The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

  “And yet this technology doesn’t decide anything on its own,” the moderator said. “It just does what the soldier’s already decided sub – er, preconsciously.”

  “That’s a bit simplistic,” the specialist replied. “The system has access to a huge range of data that no unaugged soldier would ever be able to process in realtime – radio chatter, satellite telemetry, wide-spectrum visuals – so it’s actually taking that preconscious intent and modifying it based on what the soldier would do if she had access to all those facts.”

  “So it guesses,” said the Man from VAG.

  “It predicts.”

  “And that doesn’t open the door to error?”

  “It reduces error. It optimizes human wisdom based on the maximum available information.”

  “And yet in this case –”

  Becker held down transmit and sacc’d speed-dial.

  “– don’t want to go down that road,” the lawyer said. “No matter what the neurology says.”

  Thirty-five seconds. Gone in an instant.

  “Our whole legal system is predicated on the concept of free will. It’s the moral center of human existence.”

  That was so much bullshit, Becker knew. She knew exactly where humanity’s moral center was. She’d looked it up not six hours ago: the place where the brain kept its empathy and compassion, its guilt and shame and remorse.

  The ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

  “Suppose” – the moderator raised a finger – “I get into a car with a disabled breathalyzer. I put it into manual and hit someone. Surely I bear some responsibility for the fact that I chose to drink and drive, even if I didn’t intend to hurt anyone.”

  “That depends on whether you’d received a lawful command from a superior officer to get behind the wheel,” Ms. JAG countered.

  “You’re saying a soldier can be ordered to become a cyborg?”

  “How is that different from ordering a sniper to carry a rifle? How is it different from ordering soldiers to take antimalarial drugs – which have also, by the way, been associated with violent behavioral side-effects in the past – when we deploy them to the Amazon? A soldier is sworn to protect their country; they take that oath knowing the normal tools of their trade, knowing that technology advances. You don’t win a war by bringing knives to a gunfight –”

  Speed-dial.

  “– may not like cyborgs – and I’m the first to agree there are legitimate grounds for concern – but until you can talk the Chinese into turning back the clock on their technology, they’re by far the lesser evil.”

  Twenty-eight seconds, that time.

  “It’s not as though we ever lived in a world without collateral damage. You don’t shut down such a vital program over a tragic accident.”

  A tragic accident. Even Becker had believed that. Right up until Sabrie had slipped her a medallion with a burst of radio static in its heart, a cryptic signal snatched from the warm Pacific night by a pair of smart-specs on a dead kid walking. A signal that was somehow able to offline her for intervals ranging from twenty to sixty-three seconds.

  She wondered if there was any sort of pattern to that variability.

  “Safeguards should be put into place at the very least.” The moderator was going for the middle road. “Ways to monitor these, these hybrids remotely, shut them down at the first sign of trouble.”

  Becker snorted. Wingman didn’t take orders in the field, couldn’t even hear them. Sure, Becker could channel some smiley little spin doctor through her temporal, but he was just a peeping tom with no access to the motor systems. The actual metal didn’t even pack an on-board receiver; it was congenitally deaf to wireless commands until someone manually slotted the dorsal plug-in between Becker’s shoulders.

  Deliberately design a combat unit that could be shut down by anyone who happened to hack the right codes? Who’d be that stupid?

  And yet – Transmit. Speed-dial.

  “– are only a few on active duty – they won’t tell us exactly how many of course, say twenty or thirty. A couple dozen cyborgs who can’t be blamed if something goes wrong. And that’s just today. You wouldn’t believe how fast they’re ramping up production.”

  Forty seconds. On the nose.

  “Not only do I believe it, I encourage it. The world’s a tinderbox. Water wars, droughts, refugees everywhere you look. The threat of force is the only thing that’s kept a lid on things so far. Our need for a strong military is greater today than it’s ever been since the cold war, especially with the collapse of the US eco –”

  Speed-dial.

  “– and what happens when every pair of boots in the field has a machine reading its mind and pulling the trigger in their name? What happens to the very concept of a war crime when every massacre can be defined as an industrial accident?”

  Thirty-two.

  “You’re saying this Becker deliberately –”

  “I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m concerned. I’m concerned at the speed with which outrage over the massacre of civilians has turned into an outpouring of sympathy for the person who killed them, even from quarters you’d least expect. Have you seen the profile piece Amal Sabrie posted on the Star?”

  A shutdown command, radioed to a system with no radio.

  “Nobody’s forgetting the victims here. But it’s no great mystery why people also feel a certain sympathy for Corporal Becker –”

  Becker kept wondering who’d be able to pull off a trick like that. She kept coming up with the same answer.

  “Of course. She’s sympathetic, she’s charismatic, she’s nice. Exemplary soldier, not the slightest smudge on her service record. She volunteered at a veterinary clinic back in high school.”

  Someone with an interest in controlling the narrative.

  “Chief of Defence couldn’t have a better poster girl if they’d planned –”

  Dial.

  “– should be up on charges is for the inquiry to decide.”

  Forty-two seconds.

  She wondered if she should be feeling something right now. Outrage. Violation. She’d thought the procedure was only supposed to cure her PTSD. It seemed to have worked on that score, anyway.

