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

by Jonathan Strahan

  “WOW,” SAYS LILY. “You know, I’m pretty sure you got ripped off with the name alteration thing, there’s no way it costs that much. Also, you used to have pigtails? Seriously?”

  Helena snatches her old student ID away from Lily. “Anyway, under the amendments to Article 335, making or supplying substandard printed organs is now an offence punishable by death. The family’s itching to prosecute. If we don’t do the job right, Mr Anonymous is going to disclose my whereabouts to them.”

  “Okay, but from what you’ve told me, this guy is totally not going to let it go even after you’re done. At my old job, we got blackmailed like that all the time, which was really kind of irritating. They’d always try to bargain, and after the first job, they’d say stuff like ‘if you don’t do me this favour I’m going to call the cops and tell them everything’ just to weasel out of paying for the next one.”

  “Wait. Was this at the bakery or the merch stand?”

  “Uh.” Lily looks a bit sheepish. This is quite unusual, considering that Lily has spent the past four days regaling Helena with tales of the most impressive blood blobs from her period, complete with comparisons to their failed prints. “Are you familiar with the Red Triad? The one in Guangzhou?”

  “You mean the organ printers?”

  “Yeah, them. I kind of might have been working there before the bakery...?”

  “What?”

  Lily fiddles with the lacy hem of her skirt. “Well, I mean, the bakery experience seemed more relevant, plus you don’t have to list every job you’ve ever done when you apply for a new one, right?”

  “Okay,” Helena says, trying not to think too hard about how all the staff at Splendid Beef Enterprises are now prime candidates for the death penalty. “Okay. What exactly did you do there?”

  “Ears and stuff, bladders, spare fingers... you’d be surprised how many people need those. I also did some bone work, but that was mainly for the diehards—most of the people we worked on were pretty okay with titanium substitutes. You know, simple stuff.”

  “That’s not simple.”

  “Well, it’s not like I was printing fancy reversed hearts or anything, and even with the asshole clients it was way easier than baking. Have you ever tried to extrude a spun-sugar globe so you could put a bunch of powder-printed magpies inside? And don’t get me started on cleaning the nozzles after extrusion, because wow...”

  Helena decides not to question Lily’s approach to life, because it seems like a certain path to a migraine. “Maybe we should talk about this later.”

  “Right, you need to send the update! Can I help?”

  The eventual message contains very little detail and a lot of pleading. Lily insists on adding typos just to make Helena seem more rattled, and Helena’s way too tired to argue. After starting the autoclean cycle for the printheads, they set an alarm and flop on Helena’s mattress for a nap.

  As Helena’s drifting off, something occurs to her. “Lily? What happened to those people? The ones who tried to blackmail you?”

  “Oh,” Lily says casually. “I crushed them.”

  THE BRIEF SPECIFIES that the completed prints need to be loaded into four separate podcars on the morning of 8 August, and provides the delivery code for each. They haven’t been able to find anything in Helena’s iKontakt archives, so their best bet is finding a darknet user who can do a trace.

  Lily’s fingers hover over the touchpad. “If we give him the codes, this guy can check the prebooked delivery routes. He seems pretty reliable, do you want to pay the bounty?”

  “Do it,” Helena says.

  The resultant map file is a mess of meandering lines. They flow across most of Nanjing, criss-crossing each other, but eventually they all terminate at the cargo entrance of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel on Jiangdong Middle Road.

  “Well, he’s probably not a guest who’s going to eat two hundred steaks on his own.” Lily taps her screen. “Maybe it’s for a hotel restaurant?”

  Helena pulls up the Grand Domaine’s web directory, setting her iKontakt to highlight any mentions of restaurants or food in the descriptions. For some irritating design reason, all the booking details are stored in garish images. She snatches the entire August folder, flipping through them one by one before pausing.

  The foreground of the image isn’t anything special, just elaborate cursive English stating that Charlie Zhang and Cherry Cai Si Ping will be celebrating their wedding with a ten-course dinner on August 8th at the Royal Ballroom of the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

  What catches her eye is the background. It’s red with swirls and streaks of yellow-gold. Typical auspicious wedding colours, but displayed in a very familiar pattern.

