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

by Jonathan Strahan

  The problem is a lack of references. Most of the accessible photographs only provide a top-down view, and Helena’s left to extrapolate from blurry videos and password-protected previews of bovine myology databases, which don’t get her much closer to figuring out how the meat adheres to the bone. Helena’s forced to dig through ancient research papers and diagrams that focus on where to cut to maximise meat yield, quantifying the difference between porterhouse and T-bone cuts, and not hey, if you’re reading this decades in the future, here’s how to make a good facsimile of a steak. Helena’s tempted to run outside and scream in frustration, but Lily would probably insist on running outside and screaming with her as a matter of company solidarity, and with their luck, probably Mr Anonymous would find out about Lily right then, even after all the trouble she’s taken to censor any mention of her new assistant from the files and the reports and argh she needs sleep.

  Meanwhile, Lily’s already scheduled everything for print, judging by the way she’s spinning around in Helena’s spare swivel chair.

  “Hey, Lily,” Helena says, stifling a yawn. “Why don’t you play around with this for a bit? It’s the base model for a T-bone steak. Just familiarise yourself with the fibre extrusion and mapping, see if you can get it to look like the reference photos. Don’t worry, I’ve saved a copy elsewhere.” Good luck doing the impossible, Helena doesn’t say. You’re bound to have memorised the shortcut for ‘undo’ by the time I wake up.

  Helena wakes up to Lily humming a cheerful tune and a mostly-complete T-bone model rotating on her screen. She blinks a few times, but no—it’s still there. Lily’s effortlessly linking the rest of the meat, fat and gristle to the side of the bone, deforming the muscle fibres to account for the bone’s presence.

  “What did you do,” Helena blurts out.

  Lily turns around to face her, fiddling with her bracelet. “Uh, did I do it wrong?”

  “Rotate it a bit, let me see the top view. How did you do it?”

  “It’s a little like the human vertebral column, isn’t it? There’s plenty of references for that.” She taps the screen twice, switching focus to an image of a human cross-section. “See how it attaches here and here? I just used that as a reference, and boom.”

  Ugh, Helena thinks to herself. She’s been out of university for way too long if she’s forgetting basic homology.

  “Wait, is it correct? Did I mess up?”

  “No, no,” Helena says. “This is really good. Better than... well, better than I did, anyway.”

  “Awesome! Can I get a raise?”

  “You can get yourself a sesame pancake,” Helena says. “My treat.”

  THE BRIEF REQUIRES two hundred similar-but-unique steaks at randomised thicknesses of 38.1 to 40.2 mm, and the number and density of meat fibres pretty much precludes Helena from rendering it on her own rig. She doesn’t want to pay to outsource computing power, so they’re using spare processing cycles from other personal rigs and staggering the loads. Straightforward bone surfaces get rendered in afternoons, and fibre-dense tissues get rendered at off-peak hours.

  It’s three in the morning. Helena’s in her Pokko the Penguin T-shirt and boxer shorts, and Lily’s wearing Yayoi Kusama-ish pyjamas that make her look like she’s been obliterated by a mass of polka dots. Both of them are staring at their screens, eating cups of Zhuzhu Brand Artificial Char Siew Noodles. As Lily’s job moves to the front of Render@Home’s Finland queue, the graph updates to show a downtick in Mauritius. Helena’s fingers frantically skim across the touchpad, queueing as many jobs as she can.

  Her chopsticks scrape the bottom of the mycefoam cup, and she tilts the container to shovel the remaining fake pork fragments into her mouth. Zhuzhu’s using extruded soy proteins, and they’ve punched up the glutamate percentage since she last bought them. The roasted char siew flavour is lacking, and the texture is crumby since the factory skimped on the extrusion time, but any hot food is practically heaven at this time of the night. Day. Whatever.

