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

by Jonathan Strahan

Progress? A reprieve against the long decline?

  “There’s more, Susannah.”

  The way he said it—his falling tone—it was a warning that set her tired heart pounding.

  “You asked me to act as your agent,” he reminded her. “You asked me to screen all news, and I’ve done that.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now,” he agreed, looking down, looking frightened by the knowledge he had decided to convey. “I should have told you sooner.”

  “But you didn’t want to risk interrupting work on the obelisk?”

  “You said you didn’t want to hear anything.” He shrugged. “I took you at your word.”

  “Nate, will you just say it?”

  “You have a granddaughter, Susannah.”

  She replayed these words in her head, once, twice. They didn’t make sense.

  “DNA tests make it certain,” he explained. “She was born six months after her father’s death.”

  “No.” Susannah did not dare believe it. It was too dangerous to believe. “They both died. That was confirmed by the survivors. They posted the IDs of all the dead.”

  “Your daughter-in-law lived long enough to give birth.”

  Susannah’s chest squeezed tight. “I don’t understand. Are you saying the child is still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  Anger rose hot, up out of the past. “And how long have you known? How long have you kept this from me?”

  “Two months. I’m sorry, but...”

  But we had our priorities. The tombstone. The Martian folly.

  She stared at the floor, too stunned to be happy, or maybe she’d forgotten how. “You should have told me.”

  “I know.”

  “And I... I shouldn’t have walled myself off from the world. I’m sorry.”

  “There’s more,” he said cautiously, as if worried how much more she could take.

  “What else?” she snapped, suddenly sure this was just another game played by the master torturer, to draw the pain out. “Are you going to tell me that my granddaughter is sickly? Dying? Or that she’s a mad woman, perhaps?”

  “No,” he said meekly. “Nothing like that. She’s healthy, and she has a healthy two-year-old daughter.” He got up, put an age-marked hand on the door knob. “I’ve sent you her contact information. If you need an assistant to help you build the habitat, let me know.”

  He was a friend, and she tried to comfort him. “Nate, I’m sorry. If there was a choice—”

  “There isn’t. That’s the way it’s turned out. You will tear down the obelisk, and this woman, Tory Eastman, will live another year, maybe two. Then the equipment will break and she will die and we won’t be able to rebuild the tower. We’ll pass on, and the rest of the world will follow—”

  “We can’t know that, Nate. Not for sure.”

  He shook his head. “This all looks like hope, but it’s a trick. It’s fate cheating us, forcing us to fold our hand, level our pride, and go out meekly. And there’s no choice in it, because it’s the right thing to do.”

  He opened the door. For a few seconds, wind gusted in, until he closed it again. She heard his clogs crossing the porch and a minute later she heard the crunch of tires on the gravel road.

  You have a granddaughter. One who grew up without her parents, in a quarantine zone, with no real hope for the future and yet she was healthy, with a daughter already two years old.

  And then there was Tory Eastman of Mars, who had left a dying colony and driven an impossible distance past doubt and despair, because she knew you have to do everything you can, until you can’t do anymore.

  Susannah had forgotten that, somewhere in the dark years.

  She sat for a time in the stillness, in a quiet so deep she could hear the beating of her heart.

  This all looks like hope.

  Indeed it did and she well knew that hope could be a duplicitous gift from the master torturer, one that opened the door to despair.

  “But it doesn’t have to be that way,” she whispered to the empty room. “I’m not done. Not yet.”

  A SERIES OF STEAKS

  Vina Jie-Min Prasad

  Vina Jie-Min Prasad (vinaprasad.com) is a Singaporean writer working against the world-machine. Her skills include historical research, content design, and a myriad of other things. Her short fiction has appeared in Queer Southeast Asia: A Literary Journal of Transgressive Art, HEAT: A Southeast Asian Urban Anthology, Fireside Fiction, Clarkesworld and Uncanny Magazine.

  ALL KNOWN FORGERIES are tales of failure. The people who get into the newsfeeds for their brilliant attempts to cheat the system with their fraudulent Renaissance masterpieces or their stacks of fake cheques, well, they might be successful artists, but they certainly haven’t been successful at forgery.

