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

by Jonathan Strahan

  I couldn’t get my eyes around it. It was a terrible, gorgeous whale of light and colors and music and otherness. All along a boardwalk jugglers danced and singers sang and horns horned and accordions squeezed and under it all some demonic engine screamed and wheezed. Great glass domes and towers and flags and tents glowed in the sunset but Brighton Pier made the sunset look plain-faced and unloveable. A huge wheel full of pink and emerald electric lights turned slowly in the warm wind but went nowhere. People leapt and turned somersaults and stood on each other’s shoulders and they all wore such soft, vivid costumes, like they’d all been cut out of a picturebook too fine for anyone like me to read. The tumblers lashed the pier to the Electric City docks and cut the engines and after that it was nothing but music so thick and good you could eat it out of the air.

  Life and Time hugged Maruchan and cheered with the rest of Garbagetown. Tears ran down their faces. Everyone’s faces.

  “When the ice melted and the rivers revolted and the Fuckwit world went under the seas,” Papa whispered through his weeping, “a great mob hacked Brighton Pier off of Brighton and strapped engines to it and set sail across the blue. They’ve been going ever since. They go around the world and around again, to the places where there’s still people, and trade their beauty for food and fuel. There’s a place on Brighton Pier where if you look just right, it’s like nothing ever drowned.”

  A beautiful man wearing a hat of every color and several bells stepped up on a pedestal and held a long pale cone to his mouth. The mayor of Electric City embraced him with two meaty arms and asked his terrible, stupid, unforgivable question: “Have you seen dry land?”

  And the beautiful man answered him: “With my own eyes.”

  A roar went up like angels dying. I covered my ears. The mayor covered his mouth with his hands, speechless, weeping. The beautiful man patted him awkwardly on the back. Then he turned to us.

  “Hello, Garbagetown!” he cried out and his voice sounded like everyone’s most secret heart.

  We screamed so loud every bird in Garbagetown fled to the heavens and we clapped like mad and some people fell onto the ground and buried their face in old batteries.

  “My name is Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh and I am the Master of Brighton Pier! We will be performing Twelfth Night in the great stage tonight at seven o’clock, followed by The Duchess of Malfi at ten (which has werewolves) and a midnight acrobatic display! Come one, come all! Let Madame Limelight tell your FORTUNE! TEST your strength with the Hammer of the Witches! SEE the wonders of the Fuckwit World in our Memory Palace! Get letters and news from the LAST HUMAN OUTPOSTS around the globe! GASP at the citizens of Mutation Nation in the Freak Tent! Sample a FULL MINUTE of real television, still high definition after all these years! Concerts begin in the Crystal Courtyard in fifteen minutes! Our Peep Shows feature only the FINEST actresses reading aloud from GENUINE Fuckwit historical records! Garbagetown, we are here to DAZZLE you!”

  A groan went up from the crowds like each Garbagetowner was just then bedding their own great lost love and they heaved toward the lights, the colors, the horns and the voices, the silk and the electricity and the life floating down there, knotted to the edge of our little pile of trash.

  Someone grabbed my hand and held me back while my parents, my twin, my world streamed away from me down to the Pier. No one looked back.

  “Are you her?” said Goodnight Moon. He looked longer and leaner but not really older. He had on his tie.

  “Yes,” I said, and nothing was different than it had been when I got my name except now neither of us had masks and our kisses weren’t like gentle elephants but like a boy and a girl and I forgot all about my strength and my fortune and the wonderful wheel of light turning around and around and going nowhere.

  9.

  TERRORWHORE

  ACTORS ARE LIARS. Writers, too. The whole lot of them, even the horn players and the fortune tellers and the freaks and the strongmen. Even the ladies with rings in their noses and high heels on their feet playing violins all along the pier and the lie they are all singing and dancing and saying is: we can get the old world back again.

  My door said TERRORWHORE this morning. I looked after my potato plants and my hibiscus and thought about whether or not I would ever get to have sex again. Seemed unlikely. Big Bargains concurred.

