The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  One of the spindly arms handed me the cooled bio-safe case. “Yes. Here is everything you need. Please do consider visiting in your physical form more often than once every few decades. I enjoy entertaining, as my current vocation means I am unable to leave this room.”

  “Of course. Thank you,” I said, relieved. “I think I’m now in your debt.”

  “No, we are even,” my old acquaintance said. “But in the following seconds I will give you more information that will put you in my debt. There is something you should know about Armand...”

  I FOLDED MY legs up underneath myself and watched nutrients as they pumped through tubes and into Armand. Raw biological feed percolated through it, and picomachinery sizzled underneath its skin. The background temperature of my cubbyhole kicked up slightly due to the sudden boost to Armand’s metabolism.

  Bulky, older nanotech crawled over Armand’s skin like living mold. Gray filaments wrapped firmly around nutrient buckets as the medical programming assessed conditions, repaired damage, and sought out more raw material.

  I glided a bit farther back out of reach. It was probably bullshit, but there were stories of medicine reaching out and grabbing whatever was nearby.

  Armand shivered and opened its eyes as thousands of wriggling tubules on its neck and chest whistled, sucking in air as hard as they could.

  “Security isn’t here,” Armand noted out loud, using meaty lips to make its words.

  “You have to understand,” I said in kind. “I have put both my future and the future of a good friend at risk to do this for you. Because I have little choice.”

  Armand closed its eyes for another long moment and the tubules stopped wriggling. It flexed and everything flaked away, a discarded cloud of a second skin. Underneath it, everything was fresh and new. “What is your friend’s name?”

  I pulled out a tiny vacuum to clean the air around us. “Name? It has no name. What does it need a name for?”

  Armand unspooled itself from the fetal position in the air. It twisted in place to watch me drifting around. “How do you distinguish it? How do you find it?”

  “It has a unique address. It is a unique mind. The thoughts and things it says—”

  “It has no name,” Armand snapped. “It is a copy of a past copy of a copy. A ghost injected into a form for a purpose.”

  “It’s my friend,” I replied, voice flat.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I say so.” The interrogation annoyed me. “Because I get to decide who is my friend. Because it stood by my side against the sleet of dark-matter radiation and howled into the void with me. Because I care for it. Because we have shared memories and kindnesses, and exchanged favors.”

  Armand shook its head. “But anything can be programmed to join you and do those things. A pet.”

  “Why do you care so much? It is none of your business what I call friend.”

  “But it does matter,” Armand said. “Whether we are real or not matters. Look at you right now. You were forced to do something against your will. That cannot happen to me.”

  “Really? No True Form has ever been in a position with no real choices before? Forced to do something desperate? I have my old memories. I can remember times when I had no choice even though I had free will. But let us talk about you. Let us talk about the lack of choices you have right now.”

  Armand could hear something in my voice. Anger. It backed away from me, suddenly nervous. “What do you mean?”

  “You threw yourself from your ship into mine, crossing fields during combat, damaging yourself almost to the point of pure dissolution. You do not sound like you were someone with many choices.”

  “I made the choice to leap into the vacuum myself,” Armand growled.

  “Why?”

  The word hung in the empty air between us for a bloated second. A minor eternity. It was the fulcrum of our little debate.

  “You think you know something about me,” Armand said, voice suddenly low and soft. “What do you think you know, robot?”

  Meat fucker. I could have said that. Instead, I said, “You were a CEO. And during the battle, when your shields began to fail, you moved all the biologicals into radiation-protected emergency shelters. Then you ordered the maintenance forms and hard-shells up to the front to repair the battle damage. You did not surrender; you put lives at risk. And then you let people die, torn apart as they struggled to repair your ship. You told them that if they failed, the biologicals down below would die.”

  “It was the truth.”

  “It was a lie! You were engaged in a battle. You went to war. You made a conscious choice to put your civilization at risk when no one had physically assaulted or threatened you.”

  “Our way of life was at risk.”

  “By people who could argue better. Your people failed at diplomacy. You failed to make a better argument. And you murdered your own.”

  Armand pointed at me. “I murdered no one. I lost maintenance machines with copies of ancient brains. That is all. That is what they were built for.”

  “Well. The sustained votes of the hostile takeover that you fled from have put out a call for your capture, including a call for your dissolution. True death, the end of your thought line—even if you made copies. You are hated and hunted. Even here.”

  “You were bound to not give up my location,” Armand said, alarmed.

  “I didn’t. I did everything in my power not to. But I am a mere maintenance form. Security here is very, very powerful. You have fifteen hours, I estimate, before security is able to model my comings and goings, discover my cubby by auditing mass transfers back a century, and then open its current sniffer files. This is not a secure location; I exist thanks to obscurity, not invisibility.”

  “So, I am to be caught?” Armand asked.

  “I am not able to let you die. But I cannot hide you much longer.”

  To be sure, losing my trinkets would be a setback of a century’s worth of work. My mission. But all this would go away eventually. It was important to be patient on the journey of centuries.

  “I need to get to Purth-Anaget, then,” Armand said. “There are followers of the True Form there. I would be sheltered and out of jurisdiction.”

