Now We Are Ten: Celebrating the First Ten Years of NewCon Press

by Peter F. Hamilton

  He sipped the Blue Jasmine. His disorganized thoughts floated and bumped into each other like cargo in a flooded hold. “That’s the thing, I don’t know if it’s my real name or not. I guess it doesn’t matter. The name is like the body. It’s an identity marker, not the identity itself.”

  “Joe. Honey. What the hell are you talking about?” Then in a stage whisper, “Quick, give me that.” She grabbed the almost-empty glass, finished it, and put the glass down just as the bartender turned and frowned suspiciously at them both. Had the raccoon whispered to him? “May I have another glass of water,” Allison said. “This one’s warm.”

  Looking unhappy, the bartender scooped ice into a glass, filled it with water, and set it before her. She gave him a sloppy lipstick smile and turned back to Joe. “Do go on.”

  “Never mind,” Joe said. He felt defeated by the encounter, as he did by most encounters.

  Allison grabbed his jacket sleeve. “No you don’t. Tell me the rest of it.”

  Joe looked at her hand. “Remember – I don’t actually know any of this.”

  “Go on.”

  “I don’t belong here. I’m not one of you. One of them, I mean – if you’re a Ten.”

  “You’ve got eyes. Do you think I’m a ten?”

  “I want to think it. That code, if it could unlock me, then I would know everything.”

  “Who’s ‘them’?”

  “Them. The human race. The natural humans.”

  Allison shook her head, like it was attached to a wobbly spring, making her hair flip across her cheek. “Sorry, but you pass. You might not be a shining example, but you definitely pass the human test.”

  Joe smiled weakly. “What it feels like is I just started, out of nowhere, in a dumpy apartment a couple of blocks from here. I didn’t even have a name until I heard you say ‘Joe,’ and then I thought that sounded right. I thought, yeah, that’s me. I’m Joe. For sure. Before that, I called myself Ethan, but that’s just a name on a license I found in a drugstore. Look.”

  He dug his wallet out of his hip pocket. It wasn’t really his wallet. He’d lost that on the subway a couple of weeks ago. He opened the wallet and showed Allison the driver’s license, which had the face of a movie star on it and the name “Ethan Hunt.”

  Allison snorted. “Impossible Missions Agent. Are you even for real?”

  “It was already in the wallet. Ethan’s a good name, as good as any other. At least you get ten if you double it, unlike Joe. After I lost my real wallet, I started not remembering my name. The name I’ve been using as a human.”

  “I don’t get it. You have amnesia or something?”

  “No, not like that.”

  “Joe? You’re making my head hurt.”

  “My head hurts all the time, too.”

  “If you don’t remember who you are, that’s amnesia.”

  “Except I do remember. It just isn’t believable. So I don’t. Believe it. I don’t believe my own story, is what I’m saying. If you stop believing your story, the story stops working.”

  Allison blinked. “What story?”

  “My story. My life story. Everything I’ve done, every decision, every external force that moved me – everything that led to that stinking apartment. I can’t believe it.”

  “But is your name really Joe, or isn’t it?”

  “Like I said, when I heard you say it, that’s when I realized it could be mine.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re making fun of me.”

  “I’m not making fun of you.’

  Doubtfully, Allison said, “Okay.”

  Joe experimented with a smile. It felt false, which made him wonder if he meant it. No, it was a sincere but failed effort. You could say the same for the last thirty odd years. Except Allison smiled back at him, so maybe it wasn’t a failure. How could he tell? How did anybody tell?

  Allison picked up the empty glass. “I wish I had another drink.”

  “If we wait a few minutes maybe he will give you one. Or he’ll let me order, probably, but I think he’s on to us. I don’t trust that raccoon.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not saying it’s alive, playing possum or whatever. But it could be a disguise for surveillance equipment with a direct link to the bartender.”

