MacIntosh Lake is outside of Zones 1 through 12. Additional fees will apply,” the car told her.

  She thumbed for them. The car didn’t move. “Hazardous conditions are reported. Cancellation recommended. You will not be charged if you terminate this transaction now.”

  Mom sighed. “Just go,” she said, and we went. It wasn’t too bad. The main roads had been plowed and salted, and once we got on I-5, the plows and the other traffic had cleared most of the mess down to almost pavement. It felt really odd not to have Old Paint’s bulk around me and I leaned against Ben.

  We didn’t talk much as the car hummed along. Ben had tossed a bunch of stuff in his backpack, including my pain medicine and a water bottle. I took a pill and slept most of the way. I woke up to Ben saying, “But there’s a chain across the access road.”

  “So we’ll get out here,” Mom said.

  I sat up. We were out in the country, and the only tracks on the snowy road behind us were ours. It was a very strange feeling. All I could see was wind-smoothed white snow and snow-laden trees on either side of the narrow road. We had pulled off the road into a driveway and stopped. There were two big yellow posts in front of us, with a heavy chain hung between them. A hunter-orange sign said, “CLOSED.” The road in front of us was mostly smooth snow and it wound out of sight into the woods.

  Mom told the car to wait and it obediently shut down. We struggled back into our coats. None of us had real snow boots. Mom grabbed her pack and Ben brought his as we stepped out into smooth snow. The skies had cleared and it was cold. This snow wouldn’t melt any time soon. Ben followed Mom and she followed the ghost tire tracks that left the road and went around the access gate to the lake. Snow had almost filled them and the wind was polishing them away. I came last, stepping in their footprints. Mom pulled her coat tighter as we walked and said, “There were some great raves out here when I was in high school. But in summer.”

  “What would you do to me if I went to a rave out in the woods?” Ben asked.

  Mom just looked at him. We both knew he’d been to raves out in the woods. Ben shut up.

  Mom saw Old Paint before we did, and she broke into a run. Old Paint was shut down, back under the trees. Snow was mounded over him; only the funky paint job on his sides showed. Twigs and leaves had fallen on his snowy roof during the night. His windows were thick with frost. He looked to me like he’d been there for years. As we got closer, his engine ticked twice and then went silent. Mom halted and flung out her arms. “Stay back, kids,” she warned us. Then she went forward alone.

  She talked to him in a low voice as she walked slowly around the car. She kept shaking her head. Ben and I ignored what she’d said and walked slowly forward. Old Paint was still. Both his front and back bumpers were pushed in and he had a long crease down his passenger side. One of his headlights was cracked. His rear license plate hung by a single screw. “He’s dead,” I said, and I felt my eyes start to sting.

  “Not quite,” my Mom said grimly. “He doesn’t have enough of a charge to move. His nanos have been trying to pop his dents out and fix his glass but that will take time.” She went around to the driver door and unlocked it with a key. She leaned in and popped the hood, and then tossed the keys to Ben. “Look in the back. There’s a hatch in the floor. Open it. Get out the stuff in there. Looks like we’re going to need Grandpa’s emergency kit.”

  She dropped her pack on the ground in the snow and then wrestled a Charge-In-A-Box out of it. Ben and I were staring at her. “Hurry up!” she snapped.

  We walked to the back of the car. Mom already had the cables out and she plugged Old Paint in. His horn tooted faintly. “Easy, big fella,” my brother said as he slid the key into the lock. He saw me looking at him and said, “Just shut up.”

  We pushed the deflated air bags out of the way. We found the floor hatch and opened it. “Look at all this stuff!” My brother exclaimed. My mom walked back and looked in. She had a grim smile as she said, “My grandpa was always trying to keep me safe. He tried to think of everything to protect me. ‘Plan for the worst and hope for the best,’ he always said.” She took a deep breath and then sighed it out. “So. Let’s get to work.”

  Ben and I more watched than worked. It was weird to watch her fix Old Paint. She was so calm. She pulled his dipstick, wiped it on her jeans, studied it, and then added something out of a can. Then she pulled another dipstick, checked it, and nodded. She checked wires and some she tightened. She replaced two fuses. She looked inside his radiator and then felt around under it. “No leaks!” she said. “That’s a miracle.” She stepped back and shut the hood.

  Old Paint woke up. His engine turned over and then quit. Turned over again, ran a bit rough and then smoothed out. He sounded hoarse to me as he said, “Right front tire is flat. Do not attempt to move the vehicle.”

  “There’s Fix A Flat in there,” Ben said, and Mom said, “Get it.”

  He came back with it and his back pack. I stood next to him, stroking Old Paint’s fender and saying, “It’s going to be okay, Old Paint. It’s going to be okay.” Neither one of them made fun of me. While I was standing there, his front bumper suddenly popped out into position. You can’t really see nanos working to take out a dent, but he already looked less battered than he had. Ben handed Mom the can and she reinflated the tire.