  The best forgeries are the ones that disappear from notice—a second-rate still-life mouldering away in gallery storage, a battered old 50-yuan note at the bottom of a cashier drawer—or even a printed strip of Matsusaka beef, sliding between someone’s parted lips.

  FORGING BEEF IS similar to printmaking—every step of the process has to be done with the final print in mind. A red that’s too dark looks putrid, a white that’s too pure looks artificial. All beef is supposed to come from a cow, so stipple the red with dots, flecks, lines of white to fake variance in muscle fibre regions. Cows are similar, but cows aren’t uniform—use fractals to randomise marbling after defining the basic look. Cut the sheets of beef manually to get an authentic ragged edge, don’t get lazy and depend on the bioprinter for that.

  Days of research and calibration and cursing the printer will all vanish into someone’s gullet in seconds, if the job’s done right.

  Helena Li Yuanhui of Splendid Beef Enterprises is an expert in doing the job right.

  The trick is not to get too ambitious. Most forgers are caught out by the smallest errors—a tiny amount of period-inaccurate pigment, a crack in the oil paint that looks too artificial, or a misplaced watermark on a passport. Printing something large increases the chances of a fatal misstep. Stick with small-scale jobs, stick with a small group of regular clients, and in time, Splendid Beef Enterprises will turn enough of a profit for Helena to get a real name change, leave Nanjing, and forget this whole sorry venture ever happened.

  As Helena’s loading the beef into refrigerated boxes for drone delivery, a notification pops up on her iKontakt frames. Helena sighs, turns the volume on her earpiece down, and takes the call.

  “Hi, Mr Chan, could you switch to a secure line? You just need to tap the button with a lock icon, it’s very easy.”

  “Nonsense!” Mr Chan booms. “If the government were going to catch us they’d have done so by now! Anyway, I just called to tell you how pleased I am with the latest batch. Such a shame, though, all that talent and your work just gets gobbled up in seconds—tell you what, girl, for the next beef special, how about I tell everyone that the beef came from one of those fancy vertical farms? I’m sure they’d have nice things to say then!”

  “Please don’t,” Helena says, careful not to let her Cantonese accent slip through. It tends to show after long periods without any human interaction, which is an apt summary of the past few months. “It’s best if no one pays attention to it.”

  “You know, Helena, you do good work, but I’m very concerned about your self-esteem, I know if I printed something like that I’d want everyone to appreciate it! Let me tell you about this article my daughter sent me, you know research says that people without friends are prone to...” Mr Chan rambles on as Helena sticks the labels on the boxes—Grilliam Shakespeare, Gyuuzen Sukiyaki, Fatty Chan’s Restaurant—and thankfully hangs up before Helena sinks into further depression. She takes her iKontakt off before heading to the drone delivery office, giving herself some time to recover from Mr Chan’s relentless cheerfulness.

  Helena has five missed calls by the time she gets back. A red phone icon blares at the corner of her vision before blinking out, replaced by
the incoming-call notification. It’s secured and anonymised, which is quite a change from usual. She pops the earpiece in.

  “Yeah, Mr Chan?”

  “This isn’t Mr Chan,” someone says. “I have a job for Splendid Beef Enterprises.”

  “All right, sir. Could I get your name and what you need? If you could provide me with the deadline, that would help too.”

  “I prefer to remain anonymous,” the man says.

  “Yes, I understand, secrecy is rather important.” Helena restrains the urge to roll her eyes at how needlessly cryptic this guy is. “Could I know about the deadline and brief?”

  “I need two hundred T-bone steaks by the 8th of August. 38.1 to 40.2 millimeter thickness for each one.” A notification to download t-bone_info.KZIP pops up on her lenses. The most ambitious venture Helena’s undertaken in the past few months has been Gyuuzen’s strips of marbled sukiyaki, and even that felt a bit like pushing it. A whole steak? Hell no.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t think my business can handle that. Perhaps you could try—”

  “I think you’ll be interested in this job, Helen Lee Jyun Wai.”