  She looked at him for a long moment, then seemed to come to a conclusion about something. The conclusion unhooked her attention from Joe, and she looked past him. “He’s not going to give me any more drinks tonight. It’s how it goes.”

  It took a minute for Joe to realize she was talking about the bartender. “We could go somewhere else.”

  “Out the door with you, alone? I’m not that drunk.”

  Joe deflated a little, probably not enough for anyone outside his head to notice. Maybe if he could act more normal for once, she would trust him. ‘What time is it?”

  Allison glanced at her phone, the screen a glowing playing card in her hand, briefly lamp-bright, then black again. “Almost midnight. You got an appointment?”

  “No. I take these pills? One a day. I started with ten, but there’s only three left. I took one a little while ago, but if it’s past midnight then technically it’s a new day.”

  “What kind of pills?”

  “They keep me from... spreading out. You know how a wave rolls out on the beach and kind of absorbs into the sand? That’s how I get, except the sand is people, all the people everywhere. Sometimes the animals, too. There’s no more of me left at that point, because I’m everywhere else.”

  Joe reached in his pocket for the plastic pill container and set it on the bar. A few strips of paper, all that remained of the label Joe had scraped off, clung to the orange plastic.

  Allison picked up the container. “Why’d you tear the label off?”

  “I didn’t believe it anymore. Besides, they were the wrong pills.” Joe unscrewed the cap and shook a pill into his hand. “These are the right ones. They don’t make me so sleepy.”

  Allison leaned in close. “It looks like some kind of candy.”

  “It isn’t candy.”

  Allison picked the pill out of his palm before he could pull his hand away. She scraped it with her ruby-painted fingernail. She held it under her nose. “Smells like licorice.” Allison touched the ‘pill’ with the tip of her tongue. “It is licorice.”

  Joe looked away. He watched his fingers drum nervously on the bar. “It doesn’t matter what you think it is.”

  “It’s not what I think it is – it’s what it is.”

  Joe looked up. “The point is, it’s what I think it is, not what anyone else thinks. That’s how my powers work now, since I don’t know how to unlock my true identity anymore. Which is why I thought you might be one of the Ten and BOOSTAR555 might be the code, only I don’t know how to use it. So I’m locked.”

  Allison popped the bit of licorice into her mouth.

  “Hey –”

  “Candy,” she said.

  His frantic heart bumped against the bones of his chest. “I have to go.” He stood awkwardly, as if his legs didn’t belong to him.

  “Have a nice day,” Allison said. “By the way, do you even hear the words coming out of your mouth?”

  “Of course I hear them.”

  “Maybe all you hear are the voices in your head.” She laughed, which sounded like other people at other times in his life, all through his life, really. His human life. Allison covered her mouth with her hand. “Hey, I’m sorry. I’m a little drunk.”

  “It’s not voices, in the sense you mean it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all the voices. Every voice, everywhere. The whole world comes out of me. It comes right out of here.” Joe tapped his forehead. “Your whole world, everybody’s whole world.” Allison stared at him like she was seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see, which he hated but was used to it, generally.

  “Take it easy,” the bartender said.

  “If I was unlocked, I could snap my fingers and poo
f the whole world would go away. Your whole world.”

  Now everybody in the bar was staring at him. It felt as it always felt, even when he wasn’t in a bar, even when he was alone in his room, which is where he mostly stayed. He’d lost his last crappy job, washing dishes at The Burrito Barn. The money was mostly gone. Pretty soon he would be on the street. That’s why it was so important to unlock his powers.

  He backed up toward the door, moving his lips, counting. Everybody watched him, even the raccoon. As he turned and pushed the door open, Allison said, “Hey, mister, try saying the code backward.”

  One of the guys sitting at the end of the bar laughed. “Yeah, dude,” he said, “Make the big bad world go away, starting with yourself.”

  Out on the sidewalk, Joe or whoever he was supposed to be, quietly said, “555RATSOOB” then snapped his fingers at the door under the pink neon martini glass, like he was snapping them at everybody everywhere, all of them. “Poof. Poof.”