  It’s the marbled pattern of T-bone steak.

  CHERRY CAI SI Ping is the daughter of Dominic Cai Yongjing, a specialist in livestock and a new player in Nanjing’s agri-food arena. According to Lily’s extensive knowledge of farming documentaries, Dominic Cai Yongjing is also “the guy with the eyebrows” and “that really boring guy who keeps talking about nothing”.

  “Most people have eyebrows,” Helena says, loading one of Lily’s recommended documentaries. “I don’t see... oh. Wow.”

  “I told you. I mean, I usually like watching stuff about farming, but last year he just started showing up everywhere with his stupid waggly brows! When I watched this with my ex we just made fun of him non-stop.”

  Helena fast-forwards through the introduction of Modern Manufacturing: The Vertical Farmer, which involves the camera panning upwards through hundreds of vertically-stacked wire cages. Dominic Cai talks to the host in English, boasting about how he plans to be a key figure in China’s domestic beef industry. He explains his “patented methods” for a couple of minutes, which involves stating and restating that his farm is extremely clean and filled with only the best cattle.

  “But what about bovine parasitic cancer?” the host asks. “Isn’t the risk greater in such a cramped space? If the government orders a quarantine, your whole farm...”

  “As I’ve said, our hygiene standards are impeccable, and our stock is pure-bred Hereford!” Cai slaps the flank of a cow through the cage bars, and it moos irritatedly in response. “There is absolutely no way it could happen here!”

  Helena does some mental calculations. Aired last year, when the farm recently opened, and that cow looks around six months old… and now a request for steaks from cows that are sixteen to eighteen months old...

  “So,” Lily says, leaning on the back of Helena’s chair. “Bovine parasitic cancer?”

  “Judging by the timing, it probably hit them last month. It’s usually the older cows that get infected first. He’d have killed them to stop the spread... but if it’s the internal strain, the tumours would have made their meat unusable after excision. His first batch of cows was probably meant to be for the wedding dinner. What we’re printing is the cover-up.”

  “But it’s not like steak’s a standard course in wedding dinners or anything, right? Can’t they just change it to roast duck or abalone or something?” Lily looks fairly puzzled, probably because she hasn’t been subjected to as many weddings as Helena has.

  “Mr Cai’s the one bankrolling it, so it’s a staging ground for the Cai family to show how much better they are than everyone else. You saw the announcement—he’s probably been bragging to all his guests about how they’ll be the first to taste beef from his vertical farm. Changing it now would be a real loss of face.”

  “Okay,” Lily says. “I have a bunch of ideas, but first of all, how much do you care about this guy’s face?”

  Helena thinks back to her inbox full of corpse pictures, the countless sleepless nights she’s endured, the sheer terror she felt when she saw Lily step through the door. “Not very much at all.”

  “All right.” Lily smacks her fist into her palm. “Let’s give him a nice surprise.”

  THE WEEK BEFORE the deadline vanishes in a blur of printing, re-rendering, and darknet job requests. Helena
’s been nothing but polite to Mr Cai ever since the hitter’s visit, and has even taken to video calls lately, turning on the camera on her end so that Mr Cai can witness her progress. It’s always good to build rapport with clients.

  “So, sir,” Helena moves the camera, slowly panning so it captures the piles and piles of cherry-red steaks, zooming in on the beautiful fat strata which took ages to render. “How does this look? We’ll be starting the dry-aging once you approve, and loading it into the podcars first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Fairly adequate. I didn’t expect much from the likes of you, but this seems satisfactory. Go ahead.”

  Helena tries her hardest to keep calm. “I’m glad you feel that way, sir. Rest assured you’ll be getting your delivery on schedule... by the way, I don’t suppose you could transfer the money on delivery? Printing the bone matter cost a lot more than I thought.”

  “Of course, of course, once it’s delivered and I inspect the marbling. Quality checks, you know?”

