Year’s Best SF 16

by Hartwell, David G. ; Cramer, Kathryn

  Jake nods enthusiastically. “As amazing as it ever is.”

  “No, he meant exceptionally amazing. As in, above and beyond the performance at any previous show.”

  Jake’s face tightens at the corners. “I heard it too, buddy. It was fine. On the nail. The way we like it.”

  “I got the impression it was something more than . . .” But I trail off, and I’m not sure why. “You sure there’s nothing we need to talk about?”

  “Nothing at all.”

  “Fine.” I give an easy smile, but there’s still something unresolved, something in the air between us. “Then I guess I’ll go see how the big guy’s doing.”

  “You do that, buddy.”

  I unbuckle from the seat and walk along the drumming, droaning length of the Antonov’s fuselage. It’s an AN-225, the largest plane ever made, built fifty years ago for the Soviet space program. There are only two of them in the world, and Morbid Management and Gladius Biomech have joint ownership of both. Putting Derek’s show together is so logistically complex that we need to be assembling one stage set when the other’s still in use. The Antonovs leapfrog the globe, crammed to the gills with scaffolding, lighting rigs, speaker stacks, instruments, screens, the whole five hundred tonne spectacle of a modern rock show. Even Derek’s cage is only a tiny part of the whole cargo.

  I make my way past two guitar techs and a roadie deep into a card game, negotiate a long passage between two shipping containers, and pass the fold-down desk where Jake has his laptop set up, reviewing the concert footage, and just beyond the desk lies the cage. It’s lashed down against turbulence, scuffed and scratched from where it was loaded aboard. We touch up the yellow paint before each show so it all looks gleaming and new. I brush a hand against the tubular steel framing.

  Strange to think how alarmed and impressed I was the first time, when Jake threw the switch. It’s not the same now. I know Derek a lot better than I did then, and I realise that a lot of his act is, well, just that. Act. He’s a pussycat, really. A born showman. He knows more about image and timing than almost any rock star I’ve ever worked with.

  Derek’s finishing off his dinner. Always has a good appetite after a show, and at least it’s not lines of coke and underage hookers he has a taste for.

  He registers my presence and fixes me with those vicious yellow eyes.

  Rumbles a query, as if to say, can I help you?

  “Just stopping by, friend. I heard you went down a storm tonight. Melted some faces with Extinction Event. Bitching Rise of the Mammals, too. We’ll be shifting so many downloads we may even have to start charging to cover our overheads.”

  Derek offers a ruminative gurgle, as if this is an angle he’s never considered before.

  “Just felt I ought to.” And I rap a knuckle against the cage. “You know, give credit. Where it’s due.”

  Derek looks at me for a few more seconds, then goes back to his dinner.

  You can’t say I don’t try.

  I’d been flying when Jake got back in touch. It was five years ago, just after the real-life events of my dream. I was grogged out from departure lounge vodka slammers, hoping to stay unconscious until the scramjet was wheels down and I was at least one continent away from the chaos in LA. Wasn’t to be, though. The in-flight attendant insisted on waking me up and forcing me to make a choice between two meal serving options: chicken that tasted like mammoth, or mammoth that tasted like chicken.

  What was it going to be?

  “Give me the furry elephant,” I told him. “And another vodka.”

  “Ice and water with that, sir?”

  “Just the vodka.”

  The mammoth really wasn’t that bad—certainly no worse than the chicken would have been—and I was doing my best to enjoy it when the incoming call icon popped into my upper right visual field. For a moment I considered ignoring it completely. What could it be about, other than the mess I’d left behind after the robots went berserk? But I guess it was my fatal weakness that I’d never been able to not take a call. I put down the cutlery and pressed a finger against the hinge of my jaw. I kept my voice low, subvocalising. Had to be my lawyer. Assuming I still had a lawyer.

  “OK, lay it on me. Who’s trying to sue me, how much are we looking at, and what am I going to have to do to get them off my case?”

  “Fox?”

  “Who else. You found me on this flight, didn’t you?”

