The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Oh, I appreciate that there’s a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn’t be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven’t seen your documents, and if I had, I could neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I’ll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly.”

  It’s funny. I’d anticipated that he’d answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: “we take this very seriously”; “we cannot comment on ongoing investigations”; “we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem” and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he’d assigned to a bug he owned.

  “Sergey, that’s not much of an answer.”

  He sipped that delicious tea some more. “Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn’t the sort of thing that you find out about, then everything stops until you’ve figured out what to do next.”

  I was off-balance. “I wanted—” I waved my hands. “I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?”

  He shrugged. He really didn’t seem very worried “Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs.”

  “What do you mean, ‘the labs’?”

  He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and work surfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each other’s screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling.

  “We’ve got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We’re really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There’s so much money in it, you know, but mostly it’s run by these entitled jerks who think that they’re geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys’ club.” For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

  “Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there’s a lot of difference between A/B—splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters.”

  At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can’t lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

  “I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is four hundred dollars, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is two thousand dollars a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are twenty thousand dollars for full replumbing on an eight- to ten-year basis with a seventy-five percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?”

  “Tenancy parameters?”

  He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don’t like that look. I suck at it. It’s an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I’m dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn’t mind it so much. But I do. It’s an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

  “Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable set point of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot-water temperature and volume, and so on. It’s basically just a solve-for-X question, but it’s one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

  “And, of course, it’s all highly sensitive to external conditions. There’s a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there’s an information-theory dimension to this that’s, well, it’s amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies?

  “Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there’s a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That’s just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow’s dinosaurs.

  “If we’re going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we’re disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That’s why we have the labs. They’re our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us—without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

  “So there’s not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It’s possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don’t really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We’re not a deterministic state machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it’d be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We’re not rentiers, you understand. We don’t own assets for a living. We do things with them. We’re doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We’re discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them—putting them to work.”

  His eyes glittered. “Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

  “It’s a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move look-ahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who’s pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That’s fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you’d be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we’d be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You’d be saving us opportunity cost. You’d be part of our chaos monkey.

  “Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I’m not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness, and perfect interactions. You want me to explain, right now, what we’re going to do about your piece of information. Here’s your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it; we will test those models; and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inven
tory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?”

  I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey’s eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he’d been matter-of-fact, like he’d been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I’d never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

  It scared me. I’d encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I’d ever seen. It had a purity that was almost seductive.

  But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

  “I hear that I’m going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound. You’ve got a process server waiting for me. That’s what I hear.”

  Sergey shrugged. “And?”

  “And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I’m out on the street?”

  “What’s your point?”

  He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman—transhuman?—in that dispassionate mien.

  “Don’t kick me out of my place.”

  “Ah. Excuse me a second.”

  He finished his tea, set the cup down, and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn’t try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

  He came back. “Done,” he said. “Is there anything else? We’re pretty busy around here.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “No, that’s about it.”

  “All right then,” he said. “Are you going to leave me your documents?” “Yes,” I said, and passed him a stack of hard copies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully in the middle and put it in one of the wide side pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

  I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o’clock. I had to be getting home.

  There was a process server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

  It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn’t done anything about Bryan’s eviction.

  Kadijah didn’t buy the coffee this time. And I bought my own banana bread.

  “I met that Sergey dude,” she said.

  “Creepy, huh?”

  She blew on her coffee. She drank it black. “Wicked smart, I think. And it looks like he’s got your number.”

  Kadijah heard about the mass evictions through the Ftp; she’d been watching it carefully. When she messaged me, I assumed that she was outraged on all our behalf. She’d made an offer of free, uncensored connectivity for six months for everyone in the Termite Mound and everyone who’d been evicted. But she’d met Sergey? “He’s scary, too,” she said as an afterthought. “But scary smart.”

  I’d been taking Miskatonic as an existence proof of a part of the world that the rot-fungus had not yet colonized. But afterward, I found myself turning our conversation over and over in my head. Yes, maybe she had offered all that great, free, uncensored Internet goodness because she was outraged by the dirty tricks campaign. But maybe she was doing it because she knew that appearing outraged would make her—and her company—seem like the kind of nice people to whom we should all give more money. Maybe they don’t give a damn about Ftp or fairness or eviction. Maybe it’s just an elaborate game of sound bites and kabuki gestures that are all calibrated to the precise sociopathic degree necessary to convey empathy and ethics without ever descending into either. She hadn’t bought the coffee or the banana bread.

  It’s easy to slip into this kind of metacognitive reverie and hard to stop once you start. Now I found myself questioning my own motives, scouring my subconscious for evidence of ego, self-promotion, and impurity.