  Helena adjusts the camera, zooming in on the myoglobin dripping from the juicy steaks, and adopts her most sorrowful tone. “Well, I hate to rush you, but I haven’t had much money for food lately...”

  Mr Cai chortles. “Why, that’s got to be hard on you! You’ll receive the fund transfer sometime this month, and in the meantime why don’t you treat yourself and print up something nice to eat?”

  Lily gives Helena a thumbs-up, then resumes crouching under the table and messaging her darknet contacts, careful to stay out of Helena’s shot. The call disconnects.

  “Let’s assume we won’t get any further payment. Is everything ready?”

  “Yeah,” Lily says. “When do we need to drop it off?”

  “Let’s try for five am. Time to start batch-processing.”

  Helena sets the enzyme percentages, loads the fluid into the canister, and they both haul the steaks into the dry-ager unit. The machine hums away, spraying fine mists of enzymatic fluid onto the steaks and partially dehydrating them, while Helena and Lily work on assembling the refrigerated delivery boxes. Once everything’s neatly packed, they haul the boxes to the nearest podcar station. As Helena slams box after box into the cargo area of the podcars, Lily types the delivery codes into their front panels. The podcars boot up, sealing themselves shut, and zoom off on their circuitous route to the Grand Domaine Luxury Hotel.

  They head back to the industrial park. Most of their things have already been shoved into backpacks, and Helena begins breaking the remaining equipment down for transport.

  A Sculpere 9410S takes twenty minutes to disassemble if you’re doing it for the second time. If someone’s there to help you manually eject the cell cartridges, slide the external casing off, and detach the print heads so you can disassemble the power unit, you might be able to get that figure down to ten. They’ll buy a new printer once they figure out where to settle down, but this one will do for now.

  It’s not running away if we’re both going somewhere, Helena thinks to herself, and this time it doesn’t feel like a lie.

  THERE AREN’T MANY visitors to Mr Chan’s restaurant during breakfast hours, and he’s sitting in a corner, reading a book. Helena waves at him.

  “Helena!” he booms, surging up to greet her. “Long time no see, and who is this?”

  “Oh, we met recently. She’s helped me out a lot,” Helena says, judiciously avoiding any mention of Lily’s name. She holds a finger to her lips, and surprisingly, Mr Chan seems to catch on. Lily waves at Mr Chan, then proceeds to wander around the restaurant, examining their collection of porcelain plates.

  “Anyway, since you’re my very first client, I thought I’d let you know in person. I’m going travelling with my... friend, and I won’t be around for the next few months at least.”

  “Oh, that’s certainly a shame! I was planning a black pepper hotplate beef special next month, but I suppose black pepper hotplate extruded protein will do just fine. When do you think you’ll be coming back?”

  Helena looks at Mr Chan’s guileless face, and thinks, well, her first client deserves a bit more honesty. “Actually, I probably won’t be running the business any longer. I haven’t decided yet, but I think I’m going to study art. I’m really, really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr Chan.”

  “No, no, pursuing your dreams, well, that’s not something you should be apologising for! I’m just glad you finally found a friend!”

  Helena glances over at Lily, who’s currently stuffing a container of cellulose toothpicks into the side pocket of her bulging backpack.

  “Yeah, I’m glad too,” she says. “I’m sorry, Mr Chan, but we have a flight to catch in a couple of hours, and the bus is leaving soon...”

  “Nonsense! I’ll pay for your taxi fare, and I’ll give you something for the road. Airplane food is awful these days!”

  Despite repeatedly declining Mr Chan’s very generous offers, somehow Helena and Lily end up toting bags and bags of fresh steamed buns to their taxi.

  “Oh, did you see the news?” Mr Chan asks. “That vertical farmer’s daughter is getting married at some fancy hotel tonight. Quite a pretty girl, good thing she didn’t inherit those eyebrows—”

  Lily snorts and accidentally chokes on her steamed bun. Helena claps her on the back.

  “—and they’re serving steak at the banquet, straight from his farm! Now, don’t get me wrong, Helena, you’re talented at what you do—but a good old-fashioned slab of real meat, now, that’s the ticket!”