  “It’s Jake, man. I learned about your recent difficulties.”

  For a moment the vodka took the edge off my surprise. “You and the rest of the world.”

  Jake sounded pained. “At least make an effort to sound like you’re glad to hear from me, buddy. It’s been a while.”

  “Sorry, Jake. It’s just not been the best few days of my life, you understand?”

  “Rock and roll, my friend. Gotta roll with it, take the rough with the smooth. Isn’t that what we always said?”

  “I don’t know. Did we?” Irritation boiled up inside me. “I mean, from where I’m sitting, it’s not like we ever had much in common.”

  “Cutting, buddy. Cutting. And here I am calling you out of the blue with a business proposition. A proposition that might just dig you out of the hole you now find yourself in.”

  “What kind of proposition?”

  “It’s time to reactivate Morbid Management.”

  I let that sink in before responding, my mind scouting ahead through the possibilities. Morbid Management was defunct, and for good reason. We’d exhausted the possibilities of working together. Worse than that, our parting had left me with a very sour opinion of Jake Addison. Jake had always been the tail wagging that particular dog, and I’d always been prepared to go along with his notions. But he hadn’t been prepared to put his faith in me when I had the one brilliant idea of my career.

  We’d started off signing conventional rock acts. Mostly they were manufactured, put together with an eye on image and merchandising. But the problem with conventional rock acts is that they start having ideas of their own. Thinking they know best. Get ideas in their head about creative independence, artistic credibility, solo careers. One by one we’d watched our money-spinners fly apart in a whirlwind of ego and ambition. We figured there had to be something better.

  So we’d created it. Ghoul Group was the world’s first all-dead rock act. Of course you’ve heard of them: who hasn’t? You’ve probably even heard that we dug up the bodies at night, that we sucked the brains out of a failing mid-level pop act, or that they were zombies controlled by Haitian voodoo. Completely untrue, needless to say. It was all legal, all signed off and boilerplated. We kept the bodies alive using simple brain-stem implants, and we used the same technology to operate Ghoul Group on stage. Admittedly there was something Frankensteinesque about the boys and girls on stage—the dead look in their eyes, the scars and surgical stitches added for effect, the lifeless, parodic shuffle that passed for walking—but that was sort of the point.

  Kids couldn’t get enough of them. Merchandising went through the roof, and turned Morbid Management into a billion dollar enterprise.

  Only trouble was it couldn’t last. Rock promotion sucked money away as fast as it brought it in, and the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to keep manufacturing new acts. The fatal weakness of Ghoul Group was that the concept was easily imitated: anyone with access to a morgue and a good lawyer could get in on the act. We realised we had to move on.

  That was when we got into robotics.

  Jake and I had both been in metal acts before turning to management, and we were friendly with Metallica. The band was still successful, still touring, but they weren’t getting any younger. Meanwhile a whole raft of tribute acts fed off the desire for the fans to see younger versions of the band, the way they’d been twenty or thirty years before. Yet no matter how good they were, the tribute acts were never quite realistic enough to be completely convincing. What was needed—what might fill a niche that no one yet perceived—were tribute
acts that were completely indistinguishable from their models, and which could replicate them at any point in their careers. And—most importantly—never get tired doing it, or start demanding a raise.

  So we made them. Got in hock with the best Japanese robotics specialists and tooled up a slew of different incarnations of Metallica. Each robot was a lifesize, hyper-realistic replica of a given member of the band at a specific point in their career. After processing thousands of hours of concert footage, motion capture sofware enabled these robots to behave with staggering realism. They moved like people. They sounded like people. They sweated and exhaled. Unless you got close enough to look right into their eyes, there was no way at all to tell that you were not looking at the real thing.

  We commissioned enough robots to cover every market on the planet, and sent them out on tour. They were insanely successful. The real Metallica did well out of it and within months we were licensing the concept to other touring acts. The money was pumping in faster than we could account it. But at the same time, mindful of what had happened with Ghoul Group, we were thinking ahead. To the next big thing.