  “Tire pressure is corrected,” Old Paint announced.

  Then Ben took the scrubber spray and antivirus box out of the pack and handed it to her without a word.

  Mom took it and stood up slowly. She walked slowly to the back of the car and I followed her. She put away the left over emergency supplies. She gently shut the door. The glass nanos were at work on the rear window. It was almost clear again. She walked around the car and Ben and I both followed her. She got to the driver’s door, opened it and climbed in.

  “Mom?” Ben asked
her anxiously and she waved a hand at him. “I just want to check something,” she said.

  She opened a little panel on his dash and a small screen lit up. She touched it lightly, scrolling down it. Then she stopped and leaned her forehead on the steering wheel for a minute. When she spoke, her voice was choked and muffled by her arms.

  “My grandpa considered himself something of a hacker, in an old school way. He made some modifications to Old Paint. That’s Grandpa’s voice you hear, when Old Paint speaks. And you know how I told you some people remove the safety constraints from the car’s programming, the ‘do no harm to people’ or by-pass the speed constraints? Not my grandpa.” She sat up and pointed at the screen. “See all those red ‘override’ indicators? You’re not supposed to be able to do that. But Grandpa did. He gave Old Paint one ultimate command: “Protect logged users of vehicle.”

  She flipped the little panel closed over the screen and spoke quietly. “I should have known. I was a wild kid. Drinking. Doping. So he broke into the software and overrode everything to make ‘protect the child’ the car’s highest priority. Hm.” She made a husky noise in her throat. “Got me out of a corner more times than I like to think about. I passed out more than once behind the wheel, but somehow I always got home safe.” She dashed tears from her eyes and then looked at us with a crooked smile. “Just programming, kids. That’s all. Just his programming. Despite all his tough talk, it was just his programming to protect, as best he could. No matter what.”

  Ben was as puzzled as I was. “The car? Or Grandpa?”

  She sniffed again but didn’t answer. She re-opened the panel on his dash and accessed his GPS. She was talking softly. “You remember that one spring break, my senior year? Arizona. And that boy named Mark. Sun, sun, and more sun. We hardly ever had to stop at a charging station. That’s where you should go, old friend. And drive safely.”

  “Don’t we always?” he asked her.

  She laughed out loud.

  She got out and shut the door. He revved his engine a few times, and then began to pull forward. We stepped back out of his way, and he moved slowly past us, the deep snow squeaking under his tires. Mom stepped forward, brushing snow, twigs, and leaves off the solars on his roof. He stopped and let her clear them. Then, “All done. Run free,” she told him, and patted his rearview mirror.

  When she stepped back, he revved his engine, tooted his horn twice, and peeled out in a shower of snow. We stood there and watched him go. Mom didn’t move until we couldn’t hear him anymore. Then she pitched the packet of antivirus as far as she could into the woods. “There are some things that just don’t need curing,” she said.

  We went back to the City Rents car and climbed in. My sneakers were soaked, my feet were numb, and my jeans were wet half way to my knees. We ate some peanut butter sandwiches that Ben had packed, Mom gave me another pain pill and I slept all the way home.

  Three nights later, I got out of bed and padded toward the living room in my pajamas. I peeked around the corner. My Mom’s chair was rocked back as far as it would go and her toes were up on the edge of the desk. The bluish monitor light was the only light in the room. She was watching a moving dot on a map, and smiling. She had headphones on and was nodding her head to music we could barely hear. Oldies. I jumped when Ben put his hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back into the hallway. He shook his head at me and I nodded. We both went back to bed.

  I never saw Old Paint again. He stayed in Arizona, mostly charging off the sun and not moving around much once he was there. Once in a while, I’d get home from school and turn on the computer and check on him. He was just a red dot moving on thin lines in a faraway place, or, much more often, a black dot on an empty spot on the map. After a while, I stopped thinking about him.

  Ben did two years of community college and then got a “Potential” scholarship to a college in Utah. It was hard to say good-bye to him, but by then I was in high school and had a life of my own. It was my turn to have spats with Mom.

  One April day, I came home to find that Mom had left the computer running. There had been an e-mail from Ben, with an attachment, and she had left it as a screen saver. He’d gone to Arizona for spring break. “This was as close as I could get to him,” Ben had written. The scene had been shot under a bright blue sky, with red cliffs in the distance. There was nothing there, only scrub brush and a dirt road. And in the distance, a station wagon moved steadily away from us, a long plume of dust hanging in the still air behind him.

  CHITAI HEIKI KORONBIN

  David Moles

  Here’s a look at a future where Earth’s last line of defense is a force of giant robots, but, inside the steel, the people running them turn out to still be made of flesh.