  “Yes,” Helena says. “It certainly is.”

  ALL KNOWN FORGERIES are failures, but sometimes that’s on purpose. Sometimes a forger decides to get revenge by planting obvious flaws in their work, then waiting for them to be revealed, making a fool of everyone who initially claimed the work was authentic. These flaws can take many forms—deliberate anachronisms, misspelled signatures, rude messages hidden beneath thick coats of paint—or a picture of a happy cow, surrounded by little hearts, etched into the T-bone of two hundred perfectly-printed steaks.

  While the known forgers are the famous ones, the best forgers are the ones that don’t get caught—the old woman selling her deceased husband’s collection to an avaricious art collector, the harried-looking mother handing the cashier a battered 50-yuan note, or the two women at the airport, laughing as they collect their luggage, disappearing into the crowd.

  CARNIVAL NINE

  Caroline M. Yoachim

  Caroline M. Yoachim (carolineyoachim.com) lives in Seattle and loves cold cloudy weather. She is the author of dozens of short stories, appearing in Fantasy & Science Fiction, Clarkesworld, Asimov’s, and Lightspeed, among other places, including Nebula Award nominees “Stone Wall Truth” and “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0”. Her debut short story collection, Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories, came out with Fairwood Press in August 2016.

  ONE NIGHT, WHEN I was winding down to sleep, I asked Papa, “How come I don’t get the same number of turns every day?”

  “Sometimes the maker turns your key more, and sometimes less, but you can never have more than your mainspring will hold. You’re lucky, Zee, you have a good mainspring.” He sounded a little wistful when he said it. He never got as many turns as I did, and he used most of them to do boring grown-up things.

  “Take me to the zoo tomorrow?” The zoo on the far side of the closet had lions that did backflips and elephants that balanced on brightly colored balls.

  “I have to take Granny and Gramps to the mechanic to clean the rust off their gears.”

  Papa never had any turns to spare for outings and adventures, which was sad. I opened my mouth to say so, but the whir of my gears slowed to where I could hear each click, and I closed my mouth so it wouldn’t hang open while I slept.

  WHAT PAPA SAID was true. I have a good mainspring. Sometimes I got thirty turns, and sometimes forty-six. Today, on this glorious summer day, I got fifty-two. I’d never
met anyone else whose spring could hold so many turns as that, and I was bursting with energy.

  Papa didn’t notice how wound up I was. “Granny has a tune-up this morning, and Gramps is getting a new mustache. If you untangle the thread for me, you can use the rest of your turns to play.”

  “But—”

  “Always work first, so you don’t run out of turns.” His legs were stiff and he swayed as he walked along the wide wood plank that led out from our closet. He crossed the train tracks and disappeared into the shadow of the maker’s workbench. Tonight, when he came back from his errands, he’d bring a scrap of fabric or a bit of thread. Papa sewed our clothes from whatever scraps the maker dropped.

  The whir of his gears faded into silence, and I tried to untangle the thread. It was a tedious chore. The delicate motion of picking up a single brightly-colored strand was difficult on a tight spring. A train came clacking along the track, and with it the lively music of the carnival. Papa had settled down here in Closet City, but Mama was a carnie. Based on the stories Papa told, sneaking out to the carnival would be a good adventure. Clearly I was meant to go—the carnival had arrived on a day when I had more turns than I’d ever had before. I gathered up my prettiest buttons and skipped over to the brightly painted train cars.

  It was early, and the carnival had just arrived, but a crowd had already formed. Everyone clicked and whirred as they hurried to see the show. The carnies were busy too, unfolding train cars into platforms and putting up rides and games and ropes for the acrobats.

  I passed a booth selling scented gear oil and another filled with ornate keys. I wondered if the maker could wind as well with those as with the simple silver one that protruded from my back. A face-painter with an extra pair of arms was painting two different customers at once, touching up the faded paint of their facial features and adding festive swirls of green and blue and purple. “Two kinds of paint,” the painter called to me, “the swirls will wash right off with soap.”