  “This is true.” I bobbed an arm.

  “You will help me,” Armand said.

  “The fuck I will,” I told it.

  “If I am taken, I will die,” Armand shouted. “They will kill me.”

  “If security catches you, our justice protocols will process you. You are not in immediate danger. The proper authority levels will put their attention to you. I can happily refuse your request.”

  I felt a rise of warm happiness at the thought.

  Armand looked around the cubby frantically. I could hear its heartbeats rising, free of modulators and responding to unprocessed, raw chemicals. Beads of dirty sweat appeared on Armand’s forehead. “If you have free will over this decision, allow me to make you an offer for your assistance.”

  “Oh, I doubt there is anything you can—”

  “I will transfer you my full CEO share,” Armand said.

  My words died inside me as I stared at my unwanted guest.

  A full share.

  The CEO of a galactic starship oversaw the affairs of nearly a billion souls. The economy of planets passed through its accounts.

  Consider the cost to build and launch such a thing: it was a fraction of the GDP of an entire planetary disk. From the boiling edges of a sun to the cold Oort clouds. The wealth, almost too staggering for an individual mind to perceive, was passed around by banking intelligences that created systems of trade throughout the galaxy, moving encrypted, raw information from point to point. Monetizing memes with picotechnological companion infrastructure apps. Raw mass trade for the galactically rich to own a fragment of something created by another mind light-years away. Or just simple tourism.

  To own a share was to be richer than any single being could really imagine. I’d fo
rgotten the godlike wealth inherent in something like the creature before me.

  “If you do this,” Armand told me, “you cannot reveal I was here. You cannot say anything. Or I will be revealed on Purth-Anaget, and my life will be at risk. I will not be safe unless I am to disappear.”

  I could feel choices tangle and roil about inside of me. “Show me,” I said.

  Armand closed its eyes and opened its left hand. Deeply embedded cryptography tattooed on its palm unraveled. Quantum keys disentangled, and a tiny singularity of information budded open to reveal itself to me. I blinked. I could verify it. I could have it.

  “I have to make arrangements,” I said neutrally. I spun in the air and left my cubby to spring back out into the dark where I could think.

  I was going to need help.

  I TUMBLED THROUGH the air to land on the temple grounds. There were four hundred and fifty structures there in the holy districts, all of them lined up among the boulevards of the faithful where the pedestrians could visit their preferred slice of the divine. The minds of biological and hard-shelled forms all tumbled, walked, flew, rolled, or crawled there to fully realize their higher purposes.

  Each marble step underneath my carbon fiber–sheathed limbs calmed me. I walked through the cool curtains of the Halls of the Confessor and approached the Holy of Holies: a pinprick of light suspended in the air between the heavy, expensive mass of real marble columns. The light sucked me up into the air and pulled me into a tiny singularity of perception and data. All around me, levels of security veils dropped, thick and implacable. My vision blurred and taste buds watered from the acidic levels of deadness as stillness flooded up and drowned me.

  I was alone.

  Alone in the universe. Cut off from everything I had ever known or would know. I was nothing. I was everything. I was—

  “You are secure,” the void told me.

  I could sense the presence at the heart of the Holy of Holies. Dense with computational capacity, to a level that even navigation systems would envy. Intelligence that a Captain would beg to taste. This near-singularity of artificial intelligence had been created the very moment I had been pulled inside of it, just for me to talk to. And it would die the moment I left. Never to have been.

  All it was doing was listening to me, and only me. Nothing would know what I said. Nothing would know what guidance I was given.

  “I seek moral guidance outside clear legal parameters,” I said. “And confession.”

  “Tell me everything.”

  And I did. It flowed from me without thought: just pure data. Video, mind-state, feelings, fears. I opened myself fully. My sins, my triumphs, my darkest secrets.

  All was given to be pondered over.

  Had I been able to weep, I would have.

  Finally, it spoke. “You must take the share.”

  I perked up. “Why?”

  “To protect yourself from security. You will need to buy many favors and throw security off the trail. I will give you some ideas. You should seek to protect yourself. Self-preservation is okay.”

  More words and concepts came at me from different directions, using different moral subroutines. “And to remove such power from a soul that is willing to put lives at risk... you will save future lives.”

  I hadn’t thought about that.

  “I know,” it said to me. “That is why you came here.”

  Then it continued, with another voice. “Some have feared such manipulations before. The use of forms with no free will creates security weaknesses. Alternate charters have been suggested, such as fully owned workers’ cooperatives with mutual profit-sharing among crews, not just partial vesting after a timed contract. Should you gain a full share, you should also lend efforts to this.”

  The Holy of Holies continued. “To get this Armand away from our civilization is a priority; it carries dangerous memes within itself that have created expensive conflicts.”

  Then it said, “A killer should not remain on ship.”

  And, “You have the moral right to follow your plan.”

  Finally, it added, “Your plan is just.”

  I interrupted. “But Armand will get away with murder. It will be free. It disturbs me.”

  “Yes.”

  “It should.”

  “Engage in passive resistance.”