  The bar didn’t go anywhere. Allison wasn’t one of the Ten. BOOSTAR555, frontwards or backwards, was not the code. And his little black pills were nothing but licorice bits.

  Poof.

  The world didn’t vanish, but Joe did, leaving himself standing on the sidewalk. What surprised him, while there was still a ‘him’ that could be surprised, was that the raccoon really was playing possum, perched up there so quiet and still, watching over the humans in the Moonlight Lounge.

  How to Grow Silence from Seed

  Tricia Sullivan

  Rob has never been so happy. As he runs up the stairs of the community lab on Romford Road his boots make the metal steps resound like gongs. He is fresh from a finance meeting. Even though it’s after eleven pm and most of the crew will be in the pub, he knows Injala will still be working.

  Except that Injala isn’t there. At her station a child crouches on the floor, covered in emergents. They look like worms. He recoils. He stares for some seconds before he realises that this is Injala herself. She is shrunken and distressed out of all proportion to the problems Rob knows how to deal with. When he bends over her she grabs hold of his forearms with a bitter strength, her young eyes nightshade with fear.

  “The walls are trying to kill me,” she says in a tear-guttered voice. “The walls have a mind and it’s trying to shrink me to a point and then bang me to a negative dimension. Look!”

  She points. Up in the high industrial windows curl Injala’s augmented vines, their leaves gilded by streetlights. All around, the pock-marked walls of her workspace are the same as ever, their paint spewing a cycle of news and entertainment feeds because she has been working on the ambient effects of mainstream media culture.

  Her friends also spill bright and unreal from the walls, expressing increasingly concerned enquiries for her well-being.

  “Injala? Do you need someone to sit with you until it passes?”

  “Quit running your cogs, baby. Take a break.”

  “Remember, it’s only information. It’s not real, Injala. You can pull out any time.”

  The friends’ distant panic makes Rob feel oppressed. He shuts them down. In a thin film over every other data layer, Injala’s work pops and fizzes along the walls with what looks and sounds like noise: the activity of the plants she has been training. No one but Injala understands them: she has laid her cogs open to them.

  “There’s your trouble right there,” he mutters. He should have seen this coming.

  He glances around the loft as if expecting to find a helpful fairy godmother to take over from here. At the far end of the deserted communal space, Abdul is doing some old-school recreational DNA hacking, oblivious. Rob looks back at his girlfriend. She used to be so wild. Her ideas used to take his breath away. Who knows what lives in her flesh now? Interfacing with plant AIs has turned her into an illegal mess of terror, irrationality and snot. She has become a phenomenon wholly beyond his scope.

  “Come on, Inj. Snap out of it. I want to tell you about the meeting I had. About my visibility project. Our project.”

  He says “our” more in the hope that recalling her to the days when they worked together will cheer her up than because he means it (her only involvement was to suggest a modelling technique). Then he notices the crawling things slipping from her skin to the fabric of his shirt, melting into him with hallucinatory ease. He jerks away.

  *

  “Love is a predator,” she said when they first hooked up at Imperial. She was like a maze, a series of narrowings of choices that led around corners that led to him losing himself in her. Her sensory appetites coupled with a seeming disinterest in him – her endless fascination with everything but him – made him believe there was something to her. He believed her a treasure vault of sorts, a person to be kept and encircled and unlocked over time.

  Rob now realises he has unlocked a nutjob.

  “Did your plants make these emergents?”

  She shakes her head. “We only made them visible. These influences have been here all this time, but I couldn’t see them. Look, they’re everywhere... they are in the waves. They’ve been attacking me and I didn’t even know it. They are attacking all of us, all the time!”

  “This has gone far enough,” he says. “Look at yourself. It can’t continue.”