  The thing about the rendering stage is that there’s a lot of panic-infused downtime. After queueing the requests, they can’t really do anything else—the requests might fail, or the rig might crash, or they might lose their place in the queue through some accident of fate and have to do everything all over again. There’s nothing to do besides pray that the requests get through, stay awake until the server limit resets, and repeat the whole process until everything’s done. Staying awake is easy for Helena, as Mr Anonymous has recently taken to sending pictures of rotting corpses to her iKontakt address, captioned ‘Work hard or this could be you’. Lily seems to be halfway off to dreamland, possibly because she isn’t seeing misshapen lumps of flesh every time she closes her eyes.

  “So,” Lily says, yawning. “How did you get into this business?”

  Helena decides it’s too much trouble to figure out a plausible lie, and settles for a very edited version of the truth. “I took art as an elective in high school. My school had a lot of printmaking and 3D printing equipment, so I used it to make custom merch in my spare time—you know, for people who wanted figurines of obscure anime characters, or whatever. Even designed and printed the packaging for them, just to make it look more official. I wanted to study art in university, but that didn’t really work out. Long story short, I ended up moving here from Hong Kong, and since I had a background in printing and bootlegging... yeah. What about you?”

  “Before the confectionery I did a whole bunch of odd jobs. I used to sell merch for my girlfriend’s band, and that’s how I got started with the short-order printing stuff. They were called POMEGRENADE—it was really hard to fit the whole name on a T-shirt. The keychains sold really well, though.”

  “What sort of band were they?”

  “Sort of noise-rocky Cantopunk at first—there was this one really cute song I liked, If Marriage Means The Death Of Love Then We Must Both Be Zombies—but Cantonese music was a hard sell, even in Guangzhou, so they ended up being kind of a cover band.”

  “Oh, Guangzhou,” Helena says in an attempt to sound knowledgeable, before realising that the only thing she knows about Guangzhou is that the Red Triad has a particularly profitable organ-printing business there. “Wait, you understand Cantonese?”

  “Yeah,” Lily says in Cantonese, tone-perfect. “No one really speaks it around here, so I haven’t used it much.”

  “Oh my god, yes, it’s so hard to find Canto-speaking people here.” Helena immediately switches to Cantonese. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? I’ve been dying to speak it to someone.”

  “Sorry, it never came up so I figured it wasn’t very relevant,” Lily says. “Anyway, POMEGRENADE mostly did covers after that, you know, Kick Out The Jams, Zhongnanhai, Chaos Changan, Lightsabre Cocksucking Blues. Whatever got the crowd pumped up, and when they were moshing the hardest, they’d hit the crowd with the Cantopunk and just blast their faces off. I think it left more of an impression that way—like, start with the familiar, then this weird-ass surprise near the end—the merch table always got swamped after they did that.”

  “What happened with the girlfriend?”

  “We broke up, but we keep in touch. Do you still do art?”

  “Not really. The closest thing I get to art is this,” Helena says, rummaging through the various boxes under the table to dig out her sketchbooks. She flips one open and hands it to Lily—white against red, nothing but full-page studies of marbling patterns, and it must be one of the earlier ones because it’s downright amateurish. The lines are all over the place, that marbling on the Wagyu (is that even meant to be Wagyu?) is completely inaccurate, and, fuck, are those tear stains?

  Lily turns the pages, tracing the swashes of colour with her finger. The hum of the overworked rig fills the room.

  “It’s awful, I know.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lily’s gaze lingers on Helena’s attempt at a fractal snowflake. “This is really trippy! If you ever want to do some album art, just let me know and I’ll to
tally hook you up!”

  Helena opens her mouth to say something about how she’s not an artist, and how studies of beef marbling wouldn’t make very good album covers, but faced with Lily’s unbridled enthusiasm, she decides to nod instead.

  Lily turns the page and it’s that thing she did way back at the beginning, when she was thinking of using a cute cow as the company logo. It’s derivative, it’s kitsch, the whole thing looks like a degraded copy of someone else’s rip-off drawing of a cow’s head, and the fact that Lily’s seriously scrutinising it makes Helena want to snatch the sketchbook back, toss it into the composter, and sink straight into the concrete floor.

  The next page doesn’t grant Helena a reprieve since there’s a whole series of that stupid cow. Versions upon versions of happy cow faces grin straight at Lily, most of them surrounded by little hearts—what was she thinking? What do hearts even have to do with Splendid Beef Enterprises, anyway? Was it just that they were easy to draw?