  The thing was.

  The thing was.

  The thing was that I had not ever met someone like Sergey before. Sergey, who’d shown me something glittering and cool and vast that waited for us to realize it and bring it to perfection. Sergey, who’d both understood the collective action problem and found it to be secondary, a thing to solve on the way to solving something bigger and more important.

  Sergey’s words had awoken in me a feverish curiosity, an inability to see the world as it had once been. And I hated the feeling. It was the sense that my worldview had come adrift, all my certainty calving off like an iceberg and floating away to sea. If you accepted Sergey’s idea, then the human race was just the symbiotic intestinal flora of a meta-organism that would use us up and crap us out as needed. The global networks that allowed us to organize ourselves more efficiently were so successful because they let businesses run their supply chains more efficiently, and all the socializing and entertainment and chatter were just a side effect. Ftp was a mild pathogen, a few stray harmful bacteria in the colon of the corporate over-organism, and if it ever got to the point where it was any kind of real threat, the antibodies would show up to tear it to parts so it could be flushed away.

  In other words, I was the rot-fungus. Everything I did, everything I’d done, was an infection, and not even a very successful one.

  Christmas break arrived quicker than I’d have guessed. Bryan and his girlfriend had me over to their new place for dinner during the last week of classes. She was an elf, too, of course, and their place was all mossy rocks and driftwood and piles of leaves. The food was about what you’d expect, but it was better than the slurry I’d been gulping at my desk while I wrestled with my term assignments and crammed for exams.

  The Internet access at the Termite Mound was now uncensored, but I still found myself working at the lab. There was something comforting about being around my lab mates instead of huddling alone in my dorm room.

  Bryan’s girlfriend, Lana, was in mechanical engineering and she made some pretty great-looking mobiles, which dangled and spun around the tiny studio, their gyrations revealing the hidden turbulence of our exhalations. Every time I moved, I whacked one or another of them, making their payloads of mossy rocks and artful twigs clatter together. The floor was littered with their shed dander, which I took to be a deliberate act of elfy-welfy feng shui.

  “So, how’s things at the Termite Mound?” Bryan asked as we wound down over a glass of floral mead, which is pretty terrible, even by the standards of elf cuisine.

  It was the question that had hung over the whole evening. After all, I’d cost Bryan his home and his job and had walked away scot-free.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, the city and the university are both investigating MIT Residences LLC, and it looks like they’re going to be paying some pretty big fines. There was a class-action lawyer hanging around out front last week, trying to track down the old tenants who’d been turfed out. So there’s going to be some more bad road ahead of them.”

  “Good,” he said, with feeling. The expression of rage and bitterness that crossed his face was not elfin in the slightest. It was the face of someone who’d been screwed over and knew he had no chance of ever getting back at his attackers.

  “Yeah,” I said again. The class-action guy had really been a gut punch for me. Class action was so old school, the thing that Ftp was supposed to replace with something fast, nimble, networked, and collective. Class action was all about bottom-feedin
g lawyers slurping up the screwed-over like krill and making a meal of their grievances. Ftp let the krill organize into a powerful mass in its own right, with the ability to harness and command the predatory legal kraken that had once been its master. The fact that Ftp had managed to get us cheap, unfiltered broadband, while this sleazoid was proposing to actually skewer the great beast, straight through the wallet? It made me feel infinitesimal.

  “But you’re still there,” he said. The place seemed a lot smaller. Bryan seemed a lot less elfin.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t guess they figure they can afford to evict me.”

  “That worked out well for you, then.”

  “Bryan,” Lana said, putting her hand on his arm. “Come on. It’s not Lukasz’s fault those assholes are douchehats. He didn’t make them fire you. It’s—” She waved her hands at the mobiles, the walls, the wide world. “It’s just how it is. The system, right?”

  None of us said anything for a while. We drank our mead.

  “Want to go vape something?” I said. There were lots of legal highs on campus. Some of them were pretty elfy, too. I wanted to blot out the world right then, which wasn’t elfy, but we could all name our poisons.

  I stumbled into the cold with them, in a haze of self-pity and self-doubt. The winter had come on quick and bitter, one of those Boston deep freezes, the combined gale-force wind, subzero temperature, and high humidity that got right into your bones. Too cold to talk, at least.

  As we settled into a crowd of vapers shivering in front of a brew pub, I heard a familiar voice. I couldn’t make out the words, but the tones cut through the cold and the self-pity and brought me up short. I turned around.

  “Hey, Lukasz,” Sergey said. He was in the center of a group of five other guys, all vaping from little lithium-powered pacifiers that fit over their index fingernails, giving them the look of Fu Manchu viziers.