  Shit.

  A SCULPERE 9410S only takes thirty minutes to disassemble, if you know the right tricks. Manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off to expose the inner screws, and detach the print heads before disassembling the power unit. There are a few extra steps in this case—for instance, the stickers that say ‘Property of Hong Kong Scientific University’ and ‘Bioprinting Lab A5’ all need to be removed—but a bit of anti-adhesive spray will ensure that everything’s on schedule. Ideally she’d buy a new printer, but she needs to save her cash for the name change once she hits Nanjing.

  It’s not expulsion if you leave before you get kicked out, she tells herself, but even she can tell that’s a lie.

  IT’S POSSIBLE TO get a sense of a client’s priorities just from the documents they send. For instance, Mr Chan usually mentions some recipes that he’s considering, and Ms Huang from Gyuuzen tends to attach examples of the marbling patterns she wants. This new client seems to have attached a whole document dedicated to the recent amendments in the criminal code, with the ones relevant to Helena (‘five-year statute of limitations’, ‘possible death penalty’) conveniently highlighted in neon yellow.

  Sadly, this level of detail hasn’t carried over to the spec sheet.

  “Hi again, sir,” Helena says. “I’ve read through what you’ve sent, but I really need more details before starting on the job. Could you provide me with the full measurements? I’ll need the expected length and breadth in addition to the thickness.”

  “It’s already there. Learn to read.”

  “I know you filled that part in, sir,” Helena says, gritting her teeth. “But we’re a printing company, not a farm. I’ll need more detail than ‘16-18 month cow, grain-fed, Hereford breed’ to do the job properly.”

  “You went to university, didn’t you? I’m sure you can figure out something as basic as that, even if you didn’t graduate.”

  “Ha ha. Of course.” Helena resists the urge to yank her earpiece out. “I’ll get right on that. Also, there is the issue of pay...”

  “Ah, yes. I’m quite sure the Yuen family is still itching to prosecute. How about you do the job, and in return, I don’t tell them where you’re hiding?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but even then I’ll need an initial deposit to cover the printing, and of course there’s the matter of the Hereford samples.” Which I already have in the bioreactor, but there is no way I’m letting you know that.

  “Fine. I’ll expect detailed daily updates,” Mr Anonymous says. “I know how you get with deadlines. Don’t fuck it up.”

  “Of course not,” Helena says. “Also, about the deadline—would it be possible to push it back? Four weeks is quite short for this job.”

  “No,” Mr Anonymous says curtly, and hangs up.

  Helena lets out a very long breath so she doesn’t end up screaming, and takes a moment to curse Mr Anonymous and his whole family in Cantonese.

  It’s physically impossible to complete the renders and finish the print in four weeks, unless she figures out a way to turn her printer into a time machine, and if that were possible she might as well go back and redo the past few years, or maybe her whole life. If she had majored in art, maybe she’d be a designer by now—or hell, while she’s busy dreaming, she could even have been the next Raverat, the next Mantuana—instead of a failed artist living in a shithole concrete box, clinging to the wreckage of all her past mistakes.

  She leans against the wall for a while, exhales, then slaps on a proxy and starts drafting a help-wanted ad.

  LILY YONEZAWA (DARKNET username: yurisquared) arrives at Nanjing High Tech Industrial Park at 8.58 am. She’s a short lady with long black hair and circle-framed iKontakts. She’s wearing a loose, floaty dress, smooth lines of white tinged with yellow-green, and there’s a large prismatic bracelet gleaming on her arm. In comparison, Helena is wearing her least holey black blouse and a pair of jeans, which is a step up from her usual attire of myoglobin-stained T-shirt and boxer shorts.

  “So,” Lily says in rapid, slightly-accented Mandarin as she bounds into the office. “This place is a beef place, right? I pulled some of the records once I got the address, hope you don’t mind—anyway, what do you want me to help print or render or design or whatever? I know I said I had a background in confections and baking, but I’m totally open to anything!” She pumps her fist in a show of determination. The loose-fitting prismatic bracelet slides up and down.