  Goodnight Moon and I lost our virginities in the Peep Show tent while a lady in green fishnet stockings and a lavender garter read to us from the dinner menu of the Dorchester Hotel circa 2005.

  “Whole Berkshire roasted chicken stuffed with black truffles, walnuts, duck confit, and dauphinoise potatoes,” the lady purred. Goodnight Moon devoured my throat with kisses, bites, need. “Drizzled with a balsamic reduction and rosemary honey.”

  “What’s honey?” I gasped. We could see her but she couldn’t see us, which was for the best. The glass in the window only went one way.

  “Beats me, kid,” she shrugged, re-crossing her legs the other way. “Something you drizzle.” She went on. “Sticky toffee pudding with lashings of cream and salted caramel, passionfruit soufflé topped with orbs of pistachio ice cream…”

  Goodnight Moon smelled just as I remembered. Scorched ozone and metal and paraffin and hope and when he was inside me it was like hearing my name for the first time. I couldn’t escape the me-ness of it, the us-ness of it, the sound and the shape of ourselves turning into our future.

  “I can’t believe you’re here,” he whispered into my breast. “I can’t believe this is us.”

  The lady’s voice drifted over my head. “Lamb cutlets on a bed of spiced butternut squash, wilted greens, and delicate hand-harvested mushrooms served with goat cheese in clouds of pastry…”

  Goodnight Moon kissed my hair, my ears, my eyelids. “And now that the land’s come back Electric City’s gonna save us all. We can go home together, you and me, and build a house and we’ll have a candle in every window so you always feel at home…”

  The Dorchester dinner menu stopped abruptly. The lady dropped to her fishnetted knees and peered at us through the glass, her brilliant glossy red hair tumbling down, her spangled eyes searching for us beyond the glass.

  “Whoa, sweetie, slow down,” she said. “You’re liable to scare a girl off that way.”

  All I could see in the world was Goodnight Moon’s brown eyes and the sweat drying on his brown chest. Brown like the earth and all its promises. “I don’t care,” he said. “You scared, Tetley?” I shook my head. “Nothing can scare us now. Emperor Shakespeare said he’s seen land, real dry land, and we have a plan and we’re gonna get everything back again and be fat happy Fuckwits like we were always supposed to be.”

  The Peep Show girl’s glittering eyes filled up with tears. She put her hand on the glass. “Oh… oh, baby… that’s just something we say. We always say it. To everyone. It’s our best show. Gives people hope, you know? But there’s nothing out there, sugar. Nothing but ocean and more ocean and a handful of drifty lifeboat cities like yours circling the world like horses on a broken-down carousel. Nothing but blue.”

  10.

  We Are So Lucky

  IT WOULD BE nice for me if you could just say you understand. I want to hear that just once. Goodnight Moon didn’t. He didn’t believe her and he didn’t believe me and he sold me out in the end in spite of gas masks and kissing and Madeline Brix and the man crooning in our ears that he was happy because all he could hear was Emperor William Shakespeare the Eleventh singing out his big lie. RESURRECTION! REDEMPTION! REVIVIFICATION! LAND HO!

  “No, because, see,” my sweetheart wept on the boardwalk while the wheel spun dizzily behind his head like an electric candy crown, “we have a plan. We’ve worked so hard. It has to happen. The mayor said as soon as we had news of dry land, the minute we knew, we’d turn it on and we’d get there first and the continents would be ours, Garbagetowners, we’d inherit the Earth. He’s gonna tell everyone when the Pier leaves. At the farewell party.”

 
“Turn what on?”

  Resurrection. Redemption. Renovation. All those years behind the fence Electric City had been so busy. Disassembling all those engines they hoarded so they could make a bigger one, the biggest one. Pooling fuel in great vast stills. Practicing ignition sequences. Carving up a countryside they’d never even seen between the brightboys and brightgirls and we could have some, too, if we were good.

