The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “I’ll get back to you soon, okay?”

  I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

  “Who is this?”

  “Lukasz?” The voice was choked with tears.

  “Who is this?” I said again.

  “It’s Bryan.” I couldn’t place the voice or the name.

  “Bryan who?”

  “From the Termite Mound’s customer service desk.” Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I’m not good at tough love.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “They’ve fired me,” he said. “I got called into my boss’s office an hour ago, and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm. He wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them—”

  “What if they didn’t have any violations?”

  He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. “Are you kidding? You’re always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the mound? It’s, like, sixty pages long.”

  “OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?”

  There was a pause. It drew out. “No,” he said, his voice barely a whisper. “I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me.”

  Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). “Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?” But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

  “I’ve got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there’s been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there’s always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it’s so central and all. I kept records.”

  “What kind of records?”

  “Hard copies of e-mails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It’s ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they’d have to do an air-quality audit or fix a ramp, I’d have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence.” He paused a moment. “They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too.”

  The Termite Mound should’ve been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you’d find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

  I was going to turn on the lights.

  “You’ve got all that, huh?”

  “Tons of it,” he said. “Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they’d try and blame it on me. I wanted records.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?”

  “I’m at the Coop right now,” he said. “Using a study booth.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Five minutes, then?”

  “I’m on my way.”

  The Coop’s study booths had big signs warning that everything you did there was recorded—sound, video, infrared, data—and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it’s bugged—whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

  I beat him to the T entrance and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn’t good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discreetly placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what its policy was. No one ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA’s message could always be boiled down to seven words: “ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.” Or, more succinctly: “YOU LOSE.”

  I felt bad about Bryan’s job. It was his own deal, of course. He’d stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn’t held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But, of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

  Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that’d do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras’ white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infrared range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him to my chosen spot.

  “You got it?” I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost-pepper-flavored, though that was mostly marketing. No way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

  “I encrypted it with your public key,” he said, handing me a folded-up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weak sauce—the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student click-bait thrillers—but if he’d really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he’d handed me a hard copy of the URL instead of e-mailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

  I folded the paper away. “What should I be looking for?”

  “It’s all organized and tagged. You’ll see.” He looked nervous. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “Well, for starters, I’m going to call them up and tell them I have it.”

  “What?” He looked like he was going to cry.

  “Come on,” I said. “I’m not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I’m about to get evicted, right?”

  “Technically, you are evicted. There’s a process server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. Forty-eight hours to clear out.”

  “Right,” I said. “I don’t want to have to go look for a place to live while I’m also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone’s Internet connection. Get serious. So I’m going to go and talk to Messrs. Amoral, Nonmoral, and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I’m going public with, and it’ll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now.”

  It’s time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I’m into it. I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

  But the reality is that I can’t really help myself. There’s some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they’re small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you’re a walking, suppurating lesion.

  No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a “MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2,000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS R
ESIDENCE WORKER” sign. You start out trying to do something good, then you realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn’t seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further toward the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

  The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven’t succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it. Think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge fund in a leveraged takeover, looted, and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

  I am terrified of the rot-fungus because it seems like I’m the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don’t they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven’t they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

  I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they’ll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don’t these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don’t they ever buy a train ticket? Don’t they ever eat at a fast-food joint? Can’t they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I’ve figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who’s fighting seems to be fighting against something else—injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus’s rot is what causes all of those things.

  I’m convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, “Dammit, my life doesn’t have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship, and fear in it. How do I fix that?” Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

  “Lukasz, you don’t know what you’re doing. These guys, they’re—”

  “What?” I said. “Are they the Mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?”

  He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. “No, but they’re ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They’re not normal.”

  The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. “Yeah, that’s okay. I’m used to abnormal.” I am the most abnormal person I know.

  “Be careful, seriously,” he said.

  “Thanks, Bryan,” I said. “Don’t worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?”

  He chewed his lip. “Don’t,” he said. “They’ll know it was me if you do that.”

  I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (okay, I’d helped), and he was going to couchsurf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable sellout-ism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and went and made some preparations.

  Messrs. Amoral, Nonmoral, and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office block that only had ten floors but whose company directory listed over eight hundred businesses. I knew the kind of place because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unraveled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con artists who’d destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

  At first, I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral, and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called “International Holdings [Holdings], Ltd”) was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

  I punched #300# on the ancient touch screen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue, and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: “What?”

  “I’m here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC.”

  “Send an e-mail.”

  “I’m a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero.” I let that sink in. “I’ve got some documents I’d like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC.” I put a bit of heavy English on documents. “Please.” I put even more English on please. I’ve seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do Al Pacinoid-overwound, dangerous dude as well as anyone. “Please,” I said again, meaning right now.

  There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. “Come up,” a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

  I’d expected something sinister—a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT’s best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who’d ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

  The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking work surfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable trays and conduits. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

  There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the work surfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful or handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

  One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

  “Lukasz, right?” He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly; though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

  The door closed behind me, and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

  “I’m Sergey. Can I get you a cup
of coffee? Tea? Some water?”

  The coffee smelled good. “No, thank you,” I said. “I don’t think I’ll be here for long.”

  “Of course. Come and sit.”

  The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who’d sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

  He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. “You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling myself together. “I’ve got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants—students—who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound.”

  He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn’t pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligible word. It was as though they were all going “murmurmurmurmur,” though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

  “Ah,” he said at last. “Well, that’s very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I’ll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they’re properly dealt with?”

  “I can give you a set,” I said. “But I’ll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the Tech and the local WikiLeaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don’t seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater.”