  “Man, I wish we had a logo because this would be super cute! I love the little hearts! It’s like saying we put our heart and soul into whatever we do! Oh, wait, but was that what you meant?”

  “It could be,” Helena says, and thankfully the Colorado server opens before Lily can ask any further questions.

  THE BRIEF REQUIRES status reports at the end of each workday, but this gradually falls by the wayside once they hit the point where workdays don’t technically end, especially since Helena really doesn’t want to look at an inbox full of increasingly creepy threats. They’re at the pre-print stage, and Lily’s given up on going back to her own place at night so they can have more time for calibration. What looks right on the screen might not look right once it’s printed, and their lives for the past few days have devolved into staring at endless trays of 32-millimeter beef cubes and checking them for myoglobin concentration, colour match in different lighting conditions, fat striation depth, and a whole host of other factors.

  There are so many ways for a forgery to go wrong, and only one way it can go right. Helena contemplates this philosophical quandary, and gently thunks her head against the back of her chair.

  “Oh my god,” Lily exclaims, shoving her chair back. “I can’t take this anymore! I’m going out to eat something and then I’m getting some sleep. Do you want anything?” She straps on her bunny-patterned filter mask and her metallic sandals. “I’m gonna eat there, so I might take a while to get back.”

  “Sesame pancakes, thanks.”

  As Lily slams the door, Helena puts her iKontakt frames back on. The left lens flashes a stream of notifications—fifty-seven missed calls over the past five hours, all from an unknown number. Just then, another call comes in, and she reflexively taps the side of the frame.

  “You haven’t been updating me on your progress,” Mr Anonymous says.

  “I’m very sorry, sir,” Helena says flatly, having reached the point of tiredness where she’s ceased to feel anything beyond god I want to sleep. This sets Mr Anonymous on another rant covering the usual topics—poor work ethic, lack of commitment, informing the Yuen family, prosecution, possible death sentence—and Helena struggles to keep her mouth shut before she says something that she might regret.

  “Maybe I should send someone to check on you right now,” Mr Anonymous snarls, before abruptly hanging up.

  Helena blearily types out a draft of the report, and makes a note to send a coherent version later in the day, once she gets some sleep and fixes the calibration so she’s not telling him entirely bad news. Just as she’s about to call Lily and ask her to get some hot soy milk to go with the sesame pancakes, the front door rattles in its frame like someone’s trying to punch it down. Judging by the violence, it’s probably Lily. Helena trudges over to open it.

  It isn’t. It’s a bulky guy with a flat-top haircut. She stares at him for a moment, then tries to slam the door in his face. He forces the door open and shoves his way inside, grabbing Helena’s arm, and all Helena can think is I can’t believe Mr Anonymous spent his money on this.

  He shoves her against the wall, gripping her wrist so hard that it’s practically getting dented by his fingertips, and pulls out a switchblade, pressing it against the knuckle of her index finger. “Well, I’m not allowed to kill you, but I can fuck you up real bad. Don’t really need all your fingers, do you, girl?”

  She clears her throat, and struggles to keep her voice from shaking. “I need them to type—didn’t your boss tell you that?”

  “Shut up,” Flat-Top says, flicking the switchblade once, then twice, thinking. “Don’t need your face to type, do you?”

  Just then, Lily steps through the door. Flat-Top can’t see her from his angle, and Helena jerks her head, desperately communicating that she should stay out. Lily promptly moves closer.

  Helena contemplates murder.

  Lily edges towards both of them, slides her bracelet past her wrist and onto her knuckles, and makes a gesture at Helena which either means ‘move to your left’ or ‘I’m imitating a bird, but only with one hand’.

  “Hey,” Lily says loudly. “What’s going on here?”

  Flat-Top startles, loosening his grip on Helena’s arm, and Helena dodges to the left. Just as Lily’s fist meets his face in a truly vicious uppercut, Helena seizes the opportunity to kick him soundly in the shins.