  He drags a ladder from the corner of the loft and puts it up to the windows. He fancies that the plants are snarling at him even though they can’t move. They are smart enough to make him nervous with their ability to receive information out of the air, interpret meaning. Injala has been developing this species for six years. Her thesis shows that plant filtration can reveal hitherto unrecognized structures in the bombardment of signals from commercial entertainment. “Dangerous ideas,” she wrote, “fly stealth underneath ordinary signals. Some of these can be shown to be the product of adroit manipulation by advertisers, but others are emergent. The latter are more sophisticated than anything the designers can dream up, and they appear to act volitionally.”

  Privately, she speaks of demons.

  Perhaps because her tendency to self-experiment has resulted in a growing dossier of mental illness, Injala has failed to convince any universities that the results of her self-inflicted experiments are unbiased. “Maybe if she hadn’t drunk the Kool-Aid she’d be taken seriously,” one American department head bluntly remarked. When Rob hinted that Injala could go to work for one of the ad agencies who were keen to use emergents, everyone in the bootstrap lab rose up and came at him as if he’d suggested the murder of a thousand kittens. Never mind. Let the freelancers have their little part-time projects. Rob is going to be large and he only wants the same for Injala.

  He tugs the nearest plant from its hook. “Inj, these influences are abstract. They can’t hurt you if you can’t see them. Just come out of augmentation and they won’t bother you.”

  “No!” she screams, and even Abdul looks up in alarm. “Rob, don’t!”

  Gripping the pot in one hand, he opens the window with the other. Her hysteria is getting to him. He just wants to make it stop. He will throw them all out, smash the plants on the pavement below. He doesn’t care if they are sentient.

  She scrabbles up the ladder behind him and she seizes the trailing vines.

  “Please. Don’t hurt them.”

  He presses down on the urge to throw the fucking plant. In the same way you press down on a fresh wound. Stop the bleeding. He replaces the plant on its hook and climbs down. He has to be the better man.

  “Everything okay, guys?” Abdul calls.

  There is a mild struggle between the two of them, faintly sexual. Most of the crawling things stop at his clothes, but the ones that touch his skin make him shudder. Everything about her freaks him out, even the child-smell of her dirty hair.

  “I’m getting you to hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  He puts his hands on her shoulders, determined to calm her down. That’s when her head falls off.

>   He fumbles it like a basketball, startlingly heavy and bone-hard hot. The cushy softness of her face plops into his hands like a leaden sponge. He tries not to stick his fingers in her eyes, but one of them falls out nonetheless. It looks back at him from the floor.

  He probably screams.

  The rest of her body is clawing at him, snatching at the head as if it suspects him of trying to steal it. Rob notices that there is no arterial bleeding even though he can see the severed ends of the vessels and the stumps of neck tendons. He somehow puts the head back on her neck but then she sets up an unholy wailing. The sound of her drives him away. He runs out of the building and onto the street. There, he is sick.

  “It’s okay,” he reminds himself. “That didn’t happen. Did. Not. Happen.”

  It’s obvious she somehow induced him to shift levels – or the plants did – and he feels like a tool. He is too experienced with augmentation to be tricked into dropping out the bottom of reality without notice. Still, the neural effect is convincing enough that his terrified body won’t allow him to return to the lab.

  He hangs around for a while. He can see Abdul’s shadow moving back and forth past the lit windows. No ambulance comes. She’s probably all right.

  He pushes off.

  *

  Rob will write Injala a vague letter, apologising for the breakup because he knows she will blame him even though he hasn’t done anything wrong. “I have backers,” he’ll write. “If you were yourself right now, I know you would want me to go for this. It’s going to be large.”

  Rob doesn’t actually know how she would feel about his project being funded while hers is not, but his cognitive dissonance containment capacity has already maxed out; he must take his former girlfriend’s approval as given. As for the emergents that cling to his clothes, he will capture them and keep them sealed for months before finding the courage to investigate. Only when his own project fails and the investors drop his contract will he get curious enough to check out the apps that her plants have extracted from the maelstrom of information on the waves.