  “Then let the inquiry decide. But we can’t allow this to become the precedent that tips over the Geneva Conventions.”

  The other stuff, though. The compassion, the empathy, the guilt. The moral center. That seemed to be gone too. They’d burned it out of her like a tumor.

  “The Conventions are a hundred years old. You don’t think they’re due for an overhaul?”

  She still had her sense of right and wrong, at least.

  Brain must keep that somewhere else.

  “I THOUGHT THEY’D shipped you back to the WTP,” Sabrie remarked. “This weekend.”

  The journalist glanced around the grotto: low light, blue-shifted, private tables arrayed around a dance floor where partygoers writhed to bass beats that made it only faintly through the table damper. She glanced down at the Rising Tide Becker had ordered for her.

  “I don’t fuck my interviews, Corporal. Especially ones who could snap my spine if they got carried away.”

  Becker smiled back at her. “Not why we’re here.”

  “Ohhhkay.”

  “Bring your jammer?”

  “Always.” Sabrie slapped the little device onto the table; welcome static fuzzed Becker’s peripherals.

  “So why are we in a lekking lounge at 2a.m.?”

  “No drones,” Becker said.

  “None in the local Milestones either. Even during business hours.”

  “Yeah. I just – I wanted a crowd to get lost in.”

  “At two in the morning.”

  “People have other things on their mind in the middle of the night.” Becker glanced up as a triplet stumbled past en route to the fuck-cubbies. “Less likely to notice someone they may have seen on the feeds.”

  “Okay.”

  “People don’t – congregate th
e way they used to, you know?” Becker sipped her scotch, set it down, stared at it. “Everyone telecommutes, everyone cocoons. Downtown’s so – thin, these days.”

  Sabrie panned the room. “Not here.”

  “Web don’t fuck. Not yet, anyway. Still gotta go out if you want to do anything more than whack off.”

  “What’s on your mind, Nandita?”

  “The price of freedom.”

  “Go on.”

  “Not having to worry about some random psycho shooter when you go out for sushi. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten.”

  “You know I was being sarcastic.”

  Becker cocked her head at the other woman. “I don’t think you were. Not entirely, anyway.”

  “Maybe not entirely.”

  “Because there were shootings, Amal. A lot of them. Twenty thousand deaths a year.”

  “Mainly down in the States, thank God.” Sabrie said. “But yes.”

  “Back before the panopticon, people could just walk into some school or office building and – light it up.” Becker frowned. “I remember there was this one guy shot up a daycare. Prechoolers. Babies. I forget how many he killed before they took him out. Turned out he’d lost a sister himself, six months before, in another shooting. Everybody said it tipped him over the edge and he went on a rampage.”

  “That doesn’t make sense.”

  “That shit never does. It’s what people said, though, to explain it. Only…”

  “Only?” Sabrie echoed after the pause had stretched a bit too far.

  “Only what if he wasn’t crazy at all?” Becker finished.

  “How could he not be?”

  “He lost his sister. Classic act of senseless violence. The whole gun culture, you know, the NRA had everyone by the balls and anyone who so much as whispered about gun control got shot down. So to speak.” Becker grunted. “Words didn’t work. Advocacy didn’t work. The only thing that might possibly work would be something so unthinkable, so horrific and obscene and unspeakably evil, that not even the most strident gun nut could possibly object to – countermeasures.”

  “Wait, you’re saying that someone in favor of gun control – someone who’d lost his sister to gun violence – would deliberately shoot up a daycare?”

  Becker spread her hands.

  “You’re saying he turned himself into a monster. Killed twenty, thirty kids maybe. For a piece of legislation.”

  “Weighed against thousands of deaths a year. Even if legislation only cut that by a few percent you’d make back your investment in a week or two, tops.”

  “Your investment?”

  “Sacrifice, then.” Becker shrugged.

  “Do you know how insane that sounds?”

  “How do you know that’s not the way it went down?”

  “Because you said nothing changed! No laws were passed! They just wrote him off as another psycho.”

  “He couldn’t know that up front. All he knew was, there was a chance. His life, a few others, for thousands. There was a chance.”

  “I can’t believe that you, of all people, would – after what happened, after what you did –”

  “Wasn’t me, remember? It was Wingman. That’s what everyone’s saying.” Wingman was awake now, straining at the leash with phantom limbs.

  “But you were still part of it. You know that, Deet, you feel it. Even if it wasn’t your fault it still tears you up inside. I saw that the first time we spoke. You’re a good person, you’re a moral person, and –”

  “Do you know what morality is, really?” Becker looked coolly into the other woman’s eyes. “It’s letting two stranger’s kids die so you can save one of your own. It’s thinking it makes some kind of difference if you look into someone’s eyes when you kill them. It’s squeamishness and cowardice and won’t someone think of the children. It’s not rational, Amal. It’s not even ethical.”

  Sabrie had gone very quiet.

  “Corporal,” she said when Becker had fallen silent, “what have they done to you?”

  Becker took a breath. “Whatever they’re doing –”

  Not much initiative. Great on the follow-through.

  “– it ends here.”