  His head hits the floor, and it’s clear he won’t be moving for a while, or ever. Considering Lily’s normal level of violence towards the front door, this isn’t surprising.

  Lily crouches down to check Flat-Top’s breathing. “Well, he’s still alive. Do you prefer him that way?”

  “Do not kill him.”

  “Sure.” Lily taps the side of Flat-Top’s iKontakt frames with her bracelet, and information scrolls across her lenses. “Okay, his name’s Nicholas Liu Honghui... blah blah blah... hired to scare someone at this address, anonymous client... I think he’s coming to, how do you feel about joint locks?”

  It takes a while for Nicholas to stir fully awake. Lily’s on his chest, pinning him to the ground, and Helena’s holding his switchblade to his throat.

  “Okay, Nicholas Liu,” Lily says. “We could kill you right now, but that’d make your wife and your... what is that red thing she’s holding... a baby? Yeah, that’d make your wife and ugly baby quite sad. Now, you’re just going to tell your boss that everything went as expected—”

  “Tell him that I cried,” Helena interrupts. “I was here alone, and I cried because I was so scared.”

  “Right, got that, Nick? That lady there wept buckets of tears. I don’t exist. Everything went well, and you think there’s no point in sending anyone else over. If you mess up, we’ll visit 42—god, what is this character—42 Something Road and let you know how displeased we are. Now, if you apologise for ruining our morning, I probably won’t break your arm.”

  After seeing a wheezing Nicholas to the exit, Lily closes the door, slides her bracelet back onto her wrist, and shakes her head like a deeply disappointed critic. “What an amateur. Didn’t even use burner frames—how the hell did he get hired? And that haircut, wow...”

  Helena opts to remain silent. She leans against the wall and stares at the ceiling, hoping that she can wake up from what seems to be a very long nightmare.

  “Also, I’m not gonna push it, but I did take out the trash. Can you explain why that crappy hitter decided to pay us a visit?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.” Helena’s stomach growls. “This may take a while. Did you get the food?”

  “I got your pancakes, and that soy milk place was open, so I got you some. Nearly threw it at that guy, but I figured we’ve got a lot of electronics, so...”

  “Thanks,” Helena says, taking a sip. It’s still hot.

  HONG KONG SCIENTIFIC University’s bioprinting program is a prestigious pioneer program funded by mainland China, and Hong Kong is the test bed before the widespread rollout. The laboratories are full of state-of-the-art medical-grade printers and bioreactors, and
the instructors are all researchers cherry-picked from the best universities.

  As the star student of the pioneer batch, Lee Jyun Wai Helen (student number A3007082A) is selected for a special project. She will help the head instructor work on the basic model of a heart for a dextrocardial patient, the instructor will handle the detailed render and the final print, and a skilled surgeon will do the transplant. As the term progresses and the instructor gets busier and busier, Helen’s role gradually escalates to doing everything except the final print and the transplant. It’s a particularly tricky render, since dextrocardial hearts face right instead of left, but her practice prints are cell-level perfect.

  Helen hands the render files and her notes on the printing process to the instructor, then her practical exams begin and she forgets all about it.

  The Yuen family discovers Madam Yuen’s defective heart during their mid-autumn family reunion, halfway through an evening harbour cruise. Madam Yuen doesn’t make it back to shore, and instead of a minor footnote in a scientific paper, Helen rapidly becomes front-and-centre in an internal investigation into the patient’s death.

  Unofficially, the internal investigation discovers that the head instructor’s improper calibration of the printer during the final print led to a slight misalignment in the left ventricle, which eventually caused severe ventricular dysfunction and acute graft failure.

  Officially, the root cause of the misprint is Lee Jyun Wai Helen’s negligence and failure to perform under deadline pressure. Madam Yuen’s family threatens to prosecute, but the criminal code doesn’t cover failed organ printing. Helen is expelled, and the Hong Kong Scientific University quietly negotiates a settlement with the Yuens.

  After deciding to steal the bioprinter and flee, Helen realises that she doesn’t have enough money for a full name change and an overseas flight. She settles for a minor name alteration and a flight to Nanjing.