  “You want to turn Garbagetown into a Misery Boat,” I told him. “So we can just steam on ahead into nothing and go mad and use up all the gas and batteries that could keep us happy in mixtapes for another century here in one hot minute.”

  “The Emperor said…”

  “He said his name was Duke Orsino of Illyria, too. And then Roderigo when they did the werewolf play. Do you believe that? If they’d found land, don’t you think they’d have stayed there?”

  But he couldn’t hear me. Neither could Maruchan when I tried to tell him the truth in the Peep Show. All they could see was green. Green leafy trees and green grass and green ivy in some park that was lying at the bottom of the sea. We dreamed different dreams now, my brother and I, and all my dreams were burning.

  Say you understand. I had to. I’m not a nihilist or a murdercunt or a terrorwhore. They were gonna use up every last drop of Garbagetown’s power to go nowhere and do nothing and instead of measuring out teaspoons of good, honest gas, so that it lasts and we last all together, no single thing on the patch would ever turn on again, and we’d go dark, really dark, forever. Dark like the bottom of a hole. They had no right. They don’t understand. This is it. This is the future. Garbagetown and the sea. We can’t go back, not ever, not even for a minute. We are so lucky. Life is so good. We’re going on and being alive and being shitty sometimes and lovely sometimes just the same as we always have, and only a Fuckwit couldn’t see that.

  I waited until Brighton Pier cast off, headed to the next rickety harbor of floating foolboats, filled with players and horns and glittering wheels and Dorchester menus and fresh mountains of letters we wouldn’t read the answers to for another twenty years. I waited until everyone was sleeping so nobody would get hurt except the awful engine growling and panting to deliver us into the dark salt nothing of an empty hellpromise.

  It isn’t hard to build a bomb in Electric City. It’s all just laying around behind that fence where a boy held my hand for the first time. All you need is a match.

  11.

  What You Came For

  IT’S SUCH A beautiful day out. My hibiscus is just gigantic, red as the hair on a peep show dancer. If you want to wait, Big Bargains will be round later for her afternoon nap. Grape Crush usually brings a herring by in the evening. But I understand if you’ve got other places to be.

  It’s okay. You can hit me now. If you want to. It’s what you came for. I barely feel it anymore.

  Thank you for my instruction.

  MIKA MODEL

  Paolo Bacigalupi

  PAOLO BACIGALUPI (www.windupstories.com) has been published in Wired, High Country News, Salon.com, OnEarth Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His short fiction has been collected in Locus Award winner and PW Book of the Year Pump Six and Other Stories and has been nominated for three Nebula Awards, four Hugo Awards, and won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for best science fiction short story of the year. His debut novel The Windup Girl was named by Time as one of the ten best novels of 2009, and won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Compton Crook, and John W. Campbell Memorial Awards, among others. His debut young adult novel, Ship Breaker, is a Printz Award Winner, and a National Book Award Finalist, and was followed by The Drowned Cities, Zombie Baseball Beatdown, and The Doubt Factory. His most recent novel for adults, The Water Knife, was published in 2015. Bacigalupi currently lives in Western Colorado with his wife and son, where he is working on a new novel.

  THE GIRL WHO walked into the police station was oddly familiar, but it took me a while to figure out why. A starlet, maybe. Or someone who’d had plastic surgery to look like someone famous. Pretty. Sleek. Dark hair and pale skin and wide dark eyes that came to rest on me, when Sergeant Cruz pointed her in my direction.

  She came over, carrying a Nordstrom shopping bag. She wore a pale cream blouse and hip-hugging charcoal skirt, stylish despite the wet night chill of Bay Area winter.

  I still couldn’t place her.

  “Detective Rivera?”

  “That’s me.”

  She sat down and crossed her legs, a seductive scissoring. Smiled. It was the smile that did it.

  I’d seen that same teasing smile in advertisements. That same flash of perfect teeth and eyebrow quirked just so. And those eyes. Dark brown wide innocent eyes that hinted at something that wasn’t innocent at all. “You’re a Mika Model.”

  She inclined her head. “Call me Mika, please.”