  That was when I’d had my one original idea.

  I’d been on another flight, bored out of my mind, watching some news item about robots being used to dismantle some Russian nuclear plant that had gone meltdown last century. These robots were Godzilla-sized machines, but the thing that struck me was that more or less humanoid in shape. They were being worked by specialist engineers from half way round the world, engineers who would zip into telepresence rigs and actually feel like they were wearing the robots; actually feel as if the reactor they were taking apart was the size of a doll’s house.

  It wasn’t the reactor I cared about, of course. It was the robots. I’d had a flash, a mental image. We were already doing Robot Metallica. What was to stop us doing Giant Robot Metallica?

  By the time I’d landed, I’d tracked down the company that made the demolition machines. By the time I’d checked in to my hotel and ordered room service, I’d established that they could, in principle, build them to order and incorporate the kind of animatronic realism we were already using with the lifesize robots. There was, essentially, no engineering barrier to us creating a twenty metre or thirty metre high James Hetfield or Lars Ulrich. We had the technology.

  Next morning, shivering with excitement, I put the idea to Jake. I figured it for an easy sell. He’d see the essential genius in it. He’d recognise the need to move beyond our existing business model.

  But Jake wasn’t buying.

  I’ve often wondered why he didn’t go for it. Was it not enough of a swerve for him, too much a case of simply scaling up what we were already doing? Was he shrewd enough to see the potential for disaster, should our robots malfunction and go berserk? Was it simply that it was my idea, not his?

  I don’t know. Even now, after everything else that’s happened—Derek and all the rest—I can’t figure it out. All I can be sure of is that I knew then that it was curtains for Morbid Management. If Jake wasn’t going to back me the one time I’d had an idea of my own, I couldn’t keep on working with him.

  So I’d split. Set up my own company. Continued negotiations with the giant demolition robot manufacturers and—somewhat sneakily, I admit—secured the rights from Metallica to all larger-than-life robotic reenactment activities.

  OK, so it hadn’t ended well. But the idea’d been sound. And stadiums can always be rebuilt.

  “You still there, buddy?”

  “Yeah, I’m still here.” I’d given Jake enough time to think I’d hung up on him. Let the bastard sweat a little, why not. Over the roar of the scramjet’s ballistic re-entry profile I said: “We’re gonna lose comms in a few moments. Why don’t you tell me what this is all about.”

  “Not over the phone. But here’s the deal.” And he gave me an address, an industrial unit on the edge of Helsinki. “You’re flying into Copenhagen, buddy. Take the ’lev, you can be in Helsinki by evening.”

  “You have to give me more than that.”

  “Like you to meet the future of rock and roll, Fox. Little friend of mine by the name of Derek. You’re going to like each other.”

  The bastard had me, of course.

  It was winter in Helsinki so evening came down cold and early. From the maglev I took a car straight out into the industrial sticks, a dismal warren of slab-sided warehouses and low-rise office units. Security lights blazed over fenced-off loading areas and nearly empty car parks, the asphalt still slick and reflective from afternoon rain. Beyond the immediate line of warehouses, walking cranes stomped around the docks, picking up and discarding shipping containers like they were coloured building blocks. Giant robots. I didn’t need to be reminded about giant fucking robots, not when I was expecting an Interpol arrest warrant to be declared in my name at any moment. But at least they wouldn’t come looking here too quickly, I thought. On the edge of Helsinki, with even the car now departed on some other errand, I felt like the last man alive, wandering the airless boulevards of some huge abandoned moonbase.

  The unit Jake had told me to go to was locked from the road, with a heavy duty barrier slid across the entrance. Through the fence, it looked semi-abandoned: weeds licking at its base, no lights on in the few visible windows, some of the security lights around it broken or switched off. Maybe I’d been set up. It wouldn’t be like Jake, but time had passed and I still wasn’t ready to place absolute, unconditional trust in my old partner. All the same, if Jake did want to get back at me for something, stranding me in a bleak industrial development was a very elaborate way of going about it.