  Sabrie’s eyes went wide. Becker could see pieces behind them, fitting together at last. No drones. Dense crowd. No real security, just a few bouncers built of pitiful meat and bone… “I’m sorry, Amal,” Becker said gently.

  Sabrie lunged for the jammer. Becker snatched it up before the journalist’s hand had made it halfway.

  “I can’t have people in my head right now.”

  “Nandita.” Sabrie was almost whispering. “Don’t do this.”

  “I like you, Amal. You’re good people. I’d leave you right out of it if I could, but you’re – smart. And you know me, a little. Maybe well enough to put it together, afterward…”

  Sabrie leapt up. Becker didn’t even rise from her chair. She seized the other woman’s wrist quick as a striking snake, effortlessly forced it back onto the table. Sabrie cried out. Dim blue dancers moved on the other side of the damper field, other things on their minds.

  “You won’t get away with it. You can’t blame the machines for –” Soft pleading words, urgent, rapid-fire. The false-color heatprint of the contusion spread out across Sabrie’s forearm like a dim rainbow, like a bright iridescent oil slick. “Please there’s no way they’ll be able to sell this as a malfunction no matter how –”

  “That’s the whole point,” Becker said, and hoped there was a least a little sadness left in her smile. “You know that.”

  Amal Sabrie. Number one of seventy-four.

  It would have been so much faster to just spread her wings and raise arms. But her wings had been torn out by the roots, and lay twitching in the garage back at Trenton. The only arms she could raise were of flesh and blood and graphene.

  It was enough, though. It was messy, but she got the job done. Because Corporal Nandita Becker was more than just a superhuman killing machine.

  She was the most ethical person on the planet.

  THE SCRIVENER

  Eleanor Arnason

  Eleanor Arnason (eleanorarnason.blogspot.com) published her first story in 1973. Since then she has published six novels, two chapbooks and more than thirty short stories. Her novel A Woman of the Iron People won the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Mythopoeic Society Award. Novel Ring of Swords won a Minnesota Book Award. Her short story “Dapple” won the Spectrum Award. Other short stories have been finalists for the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Sidewise and World Fantasy Awards. Eleanor would really like to win one of these. Eleanor’s most recent books are collections Big Mama Stories and Hidden Folk. Her favorite spoon is a sterling silver spoon given to her mother on her mother’s first Christmas and dated December 25, 1909.

  THERE WAS A scrivener who had three daughters. He lived in a great empire that stretched from west to east. Some parts of the empire were civilized and up-to-date, full of coffee shops and other amenities. Other parts were backward and primitive, the home of peasants and witches.

  The scrivener lived in a provincial city, midway between civilization and the primitive. The streets were lined with shops, many of them selling foreign luxuries; there were cafés and coffee shops that had the latest newspapers and journals. In the marketplace, peasant farmers and hunters sold their traditional products. Outside the city were fields. Beyond the fields was a vast, dark forest.

  He made his living in a modest way, writing letters for illiterate neighbors, drawing up bills of sale and even doing some accounting, for he was a man of many skills, who could do complicated sums and figure compound interest.

  In spite of his skills and his adequate living, he had always dreamed of more: to be a writer of stories. But he lacked something, a divine spark, or so he believed. So he stuck to what he knew.

  His wife died when the children were still young. He might have remarried, but he had loved the woman and had no desire to replace her. Three children were enough,
even if none was a son.

  Their mother had wanted to name them after fruits or flowers. But he had always dreamed of fathering a storyteller and insisted that they be named Imagination, Ornamentation, and Plot. All three were active and quick to learn. Surely they could become what he could not.

  He bought books of fables for them and took them every week to the marketplace to listen to the storytellers who sat there in the dust, reciting tales about heroes and dragons. The girls liked the fables and the oral narratives, but showed no inclination toward becoming authors.

  Imagination, who was called Ima, said the stories she heard and read gave her wonderful dreams, which she treasured, but she had no desire to write them down.

  Ornamentation, who was called Orna, liked individual words. She sang them as she embroidered. What she made were not true songs, which have meaning most of the time. Rather, they were random strings of words that chimed and tinkled, rhymed or rolled majestically, but told no coherent story. She also liked images and put them in her embroidery: flowers and fruit and – between these – tiny lords and ladies, delicate dragons, diminutive heroes with needle-like swords.

  Plot said it was all silliness, and she would rather do accounting.

  But the scrivener did not lose hope; and when the girls were grown up, he took them to a famous critic. She was a large, fat woman, who sat every day in one of the city’s cafes, wearing a caftan, smoking black cigarettes and drinking coffee or wine. Piled in the chair next to her were newspapers, literary reviews, and books, some leather bound, but most bound only in paper. There were coffee rings on the book covers and notes scribbled in the margins. The woman had a broad, arrogant face with a hawk nose and heavy-lidded eyes.

  “Yes?” she said in her gruff, deep voice.

  The scrivener told her that the dearest wish of his heart was to have a child who wrote stories, and he had brought his three daughters to be examined.

  Each child had brought a story, which she had written reluctantly, not out of fear of her father, but rather out of fear of disappointing him. He was a kind, gentle man, whose only failing was his desire to have an author.