  Helena blinks at Lily with the weariness of someone who’s spent most of their night frantically trying to make their office presentable. She decides to skip most of the briefing, as Lily doesn’t seem like the sort who needs to be eased into anything.

  “How much do you know about beef?”

  “I used to watch a whole bunch of farming documentaries with my ex, does that count?”

  “No. Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises—”

  “Oh, by the way, do you have a logo? I searched your company registration but nothing really came up. Need me to design one?”

  “Here at Splendid Beef Enterprises, we make fake beef and sell it to restaurants.”

  “So, like, soy-lentil stuff?”

  “Homegrown cloned cell lines,” Helena says. “Mostly Matsusaka, with some Hereford if clients specify it.” She gestures at the bioreactor humming away in a corner.

  “Wait, isn’t fake food like those knockoff eggs made of calcium carbonate? If you’re using cow cells, this seems pretty real to me.” Clearly Lily has a more practical definition of fake than the China Food and Drug Administration.

  “It’s more like... let’s say you have a painting in a gallery and you say it’s by a famous artist. Lots of people would come look at it because of the name alone and write reviews talking about its exquisite use of chiaroscuro, as expected of the old masters, I can’t believe that it looks so real even though it was painted centuries ago. But if you say, hey, this great painting was by some no-name loser, I was just lying about where it came from... well, it’d still be the same painting, but people would want all their money back.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Lily says, scrutinising the bioreactor. She taps its shiny polymer shell with her knuckles, and her bracelet bumps against it. Helena tries not to wince. “Anyway, how legal is this? This meat forgery thing?”

  “It’s not illegal yet,” Helena says. “It’s kind of a grey area, really.”

  “Great!” Lily smacks her fist into her open palm. “Now, how can I help? I’m totally down for anything! You can even ask me to clean the office if you want—wow, this is really dusty, maybe I should just clean it to make sure—”

  Helena reminds herself that having an assistant isn’t entirely bad news. Wolfgang Beltracchi was only able to carry out large-scale forgeries with his assistant’s help, and they even got along well enough to get married and have a ki
d without killing each other.

  Then again, the Beltracchis both got caught, so maybe she shouldn’t be too optimistic.

  COWS THAT UNDERGO extreme stress while waiting for slaughter are known as dark cutters. The stress causes them to deplete all their glycogen reserves, and when butchered, their meat turns a dark blackish-red. The meat of dark cutters is generally considered low-quality.

  As a low-quality person waiting for slaughter, Helena understands how those cows feel. Mr Anonymous, stymied by the industrial park’s regular sweeps for trackers and external cameras, has taken to sending Helena grainy aerial photographs of herself together with exhortations to work harder. This isn’t exactly news—she already knew he had her details, and drones are pretty cheap—but still. When Lily raps on the door in the morning, Helena sometimes jolts awake in a panic before she realises that it isn’t Mr Anonymous coming for her. This isn’t helped by the fact that Lily’s gentle knocks seem to be equivalent to other people’s knockout blows.

  By now Helena’s introduced Lily to the basics, and she’s a surprisingly quick study. It doesn’t take her long to figure out how to randomise the fat marbling with Fractalgenr8, and she’s been handed the task of printing the beef strips for Gyuuzen and Fatty Chan, then packing them for drone delivery. It’s not ideal, but it lets Helena concentrate on the base model for the T-bone steak, which is the most complicated thing she’s ever tried to render.

  A T-bone steak is a combination of two cuts of meat, lean tenderloin and fatty strip steak, separated by a hard ridge of vertebral bone. Simply cutting into one is a near-religious experience, red meat parting under the knife to reveal smooth white bone, with the beef fat dripping down to pool on the plate. At least, that’s what the socialites’ food blogs say. To be accurate, they say something more like ‘omfg this is sooooooo good’, ‘this bones giving me a boner lol’, and ‘haha im so getting this sonic-cleaned for my collection!!!’, but Helena pretends they actually meant to communicate something more coherent.