  I pressed the intercom buzzer in the panel next to the barrier. I was half expecting no one to answer it and, if they did, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to explain my presence. But the voice that crackled through the grille was familiar and unfazed.

  “Glad you could make it, buddy. Stroll on inside and take a seat. I’ll be down in a minute. I can’t wait to show Derek off to you.”

  “I hope Derek’s worth the journey.”

  The barrier slid back. I walked across the damp concrete of the loading area to the service entrance. Now that I paid proper attention, the place wasn’t as derelict as I’d assumed. Cameras tracked me, moving stealthily under their rain hoods. I ascended a step, pushed against a door—which opened easily—and found myself entering some kind of lobby or waiting room. Beyond a fire door, a dimly illuminated corridor led away into the depths of the building. No lights on in the annex, save for the red eye of a coffee machine burbling away next to a small table and a set of chairs. I poured a cup, spooned in creamer and sat down. As my vision adjusted to the gloom, I made out some of the glossy brochures lying on the table. Most of them were for Gladius Biomech. I’d heard of the firm and recognised their swordfish logo. Most of what they did creeped me out. Once you started messing with genetics, the world was your walking, talking, tap-dancing oyster. I stroked one of the moving images and watched a cat sitting on a high chair and eating its dinner with a knife and fork, holding the cutlery in little furry human-like hands, while the family dined around it. Now your pet can share in your mealtimes—hygenically!

  The firedoor swung open. I put down the brochure hastily, as ashamed as if I’d been caught leafing through hardcore porn. Jake stood silhouetted in the dim lights of the corridor, kneelength leather jacket, hair still down to his collar.

  I put on my best laconic, deadpan voice. “So I guess we’re going into the pet business.”

  “Not quite,” Jake answered. “Although there may be merchandising options in that direction at some point. For now, though, it’s still rock and roll all the way.” He gestured back at the door he’d come through. “You want to meet Derek?”

  I tipped the coffee dregs into the wastebin. “Guess we don’t want to keep him waiting.”

  “Don’t worry about him. He’s not going anywhere.”

  I followed Jake into the corridor. He had changed a bit in the two years sin
ce we’d split the firm, but not by much. The hair was a little grayer, maybe not as thick as it used to be. Jake still had the soul patch under his lip and the carefully tended stubble on his cheeks. Still wore snakeskin cowboy boots without any measurable irony.

  “So what’s this all about?”

  “What I said. A new business opportunity. Time to put Morbid Management back on the road. Question is, are we ready to take things to the next level?”

  I smiled. “We. Like it’s a done deal already.”

  “It will be when you see Derek.”

  We’d reached a side-door: sheet metal with no window in it. Jake pressed his hand against a reader, submitted to an iris scan, then pushed open the door. Hard light spilled through the widening gap.

  “You keep this locked, but I’m able to walk in through the front door? Who are you worried about breaking in?”

  “It’s not about anyone breaking in,” Jake said.

  We were in a room large enough to hold a dozen semi-trucks. Striplights ran the length of the low, white-tiled ceiling. There were no windows, and most of the wall space was taken up with grey metal cabinets and what appeared to be industrial-size freezer units. There were many free-standing cabinets and cupboards, with benches laid out in long rows. The benches held computers and glassware and neat, toylike robotic things. Centrifuges whirred, ovens and chromatographs clicked and beeped. I watched a mechanical arm dip a pipette into a rack of test tubes, sampling or dosing each in quick sequence. The swordfish logo on the side of the robot was for Gladius Biomech.

  “Either you’re richer than I think,” I said, “or there’s some kind of deal going on here.”

  “Gladius front the equipment and expertise,” Jake said. “It’s a risk for them, obviously. But they’re banking on a high capital return.”

  “You’re running a biotech lab on your own?”

  “Buddy, I can barely work out a bar tip. You were always the one with the head for figures. Every few days, someone from Gladius stops by to make sure it’s all running to plan. But it doesn’t take much tinkering. Stuff’s mostly automated. Which is cool, because the fewer people know about this, the better.”