  David Moles has sold fiction to Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Engineering Infinity, The Future Is Japanese, Polyphony, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Say . . . , Flytrap, and elsewhere. He coedited, with Jay Lake, 2004’s well-received “retro-pulp” anthology All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, as well as coediting, with Susan Marie Groppi, the original anthology, Twenty Epics. He won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Short Science Fiction of the year with his story “Finisterra.”

  THERE MUST HAVE been a snack bar or a kebab shop or something at the side of the hangar, once. It’s scrap now, a shapeless pile of fiberglass and corrugated tin, broken pieces of brown and white signs advertising döner and currywurst. Some of the plastic chairs have survived though and now Jacob drags three of them through the green-uniformed cordon of nervous Ländespolizei into the rain shadow of the hunched Colombine and Pantalon. Maddy takes one without a word and sits, or rather sprawls, knees wide like a salaryman on a late train, looking out at nothing. After a moment the black figure of the Scaramouche crouches down beside the other two robots; the cockpit opens, and Abby slides down to join Maddy and Jacob.

  “Captain Asano says the transport’s almost here,” she announces.

  Maddy nods.

  Jacob says, “Tanimura get any?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  Jacob is still wearing his helmet. He takes it off now and flings it across the tarmac. Some of the Ländespolizei look round at the clatter and then hurriedly away. Without his big Malcolm X glasses, Jacob’s face looks naked. Maddy and Abby can see that he’s crying.

  Abby goes and retrieves the helmet and sets it down at Jacob’s side. Then she draws the third chair up next to Maddy and perches there, her knees drawn up to her chest. In the white chair, in her black Nomex suit, she looks very small.

  “You got a few of them, Maddy,” she says after a moment. “Didn’t you?”

  “I got one or two,” Maddy says, her voice sounding flat, echoless in her own ears.

  Abby looks over toward the hangar, the second ring of Ländespolizei, the green tarps and trailers of the field hospital and the makeshift morgue.

  “That’s something, I guess,” she says.

  Maddy doesn’t answer.

  The transport comes in, low and heavy, roaring down the length of the runway so the wind of its passage rocks the trailers, rips tent pegs from the ground and sends the Ländespolizei scurrying to secure the tarps. It slows and turns down at the far end and taxis slowly back.

  A squawk comes from Jacob’s helmet. Abby lifts her own to her ear, says something quietly into the microphone, then listens. She looks over at the others.

  “Tanimura’s gone,” she says.

  “What?” says Jacob. “They got him?”

  Abby shakes her head. “No,” she says. “He’s AWOL. Asano wants one of us to go look for him.”

  “You’re kidding,” says Maddy. “Isn’t that her job?”

  “He’s taken the Pierrot, too,” Abby says.

  Maddy stands up. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll go.”

  She doesn’t bother putting on her own helmet, just climbs back into the Colombine’s cockpit, closes the hatch, powers up the instr
uments and screens, plugs the IV into the cannula in her hip. She waits for Jacob and Abby to get the Pantalon and the Scaramouche moving, follows them up the ramp into the transport.

  “All right,” she says into the helmet, as the crew locks the Colombine into its cradle. “Where’s he gone, Disneyland Paris?”

  Asano’s voice, coming from the helmet, is reedy and strained.

  “He’s gone into the zone,” she says.

  The secret robot base was an old oil platform somewhere north of the Arctic Circle. Officially it was the United Nations Provisional Containment Authority Northern Hemisphere Rapid Deployment Facility, but after six weeks in the British Columbian woods at the United Nations Provisional Containment Authority Pacific Region Candidate Induction Centre Camp Chilliwack, Maddy had had enough of UN word salad, and when Abby had called it the secret robot base, Maddy had picked the name up and made it stick. The walls of the base were white-painted steel that flaked in places to reveal an older layer of nicotine yellow and occasionally bits of faded Russian stencil. The UN had rubberized the floors and put in new signs in English and Japanese but to Maddy it still felt like they’d gone back in time, or like they were on the set of some old war movie like her dad was always watching on The History Channel, Top Gun or Blue Submarine No. 6 or The Final Countdown. She liked that. Jacob said the gray glop on the ceilings was asbestos and it was giving them cancer.

  They would come back from one of their thirty-hour Rapid Deployments, to the edge of—but never into—the Canadian zone, or the European zone, or the zone off the coast of the Philippines in the South China Sea, and the doctors would strip Abby and Maddy and Jacob out of their Nomex pilot suits and decontaminate them and flush the zone drugs out of their systems and put them through a battery of medical and psychological and parapsychological tests that would have been humiliating before Camp Chilliwack. Likewise before Chilliwack Maddy would have been self-conscious about being undressed and prodded in front of Abby and Jacob, would have been conscious of Abby’s bony nakedness and Jacob’s invasive gaze, but now it was just Jacob and Abby, and Jacob’s gaze wasn’t invasive, just exhausted, and Abby’s naked body wasn’t remotely erotic, just tired and bruised, and Maddy could care less what she herself looked like. If the doctors put Tanimura through any of this they did it somewhere else.