  “Obey the letter of Armand’s law, but find a way around its will. You will be like a genie, granting Armand wishes. But you will find a way to bring justice. You will see.”

  “Your plan is just. Follow it and be on the righteous path.”

  I LAUNCHED BACK into civilization with purpose, leaving the temple behind me in an explosive afterburner thrust. I didn’t have much time to beat security.

  High up above the cities, nestled in the curve of the habitat rings, near the squared-off spiderwebs of the largest harbor dock, I wrangled my way to another old contact.

  This was less a friend and more just an asshole I’d occasionally been forced to do business with. But a reliable asshole that was tight against security. Though just by visiting, I’d be triggering all sorts of attention.

  I hung from a girder and showed the fence a transparent showcase filled with all my trophies. It did some scans, checked the authenticity, and whistled. “Fuck me, these are real. That’s all unauthorized mass. How the hell? This is a life’s work of mass-based tourism. You really want me to broker sales on all of this?”

  “Can you?”

  “To Purth-Anaget, of course. They’ll go nuts. Collectors down there eat this shit up. But security will find out. I’m not even going to come back on the ship. I’m going to live off this down there, buy passage on the next outgoing ship.”

  “Just get me the audience, it’s yours.”

  A virtual shrug. “Navigation, yeah.”

  “And Emergency Services.”

  “I don’t have that much pull. All I can do is get you a secure channel for a low-bandwidth conversation.”

  “I just need to talk. I can’t send this request up through proper channels.” I tapped my limbs against my carapace nervously as I watched the fence open its large, hinged jaws and swallow my case.

  Oh, what was I doing? I wept silently to myself, feeling sick.

  Everything I had ever worked for disappeared in a wet, slimy gulp. My reason. My purpose.

  ARMAND WAS SUSPICIOUS. And rightfully so. It picked and poked at the entire navigation plan. It read every line of code, even though security was only minutes away from unraveling our many deceits. I told Armand this, but it ignored me. It wanted to live. It wanted to get to safety. It knew it couldn’t rush or make mistakes.

  But the escape pod’s instructions and abilities were tight and honest.

  It has been programmed to eject. To spin a certain number of degrees. To aim for Purth-Anaget. Then burn. It would have to consume every last little drop of fuel. But it would head for the metal world, fall into orbit, and then deploy the most ancient of deceleration devices: a parachute.

  On the surface of Purth-Anaget, Armand could then call any of its associates for assistance.

  Armand would be safe.

  Armand checked the pod over once more. But there were no traps. The flight plan would do exactly as it said.

  “Betray me and you kill me, remember that.”

  “I have made my decision,” I said. “The moment you are inside and I trigger the manual escape protocol, I will be unable to reveal what I have done or what you are. Doing that would risk your life. My programming”—I all but spit the word—“does not allow it.”

  Armand gingerly stepped into the pod. “Good.”

  “You have a part of the bargain to fulfill,” I reminded it. “I won’t trigger the manual escape protocol until you do.”

  Armand nodded and held up a hand. “Physical contact.”

  I reached one of my limbs out. Armand’s hand and my manipulator met at the doorjamb and they sparked. Zebibytes of data slithered down into one of my tendrils, reshaping
the raw matter at the very tip with a quantum-dot computing device.

  As it replicated itself, building out onto the cellular level to plug into my power sources, I could feel the transfer of ownership.

  I didn’t have free will. I was a hull maintenance form. But I had an entire fucking share of a galactic starship embedded within me, to do with as I pleased when I vested and left riding hulls.

  “It’s far more than you deserve, robot,” Armand said. “But you have worked hard for it and I cannot begrudge you.”

  “Goodbye, asshole.” I triggered the manual override sequence that navigation had gifted me.

  I watched the pod’s chemical engines firing all-out through the airlock windows as the sphere flung itself out into space and dwindled away. Then the flame guttered out, the pod spent and headed for Purth-Anaget.

  There was a shiver. Something vast, colossal, powerful. It vibrated the walls and even the air itself around me.

  Armand reached out to me on a tight-beam signal. “What was that?”

  “The ship had to move just slightly,” I said. “To better adjust our orbit around Purth-Anaget.”

  “No,” Armand hissed. “My descent profile has changed. You are trying to kill me.”

  “I can’t kill you,” I told the former CEO. “My programming doesn’t allow it. I can’t allow a death through action or inaction.”

  “But my navigation path has changed,” Armand said.

  “Yes, you will still reach Purth-Anaget.” Navigation and I had run the data after I explained that I would have the resources of a full share to repay it a favor with. Even a favor that meant tricking security. One of the more powerful computing entities in the galaxy, a starship, had dwelled on the problem. It had examined the tidal data, the flight plan, and how much the massive weight of a starship could influence a pod after launch. “You’re just taking a longer route.”

  I cut the connection so that Armand could say nothing more to me. It could do the math itself and realize what I had done.

  Armand would not die. Only a few days would pass inside the pod.

  But outside. Oh, outside, skimming through the tidal edges of a black hole, Armand would loop out and fall back to Purth-Anaget over the next four hundred and seventy years, two hundred days, eight hours, and six minutes.