  The girl, the robot… this thing—I’d seen her before, all right. I’d seen her in technology news stories about advanced learning node networks, and I’d seen her in opinion columns where feminists decried the commodification of femininity, and where Christian fire-breathers warned of the End Times for marriage and children.

  And of course, I’d seen her in online advertisements.

  No wonder I recognized her.

  This same girl had followed me around on my laptop, dogging me from site to site after I’d spent any time at all on porn. She’d pop up, again and again, beckoning me to click through to Executive Pleasures, where I could try out the ‘Real Girlfriend Experience™.’

  I’ll admit it; I clicked through.

  And now she was sitting across from me, and the website’s promises all seemed modest in comparison. The way she looked at me… it felt like I was the only person in the world to her. She liked me. I could see it in her eyes, in her smile. I was the person she wanted.

  Her blouse was unbuttoned at the collar, one button too many, revealing hints of black lace bra when she leaned forward. Her skirt hugged her hips. Smooth thighs, sculpted calves—

  I realized I was staring, and she was watching me with that familiar knowing smile playing across her lips.

  Innocent, but not.

  This was what the world was coming to. A robot woman who got you so tangled up you could barely remember your job.

  I forced myself to lean back, pretending nonchalance that felt transparent, even as I did it. “How can I help you… Mika?”

  “I think I need a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer?”

  “Yes, please.” She nodded shyly. “If that’s all right with you, sir.”

  The way she said “sir” kicked off a super-heated cascade of inappropriate fantasies. I looked away, my face heating up. Christ, I was fifteen again around this girl.

  It’s just software. It’s what she’s designed to do.

  That was the truth. She was just a bunch of chips and silicon and digital decision trees. It was all wrapped in a lush package, sure, but she was designed to manipulate. Even now she was studying my heart rate and eye dilation, skin temperature and moisture, scanning me for microexpressions of attraction, disgust, fear, desire. All of it processed in milliseconds, and adjusting her behavior accordingly. Popular Science had done a whole spread on the Mika Model brain.

  And it wasn’t just her watching me that dictated how she behaved. It was all the Mika Models, all of them out in the world, all of them learning on the job, discovering whatever made their owners gasp. Tens of thousands of them now, all of them wirelessly uploading their knowledge constantly (and completely confidentially, Executive Pleasures’ assured clients), so that all her sisters could benefit from nightly software and behavior updates.

  In one advertisement, Mika Model glanced knowingly over her shoulder and simply asked:

  “When has a relationship actually gotten better with age?”

  And then she’d thrown back her head and laughed.

  So it was all fake. Mika didn’t actually care about me, or want me. She was just
running through her designated behavior algorithms, doing whatever it took to make me blush, and then doing it more, because I had.

  Even though I knew she was jerking my chain, the lizard part of my brain responded anyway. I could feel myself being manipulated, and yet I was enjoying it, humoring her, playing the game of seduction that she encouraged.

  “What do you need a lawyer for?” I asked, smiling.

  She leaned forward, conspiratorial. Her hair cascaded prettily and she tucked it behind a delicate ear.

  “It’s a little private.”

  As she moved, her blouse tightened against her curves. Buttons strained against fabric.

  Fifty-thousand dollars’ worth of A.I. tease.

  “Is this a prank?” I asked. “Did your owner send you in here?”

  “No. Not a prank.”

  She set her Nordstrom bag down between us. Reached in and hauled out a man’s severed head. Dropped it, still dripping blood, on top of my paperwork.

  “What the—?”

  I recoiled from the dead man’s staring eyes. His face was frozen in a rictus of pain and terror.

  Mika set a bloody carving knife beside the head.

  “I’ve been a very bad girl,” she whispered.

  And then, unnervingly, she giggled.

  “I think I need to be punished.”

  She said it exactly the way she did in her advertisements.

  “DO I GET my lawyer now?” Mika asked.

  She was sitting beside me in my cruiser as I drove through the chill damp night, watching me with trusting dark eyes.